That is all.
20 Likes
The shard system served a purpose at one point, but I don’t know that I ever felt it was a good system.
Going to guess the OP is talking about Shards of Domination and not sharding
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The shard system is there to replace tier sets. Blizzard didn’t want you to have 4 gear slots locked up to tier so instead they made this great shard system that locks up 5 gear slots.
Genius.
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Yeah that one.
I got the shard of zed from Sylvanas, super helpful as a Sub rogue with all of my healing abilities.
Why that’s even in my loot table is beyond me…
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I did a bunch of sleuthing in WoWhead’s database during the PTR and you can definitely tell Blizzard wasn’t sure what the heck “Domination Sockets” were supposed to be - there’s a bunch of wild experiments in the data. They went through a ton of iterations and to be honest I’m going to guess they were rushed to pick one of the two more final-looking options and this is the one we got, and they’ve simply been tweaking it to try to make it work.
People act like Blizzard wanted to maliciously force people to move their legendary, but earlier iterations of this system had items with 2-3 domination sockets, which would mean you wouldn’t really need to have as many pieces to complete your set. I’m guessing Blizzard was unhappy with the idea of “BIS” only including a couple pieces of raid gear and mostly M+ gear, so they spread out the dom sockets more, and that’s where we are now. Yes, the system isn’t perfect, but it does accomplish a number of goals Blizzard set out to achieve. Within I’d say four weeks, a large chunk of players will have their set bonuses rolling and this drama will fade into the back-ground - this is NOT a corruption situation. It already seems like they hotfixed the gem drop-rate from week 1 to week 2 TBH.
Zed is BIS for you because it is part of Chaos Bane.
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Did we need another system? No… no we didn’t. Did we get another system… yes yes we did. About those broken promises of “no new systems that aren’t in the beta”.
/sigh
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Getting the runeword bonus will require using 3 of the same color shards. They aren’t all going to be just dmg bonuses, but the runeword bonus is well worth socketing a defensive or support shard.
1 Like
How is a system being awful @ launch drama?
Poor iterations isn’t drama and people aren’t being dramatic for disliking it.
Are you ok?
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They tried to experiment with a different sort of set piece raid bonus, I don’t think it worked out 100% but it’s not like set pieces themselves didn’t fall into some of the same trappings.
May not have been a success but I’m sure they are still learning from it.
Shards are still only 1 possible per boss per week, regardless of difficulty. Was it even worse than that last week?
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My point is that this situation isn’t dramatically different from the drama of people whining about others get their set bonuses before them. Once most people have their set bonuses, we stop talking about them unless there’s dramatic outliers in performance (but this system has universal set bonuses so even that won’t really be an issue unless certain classes scale much better with primary stat).
It isn’t a corruption situation. It’s just set bonuses, but with a bit of extra jank thrown in there. It isn’t perfect, but it basically does what set bonuses do, but just a bit worse.
That goal was pretty much exclusively create a new power system given by the raid to approximate tier, azerite, and corruption while spending the least amount of resources and time balancing as possible to do.
The result was this uninspired mess with a horrible distribution method where someone can have all the shards on week 1 and another can get a single utility one.
There are no redeeming qualities about shards of domination.
9 Likes
Anecdotally yes, my raid saw I think 5-6 drop total for 15 people. This week almost everybody has gotten one if not two from the first five bosses.
Forget the shards, Do you warlocks even exist? can’t even get you guys to make a portal for the raid, invites are free mate.
My only disappointment with the Domination shards is that there aren’t more options. I initially thought there was going to be something more along the lines of a couple dozen shards, and you could pick and choose more. But now it’s three sets of three gems, pick the one oriented for your role, and ta-da that’s your BiS. The other two remaining domination sockets aren’t a total non-factor, but they don’t make as much of an impact, and they aren’t much of a choice either.
Thinking on it now, I suppose Blizzard wanted to avoid players complaining about swapping out shards, or having alternate gear with said shards for different purposes. Still not especially happy with the final result, but it’s not bad, it’s just kind of bland.
1 Like
The distribution of them is dramatically worse especially with how uneven drop rates are, they also require a secondary drop with a domination socket to even be used, and the powers themselves are bland, generic, and uninspired, and most of them completely useless.
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“Wah wah this guy got his set bonus before me”.
They make people want raid loot, while also baking borrowed-power-content-nerfs into the system, without causing massive escalation in PvP or M+ due to the imba set bonuses not working in those environments (and the gems being heavily nerfed in PvP).
1 Like
You are a mess.
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