It was done to keep you playing longer. Literally every major design decision is being done with the sole purpose of increasing playtime. Not for enjoyment, ease of use, or logical sense. Because right now that’s the only metric that truly matters.
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I wonder if Blizzard knows there’s more flavor in that diet coke than in their azerite traits.
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Has Blizz ever answered why they don’t want us to respec our azerite armor at no cost? I still do not understand why they care so much if we respec or not.
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That’s the whole point to this thread. WIth all of the blue posts responses - we still don’t have a direct answer.
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I agree, there is diffidently few valid augments. I am not sure about, longer queue times in regards to healers and tanks. Tanks and healers have low queue times around 25 mins in relation to dps that can wait up to an hour.
There is a shortage of tanks and healers for a reason. If players are supposed to have more than one sets of gear per role, then raid drop rate needs to be adjusted. There has been weeks that all I got from raids are Battle-Scarred Augment Runes. Drop rates are crazy low. Then adding players that get drops not for their class then running off without asking for need rolls. That is one big complaint with lfr, is the loose loot system. This is a bit off topic but it is feeding the problem of shortages in tanks and healers. Creating a system that ignores need before greed limits the players with gear. Not really complaint, more of a observation. I got my gear fairly fast, but it was luck. I do understand the frustration of seeing a 350+ getting gear they don’t need and on top of that 350+ are in chat complaining about the raids lower geared players.
This is right. All of this is blizzards way of stretching out gratification, with hope that players will keep paying for the monthly. Its not working. Subscription rates are still on a steady decline. Normally if players are having fun then they will want to keep playing.
The playing longer mentality is good and it worked in legion. They had a compelling system in place to want to you keep going with what felt like tangible results. The azerite gear and traits in general are not compelling. Oh the 2 traits on the outer ring are not in the top 5-10 on sims, guess i will bank/scrap/de it then.
I don’t mind keeping different gear sets. I have done it since vanilla but the amount of stuff that has been stripped away this expansion and replaced with significantly more mundane stuff is insane. Boring looking armor that looks just like everyone else, boring azerite traits with zero impact on how I play, boring island expeditions with no incentive to do the higher difficulties. There really is no incentive to do anything anymore aside from raiding but with the stripped down loot tables people geared out so fast no one cares anymore.
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BFA - we dont want you switching specs, we dont want you reforging gear, huge gold cost - low gold income
LEGION - Everything switches when you do, oh btw here’s the Ashbringer, and cool mounts, and toys for when you switch specs, which we want you to do
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While this may be true on the surface, having a trait that’s not active is almost always a downgrade from a piece with 2 traits even if they are sub-par.
To be fair, I’m glad that azerite drops were increased to address this. If I’m playing a hybrid, getting decent enough offspec pieces for the content I do on alts isn’t near as difficult as it was.
Kinda.
The complication comes from there being too many traits that are basically “chance to deal damage” or “chance to increase stats” without enough information to tell us exactly how much we much of an increase in performance it’s going to be.
Say you have two different traits to choose from. One is “chance on spellcast to deal 1000 damage to target” and the other is “chance on spellcast to deal 500 damage to target”.
Based on just that information, it would appear that the first one is stronger. But without knowing the % chance (or PPM) for those traits to proc, how can we know other than spending a ridiculous amount of time with target dummies or simming it? If the first trait has a 10% chance to proc while the second one has a 50% chance, that’s a large difference that we would like to know.
Azerite slots are basically very powerful passive trinket slots. Only now, instead of comparing 3-4 trinkets per raid, we’re now comparing hundreds of possible effects per slot for 3 slots. Arcane has a possible ~240 trait combinations just between the outer ring and second ring traits (30 outer, 8 second ring).
Each individual piece is 12 trait combinations and that’s all I account for as DPS. I assume hybrid classes that can tank factor in the defensive traits in the inner ring as well so they have to contend with up to 24 total trait combinations per piece to decide which spec they want to use that piece for and which traits to pick. And all of this is about to increase by a factor of 6 in the next raid.
I’m fine with the concept of azerite gear but we could stand to reduce the huge amount of clutter that’s in it. Reforging stats was removed because the intent was for us to equip our gear as soon as possible without simming first. The current incarnation of the azerite system flys against that.
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This sums up a lot nicely. We saw in legion that players want choice, convenience, and less RNG. Seems like blizzard saw that and decided we needed less choice, convenience and more RNG. They have backed out on the RNG a bit in 8.1 but it’s doubtful that’s enough. I’m not holding legion on a pedestal here because it definitely had it’s flaws but many of these flaws were addressed (aside from legendaries at the tail end when it really didn’t matter). The communication we see seems to come across as more of a lack of caring as we are being told we are playing wrong. When we have come to expect a certain level of flexibility from prior expansions only to have it removed and put behind some exponential gold sink in order to deflate the economy that was inflated from WoD and Legion people are bound to get annoyed.
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When I first started Beta I thought Azerite armour was good and would be a good little system. Because I thought that it Swapped traits when you swapped specs. My Thinking of Azerite armour change after i got my first piece and realized it didnt.
Why can’t blizzard admit they got it wrong and allow Azerite armour traits to swap depending on spec. This may eliviate some of the problems and show they are at least listening.
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I thought this too. Blew my mind that they didn’t change.
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I keep a holy set and a discipline set. I don’t reforge constantly. Problem solved.
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THIS!
I was shocked by that, too. I remember the first piece I got, I was thinking, okay, so when I cast over to disc, it’ll let me pick my disc preferences. I actually totally noob’ed out on it and had my husband come over to figure out why I couldn’t click the trait. “Um, babe, you only get to pick one.”
Sigh.
So I got two sets, but I really did think…
This sums up everything about the Azerite System perfectly. I am really not being sarcastic here either (I stopped leveling my HoA months ago), it has been utterly disappointing since its inception and nothing you have done so far has addressed this. At this point I really don’t know what it would take to make you see that it just doesn’t work.
I wish you guys would work half as hard on creating a different and workable system as you do defending and doubling down on this one.
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BFA has been so much more alt friendly than Legion ever was, the only thing I don’t enjoy is the Champions of Azeroth rep for alts, which will be fixed in a couple weeks!
My reforge cost is regularly over $10,000.
Not even factoring in mistakes or experimentation I regularly have to switch because:
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Different mythic dungeon affixes weekly
(I actually had a group kick me out of a mythic 10+ because I had dps traits chosen instead of tanking traits. At that point I didn’t want to pay over 10,000g to respec again. Needless to say the group didn’t afford me the opportunity to explain how the traits were still somewhat useful). -
DPSing or Tanking in m+ (I only have 1 385 head/shoulder piece).
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I primarily Tank in raids, however I want DPS traits for farm content, and then must swap to defensive traits for progression fights.
I’m sure there is a justification for how these are my choice, and I could just play with less efficient traits, or how I can just wait to target gear in 8.1 since RNG has only dropped two 385s for me since bfa launches.
But my feedback is this doesn’t feel fun with such high costs to change traits and such a long time for the cost to diminish.
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Hahahaha!
Have a ![:beer:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/beer.png?v=6" ":beer:")
, mate!
![:wink:](https://d38bqls1q93fod.cloudfront.net/en/wow/images/emoji/twitter/wink.png?v=6" ":wink:")
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Reforging was too complicated specifically due to (Haste) breakpoints and the RoRo min-max. Players were effectively forced to use tools, mostly AMR, to optimize their gear. This includes redoing gems, enchants, and reforging (ofc) to bring it within 3 secondary stats, instead of 40. (Does it matter at that point? No, but whatever we did at the top trickles down to become part of the bottom.)
Cookie cutter specs were do to poor talent balancing, something Blizzard has dramatically improved upon. Some specs still have outliers (Deathbolt, Affliction), but talents are far more balanced to their rows compared to 4 years ago. In addition, most players trying to min-max will do the highest-simming talent regardless. There are many specs were you swap talents to fit the encounter or gameplay (PVP vs PVE, Dungeons vs Raids, etc.) and that’s as good as it’s ever been.
Azerite traits have not been great overall, but you cannot deny that Blizzard has made a decent systems with regards to balance between Azerite traits.
For me, the problem with this system is that we are all here debating the merits or pitfalls of this system, only to throw it out next expansion for another system we will likely only use once.
I would much rather have had a trait system comprised of both the artifact system and the azerite system linked to my actual character in a large “tree” that’s permanent going forward.
Surely a more permanent system would be a better one to adjust over time. We’ve had 2 expansions now where classes went through quite the upheaval only to support a system that wasn’t deemed “good” until multiple iterations later. By the time we even got to that point, we the expansion itself was half over and the system slated to be scrapped. Why do that over and over?
It personally kills my desire to progress my characters much when it simply doesn’t matter with these systems long term. Gear is one thing, but feeling like I lose parts of my class is another.
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I thought mine was bad… Jeez bro