I watched the Q&A portion OP is referring to. Ion seemed to me to be making the point that IF a person WANTS to "specialize in ONE spec and role, they want that person to feel validated in that they get a little bit of a bonus over a person who keeps their hands in a lot of different pies. Or all of them.
That would make sense if you could “choose” your azerite gear through M+'s so that you could hone in on the traits you want for your class - but we don’t get that option.
A person that wants to specialize in one class also gets a bonus to their output because they aren’t splitting their time over multiple classes - thus able to refine and hone in their rotation for that various boss fights and trash mechanics.
Lastly - if someone is willing to switch to a tank or healer spec to make a raid night or dungeon run possible; why do they have to be punished in order to do so optimally for the sake of somehow “giving the dedicated person some validation”?
That argument just doesn’t make sense in practice. I still don’t understand the benefit to the game and how that makes playing more fun.
To be fair, it used to be a lot more difficult to play multiple specs. You used to have to carry around a bunch of extra gear sets, and pay to switch.
Either farm the gold, buy the gold, or re-farm the item. All of these turn into money for blizzard. Time is money, friend, especially when you pay money to spend time.
also lets not forget the q&a where josh and ion both reiterated that they would be more likely to INCREASE THE COST OF REFORGING than to decrease it.
We used to enslave African Americans in America - then we counted each of them as 3/5 of a person. Now we count them as a whole person.
If we moved to counting African Americans as 4/5 of a person - do you think that argument would be accepted because “it’s better than it was at some point in time”?
Sharing the fact that a change in a backwards direction is still better than it was at some previous point in history doesn’t change the issue.
It also doesn’t answer Why the change was made, WHAT benefit it provides, and HOW it makes the game more fun.
Interesting to see that they ended up reducing the time it takes for the reforge cost to be halved. Which goes in the opposite direction of what they were “likely” to do.
Seems like the players voicing their distaste had an impact.]
You can’t “farm” Azerite Gear.
These are work-arounds that cost the players.
The question is: What benefit to the game is worth this cost?
I don’t see how this is relevant. We used to have a lot of bad systems in place - then they changed and things got better.
This is a step backwards from the improvement we saw in Legion.