Cut off the arm to save the body.

[erifwodahs]

The moment you need to go outside the game to "sim" your best gear, something is wrong.

The thing is that you don't have to -.-. Something like twilight devastation doing 10% of your dps will be obvious upgrade in comparison to some other crap by hitting a target for two minutes. There are some not so obvious but YOU DON'T HAVE TO. You choose to to be "the very best". In vanilla or TBC you would be wearing ilvl 128 ring instead of ilvl 141. Why? It's a tier higher drop! Were sims available then? No. But there were plenty of people doing math and putting guides up.
The moment you use 3rd party site for gearing guide in an RPG is that a failure of the game company? Because then it is every damn RPG ever starting with Old School Runescape gearing ending with current WoW. Because no casual will ever do maths and tests on gear for hours. They will go on icy vein and check out most optimal rotations azerites and other crap there. Like 12 years ago. "Do I keep my t4 4 set or do I go for t4 2 parts and have this new non tier set helmet on me!?"
THINK MAN!

[StillMcfuu]

so like the difference between new tiers and old tiers?

Sounds about right yeah, keep your gear up to date or suffer has been WoW since tbc. Vanilla itemization was lol at best

I'm only bringing up triple stacks because you're complaining about traits and getting certain gear, when, spoiler alert, the same combos appear on several items

I'm complaining about traits and how out of the 20 of them 1 or 2 are good. Not getting the gear. You brought up the gear acquisition for Azerite, even though it's not that bad. I'm saying it's a bad system when 95% of the gear that drops higher level or not, is useless because the spinny wheel only has 1 useful skill out of the 5 presented.
They should return stats to these pieces so there is a balance-able (by the player) way of looking at the gear and with a reduced pool of Azerite have the majority if not all options be available on the gear. This was supposed to replace tier, but lost the idea that once you get your tier your gtg. The point of tier has always been a give and take over keeping as many pieces as possible to maintain your max set bonus, while sacrificing on that one item that drops that may be better than the tier piece, but will lose you your bonus.

That's good gearing. Not this nonsense in the same raid tier where you have to go 3 different places for your azerite, none of the raid azerite is actually any good for you, so now your stuck 2 ilvl jumps below other classes that can use the raid pieces. And it would all be fixed if they reduced the trait pool to actual meaningful traits that are more readily available.

These were supposed to replace Tier sets, but they don't offer meaningful spec upgrades, nor are there options to weigh against the items. You have a list of traits you need to be competitive and then you go on the internet and search for what pieces have the correct combo of traits to put together for that list.

[Kehego]

I'm complaining about traits and how out of the 20 of them 1 or 2 are good. Not getting the gear. You brought up the gear acquisition for Azerite, even though it's not that bad. I'm saying it's a bad system when 95% of the gear that drops higher level or not, is useless because the spinny wheel only has 1 useful skill out of the 5 presented.
They should return stats to these pieces so there is a balance-able (by the player) way of looking at the gear and with a reduced pool of Azerite have the majority if not all options be available on the gear. This was supposed to replace tier, but lost the idea that once you get your tier your gtg. The point of tier has always been a give and take over keeping as many pieces as possible to maintain your max set bonus, while sacrificing on that one item that drops that may be better than the tier piece, but will lose you your bonus.

That's good gearing. Not this nonsense in the same raid tier where you have to go 3 different places for your azerite, none of the raid azerite is actually any good for you, so now your stuck 2 ilvl jumps below other classes that can use the raid pieces. And it would all be fixed if they reduced the trait pool to actual meaningful traits that are more readily available.

These were supposed to replace Tier sets, but they don't offer meaningful spec upgrades, nor are there options to weigh against the items. You have a list of traits you need to be competitive and then you go on the internet and search for what pieces have the correct combo of traits to put together for that list.

Tier gear wasn't always good
You just didnt have a choice lol

and it's more like 6 traits to choose from, and you can have up to 3 of one.
Versus 1 set of tier gear that either increased or lowered your net damage (legion was infamous for having old tiers > new tiers)


and, if you're saying that none of the raid azerite is good for you with your whole chest, i can safely say that you know nothing and you're just loud for being loud's sake.

[StillMcfuu]

Tier gear wasn't always good
You just didnt have a choice lol

and it's more like 6 traits to choose from, and you can have up to 3 of one.
Versus 1 set of tier gear that either increased or lowered your net damage (legion was infamous for having old tiers > new tiers)


and, if you're saying that none of the raid azerite is good for you with your whole chest, i can safely say that you know nothing and you're just loud for being loud's sake.

Dead wrong.

[Kehego]

Dead wrong.

What class? Link your armory, and I'll link sims

[Powerogue]

Blizzard need to much more critical when it comes to their own work. If something doesn't work, then just drop it. Don't spend months trying to save a lost cause only to end up with something which makes the game worse. With systems like the Azerite gear which from the beginning clearly didn't work they just need to make a clear cut and remove it from the game instead of using a lot of resources trying to fix something which is already lost. Azerite gear brought much more negatives to the game than positives and adding systems like that is only damaging. Especially when they use extra resources on them. Only a very small minority of players are going to look back at the Azerite gear with any positive feelings. The same thing can be said about the corruption gear. The situations where you feel bad because of the corruption just massively outweighs the times when you feel good. They shouldn't spend time and resources on these systems which just have a overall negative impact on the game. If something clearly doesn't work, they just need to put their proudness aside and cut it from the game. Simple as that.

If your game has fun content people will play it. Don't add negatives to it.

They do.

The thing is once they've invested into something major, they don't have the resources to just totally replace it immediately. They replace it the next expansion. In extreme cases like WOD, they're willing to cut an expansion short to get it over with faster.

My beef is that all too often they also replace things that did work well with things that don't, particularly Legion-BFA. I can see the feedback they listened to to go from artifact weapons (infinite grind) to azerite gear (not infinite grind) but it didn't work well.

[TheLucky1]

Seems to me you didn't get the point. There is literally a slider on raidbots, you set your desired max corruption, which will always be 39, 59, or fucking bonkers if you're a DH or BM, and poof you're done. The decision is still made by simcraft, and if anything, gear choices are even more dependent on it now.

Are you dense?
Who decides if you go for 39,59 or whatever breakpoint? you do!

[kamuimac]

Agree with OP

mythic raiding should have been cut off from game years ago

wouldnt turn all wow toxic if they did it back in wolk/cata

[Michael Jackson]

Final Fantasy and ESO did this and came out as new games, and they're now the two best and most played MMOs on the market.

Blizzard is just masochistic, never want to admit they're wrong, or even when they do they make it sound like they're just a bit wrong.

Then they make the same mistakes.

[Ghostile]

Final Fantasy and ESO did this and came out as new games, and they're now the two best and most played MMOs on the market.

Pretty sure wow still outnumbers both.

FFXIV nor ESO will catch up until they have unfucked the endgame and specially the pvp.

[Donald Hellscream]

Just scrapping Azerite armor at launch and not continue to improve on it would've been an even bigger disaster than trying to make it make it work.

Imagine an expansion where the core character progression is fundamentally broken, and remains broken from launch till the last day of the expansion. That would be magnitudes worse than Blizzard trying to make the system somewhat work.
Even worse imagine an expansion where Blizzard just flatout removes the core progression system of said expansion and left nothing to replace it with, because that is what would happen if they just ditched the azerite system then and there.

[Kaver]

"Hey, I personally don't like that body part. Therefore it must not be important. Better cut it out".

You would make a great doctor!

Do you think Azerite gear has made the game better? Is it worth all the resources Blizzard have used to create it?

- - - Updated - - -

Just scrapping Azerite armor at launch and not continue to improve on it would've been an even bigger disaster than trying to make it make it work.

They should just have removed the system completely before launch.

All beta/alpha testers told Blizzard that the system was a disaster, but they chose not to listen because of their skewed proudness.

- - - Updated - - -

In that case Azerite Armor, Island, Warfronts and the whole storyline for BfA should have been dropped right after release. No matter what your stance on BfA is, its pretty clear, that this is a very unrealistic scenario.

I agree. The thing with Islands, Warfronts etc. is that you can ignore them if you want. You cant ignore Azerite gear.

- - - Updated - - -

If only it was that simple. I like to know what is your experience in large scale software development. How easy is it to remove core components midway of their life cycle.

Couldn't they just have removed azerite gear before BFA launched?

[rhorle]

I agree. The thing with Islands, Warfronts etc. is that you can ignore them if you want. You cant ignore Azerite gear.

You pretty much can though. You just gain it, pick traits, and ignore it. If you can't ignore Azerite gear then you also couldn't ignore Island Expeditions because you can spam them for minuscule Azerite. Or even Conquest. The improvements done to Azerite in 8.1 made the system fine. It wasn't that bad to begin with but was improved just fine.

The biggest problem with Azerite was how people treated it like Artifacts. A lot of issues were because of that perception. You never needed to grind out every last drop of Azerite. Once you unlocked traits that was all you needed. And Blizzard made catch up mechanics so you were never far behind if you barely did anything.

[Zantera]

What's wrong with azerite? I know the acquisition was a bit off in like s1 of BFA but I'd say it's been fine since BoD at least. Like sure I can miss tier sets as well (though they also come with a bunch of problems) but you win some you lose some.

[Kaver]

You pretty much can though. You just gain it, pick traits, and ignore it. If you can't ignore Azerite gear then you also couldn't ignore Island Expeditions because you can spam them for minuscule Azerite. Or even Conquest. The improvements done to Azerite in 8.1 made the system fine. It wasn't that bad to begin with but was improved just fine.

The biggest problem with Azerite was how people treated it like Artifacts. A lot of issues were because of that perception. You never needed to grind out every last drop of Azerite. Once you unlocked traits that was all you needed. And Blizzard made catch up mechanics so you were never far behind if you barely did anything.

You cannot ignore Azerite gear because it is a core part of your character progression.

You can easily ignore Islands because there are many other sources of Azerite in the game.

- - - Updated - - -

What's wrong with azerite? I know the acquisition was a bit off in like s1 of BFA but I'd say it's been fine since BoD at least. Like sure I can miss tier sets as well (though they also come with a bunch of problems) but you win some you lose some.

Azerite gear was a huge investment from Blizzard. They have used a lot of resources to develop it. And what value has it added to the game?

[kaminaris]

You cannot ignore Azerite gear because it is a core part of your character progression.

You can easily ignore Islands because there are many other sources of Azerite in the game.

- - - Updated - - -



Azerite gear was a huge investment from Blizzard. They have used a lot of resources to develop it. And what value has it added to the game?

Value? Azerite gear massively upgraded tier sets.

[Jamais]

You cannot ignore Azerite gear because it is a core part of your character progression.

You can easily ignore Islands because there are many other sources of Azerite in the game.

- - - Updated - - -



Azerite gear was a huge investment from Blizzard. They have used a lot of resources to develop it. And what value has it added to the game?

They tried to give players their own customizable tier set. It hasn't turned out perfect, but it is an improvement over tier sets from every point of view (except for the looks, but that is another topic). There is no malicious intent behind their decision.

I would rather they expand and improve on that concept, then going back to tier sets, which had many, many problems, many of them most people seem to leave out.

[Zantera]

Azerite gear was a huge investment from Blizzard. They have used a lot of resources to develop it. And what value has it added to the game?

Was it really? I guess it was mentioned as a feature going into BFA but it's been a minor part of every patch since then. Once they fixed the acquisition problem (which was the biggest annoyance by far imo) it's been pretty much fine and while it's not an amazing feature by any means, I think it's fine for what it is.

[rhorle]

You cannot ignore Azerite gear because it is a core part of your character progression. You can easily ignore Islands because there are many other sources of Azerite in the game.

It is like any other gear though. You are drowned in it. You only have to unlock the rings once. Blizzard hasn't added any new rings for a while so any Azerite gear you get is already fully unlocked. Azerite is only important now to get to the third essence slot. Which is relatively easy even with new characters because of the catch up mechanics.

Sure you can still level the neck but it is practically no point. Azerite is just passively gained from doing most end-game activities. And once you unlocked all gear rings it is no longer relevant for gear. And only relevant to 80 if you want to unlock the entire neck for stamina/stuff.

[Sansnom]

Couldn't they just have removed azerite gear before BFA launched?

And why would they remove core components BEFORE launch?