Hey folks! Wanted to give you a heads up on an interview that was just posted a short time ago!
On February 10th, 2020, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas sat with Athalus of Warcraft Radio to discuss the recent Race to World First Ny’alotha event that took place as part of patch 8.3: Visions of N’zoth.
You can find the interview at Warcraft Radio’s YouTube channel.
Warcraft Radio is home to a variety of videocasts and audio podcasts covering different aspects of World of Warcraft and other Blizzard properties.
It was a really good interview even if I didn’t like that Ion didn’t address the multiple layers of RNG on corrupted gear directly.
It seems like they are trying to make gear so complicated that it’s impossible to sim. Meanwhile I just want to be able to put on whatever has the higher ilevel and be done with it.
Not to get in the weeds here but I don’t think that’s the solution the game needs. We have ilvl and then affixes to think about and that thinking of affixes makes itemization fun.
That isn’t to say default templates are bad either. A starting point, a set and forget path can be done without destroying the manual approach so many people love.
Ion: Overall the team is happy with how corruption turned out, but there are still tuning issues. They like the choices and trade-offs that it brings to fights.
Ion: There are multiple tiers of each corruption so that you can wear more pieces of gear with good corruption without having excessive corruption negatives attached.
The Sims tend to show that damage per corruption, Rank 3 tends to fair better… especially infinite stars… are the sims/my ability to read them wrong or have you messed up tuning?
If its tuning, whats the point of tuning AFTER the content becomes less relevant?
Maybe it’s not what the game needs but it’s what I want to do. I don’t mind a few gear slots like trinkets being a little different, but it feels like all gear is turning into trinkets AND with the RNG on top of it, makes gearing feel very chaotic.
I have a ton of gear in my bags I’m afraid to get rid of because I just don’t know what is best especially with Azerite traits and Essences on top of it all. It’s just later after layer of ‘customization’ except it’s all doled out randomly, so even if I did know what I wanted there is a low chance of even acquiring it.
It seems they expect players just to equip whatever and hope for the best but you can end up making some very poor choices if you don’t research it, look at logs, and for DPS, sim.
That’s why I mentioned some time ago about an itemization shift to have base items and components. It would work sort of like the way the azerite essence panel works today. Base items would have empty affix slots for components to plug into them and components would be found in the world instead of gear. This would reduce the needed bag space considerably, maybe even permanently.
The base item could come with some default components that do what you’re looking for and the components that are picked up later could be an upgrade or a deviation from that to start an entirely new build. Components for specific content, too.
That seems to be the best solution for itemization in the future IMO.
