Musing on Cracked Titan Gem

I know, another thread about the Evoker legendary. Honestly this is more for me than anyone else, I’m so frustrated with this that I need to get this out. As a player who picked up Evoker as their main at the start of the expansion and has played it through all current content I wanted to give my opinion on the design choices with the legendary. I wont touch on the Cracked Titan Gem being a drop, rather just accept that as the basic design premise and what choices were made after that that were poor design.

  1. The gem drops off of the last boss in the instance. First, I want to say I did like the way the gem was made available - the first group to kill Mythic Sarkareth in each region unlocked the drop for their entire region. But at the same time I don’t understand the decision to put it on the last boss. For the region first Mythic raiders the legendary makes sense as a reward for clearing the raid on the highest difficulty before anyone else. But what about everyone else? It’s not a 100% drop rate from Mythic beyond the region first kill. So for everyone else it appears the legendary is to help players tackle the next tier of content, i.e. you kill Sarkareth on Normal, maybe you get the legendary to help you on Heroic. But why then put it on the last boss? For guilds that don’t do Mythic raiding, Heroic is their top tier. And if you kill H Sarkareth before you get the legendary, what’s the point of it? And for those who kill M Sarkareth before getting the drop, they’re done with the raid. Maybe you get it before 10.2 so it helps you clear the new raid. But then what if you don’t? The gem should have dropped off of an earlier boss.

  2. The drop rate. First, the way the drop rate was explained was done poorly. We were told there is a chance for the gem to drop from each raid difficulty so players then went and killed Sarkareth on every difficulty to maximize their chances. Then about 6 weeks after the raid was released, Blizzard clarified if you kill Sarkareth on Heroic, you didn’t need to do any lower difficulties because the Heroic roll included your LFR (once available) and Normal rolls. So for 6 weeks players wasted their time on lower difficulties. Second, the drop rate clearly is so abysmal that bad luck protection was added which…is also abysmal? At least with anecdotal evidence. Let’s go back to 1. If the legendary was to help you clear the next tier of content and you’d already killed Mythic Sarkareth before you got it, or Heroic if that was the highest tier you were doing, then the legendary is to help you in 10.2. But as someone who has killed Heroic Sarkareth every week since BLP was added (ignoring any LFR, N, and H kills before BLP) I have one more reset to get the gem before 10.2 arrives. Either I’m very close to 100% BLP or the BLP was done in such a way that you’re not even guaranteed to get the gem before 10.2. So then what was even the point of BLP? BLP should have been implemented in such a way that if you killed H Sarkareth each week you were guaranteed to get the gem by 10.2, and if you had some Mythic kills mixed in you got it sooner than someone who only did Heroic.

At this point if I were to get the gem with the next reset, I wouldn’t even be happy. I’d be relieved. Relieved that I don’t have to think about trying to get into a Sark raid after 10.2 releases. I’m fortunate enough to be in a small guild that wouldn’t bench me in favor of another Evoker with the legendary, or have me play a different class, but I know there are people who are/would be in that situation and that sucks.

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17 kills so far - no cracked gem. Argh.

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