The main problem I see is that we have 10 dungeons on release and we already know the Azerite traits that gear will have. This is the gear we will still be getting from Mythic+ at the end of the expansion. There's not going to be that many more dungeons added and unless Blizz goes back and changes the existing traits, this is the gear we will have for the most part FOR THE REST OF THE EXPANSION.
And that is not okay, imo. There's too few traits and not enough interesting stuff going on with them for this to be a large part of the gear we will see for the rest of the expansion.
Blizz can add traits on the raid gear and the PvP gear, but that doesn;t change the M+ system. It will either mean that Blizz has to introduce better Azerite gear in the dungeons it adds down the line (which would cause balance issues with some dungeons being more attractive to run than others) or they force people that play mostly M+ to get their azerite pieces from other sources or they force themselves to go back in later and make changes, meaning our gear might not be good anymore or we might have discarded gear that we now need with the "new" traits.
Too many of the Azerite traits just add through put or simply amplify things you would be doing anyway. And as always, there's crappy ones, to make the other traits look good. Who in their right mind is waiting to equip a piece of gear that increases Drain Life's healing? You're not supposed to use that spell at all, unless things have gone horribly wrong.
I have no doubt Blizz will iterate on the system and improve it, but I wish they had been a bit more ambitious with their initial version. My guess is they didn;t want to make certain pieces TOO good and conversely decided to keep it simple and add and improve the system going forward. With the old mantra of "it's better to add things than to have to take them away and nerf them"
I'm not saying the Azerite system is down right bad or unplayable. Just that it does not deliver the kind of impact that the whole of Artifact traits + Legendaries + tier sets (which is what it is replacing) did in Legion, and that's disappointing.
Again, you are appealing to some "blizzards know better statistics". You know nothing about it. SP gets totally fcked since the beginning of the the beta, from alpha even. And guess what? Post release fixed. What's the purpose of beta then? Collect some feedback, what will be evaluated year later? When everything will be different? Blizzard can't or won't make quick changes. They are too big for it. All beta feedback are totally useless. Mb some bugs will gets fixed, but nothing more. All the suggestions are completely in vain. You can't even give a proper example, because there is none.
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And too add to it, first ring of traits contain only 2 possible choices - one for a specific spec, and one "generic cross-spec trait". And there is not much of a variety yet.
One ring of traits is just some procs like "+150 crit and 200 mastery". It is strong, but not really. You shouldn't forget, that azurite gear pieces don't have secondary stats. Only main stat + stamina. So it is kinda neglected.
One ring of traits are totally utility. For plate users it's choice between aggramar or prydaz.
Center trait being +5 ilvl is just a placeholder i hope.
Over all, it's very easy to determine which traits are good and which trait are not.
The true purpose of this systems, if to make useless gear from m+ and raids less useless. You know, after third stack of chaos crystals it gets a bit boring.
I get it if people just don't like the traits. They should be interesting, so if all the traits are boring then I agree that the system is a failure. I would wait for raid azerite gear to drop before drawing a conclusion though.
However, it was pretty obvious that the Azerite gear would not be as powerful as Legendaries + Artifact weapons + Tier sets. That's so unrealistic, it's obvious that everyone who thought that is now disappointed.
Nope i find it quite astounding more people have not questioned why classes are being released unfinished by a company who built their reputation on only releasing products when it was ready.
That same company who just a few years ago stated that they had expanded the team to be the biggest team they have ever had for wow, yet now even when the majority of class design since wod has been removing more than adding we are now at the stage where they are happy to ship classes fundementally broken.
Bigger team and more expensive expansions, when do we actually see the benefits of this?
Yes. Yes it is. Every beta tester has yelled that from his rooftop since the very beginning. Azerite is supposed to replace tier set, artifact and artifact traits. It can't even replace the artifact without its traits. That's why people have been crying that the gameplay feels worse compared to Legion. Honestly, it feels so much worse thatt I'm getting bored already and the game hasn't even been out yet.
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But we already knew that. And if we need the raid gear to actually have a fun and interesting gameplay, then why even bother?
I feel like a lot of people are complaining about classes being "fundamentally broken" just because they lost pieces of their kits that players were used to from Legion. Yeah there are a couple of corner case specs that might not be super tight, but as for the rest of them as far as I've tested and read they play fine... I think many people are mislabeling "different" and "pruned" as "broken" and "incomplete".
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Give kids a couple of fun tools and toys for their arsenal for an xpac and what happens when you return to the basics and remove those? Get a bunch of children throwing tantrums. WoW has worked fine before the artifact weapons and legendaries, it will work fine without them again. This is just the standard QQ from people that don't understand that an MMO can't indefinitely ADD to kits without eventually having to back up a little bit to avoid bloating (comparatively, Legion was incredibly bloated with artifact weapons + legendaries compared to past expansions, hence them backing up a bit).
For the record, no raid gear is not "more interesting and complex". The raid azerite gear and high PvP azerite gear were both available on Beta in their 120 realm for purchase, for the most part they're all the same passives as the dungeon and questing gear. The only thing that's different is the non-class specific first row trait. PvP gear gives a proc that slightly buffs you and up to 4 other allies and Raid gear has 2 different ones, one where you shoot out lasers for flat damage and another where you get a proc of stat. The more difficult gear is exactly as disappointing as the dungeon/wq gear.
As for "it hasn't been released yet" comment. It's on beta, it's there for testing, I have tested it, thousands of other people have tested it, it's a garbage system and the point of beta is to make sure it doesn't get released like garbage, but they're not listening to the feedback.
@skumnasty i play shadow where it is most efficient for me to get into voidform asap for void erruption, do absolutely nothing to drop out of voidform asap then repeat the process. I would say that qualifies as fundementaly broken.
That's not even talking about the convoluted mess that is the actual "intended" gameplay.
Or the completely pointless outdated talents designed for legion shadow that do not work with the new bfa shadow.
Not to mention we are still just walking punching bags for melee in pvp.
So yeah...
I'm not very familiar with shadow priests. When you say "most efficient", it sounds like that is a tuning issue. The fact that 1 ability is so important makes it sound like it needs to be nerfed slightly and other abilities brought up to par on importance.
With less cc across the board, I think comps will be more important then ever in PvP. The fact that you are playing an immobile caster should lessen your surprise at melee being able to smash you...
This shows that you have no clue what you're talking about. Many core class abilities were baked into the artifact and many of those were removed with the artifact and not given back as passives. A great example: Guardian Druids, no longer have a damage cooldown, every other tank has one, but they took Berserk away from Guardian and gave them Rage of the Sleeper in their artifact. They removed the artifact and didn't give Guardian back their damage cd. Guardian again, they lost their passive snare with Thrash because it became an Artifact trait, removed the artifact and didn't give Guardian back their snare, now the only tank in beta without a snare too. What you're missing here is they removed a ton of passives abilities from players to bake them into the Artifact for artificial progress, but now that they're removing the Artifact they're not giving back specs core aspects of their spec.
What I'm reading is "that spec has it, so everyone should", which is the exact thing they blatantly said they were trying to steer away from. Yeah I was a little harsh saying they just took away the extra bells and whistles from Legion; they definitely took away more, but in an attempt to make classes unique again, which I don't have a problem with.
@skumnasty It is not a number issue, it is a fundemental design problem that shadow has suffered since they introduced voidform.
If you're not really familiar with shadow then you can hardly tell me what is broken and what is not about it can you?
We are in essence a slow building fast spending reverse energy resource system that simply does not work in a game like wow for a ranged class. The only way it actually worked in legion was in raids at 40+ stacks, even that required complete stationary turret casting, since they totally reworked how insanity drain works now and have changed how several mechanics of the spec actually work the flaws show even more so. When you need to throw in 50+ band aid fixes to get the thing to be playable it is time to scrap the thing.
This is why we have been told we have to wait for a patch AFTER release for a rework, that same rework we were told can only happen at start of a new expansion...
You cannot have a caster class that has all of it's damage, their only heal AND their only defensive which completely silences you tied to the same magic school that can be interrupted and locked out of for 4 seconds every 10-20 seconds depending on the melee. Whilst simultaniously that class has no mobility other than a 3 second small move speed buff talent that is tied to a very small mana bar on a 6 second cd whilst also being cloth and extremely fragile and still requiring that class to hard cast it's spells to actually generate its resource to build into the aspect of the spec that actually increases your physical damage taken if you successfully manage to even enter the form before the melee completely crushes you.
The melee vs shadow priest issue is absolutely ridiculous and has been beyond a joke for far too long. You should maybe try playing one and see just how retarded it is.
It's pretty sad seeing just how many of us have just gave up over the latest couple expansions since voidform came in. Pretty much the vast majority of positive posts you see regarding shadow are from people who rerolled it for purely raiding or as an alt. We have always accepted we are an afterthought spec but it is becoming ridiculous the differences between us and the more favoured classes, a perfect example is the new fury rework, they say a fury ability felt wrong without 2 charges so they gave it 2 charges baseline, shadow went the entire expansion with this problem requiring a mandatory legendary to fix it, and now in bfa as usual we need to spend talents to get stuff others get baseline. We always seem to be the class that gets half baked ideas that didnt work for other classes or were removed to make way for a different remake for other classes, voidform for example voidform is basically a poor mans demo meta form.
They always show a complete disconnect from what shadow needs, their best example lately is they couldn't even think of a new talent so they gave us a pvp talent in the normal talents to reduce our silence adding insult to injury that if we are a class that are legitimately free food for melee then surely we should get a disarm, but no, we get -15 sec to silence.....
If i even play bfa i will be rerolling to assassination rogue the pseudo melee version of shadow and the difference between the 2 is night and day, it's fun, has mobility, ridiculous defensives, a reliable heal, immunites, cheat death, immune to silences, almost no classes have disarms and i have ways to counter the situations i actually do get disarmed. Literally everything shadow lacks. Oh and it even has stealth and great cc options.
But i really do not want to derail this thread any further to explain the flaws of shadow.
The point stands, we have a much bigger dev team, expansions cost more yet classes are getting more simple, worse, boring and are now even being shipped incomplete on a release of a new expansion.
Last edited by mmoc1448478633; 2018-07-03 at 09:24 PM.
The issue is, when they're making it so you need these things and you don't offer anything different from the other classes, that is a problem. For example you NEED a snare for necrotic weeks in M+, so basically fuck Guardians that entire week. Guardian's already do far less damage than any other tank in the game, they don't have a damage cooldown, yet every other tank spec does, so again fuck Guardians. You honestly can't be so ignorant, this is a huge problem, they can claim that they want to steer away from classes being so similar, but then they need to stop designing the game to require certain things.
Instead of thinking "fuck Guardians that entire week" try looking at it like "bring a dps or heal that has a snare that week". A prime example of why they want classes to be diverse.
This can be a numbers thing. If they indeed do significantly less damage once BfA is live and all things are considered, I could see your frustration here. However, if you happen to have a lot of other utility then that (hopefully) will make up for the lower damage.
I think the ignorance may be on your part where you expect them to make it so YOU can personally deal with every thing that is required. The idea behind class diversity is that YOU ALONE cannot (or will have difficulty) countering every problem in a dungeon/raid etc thus encouraging the need for certain classes.