Upcoming Azerite Changes

[Kwaai]

https://us.battle.net/forums/en/wow/topic/20769297394#1

Upcoming Azerite Armor Improvements

Lore / Community Manager

*****

Thanks for all of the continued feedback and discussion around the Azerite Armor system. We’ve been following the community discussions closely, and the systems team has been focusing on making some improvements as their top priority. I’ve got some updates to share on our current thoughts, as well as some upcoming changes.



To start, here’s some of the bigger issues we’ve been seeing brought up:

Overall Availability: While there’s plenty of Azerite Armor in the 295-340 item level range, further sources are heavily limited and susceptible to bad luck. Even players who are doing a wide range of high-end content are still wearing at least one Item Level 340 piece, despite having replaced all their other gear several times over. Everything else about the system is basically irrelevant if you can’t get your hands on the gear in the first place.

Lack of Agency: When items do drop, it can feel like you’re not really given much in the way of options. You can choose whether you want this to be a Fire or a Frost piece, or a versatile one with a generic trait, but that isn’t necessarily an interesting choice. And when you look at the complete package, those choices don’t often feel like they’re having a meaningful impact on how you play your character.

Trait Depth: Several of the traits that are considered the “best” mathematically turn out to be some of the simplest mechanically, which reinforces the sense that the system isn’t really affecting gameplay.



We agree that those issues need to be resolved. So, here’s a few changes we’re working on:

+ We need to make Azerite Armor more available, for all types of players, through a method everyone can utilize. So we’re actually looking at Emissary rewards for that. The plan is to make Azerite Armor rewards from Emissary quests scale all the way up to 370 (based on your item level), which gives everyone a new, reliable source for appropriate gear. Further on, we’re looking at making some further improvements to the ways Emissaries reward gear, but getting more Azerite Armor in your hands is the higher priority for the immediate future.

+ When we add new Azerite Armor in what we’re calling “BfA Season 2” (starting with Siege of Zuldazar and its corresponding Mythic+ and PvP seasons), we’re going to add another outer ring to those pieces of gear that has two spec-specific trait options for each spec. This effectively means that your favorite traits will be available on a lot more items, while also opening up a lot more options across the scope of all of your Azerite pieces (and thus, we hope, create more interesting decisions).

+ We’re also going to continue to work on the individual traits themselves. We’ve done some basic tuning so far, but we’re taking the lessons we’ve learned from these first iterations forward, and Tides of Vengeance will bring new traits into the pool that reflect that. Our goal is to make the more generic traits be decent middle-of-the-road options for when you want to use a single piece for multiple situations or specs, but make sure the spec-specific options (which are generally the more interesting traits) win out in their respective environments.



Some of those changes won’t be coming until Tides of Vengeance (and you’ll see them on the PTR soon), but the overall availability of Azerite Armor is a much more pressing concern, so we’re investigating ways of hotfixing that directly into the live game. I don’t have a solid timeline on when that might be yet, but we’ll definitely have more information to share as soon as we can confirm when that can happen.

Thoughts? Seems pretty nice to me. I didn't think that Azerite was as bad as some people did, but it absolutely had issues so it's nice to see that Blizzard is willing to make some changes. I wish Azerite gear would change traits based on spec, though.

I'd like to see a bit more info on how the double spec specific traits will work and what it'll look like.

[GreenJesus]

oo wooow... Emissary cache can scale up to 370 in 8.1??? Wow!!! That solves eeeeeverything... lol.... what a fucking joke. Just make them available from mythic+ and boom everyone will stop complaining about not being able to get them.

[Faesroll]

oo wooow... Emissary cache can scale up to 370 in 8.1??? Wow!!! That solves eeeeeverything... lol.... what a fucking joke. Just make them available from mythic+ and boom everyone will stop complaining about not being able to get them.

It really is that simple, I honestly don't see any issue with it dropping from M+.

[Deleted]

oo wooow... Emissary cache can scale up to 370 in 8.1??? Wow!!! That solves eeeeeverything... lol.... what a fucking joke. Just make them available from mythic+ and boom everyone will stop complaining about not being able to get them.

Apparently emissary cache scaling will come with hotfix... or at least they will try to do so, but rest with 8.1.

"...but the overall availability of Azerite Armor is a much more pressing concern, so we’re investigating ways of hotfixing that directly into the live game".

Shouldnt be that hard, just add 2 more scaling levels, 340-355 to drop 355 azerite pieces, and above 355 to get 370 azerite pieces.

[Jahrastafari]

Yeah, this isn't going to be enough to bring me back.

[Softbottom]

It really is that simple, I honestly don't see any issue with it dropping from M+.

I think they said somewhere they didn't want to do that because people would feel "forced" to run mythic + over and over (which I think is dumb). It is what it is though.

[GreenJesus]

I think they said somewhere they didn't want to do that because people would feel "forced" to run mythic + over and over (which I think is dumb). It is what it is though.

But people already have to do that anyway.. Are they fucking retarded?

[Keihndeth]

This doesn't solve the underlying issue that its uninteresting and unintuitive. Glad they are trying, but it's looking pretty clear this isn't going to be solved for BfA. Question is, will it bottom out like WoD did or will enough bandaid fixes prop up the expansion. Kind of shocked how much I'm starting to miss Legion this fast... even that incessant fel green. Ugh.

[Deleted]

oh yes emisary cache can scale up to 370 and requires azerite ilvl 30 or something YES!

[EbaumsTipster]

It really is that simple, I honestly don't see any issue with it dropping from M+.

oo wooow... Emissary cache can scale up to 370 in 8.1??? Wow!!! That solves eeeeeverything... lol.... what a fucking joke. Just make them available from mythic+ and boom everyone will stop complaining about not being able to get them.

You really don't see why making 375+ BIS gear farmable over and over and over when you can only raid once a week is a bad idea? It would mean that M+ is MANDATORY. No point in raiding when you can kill pirate ass for infinity.

[Varolyn]

The addition of the new ring is good imo. Also, pretty much of all the new traits datamined are far more interesting than the 8.0 launch ones. So blizz is making progress in making the system better but I do have serious concerns on balance with another spec-specific ring being added.

[GreenJesus]

You really don't see why making 375+ BIS gear farmable over and over and over when you can only raid once a week is a bad idea? It would mean that M+ is MANDATORY. No point in raiding when you can kill pirate ass for infinity.

It is already mandatory for all of your other pieces on your gear. And you still need Uldir for the BiS Archive/lazer anyway.

[elaina]

I like this change but still don't know why they won't let it drop in M+ or warforge.

[EbaumsTipster]

It is already mandatory for all of your other pieces on your gear. And you still need Uldir for the BiS Archive/lazer anyway.

Except Uldir gear is only BIS in Uldir, and getting that gear is completely RNG dependent.

M+ Azerite Gear would just mean that you can farm Heroic/Mythic-tier azerite traits all day. Won't ever happen.

[keyboardshinobi]

oo wooow... Emissary cache can scale up to 370 in 8.1??? Wow!!! That solves eeeeeverything... lol.... what a fucking joke. Just make them available from mythic+ and boom everyone will stop complaining about not being able to get them.

excpet for the group who doesn't like doing M+ then it will be them bitching they don't have as many options.

[Aleksej89]

Just make a limit how many ass-erite gear pieces can a player get per week in M+ dungeons.

Quality of item depends on the level of M+ dungeon.

Frankly its a simple band-aid that they can implement soon.

And its logical that if you want all the chances to get the best gear possible, you should do all the relevant content.

Raids and M+ are to me the same part of WoW - end game PVE.
If you want gear that is relevant to that part of WoW then you should do both types of content - assuming you care to min-max your chances for gear.

[capri sunset]

The extra ring is probably some of the best news we could get, if they actually do make a good amount of gameplay oriented traits I think the system can be salvaged

[Augrelle]

Nah, looks good.

It addresses a lot of the issues people have been having.

Having 6 traits (2 per spec) on the other most ring might cause a simming or power overload. At least for classes with multiple DPS specs.

It doesn't completely some the issue of how often you can farm it but it's better.

As to above: I don't want M+ to be even more required. Spread out the loot to other 'dead content' so that content isn't as dead. Now if only they can add some to island expeditions.

[Armourboy]

Really don't understand why they want to tie it to emissary. I'm super casual these days and I'm sitting with three pieces of azerite over 355.

[MakeMeLaugh]

Can't believe a whole team is working on this, and after all the feedback, that's what we get. GTFO.