World of Warcraft: Current Year

Arbitrary said:

If I remember correctly the prereq is three different commanders and the reason it says two now is because you've killed one. I think we're another full cycle away. That's what, an extra month?

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It got changed to 'only' needing 2 commanders in a patch a couple weeks ago. Not that it matters much, as I will stop doing WQs when I hit exalted with everything (far before I get that achievement).

Arbitrary said:

If I remember correctly the prereq is three different commanders and the reason it says two now is because you've killed one. I think we're another full cycle away. That's what, an extra month?

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They lowered the requirement to be two commanders because people yelled at them that it was stupid to have to wait basically 2.5/3 months to progress that.

I mean I've been waiting on that for at least a month now and I'm still gonna have to wait another month, so it still seems dumb.

kaid said:

They lowered the requirement to be two commanders because people yelled at them that it was stupid to have to wait basically 2.5/3 months to progress that.

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The entire tree seems pointless. The Legion felt like it had some choices. Did Warlords have an even fancier one?

Arbitrary said:

The entire tree seems pointless. The Legion felt like it had some choices. Did Warlords have an even fancier one?

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A lot of stuff smacks of they want to spread things out more throughout the expansion. I am guessing we see a couple new options every major patch or every other patch to the upgrades. Kinda like the rewards from the missions they seem to be starting off pretty basic just minor gold/ap/rep but as the expansion goes on they likely start adding more and more to it. I think they were unhappy that WOD basically had 90% of the rewards from the table available right at launch. This go round feels like they are trying to pace this stuff out more and maybe just missed their goals by being a bit to stingy early on.

Anyone else beyond annoyed with these loot rules yet?

Yes it's quite annoying. I'm sure the F&F in my guild that get to come with us to Heroic runs love it.

I have given up on raiding beyond Normal, and the current gold/AP per time rewards for BFA activities are so pointless, that now:

Every day I click on the world map, see if the last rep I need to finish off has an emissary today and check if the turtles are offering the last two cooking recipe upgrades I need. One of these days, I won't even have to bother with that anymore.

Every week I spend 10 minutes flying to and zerging the world boss.

Every two? four? weeks I do 1 Warfront, 1 Arathi World Boss, and do a pass on the mount / pet drops in Arathi.

Also, I don't even bother with the mobile app anymore. The only thing of value is pet charms to avoid having to actually do the pet battles, and half the time I don't even have the counter for Cursed: they're troop based, the counters the troops earn appears random, none of my current troops have that counter, and I can't even dismiss troops to train new ones? Apparently I should just send them to die on missions I don't care about until RNG decides to give me troops with useful counters, at which point the mission in question isn't available? What kind of moronically stupid system is that?

I honestly spend more time (and get better gold income) in Legion doing the Dailies for the Legion rep bag mounts I still need. This early into an expansion, that seems entirely wrong.

Ryoz said:

Anyone else beyond annoyed with these loot rules yet?

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I think it actually feels even WORSE than the problem they wanted to fix.
They wanted you to actually see gear, not just guild loot councils handing it out "to their friends" (which no higher end guild was doing because the raiders would just leave and destroy the guild) - but now the problem stands that you can still trade gear and instead of just looting it directly to somebody off of the boss... you now get a piece that is an upgrade for your tank. You trade it, because that's how guilds work - and now not only did you not get a piece of loot, but you literally got a piece of loot removed from YOU.

I mean, psychologically it's retarded to think this system is any better than what master looter was. I've never given a fuck about loot, I passed shit a lot when raiding but god damn does it irk me to have to lose something I received. At least before I just didn't get shit at all.

Azerite - Worst Itemization in WoW's History
You can't target the gear you want at all.
There are 10 M+ dungeons, all of which drop ~10 different items per dungeon, and are all eligible to be looted from the cache (the only way to actually get the gear). This translates to a 1/100 chance to get the piece that you want, but that's only one piece. Then you've got to get 2 more pieces, each on separate 1/100 "drop" chance. Let's be lenient here and say we are given 6 months per content patch. This means that the probability of getting the items we want is actually orders of magnitude lower than the probability of getting the ideal legendary items in Legion.

The vast majority of traits are useless and uninteresting.
When all of our abilities were stripped away in 8.0, we were promised Azerite armor that would bring back the gameplay changes that artifacts brought. There are very few circumstances where this is the case, and most of the top-performing traits are just stat-padding, providing no progression or gameplay enhancements.

When we get "upgrades" we have to re-farm the same traits that we have already farmed.
We complained about having to farm traits on Legion Artifacts, and Blizzard's response was to give us only 1 or 2 traits, but to consistently lose them and have to re-farm them for the whole expansion. How is this an improvement?

Every single gear change or upgrade requires simming.
At no other point in WoW's history has simming been so required to find out if an item or trait is actually an upgrade. The proc rates, damage bonuses, or other interactions are so unintuitive that we have absolutely no idea what is an upgrade or not. At no other point in WoW's history has the casual player been at such a disadvantage for being uninformed.

340 traits are out-performing 385 traits. Significantly.
This is just embarassing, and should not be the case. How did this sort of imbalance between traits make it to live?

The reforge cost re-introduces the exact spec-lock problem people had in Legion, but worse.
Oh you want to PvP? Gotta reforge your Azerite! You want to PvE now? Reforge time! Oh, you need to tank this boss? Hearth and reforge your Azerite! People are getting their reforge costs into the thousands of gold, and it doesn't go down fast enough to allow us to reasonably perform multiple roles. How was this supposed to improve gameplay?

The massive swings in power during "tuning" passes mean we have to hold onto all gear.
We have no idea what is going to be our best trait next week, and what is best today may just be completely gutted tomorrow. Our only option as a player is hold onto every single piece of Azerite Armor and hope we have the right ones when Blizzard swings power in a different direction. Not only that, but when new traits are introduced to replace old traits, per Ion's comment, we are likely to encounter exactly the same issue.
Few things I'd like to comment on here.

First off, thanks for putting this thread together. Even if phrases like "Worst Itemization in WoW's History" are a bit hyperbolic (seriously, I can't be the only one who remembers farming level 30 dungeons for AQ40 resistance gear), you've summarized a lot of the discussions we've been seeing around the community very well. It really helps us clarify exactly what we need to be focusing on.

I'll speak to each of your points as best as I can:

Regarding targeting specific traits: I think we've said this a few times now, but just to reiterate, we believe that's merely a symptom of the imbalance between traits. Ideally, the gap between them isn't so large that you feel it would be hugely beneficial to grind out the perfect set.

The point about traits being "useless and uninteresting" is interesting considering that you also make the point of "every gear change requires simming." These two points are kind of at odds with each other. The way to solve the simming issue would be to make the traits more simplistic in nature. Similarly, making traits with more outside-the-box designs leads to more complicated questions of "is this better or not," which in turn encourages more simming. Either way, it's an interesting challenge, and one we're taking to mind as we move forward with traits in future updates.

I think we agree that re-farming traits doesn't feel great. I don't have a solve for that issue to share today, and to be completely transparent it may be something we simply have to accept as a downside to the system for other reasons. But we agree it can be a bit of a downer.

I mentioned the imbalance between traits before, but just to expand on that: that's why we've focused so much effort into tuning Azerite traits over the past few weeks. With this most recent round of tuning, we think we've gotten most of the really egregious outliers dialed in, but please let us know if there are any you still feel are so good that they're worth huge sacrifices in terms of item level.

As to the point about reforging costs: these costs get so high because we want the behavior you're describing -- reforging constantly depending on what you're doing -- to be unsustainable. Our intention is that you either build out multiple sets of gear for different situations, or you lean towards traits that work in a variety of roles (even if they're maybe not the absolute best for each in particular). We added the reforging system to help ease cases like, for example, a DPS who suddenly finds themselves needing to transition to being their guild's main tank, not as a means for constantly re-adjusting traits like a second set of talent points. Maybe the current system isn't achieving that, but if it isn't, we're likely to become MORE restrictive on reforging, not less.

And finally, regarding the tuning passes: like I mentioned, we think we've got most of the major outliers dialed in to an acceptable level at this point. There's likely to still be some adjustments here and there, but we don't believe we're going to need another big wave of Azerite trait tuning like you've seen over the last few weeks. To put it another way: if one trait is far and away the best compared to every other option, sure, we should probably do something about that, but we don't expect that to take the form of a widespread tuning pass going forward.

Also, to Ion's comment about new traits being introduced: he was referring to new traits on new gear added in new content, with higher item level, that replaces your old gear entirely. We're not planning to add in new traits to existing items, so don't worry about holding onto old Azerite pieces just in case their traits change.

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Azerite - Worst Itemization in WoW's History - World of Warcraft Forums

TLDR; They want you to farm multiple sets of gear and they have no "fix" in the works to address the system.

The entire Azerite system is trash.

Azerite is trash and in no way replaces tier sets. Not to mention how shitty the sets are looking.

Just give us 3-4 options per spec on the neck, scale their power with neck level let us choose which we want and put stats back on head chest shoulders.

tfw you have 100 software developers at your disposal and then you say things like
"I don't have a solve for that issue to share today, and to be completely transparent it may be something we simply have to accept as a downside to the system for other reasons. "

Also, preach has been complaining about Azerite since day 1, p good video in response to this bluepost just came out too

Araxen said:

Azerite - Worst Itemization in WoW's History - World of Warcraft Forums

TLDR; They want you to farm multiple sets of gear and they have no "fix" in the works to address the system.

The entire Azerite system is trash.

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One of the traits I liked early on was Tidal Surge. It gives your damaging spells and abilities a chance to release a tidal surge (obviously) that deals damage and the slows the target for a few seconds. Running around dotting everything and jumping around like a jackass as I pretend to be a Frost Mage appealed to me as a Priest. Shadow was really shitty so I'd have this stuff ready to go for fucking around. Every time I got a new piece of armor I'd check the traits and be disappointed. I eventually looked online. The armor with it caps at level 350, only drops from a single world boss, and only exists at that item level on shoulders and hat.

It was another time this expansion has really, really disappointed me. Some dumb little side project I had was doomed before it even got started.

What the system needs is a way to extract a trait from one piece of armor and implant it in another but there's no way we are getting something like that.

Remember when everyone was really excited that we wouldn't have tier anymore

I'm still very happy we don't have tier sets anymore.

Wahhhh I have to give my drop to the guild tank so we can all have greater success....didn't you guys nerd out on EQ for a decade? You should be use to that universal MMO raiding characteristic by now.

Are you incapable of reading? You absolute waste of your fathers cum

I think for those that need to swap specs a lot they kinda intend you to just stick with the generic trait for your items which is weird.