Armory Stats - Challenge Artifact Appearances, Poll, Tweets, DLC #584

Originally Posted by Zigrifid

Its good to see blizz actually caters towards those who try a bit harder at this game , than people who brainless mashing buttons , i havent completed mine but i wont whine if i cant for now .

That's not at all what to take from it.

What to take from it is that the challenge is shoved behind a gear wall that only organised raiders will be able to hurdle. Skill plays no part when the average player is 40 item levels short. What's even more embarrassing for Blizzard is that, with their item-level scaling technology, there was absolutely no reason for it to be this way.

If skill is the meant to be the barometer, there's no need for a gear wall; yet there it is, to keep people grinding up gear for a bonus artifact skin.

It's pretty scummy, to be honest.

Originally Posted by Aviemore

That's not at all what to take from it.

What to take from it is that the challenge is shoved behind a gear wall that only organised raiders will be able to hurdle. Skill plays no part when the average player is 40 item levels short. What's even more embarrassing for Blizzard is that, with their item-level scaling technology, there was absolutely no reason for it to be this way.

If skill is the meant to be the barometer, there's no need for a gear wall; yet there it is, to keep people grinding up gear for a bonus artifact skin.

It's pretty scummy, to be honest.

But the whole gear grind has been a part of the game since the genre's inception. Maybe the challenge does incentivize the whole gear grind, but it certainly isn't the main reason why someone would grind gear. It's just a part of the game, you need gear to progress.

Obviously gear will trivialize the content, and I don't think that's an issue. You will get it eventually. I personally completed it at 892 ilvl, after many hours and over 100 attempts. I feel like that ilvl is fairly easy to get to without needing to been on an organized raid team.

I would say skill is the dominate factor with gear eventually overshadowing it as we move through the expansion.

Originally Posted by mitbrandir

My best guess would be that most warlocks run around etc as affliction, rather than demo or destro.

I personally completed all three with ~ 10 ilvl less than the average. The only annoying thing about the destro (and demo) one is that they are very reactive, so it took me some time to get used to the timings, as I had no timers from bigwigs.

Yeah I used no cheap addons either to beat it. I hate using anything else other than dbm and exorsus raid tools for raiding and nothing else. I like to play blindly through the game when my performance won't affect others. I defeated the destro challenge as 889 myself

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Originally Posted by Mhyroth

So many liars on this forum clicking "yes" on the Poll.
No way the MMO-C community is that hardcore (since many threads show the opposite).

Or maybe many of the non-hardcore people decided NOT to vote? Cause well, they aren't hardcore, and aren't here to check the front page for news every day? Gosh, use your head a little before calling everyone a liar.

Originally Posted by Phyxius

Makes me feel less of a failure as outlaw when I could not do it with 898 ilvl. Seems like it's a challenge in that spec.

Took me more than 30 tries with 906 ilvl. It is just the worst challenge ever. Not even Ornstein and Smough in Dark Souls frustrated me this much. RtB is just completely out of ones controll.

Originally Posted by Aviemore

That's not at all what to take from it.

What to take from it is that the challenge is shoved behind a gear wall that only organised raiders will be able to hurdle. Skill plays no part when the average player is 40 item levels short. What's even more embarrassing for Blizzard is that, with their item-level scaling technology, there was absolutely no reason for it to be this way.

If skill is the meant to be the barometer, there's no need for a gear wall; yet there it is, to keep people grinding up gear for a bonus artifact skin.

It's pretty scummy, to be honest.

The "average" player being 865-870 isn't that average. I have two characters, one with which the only raiding I did was PUG normal nightholds that's like 902 or 903, which I completed the Artifact Challenge back when I was 895 or so (Ret Paladin), and one character with which I run Mythic+ one night a week, which is 898 or something.

It's not hard to gear up to the 890s at all, especially with the new rewards for M+. There is no gear wall for this skin, you either are good and you get it, or you're bad and you don't.

Originally Posted by Aviemore

That's not at all what to take from it.

What to take from it is that the challenge is shoved behind a gear wall that only organised raiders will be able to hurdle. Skill plays no part when the average player is 40 item levels short. What's even more embarrassing for Blizzard is that, with their item-level scaling technology, there was absolutely no reason for it to be this way.

If skill is the meant to be the barometer, there's no need for a gear wall; yet there it is, to keep people grinding up gear for a bonus artifact skin.

It's pretty scummy, to be honest.

Oh no! Content requires you to be geared enough to complete it, sky is totally falling!

Originally Posted by ProfessorTjc

Wow, I wonder why tanks are soo low? Probably because our artifact challenge is still stupid difficult.

and has maybe 1% to do wit tanking.. ya know what we do.... and enjoy doing and want to be challenged on.

Originally Posted by paflodder

Typical blizz , catering towards 5% of their playerbase .
Then wondering why the other 95% is leaving lol .

God forbid something in this game be challenging on a personal level for once. And it won't even remain challenging forever because it doesn't scale with gear.

My only problem is how the data is represented. We're not being told to total number pooled for each class.

Obviously the number of people playing a class is different between classes, so 1% means something different for each class.

Also holy shit Outlaw must really be unpopular or the challenge must really suck as Outlaw without BiS legendary/trinkets.

Can't you check more accurately by searching for the "A Challenging Look" achievement?

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Originally Posted by Mhyroth

So many liars on this forum clicking "yes" on the Poll.
No way the MMO-C community is that hardcore (since many threads show the opposite).

MMO-C community only makes up a very few percentage of the actual playerbase. If someone takes the time to invest in a WoW forum, then they probably play or are invested in the game itself more than the average player. 40% does seem a bit high, but I wouldn't be surprised if a third of the people on this forum have unlocked at least 1 of their weapon.

I currently have 2 and working on my 3rd which hopefully I will have soon (got Kruul to 6% before MT went down) and I'm not even a Mythic raider.

Originally Posted by Saverem

Can't you check more accurately by searching for the "A Challenging Look" achievement?

You could, but that won't tell you what spec has it, just that said player has it. The way they're doing it is the best possible way to see what specs have it rather than just classes.


Also, if a player has the achievement it will show up on all characters on said players account. So no, they can't use the achievement to track who has actually completed it.

Where are the doom and gloom ppl? They took another sample size of 4.5 million players.

Originally Posted by Zyrosis

You could, but that won't tell you what spec has it, just that said player has it. The way they're doing it is the best possible way to see what specs have it rather than just classes.

Ontop of that Blizzard went out of their way to make Armory even more difficult to collect data from. Hopefully this was done before the new changes or I'd feel really bad for the person(s) having to manually look at every person with the achievement to see which spec they had it with.

Seriously I tried to look at my achievements and it was fucking awful and you can't click to reveal more information about 90% of the shit on the page.

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Originally Posted by zezel81

Where are the doom and gloom ppl? They took another sample size of 4.5 million players.

Because Blizzard doesn't care about sub numbers anymore. They probably make more money now with WoW Tokens then they did with subscriptions alone.

They've become a shallow cashgrab of their former self. They'd rather 1 player spend $1000 on the battle.net store than have 50-100 players spend a subscription.

I am glad that I help in all 3 hunters' statistics

Blizzard already stated the challenge appearances will be something few will get early but will expect that anyone with an interest in will have by the end of the xpac. Keeping the trend of gear scaling, then LFR and WQ players will be able to get this done by the end of ToS or possibly the Argus patch. One reason I'm not banging my head against the wall on my alts. I've got all 3 on my Hunter main, I'll get the rest I care about later on.

Originally Posted by Zyrosis

You could, but that won't tell you what spec has it, just that said player has it. The way they're doing it is the best possible way to see what specs have it rather than just classes.


Also, if a player has the achievement it will show up on all characters on said players account. So no, they can't use the achievement to track who has actually completed it.

I'd be interested to see the % of accounts that have managed to do it on at least one character/spec.

Not suprised with Enhancement numbers, that challenge was disturbingly easy. I expected nothing else from Resto Challenge though that part with the 5 waves made me hit stuff several times. And Ele... oh well, i tried, considering i never play ele i failed pretty horrible and will try again with tomb or argus raid opening.

Very gear dependant challange, if you can call it like that, I've done it with 8-9 ilvl below avarage, so I'm kinda satisfied with result (and stopped playing like 2 days after achi, so armory can confirm this). With ToS/ Mythic Nighthold gear it should be easy.

Why is everyone crying "Gear" challenge?
It is more of a "have acquired the proper legendary items challenge", tanks for example can't even sniff the challenge without a DPS increase legendary items. Or what, we forget that sephuz gives you a mini lust each 30 secs?

Why are people discussing the difficulty? This is armory stats for characters with their challenge artifact appearence equiped. Read the bold part again please. Not everyone want to use their challenge artifact appearence even if they got it. I for once don't use the fury one because I think the hidden appearence looks better. Some spec artifacts simply looks better than other and therefore you can't use these statistics as a way to measure challenge difficulty. Naturally difficulty will affect these stats aswell, but it's far from the whole truth. Some artifacts simply looks like shit.