I make this post knowing its futility, as I can find 8 posts similarly mentioning the issue that did not even receive an official reply stating the cop-out answer received through a formal ticket.
Per this post, “All [non-Thundering Hero] Mythic+ achievements and rewards can still be earned until Dragonflight Season 2 begins.” Concentrated Primal Foci were a reward. This is the only advanced notice of the availability of Primal Foci I can find, and it implies that it WOULD be available.
That is clearly not the case. They were removed, and without warning. Through support tickets, I have gotten the same response worded differently twice; “You will be able to use different materials to craft and upgrade items going forward.” and “There is no specific reason on why this was removed is just that new things were introduced and old things were changed.”, both referencing the addition of Flightstones as a direct reason for the nonexistence of Foci in M+ caches for this week.
However, Valor is being replaced by Flightstones with the coming reset. And raid bosses still drop foci themselves. So, if this reasoning was meant as some be-all-end-all justification, Valor should’ve similarly been removed with the launch of 10.1, and raid bosses shouldn’t have dropped it either. But that’s not the case! And if those 2 are things that did not need to be removed with 10.1, and can instead be removed with S2 launch, why would we need to simply accept that the M+ Foci acquisition needed a 10.1 removal and not a S2 one?
I understand why foci won’t drop in S2. But this week is meant to still function like S1 for loot purposes. Were I a game designer claiming that Flightstones would totally replace foci so we can remove them from M+ (ignoring the inconsistency of still leaving them available via raid, and the continued inclusion of Valor in M+ despite it meeting the same criteria for removal that was given for M+ Foci), my first order of business would’ve been putting in a vendor to trade the new currencies of Flightstones and Crests for Foci/Infusions to use with my S1 sparks. Because saying I can use different materials to upgrade gear is useless information, when I can’t use those materials to upgrade the gear I am having a problem with.
Frankly I don’t know what I want. Ideally I would’ve just loved for Blizzard to just give me 4 Concentrated Primal Foci and call it a day. But I’m clearly not the only person with this issue; I’ve seen reddit posts, forum posts, and tweets all sharing the same issue. Many people expected to get their remaining foci this week, as that was something we were told we could do, per the blue post linked above. Many people have massive changes to embellishments due to tuning passes to them changing our entire bis setups, and were hoping to craft 421 spark pieces to expedite this process. But now we’re told that this can’t happen, and we’re only given excuses for why this is the case instead of valid reasons.
As I said, I can almost guarantee I won’t get a reply from Blizzard on this issue. I’ve gotten 2 separate replies to my ticket and neither had any interest in helping me, just telling me “sucks to suck” and encouraging me to stop requiring replies via the ticket system and instead shout into the void that is the forums so my words can go unheard by anyone internally. Nevertheless, I post in the hopes that I am proven wrong. And should I get a reply, I’d like an answer to the inconsistency (Valor and Raid Foci available, but M+ Foci isn’t). I’d like an answer to why “All rewards can still be earned until S2 begins” but yet a reward was removed before S2 began. I’d like an answer as to why no “workaround” that let you trade the new currencies for an old currency to craft a 421 Ingenuity piece existed. But I anticipate I will receive none. Partly because this post is so long that they won’t want to read it, but it’s long because I care about this game and this decision is so asinine that I simply can’t accept it.