World of Warcraft: Current Year

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kaid

Blackwing Lair Raider
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One weirdness of the system I did not see mentioned is for the azerite stuff the outermost ring is generally the only one anybody even cares about. So you just unlocked your first ring or maybe first two rings for epic stuff and then there is no real incentive to push to unlock the remainders. By the time you ever got the last +5 ilevel thing unlocked for the uldir stuff you likely are already running the next rank of raids. So it is both so minor you don't care to unlock it but frustrating in that even if you wanted to it would take you far to long to be worthy of the effort to do so.
 

kaid

Blackwing Lair Raider
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Overall I am liking the expansion and I think the islands and warfronts have a lot of promise if the former has has some more consistent non AP rewards like shit just putting a bunch of the transmog stuff up for dubloons. Maybe rotate them around if you want to time gate it so only x many show up on the dubloon vendor every week. The warfronts simply upping the challenge a bit so that failure is more of a possibility if people are not playing it well or are afking out. It has good rewards so up the risk a bit to match and that I think would be pretty enjoyable for folks. Shit eventually add in heroic/mythic level warfronts and you could have a fun event thats a challenge even for the hard core raiders.

But the whole azerite system seems to be a big contradictory mess that needs a serious rework. The basic skeleton of it is salvagable to something people would at least find functional but what currently is in game needs a massive overhaul sooner rather than later.
 

Khane

Got something right about marriage
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In previous expansions, those who managed to complete a full set of raid armor unlocked an extra bonus ability that could really push their character into overdrive. It was sometimes unbalanced but it was always a lot of fun.

Stopped reading there.
 
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Nirgon

YOU HAVE NO POWER HERE
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I'm pretty sure that Blizzard is allergic to good game design and will do none of this.

Remember that this is the company that had the Diablo 3 level designers learn how to do procedurally generated levels on the job because all they let go the Diablo 2 level desingers and hired people who had never played Diablo 2 managed by a guy who didn't like DIablo 2, then got curbstomped by a tiny indie studio in New Zealand who just iterated on Diablo 2.

When u got em... You got em... and weww you got em good
 

Bubbles

2022 Asshat Award Winner
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I, to my amazement, discovered that when you do Warfront and go for the achievements, it's actually sorta enjoyable.
 

Araxen

Golden Baronet of the Realm
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Surprisingly, my LFR group two-shot Mother and 1-shotted the other two. I thought Mother would cause more problems because of forcing the raid to move in waves. I wouldn't mind trying Normal, but that would put me on a schedule and I really don't want to do that.

Edit: Q&A has begun: I'm World of Warcraft Game Director Ion Hazzikostas, and I'm here to answer your questions about Battle for Azeroth. AMA! • r/wow

Ion's reply on Azerite Amor:

Azerite Armor.

To be brief, it doesn't appear that the core ideas behind Azerite armor pieces are working out well in practice; and in some places it seems to directly conflict with stated design directions we've heard from the WoW team in the past. There's really three key areas where the system doesn't work well:

  1. We have a situation now where you can get a piece that's a 20+ ilvl upgrade be an effective downgrade because the traits on it are locked behind inordinately high necklace levels (which seems to line up in the bad way with the reasons we've been given in the past for why systems like reforging were abandoned -- upgrades aren't clear, or gear need to be 'worked' before it can be equipped).
  2. The traits themselves are underwhelming; the vast majority are passive, incremental, and forgettable (one of the reasons given in the past for why the oldschool talents that gave +1% to damage were scrapped) and very few of them have the same sort of game-changing impact that Legion's key artifact traits gave.
  3. There's a bleak outlook that we're going to be forced by sheer necessity onto the Azerite grind treadmill for the entire expansion simply to keep re-unlocking the same underwhelming traits we already have today as we upgrade our gear simply because getting gear upgrades forces us to and not because grinding Azerite is actually going to give us anything new.
So in that context, my questions are: Does the dev team agree with the above characterization of the state of Azerite armor? If so, what sorts of things are being thought about and planned to address the issues with the system, and what sort of time frame are we looking at to see those changes landing in game?
Ion: (Sorry, I cheated and spent some time composing a reply in advance as soon as I saw this, since it hits on a lot of great points. My other replies likely won’t be nearly this long.)

We’re certainly not entirely happy with how the system is playing out, and all of these are very valid concerns. We agree that it’s a problem for someone to look at a 30-ilvl upgrade under normal circumstances and feel like it’s not worth equipping. I know this risks sounding like a cop-out, but a few of the problems you've outlined simply boil down to tuning.

Once you get to Heart Level 18 (a process that will become increasingly fast as the weekly catch-up system continues to ramp up, effectively letting you gain AP 30% faster with each passing week), you can activate the outer ring of any item in the game, and that’s where the most powerful traits lie. That was by design, so that you wouldn’t feel as much of a loss when upgrading to a higher level item that isn’t yet fully unlocked. There’s a ton of primary stat on Azerite pieces in part to bolster the importance of item level there, and the power of traits is directly proportional to the ilvl of the item that contains them, so a 370 Heroic Uldir helm will have a ~30% more powerful trait than a 340 Raid Finder Uldir version of the same item.

Where all of this breaks down is when both of the traits on your 370 piece are significantly worse than the ones on your 340 piece. Reducing the number of situations in which that is the case is one of the system team’s top priorities right now. We made hundreds of unique traits for BfA, and 216 spec-specific traits for the outer ring alone. Many of those are undertuned. A handful are overly powerful, to the point that they stomp out the entire decision space for a spec, and the game becomes about getting a piece with one specific trait. We’ll be fixing the outliers on both ends (probably buffing dozens of weaker traits and nerfing a handful of too-strong ones).

While the generic traits are deliberately fairly straightforward, some of the spec-specific ones are indeed too passive, or interact awkwardly with spec rotations. We’ll be retiring some of those in an upcoming patch and adding better replacements to the pool. And of course we’ll be adding all-new Azerite traits on new tiers of gear from upcoming content as the expansion continues. Again, tuning is a big part of the current problem. If you look at a guide and most of the recommended traits for your spec are various flavors of “proc damage on your target” or “proc a buff on yourself” then yeah, that’s really underwhelming – no argument there. But there are dozens of traits out there with deep interactions on par with Legion legendaries, old set bonuses, or gold-border Artifact traits, such as interactions between abilities or resource generation in ways that vary rotations, talent selection, stat priority, and so forth. The problem is that they’re just mostly too weak to feel worth using right now. But we can fix that.

In terms of long-term prospects, we see the current system as a foundation upon which to continue building, not a treadmill to throw out there and let sit passively for the rest of the expansion. We’ll be adding loads of new traits in future content updates, for starters. But tuning work is something that is already ongoing, and which will ramp up in the very near future as we now have most of the data we need to make these adjustments.
 
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Blitz

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Thought about coming back, expansion releases are fun, but I did not and that appears to have been the right decision? Seems near unanimous that the current "state of the game" is boring?
 
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kaid

Blackwing Lair Raider
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Surprisingly, my LFR group two-shot Mother and 1-shotted the other two. I thought Mother would cause more problems because of forcing the raid to move in waves. I wouldn't mind trying Normal, but that would put me on a schedule and I really don't want to do that.

Edit: Q&A has begun: I'm World of Warcraft Game Director Ion Hazzikostas, and I'm here to answer your questions about Battle for Azeroth. AMA! • r/wow

Ion's reply on Azerite Amor:


I read through the azerite response and I think a lot of what he said has some merit. The basic skeleton of the system has some promise but I think it is going to be one they are going to have to do some pretty agressive surgery on during patches to get things sorted out in a fashion people enjoy. Right now it missed its mark pretty badly but a lot of stuff could be fixed simply by giving access back to a lot of the traits people liked from their legendaries that have more rotational impact. Some of that they may have just been saving for later in the expansion as something to progress too but I think they have to be aware the current state of it is such that a lot of people are going to give up on the system if they wait too long to rectify the issues. The spec specific stuff is clearly a point of problem. Right now for the specs I play most of my spec specifc stuff is so under performing it is sad.
 

kaid

Blackwing Lair Raider
4,647
1,187
Thought about coming back, expansion releases are fun, but I did not and that appears to have been the right decision? Seems near unanimous that the current "state of the game" is boring?

Its well worth playing through at least the story line on both sides. The PVP stuff seems at least from what I do to be in a much better place this expansion so far although my current chosen main is not ideal for pvp. The way they are doing conquest makes a lot more sense and something you can work through at a reasonable clip without having to just smash your head into the wall. The honor level change stuff also made a BIG improvement of not being forced into playing one pvp character to the exclusion of all else to get rewards. The war mode stuff seems pretty fun so far and I have seen a lot more world pvp on our previously pve server than ever before.
 

Araxen

Golden Baronet of the Realm
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I read through the azerite response and I think a lot of what he said has some merit. The basic skeleton of the system has some promise but I think it is going to be one they are going to have to do some pretty agressive surgery on during patches to get things sorted out in a fashion people enjoy. Right now it missed its mark pretty badly but a lot of stuff could be fixed simply by giving access back to a lot of the traits people liked from their legendaries that have more rotational impact. Some of that they may have just been saving for later in the expansion as something to progress too but I think they have to be aware the current state of it is such that a lot of people are going to give up on the system if they wait too long to rectify the issues. The spec specific stuff is clearly a point of problem. Right now for the specs I play most of my spec specifc stuff is so under performing it is sad.


I just have no faith they are going to balance over 200 traits. Blizzard has a long history of balancing, let alone at a quick pace this needs to happen at, and they are usually pretty terrible at it.
 

kaid

Blackwing Lair Raider
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I just have no faith they are going to balance over 200 traits. Blizzard has a long history of balancing, let alone at a quick pace this needs to happen at, and they are usually pretty terrible at it.
I think it is likely that they move to a smaller amount of trait options on a tier based mode so they become set piece bonuses with some limited configurability
 

Mahes

Ahn'Qiraj Raider
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I am going until I have to pay for it or Ashes of Creation comes out. I will also accept Camelot but that is late next year. I am in a guild that raids during my time now so that helps. Finished Normal and they are working on the last guy in Heroic. I am not the haredcore raider and so I am plenty happy to be on the "B" team for normal runs.
 

a c i d.f l y

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That line of ama questioning and what they answered was pretty brutal and hit most of the critical complaints, with overall reasonable responses, but there was definitely a lot of "we're sorry, we'll do better" without an actionable response (we're going to do X to fix Y). Fix responses were mostly open ended. "We see this, we'll try to change the perception of the thing, instead of actually fixing it." "We're sorry we didn't communicate these things better."

Ultimately, like has been mentioned, we're being gated, and the full system isn't actually available yet. They probably designed the entire expansion based on its end state, so we're stuck in a holding pattern before we can see that state realized. All the build up feels fucked up though, instead of something that feels like it's growing naturally, which, more or less, was the case during Legion, save certain things like random Relic secondaries.

There's really only a couple things that bother me personally, and it has a lot to do with how things are gated. I probably play a lot more than your average player, but I'm not balls deep in the stock exchange of the auction house, so I'm stuck not being able to afford the best enchants, food, flasks, where every expansion prior I could simply play the game and easily afford all of the above on any given raid night. I also give zero fucks about farming AP when I'd gladly do so in Legion for those stupid +200 proc buffs (until Argus and AP skyrocketed). The equivalent of class order hall traits are also entirely uninspired, and being inordinately time gated by the next warfront feels unnatural. If they'd kept the clear increase in days to "train" for them to unlock instead of feeling like it's just....stuck.

Honestly don't have an issue with the rate of gearing. I do, however, have an issue with the gear itself. Traits are such a miniscule improvement so as to almost not even matter, and those that do, don't have any actual impact to how you play. Also the AP gating on them is definitely fucked. Who gives a fuck about a 0.05% increase in survivability for 65,000 AP? Or 5 ilvl for twice that, when you could get a +15 higher ilvl item based on pure luck? Also, the top three traits vs the rest being between 3% and less than 1% of a benefit. Scaling and growth of your character with new items has been normalized to the point of insignificance.
 

a c i d.f l y

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I think it is likely that they move to a smaller amount of trait options on a tier based mode so they become set piece bonuses with some limited configurability
Right now you want one piece of raid gear with the appropriate raid trait that gives the secondary silent scaling buff, and the other two pieces with the best 1-3 traits for the outter ring, so it's almost already like that.
 

taimaishoo

Golden Knight of the Realm
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When was BFA announced? Over a yearish ago I am guessing? In that time, they knew all along without artifact weapons, shadow was going to be a steaming pile of garbage to play and yet they decided that it wasnt enough time and pushed the fix to 8.1. That is one single spec. Color me skeptical on them revamping/fixing the core gearing system for every spec in a reasonable time frame.
 
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Argarth

On the verandah
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As Legion drew to a close:
"Well folks, we admit we screwed up with Legendaries, sorry you had to endure that massive cluster-fuck for so long. We've learned from our mistakes, we promise.

As BFA draws to a close:
"Well folks...
 
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Qhue

Trump's Staff
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What dungeons do people avoid like crazy on mythic+? Which are your go-to for farming easy shit like the weekly?