So the trailer for 8.2 was released today, and it looks totally amazing:
But that’s where my problem with the patch lies, it looks cool as hell, sure, but when you go past a surface level view, you realize it’s not actually as good as it looks.
The art and sound team is absolutely knocking it out of the park this expansion. Seriously Blizzard, give those people a raise or something because holy moley I can’t believe how amazing everything looks and sounds this expansion, it makes it extra sad that it’s attached to such crappy game design.
So you watch the trailer and are blown away by how everything looks, but then it dawns on you:
The classes are still poorly designed and boring to play, no significant changes are being made to fix this.
The Heart of Azeroth is still an awful system with no significant changes made to fix this, either.
The zones might look amazing and you get flying in them but it’s still likely just going to be mostly doing repetitive, boring world quests over and over again.
The only thing that sounds promising IMO is that there is supposedly some kind of story/campaign in the new zones and that sounds pretty neat. But I still have to play through it with a class that is 100% not fun to play to then get upgrades to an item/system that is just wonky as hell and poorly designed.
I’m willing to possibly give it a try I guess but honestly, I just don’t know how such integral problems have been overlooked and they haven’t done anything to fix them yet. Class design is SO important to this game and we’ve been waiting since the BfA beta to get some fixes to make it better. I just don’t see how we can expect the new patch to fix things and draw people back into the game when none of the problems people had with this expansion have even been remotely fixed at all. “9.0 will fix it” just seems like Blizzard really expects people to just give up and wait for the new expansion, and that’s just sad. It makes me sad to see such a beautiful expansion ruined by such poor design choices.
To be fair it’s 1 major power 2 potential additional minor passives and 12% stamina over 17 additional AP levels. The essences may prove worthwhile but the neck itself is still dull and a grind.
People can see the changes themselves, you can look them up and they are widely available. If there are no significant changes to class design and my #1 main problem with this expansion is the poor class design, isn’t it kind of correct to assume it won’t make much of a difference?
I mean I’ll give it a try, I guess, but an educated guess kind of tells me it won’t be any different from what we have now minus new other beautiful zones to play in.
8.2 is not bringing back people who unsubbed for these reasons. It’s kinda not meant to, I think the devs kinda acknowledge the problems and understand that tinkering with the base system (heart of az) isn’t actually going to solve bfa’s main problems with class design and rng.
The artifact system wasn’t terribly different from Azerite Armor – the difference is that the artifact traits actually changed the way classes played, and in a positive way. That’s why most Azerite traits are garbage. They’re procs, stat boosts, and similar things that don’t have much gameplay impact.
The changes to the Heart of Azeroth may actually cause gameplay changes, which, IMO, is what sets them apart.
Anyone expecting massive class overhauls anytime but with a new xpack’s launch are kidding themselves and should unsub / stay unsubbed until 9.0. Anyone who hates grinding AP should do the same, and should have done it ages ago, since it’s been like this for 3 years now. Anyone who doesn’t like the heavy focus on world quests? Same thing, been this way for 3 years.
These aren’t issues OP really has with this patch. They’re issues they have with the entire design of the game (+ classes, which I guess you could tie to the xpack overall, but honestly people oversell the class design issues)