BFA is the first expansion where we lose more than we gain.

[Zka]

- "We lose Tiersets" Good thing, locked items never to be replaced
- "We lose legendaries" Good thing, locked items never to be replaced
- "Artifact weapons are gone" The interesting passives and skills should be made baseline/talents/azerite
- "Visual diversity will be gone" Tier visuals are not going anywhere, only the tier set bonuses

Exactly this.

[nocturnus]

- We lose Tiersets. While they tended to lock down slots in armor, they are still more interesting than "stamina crit and hast" on a slot.

- We lose legendaries which where a nice way to customize classes. Especially in mythic+ you find yourself often switching between them for different situations. The method of acquiring these obviously sucked, but the idea itself was really really good. They do implement a few as talents, but thats it.

- Artifact weapons are gone, and with them a million passives (remember, WoD had passives as well while you leveled up). This time around, there won't be any passives from leveling, and there wont be any passives from artifact weapons.

- We trade in 20+ passives that completely changed how a class worked or had nice small effects for THREE effects from our Azerite "tierset".

- We lose effects such as execute for Assa Rogues, Full Moon for owls, fall damage immunity for rogues, purgatory-lite for Fury warriors, sprint on leap for arms warriors, Ebonbolt for mages, the list goes on forever. One wonders how an elemental shaman will ever be able to do DPS without his legendary boots and gloves.

- Visual diversity will be gone. With no more artifact weapons, their transmogs are gone (old ones stay, obviously.) and with the removal of tiersets, i fear that every mail, leather, plate and cloth wearer will look the same, akin to Trial of Crusader tiersets.

Obviously subjective, but this is what I think:

- Losing tier sets: A very good thing! I don't want to be forced to raid for a set I need to perform well in the content I want to do. Plus, I want itemisation freedom and tier sets lock at least 4 options which makes the vast majority of available gear useless. Especially when combined to legendaries and AF weapons.

- Losing legendaries: A very good thing! Legendaries make it nigh impossible to balance classes. Performance discrepancies are huge and often determine how useful a particular spec is.

- The fact that you can't imagine an elemental shaman doing DPS without a particular set of legendary items, merely proves how badly legendaries are implemented and the imbalance they cause.

- Losing artifact weapons: A very good thing! Artifact weapons consisted of mostly boring passives and the perpetual growth of AP requirements resulted in a constant compulsory grind.

- Visual diversity will not be gone as long as we have the ability to transmog. Tier sets never resulted in visual variety/diversity. If anything, they worked against that.

Oh, Wow look at the casual crying about passives.

Damn, how pathetic do you have to be to write something like this ^^

[Craaazyyy]

first expansion? we gained nothing in wod and lost alot of shit.. and then lost more than we gained in legion(compared to wrath/cata/mop)

[Piesor]

I am really happy that Blizzard "purges" WoW in BfA regarding talents, features and especially the story. That leaves more place for new different and interesting stuff.
Alliance vs Horde just feels right - like back to the roots. Would be totally bored to fight more old gods / demons that are bigger than planets or else.
And I am happy that they do the same with talents / skills, gear etc.

[InfiniteCharger]

The ability to customize talents and abilities should be core to the class and not dependent on gear.

That makes no sense. Having to rework a class every expansion in order to make rotating talents and abilities worth while is bad.

Tier sets originally were purely for end game progression for classes outside of baseline skills and abilities during raid content.
Lower level gear sets also offered some bonuses but weren't required to make classes viable, they were bonuses to core class game play.

Blizzard has just gotten rid of the concept of what a core class is in terms of abilities and talents and has just decided from now on a class is defined by gear procs.

It defeats the whole concept of being in a world and growing in power as you grow, learning more powerful spells as you defeat more and more powerful enemies.

At this point they are treating all these expansions like one long piece of continuous end game content as classes reached ability cap at level 80 and talent cap at 100. After that they are just moving stuff around using gear like artifacts and azerite that you DONT KEEP permanently as part of your core class toolkit. That is the annoying part. So every expansion you get a new "revised" class based on the need to create these gear based traits and talent trees for players to grind after, whereas previously you didn't have to grind for abilities and talents and they werent temporary

[Low Hanging Fruit]

Of course you are losing more than you are gaining. The path to the PS4 and being able to resell the game all over again is underway.

[Projectmars]

If we go ahead and ignore the stat squish, which is something that comes down to personal taste since its just numbers:


- We lose Tiersets. While they tended to lock down slots in armor, they are still more interesting than "stamina crit and hast" on a slot.

- We lose legendaries which where a nice way to customize classes. Especially in mythic+ you find yourself often switching between them for different situations. The method of acquiring these obviously sucked, but the idea itself was really really good. They do implement a few as talents, but thats it.

- Artifact weapons are gone, and with them a million passives (remember, WoD had passives as well while you leveled up). This time around, there won't be any passives from leveling, and there wont be any passives from artifact weapons.

- We trade in 20+ passives that completely changed how a class worked or had nice small effects for THREE effects from our Azerite "tierset".



- We lose effects such as execute for Assa Rogues, Full Moon for owls, fall damage immunity for rogues, purgatory-lite for Fury warriors, sprint on leap for arms warriors, Ebonbolt for mages, the list goes on forever. One wonders how an elemental shaman will ever be able to do DPS without his legendary boots and gloves.

- Visual diversity will be gone. With no more artifact weapons, their transmogs are gone (old ones stay, obviously.) and with the removal of tiersets, i fear that every mail, leather, plate and cloth wearer will look the same, akin to Trial of Crusader tiersets.

- Many classes class identity will suffer greatly from this. They feel incomplete and i HIGHLY doubt that 3 traits can change that.

- No level 120 talents, no "new" talents, no active effect from the azerite neck itself, no new spells for any class, nothing.

Don't forget that the Alliance loses on having good Allied Race choices by having Void Elves and Lightforged Draenei. And lore loses by the fact that the Void Elves chose a side and the Lightforged not going to hunt down the rest of the Legion like they should.

[Scathbais]

- "We lose Tiersets" Good thing, locked items never to be replaced
- "We lose legendaries" Good thing, locked items never to be replaced
- "Artifact weapons are gone" The interesting passives and skills should be made baseline/talents/azerite
- "Visual diversity will be gone" Tier visuals are not going anywhere, only the tier set bonuses

Hey ReVnX, I remember Blizz saying something about class-specific tier was going away and that they would be focusing on themed gear related to where the items drop, so I don't think he is totally wrong there. Just the rest of his post is crap.

[wysimdnwyg]

- "We lose Tiersets" Good thing, locked items never to be replaced

Also, no more using lower ilvl gear for set bonuses. Sickens me every time I have to swap for an item 15+ ilvls lower so I can get that bonus.

[Deleted]

I dont think you can really say this already.. Maybe we are losing some abilities more than gaining them, but you dont know what the actual CONTENT will be like in terms of raids and dungeons and those kind of things.

[ReVnX]

Also, no more using lower ilvl gear for set bonuses. Sickens me every time I have to swap for an item 15+ ilvls lower so I can get that bonus.

I got a Tier 20 920 Cloak I can't replace and 2 960's collecting dust in the bank

[dcc626]

We have not, however, heard anything about the process of getting Azerite gear and the system in which the traits are chosen. All we know is that they won't be random like the crucible so if you get two versions of the same item, they'll both have the same traits, the only difference that can exist would be ilvl. However, Blizzard has not communicated whether the bonuses available will change throughout the expansion and what they will be. So far the ones they've shown were things each class already had, just reintroduced through a new UI.

Here's the thing. People hate how good Arcano Crystal was, but the same issue can exist through Azerite gear. What if an ilvl 300 Helm has all BiS traits and every ilvl upgrade you get after the fact has terrible ones? You're still locked into that one item due to traits.

Also, there's four slots locked next expansion; helm, neck, shoulder, and chest, so it's not much different than a current 4 piece set bonus.

its certainly different than 4-6 pieces of tier AND 2 legendaries AND weapons.

[Ielenia]

- Visual diversity will be gone. With no more artifact weapons, their transmogs are gone (old ones stay, obviously.) and with the removal of tiersets, i fear that every mail, leather, plate and cloth wearer will look the same, akin to Trial of Crusader tiersets.

You will be able to transmog your artifact weapon skins onto the BfA weapons, provided you have the skins unlocked. Also, tier set visuals stopped being unique after Burning Crusade. From beginning of Wrath of the Lich King and onward, all tier sets look exactly like any normal gear from the same raid tier.

[dcc626]

Fair enough so 25-26 to 9 then, it's still a ridiculous prune in a game that desperately need more abilities, not less.

actually its 4 per piece (the center talent seems fixed) plus whatever the neck might give (which at this point is nothing but stats because lol 2nd alpha build)

thank you for mentioning the fact that some number of the 25-26 things we lose are garbage like dodge for ferals and such.

cant really make all encompassing statements about loss until we see what we can gain.

- - - Updated - - -

We actually lose all of that and then we don't gain anything in return.

Specs were completely gutted to make way for an Artifact. So much so that the Legion pre-patch made almost every spec feel like you were handicapped.

Now we're heading back to that handi-capped state. Except... We have no Artifact. No new Artifact ability. All it is.... Is a fucking necklace.


No new 120 talent tier.

No new 120 ability.

Removal of 90% of Artifact Traits.

Removal of Gold Traits.

Artifact abilities removed/turned into talents. Shoved into existing talent rows forcing you to lose a talent you spent all of Legion with. (EG. Ret Paladin choose between Crusade OR Wake of Ashes(Artifact Ability).

Baseline abilities removed and turned into talents. (EG. Shadow Word: Death. Shadowpriest)



And people think a Necklace is going to fix this? LOL. Azerite gear has 3 traits to choose from. The example ones from Blizzcon were literally +% dmg to Stormstrike.

3 rings of traits with 3 options per plus the center trait that seems fixed x3

[Aggrophobic]

actually its 4 per piece (the center talent seems fixed) plus whatever the neck might give (which at this point is nothing but stats because lol 2nd alpha build)

thank you for mentioning the fact that some number of the 25-26 things we lose are garbage like dodge for ferals and such.

You don't know how many per piece either though. We do know what we'll loose. Thats already been cleared up in most cases. We don't know if we'll get anything else at all actually. It might very well just be flat %.

[Deleted]

Yeah, what's the point of this post?

You'd know if you'd bothered to read the post but I guess dem wurds 2 hard amiright.
They're gutting an already gutted game. I'm guessing to make it playable with a four button gamepad.

[Wewlad]

OP defends legiondaries.

No. Fuck that noise.

[Alpacapacino]

Except the proof is there lol. Take 5 minutes to look, guilds aren't rough to run at all, I did it the last 2 expansions at a high level. The incentive isn't there, everyone raiding at a high level is saying it, and everyone is saying that's why they're burning out. That's why Midwinter's leadership quit, that's why Serenity decided to not bother accepting recruits after a few of their raiders got poached. Fact: the main incentive for raiding at a high level every expansion except for Legion has been the top notch gear. Fact: you're now able to get best possible gear without even putting in any effort. Fact: It doesn't make the raiding community feel valuable when they have nothing that sets them apart from others. Fact: You spend far more time doing Mythic progression than it takes to get full 960 or higher from Mythic +.

There's zero incentive for Mythic raiding right now, even the mount isn't worth much because guilds eventually sell the mounts which diminish the value of having it in the first place. The reason why you're struggling with recruitment is because of the incentive, many good players don't bother to raid anymore because they don't need to because of Mythic+. It all boils down to INCENTIVES, which raiding has none of. Yet you're required to put in a massive amount of effort for it, between the time investment of just progression and the grinding of Artifact Power and Legendaries(granted at this point anyone playing the whole expansion shouldn't need to worry about Legendaries but still a problem early on this expansion).

Because a few guilds broke up doesn't mean they did because of their being no incentive you say that's the reason but from I've experienced in my own group and from the content that i watched a few of those guilds broke up due to the massive amount of investment, that has drastically increased in legion. You have split pushes, you have to grind out X amount of ap, the TF system incentives you to run all level of difficulties because of the TF lottery. When you're having to maintain 3-4 alts or more coupled with large time investments for ap grinding. The list goes on, if you watched for example any of Sco's interviews this he delves at the heart of the problem and blank stated that's what it was. Time investment now due to time investment in the past has drastically gone up. He even went on to say that if this was how WoW raiding was a few years back he would of never had the time to raid at the level he raids at.

And it is hard to manage a group of 26-30 players, you have to have a larger roster, just having 20 never works out so you invest a lot of time recruiting. Any decent guild will tell you it's not an easy feet. Getting to that point of being a well progressed guild is a huge investment. You face a lot of ups and downs, then when you finally reach that point you have to maintain it. You're always recruiting, figuring out your weekly raid plans. There is much more to it than just what i listed but yeah. Guild management is not a passive thing. you have to actively put in effort. Depending on the kind of raid group you're in, how many officers you have etc, delegation is usually key. But for example for our group we have 4 officers. even with a lot of responsibilities delegated I still micromanage more than half of everything regarding our raid group. And we are only a top 200 guild. I know what I've had to do with my own experiences creating a raid group culture and let me tell you it's draining.

[Zyky]

Because a few guilds broke up doesn't mean they did because of their being no incentive you say that's the reason but from I've experienced in my own group and from the content that i watched a few of those guilds broke up due to the massive amount of investment, that has drastically increased in legion. You have split pushes, you have to grind out X amount of ap, the TF system incentives you to run all level of difficulties because of the TF lottery. When you're having to maintain 3-4 alts or more coupled with large time investments for ap grinding. The list goes on, if you watched for example any of Sco's interviews this he delves at the heart of the problem and blank stated that's what it was. Time investment now due to time investment in the past has drastically gone up. He even went on to say that if this was how WoW raiding was a few years back he would of never had the time to raid at the level he raids at.

And it is hard to manage a group of 26-30 players, you have to have a larger roster, just having 20 never works out so you invest a lot of time recruiting. Any decent guild will tell you it's not an easy feet. Getting to that point of being a well progressed guild is a huge investment. You face a lot of ups and downs, then when you finally reach that point you have to maintain it. You're always recruiting, figuring out your weekly raid plans. There is much more to it than just what i listed but yeah. Guild management is not a passive thing. you have to actively put in effort. Depending on the kind of raid group you're in, how many officers you have etc, delegation is usually key. But for example for our group we have 4 officers. even with a lot of responsibilities delegated I still micromanage more than half of everything regarding our raid group. And we are only a top 200 guild. I know what I've had to do with my own experiences creating a raid group culture and let me tell you it's draining.

lol "a few guilds". I'm not even going to bother reading that wall of text after you open up with that line of garbage. Just to prove you know nothing of what you're talking about: we're 3 months into Antorus, 200 guilds Worldwide have killed Mythic Argus. Nighthold opened Jan 18th 2017, 3 Months into Nighthold there were 257 Mythic Gul'dan Kills Worldwide Further back Siege of Orgrimmar came out on September 10th 2013, 245 guilds killed Heroic Garrosh in between 2 holidays where many guilds don't raid.

Statistics don't lie dude, sorry to show you facts that burst your little "everything is fine" bubble.

Edit: Heroic has the same problem if you want to look into that too.

[Imbalanced]

lol "a few guilds". I'm not even going to bother reading that wall of text after you open up with that line of garbage. Just to prove you know nothing of what you're talking about: we're 3 months into Antorus, 200 guilds Worldwide have killed Mythic Argus. Nighthold opened Jan 18th 2017, 3 Months into Nighthold there were 257 Mythic Gul'dan Kills Worldwide Further back Siege of Orgrimmar came out on September 10th 2013, 245 guilds killed Heroic Garrosh in between 2 holidays where many guilds don't raid.

Statistics don't like dude, sorry to show you facts that burst your little "everything is fine" bubble.

Well to be fair the last 2 bosses in Antorus are much harder than anything in Nighthold or Seige