This is different.

Expeditions are designed, at least from a reward perspective, to focus on providing you AP for your neck.  The weekly quest gives you 2500AP for about 7 expedition runs, which is a significant amount.  AP has diminishing returns, and every week the amount needed for the next level drops by 30%.  If you are doing the daily emissary quest, then 2500 AP is drop in the bucket.  It is absolutely not in your interests to grind AP.  I prefer to think of it as a happy accident.  It feels like the same time investment for this weekly quest as it would be for running the daily emissary quests.  Just that the latter is going to give me a) gold, b) gear, and c) reputation.

Expeditions are also self-contained, in that the rewards (dubloons) can only be spent on other expeditions.  I have yet to see any other rewards, armor, weapons, or material.  At least, no different than regular mobs out in the world.  They are however a requirement for improving your war faction, in that you need to complete 5 different islands to even get the 3rd upgrade.  There are only 3 islands per week, so it’s 2 weeks before you can get this.  Mind you, the upgrades in this expansion are much less attractive than before.

All that do say is that the incentives for Island Expeditions are not there for me.  Perhaps the act of doing an expedition is the driver?

Construct

3 random players taking on an open world of enemies and things to collect 6000 azerite.  Roles do not matter, but there are clearly better team constructs to apply.  3 cloth DPS are going to have a rough time here, just like 3 tanks are going to be slow going.

About 90% of the island is regulars and some elites.  Killing them awards azerite, and the elites reward an orb that heals you and buffs damage.  So there’s some thinking required as to when to use them.  Eventually there are some boss enemies that are a bit harder to take down but reward decent azerite drops.  You’ll also encounter 3 opposite faction enemies, who make judicial use of their skill set.  It can certainly make for some hectic battles.

The islands are decent size, and have a fair amount of randomization.  Two trips are similar but not identical.  I ran one where the 3 of us just mowed down everything as a group, and another that we each went our separate ways.  Both worked, but the first one was so much more effective and fun.  I run a tank, so I can pull 8-10 enemies without much sweat.  Having 2 DPS next to me is really quick work.

Each mission is about 15 minutes long, and in order to queue for it, you need to physically interact with a table in your capital city.  Queues are quick (1-2 min) but longer than a dungeon queue for a tank.  Which is odd.

Challenge

If there isn’t a large reward, then at least there needs to be a challenge.  In normal mode, I can’t say that there is.  I’ll need to give Heroic a shot.  It feels more like a an open world group quest – in line with the clear % of zone, or the % azerite mining areas.  There are other people, you kill things, and move on.

I can see potential here.  Not as dungeon replacements… that is not even close to the purpose.  Mythic+ has its role there, but these feel like an experiment.  A bit more like Timeless Isles, in that they are self-contained.  I’ll be giving it a few more runs, trying to get the weekly complete for the next 2 weeks, then come back with a more in-depth look.

Overall

• Expeditions are a pain to get started since you need to be in a single world spot and then wait for the queue
• They provide no real reward since daily WQ emissary work will give you more than enough AP for a given week
• They favor a balanced or at least heavily coordinated group that works together
• They are quite random
• They are fun in small doses

Ok, maybe not so quick.

Re-spec Costs

Previous post regarding money… the upwards scaling of respecing gear is both a problem and not a problem.  The odds of 1 piece of gear having more than 2 skills that you want to use are very low.  In the case where you would want to use the same piece of gear on another spec, with a different skill loadout are also quite small.  Let’s say that’s even the case… you’re likely better farming another piece of gear and keeping it in your bag, rather than having to return to town and respec.

Maybe this would be the case for specific raid gear items, but that gets into the next point.

Available Skills

There are clearly better skills than others.  As a tank, I much prefer a healing buff, or shield than something like a haste on kill.   I’ve tried swapping out higher level gear with worse skills, and my survivability drops.

The core effect of this is that people will hunt specific item drops, as the skills are non-random.  For example, the ideal head piece is going to come from Mogul in the MOTHERLODE!!!  I will not want to use the helm pieces from say, Tol Dagor, regardless of the item level.

I clearly recall one of the drivers of this expansion’s itemization that increases in item level be a clear power increase.  For 3 gear slots… that is not the case.   It’s a better system than legendaries for sure, but it is a poor replacement for artifacts.

The core issue to me is that there are some skills found on azerite gear that should just plain be part of the core class toolkit.

Skill Overlap

Remember reforging?  The only reason it exist was so that you remained hit-capped?  I remember it being removed and being ever so happy that I didn’t need to use Mr Robot everytime I got a new drop.
Azerite skills do not overlap.  If you have 2 copies of the same skill, only 1 of them actually takes effect.  This is the only practical use case I see for respecs, where you need to change the selection based on new pieces of gear.  I need to have Boiling Brew on my monk, it’s an insanely good skill.  I’ll need to reset my skills on new gear, and keep gear in my bag that I will only use when I get an upgrade, just to make sure I always have it available.  So while I may have 3 pieces of 3 slots for each spec (tank/heal/DPS), I may also have more spares around with the “good” skills to avoid losing access to them when I get an upgrade.   May is the wrong word – I am doing this now.

Overall

I am curious as to the long term plan for this system.  It’s arguably worse than artefacts since there’s no clear upgrade path, just a bunch of bad options.  It is a horrible feeling to see a large boost in ilvl on a piece but also realize that the skills on that piece are a direct nerf to your overall abilities.  Honestly, it almost feels like seeing a cloth piece drop for a leather wearer.  You can see it’s neat, and know someone can use it, but not you!

I’m sure there’s a tweak somewhere in the plans on this.  It’s better than the random hunt for legendaries, granted.  It’s also better than the netherlight crucible, since you can target your actions for a specific drop.  But it’s worse than the artifact skill system in that your core skill package is dependent on gear.  Maybe a skill system integrated into the heart for core skill choice, then flavor skills on azerite gear?  Right now it just feels cumbersome, and a step back from the “cleanliness” of Legion.

Ian and Lore had a Q&A session.  I always find these interesting.  In my real life job, I’m trying to get the team to operate under “open principles”, which means transparency and disclosure along the way.  Clients may not always agree with the why, but it does end up building trust.

Anyhow, the Q&A is the WoW attempt at transparency and honestly, I think that works pretty well.  MMO-Champ does have a good summary, or you can watch the video.  The points I’d like to cover are:

Class Tuning

The last Q&A they mentioned that a few classes were essentially broken.  Arms and Feral had a massive temporary buff to numbers, which honestly seems a bit odd after launch.  But there’s a difference between tuning and class overhaul.  There are classes that need that do be done – Druid and Shaman are top of that pile.

My experience with development delays is a lack of internal expertise to take on the challenge.  It is not a small task to overhaul a class, and it’s good that they are taking their time.  It’s less good that the issues that were in Legion for 2 years didn’t meet the criteria for a fix.

Auction House Lag

I laugh a bit at this since the service I manage is in the middle of something similar.  It’s been 18 hour days to try and resolve it.  Stormrage’s AH is almost useless, but it’s not so much critical now as it will be the week before raid launch.  I’ve had issues with the AH interface and structure for a very long time.  The mobile app was an improvement and with that gone, things are just worse.

There are two issues at play here.  First is the actual mechanics of the AH and the database transaction load must be insane.  Single items instead of stacks should be outright banned (or the deposit fee increased 100 fold), and there should be a cap on the number of active auctions per player.  That would provide time to get a larger fix in… which honestly will likely require rebuilding the AH from scratch.  I do not envy that team.

The second issue is Blizzard’s lack of internal market expertise.  I am sure they have internal metrics on the income of gold, the average per player, and new ways to add sinks (like a 5m gold mount).  Way back in WotLK I mentioned that daily quests were flooding the game with “easy gold” and we’re so far along now that there’s no way to put that genie back in the bottle.  We’re at a point now where design decisions are based on the fact that everyone can make X gold per day with minimal effort, and that everything past that is for customization.  The exception here is Azerite gear respec costs, which frankly make no sense to me.  But that’s for another post.  Best of a bad hand in this.

(Another example of poor game planning due to economic is pretty much any gathering WQ – though particularly herbs.  40 herbs is something like 1500g.  Who in their right mind would do that?  Or a champion mission that rewards 70g.  The daily heroic dungeon bag gives more than 1000g.)

Group Auto-accept

The reasoning here is that it breaks the social aspect of the game.  So, shenanigans?  Are they actively playing the same game as me?  Have they tried using the horrible interface to find a group?  Even the world-boss group finder was atrocious due to tons of spelling mistakes – and the leader getting spammed with invites even during the battle.  Anyone playing now is looking at either the quest ID in group finder (piles of numbers) or getting whispers.  Lunacy.

I’ll give a better example – Legion assaults, in that I mean the sub zones with 3-4 stages on Argus.  Those should AUTO-group everyone that enters.  It’s crazy that it doesn’t.  You end up clicking/inviting everyone manually because the group finder is likely to port you to another instance altogether.

Every single UI mod is based on someone’s critique of Blizzard’s UI.  The most popular ones are clearly massively popular critiques.

Scaling

“It’s been that way since 7.2 and we’re not going to change it”.

Let’s cover this off shall we?

• The leveling curve was not applied to Legion zones in 7.2.
• The curve was applied to all other leveling zones, and took over a month to tweak the numbers.
• The 8.0 stat squish made this oh so much worse, enough that they had to boost EXP gains to offset some of it
• It therefore only impacted a small portion of the playerbase until the launch of BfA

It now impacts every single character, as everyone is leveling.  It clearly has less optimized pieces during the journey from 110 to 120.  PvP scaling is also impacted.  See video below at the 2:26 mark where a 120 loses 50% of their HP in 1 GCD, with a defensive cooldown activated – against a level 116 player.

The question is, does it matter?  The problem goes away once everyone is at 120 and >ilvl 300.  We all know that in 2 months when 120s are running in full epics, anyone leveling in BfA with War Mode is going to be eating dirt all the time.  Will anyone care then?

The answer here is no.  Blizzard has zero motivation to address any of this.  There are not enough people who care about PvP balance at different character levels to move a finger.  Blizzard will focus on two specific areas instead – level 120 PvP at similar ilvls, and level 120 PvE content so that time to kill is 2 GCD or more.

Overall

The rest of the items are all in line with previous discussions, and it’s good to see that the thinking behind them is stable.  Some items it was just good to see the logic behind it – like island expedition rewards, or artifact power.

I manage a development team, I know there’s a lot required manage these types of events, and even more required to ensure that the message transmitted is as clear as possible to the largest audience.  I may not agree with the design (group finder!) but I certainly appreciate their openess on it.

I like alts.  Maybe not as much as Syp does, but I do like the concept of a fresh run and a different lens on the game.  I play a Monk main (Alliance) to cover off the 3 main roles, and honestly, it’s a ton of fun.  It’s complicated but well balanced in all 3 specs.  They’ve come a very long way since MoP.

But I have other classes too.  Rogue was my first character and I mained one up until MoP.  I have a 110 rogue, paladin, hunter, death knight, demon hunter, and druid.  Shaman is over 100.  Mage and Warlock are in their 70/80s.  Warrior, Priest I have little interest in mechanically.

I have done a bit of the Horde playthrough but not nearly as much as I should have.  It’s been since Cata when it actually seemed to matter.  On the bucket list of tasks I do want to run through.  So I do have a choice – what class for a Horde alt?  I could take one of the 2 classes I’m not so fond of, but they would have an easy time leveling in groups.  Druid would just fly through the entire game… but I’d like to use a troll race for that.  And there’s a 99% chance that to play a Zandalari troll I will need to max another Horde to get the necessary faction/quest achievements.

Planning

So if the goal is to unlock the troll race, what I need to do is get to max level ASAP.  Some fun facts first!

• There’s a limit of one Demon Hunter per server.  I already have one on Stormrage
• You need a level 70 character to make a DH.  I only have level 70+ on Stormrage
• Death Knights start at 55.

Trolls won’t be around until at least 7.1, so there’s time.  The choice then becomes do I want everyone on Stormrage or split to another server?  Aside from seeing characters on the select screen, there’s next to ZERO interaction between factions on a given server.  Can’t mail items or gold.  And Stormrage has like 3 Horde players.

So I’m thinking the following:

• Create a new char on Uldum
• Death Knight with full heirloom gear (that’s account-level, and I have it already)
• Level the DK to 70
• Create a DH on Uldum and skip 30 levels.
• DH with full heirloom, cept weapon.  Cause, you know.  Legion.
• Ignore all professions until 110, then dual spec into herbalism / mining
• …
• Profit

Execution

I made a Tauren DK.  This was a mistake for one main reason – the game considers it a feature that Tauren cannot fit in most doors pre-MoP.  And everything looks like a toy in a Tauren’s hands.  Fine enough.

The DK starting experience gets you to 59.5 and it takes about 10 minutes of “scaled” quest content to get to 60.  Off to Borean Tundra.  I will say that the starting DK experience has not aged terribly well, neither has Borean Tundra.  But it’s only going to be 10 levels.  Without flying, because I don’t have 225g for the training.  The alt is logged out in an inn to get some rested XP to make it go faster.

New video.  It’s certainly a different take and quite well done.

A few takes:

• The only other night elf with golden eyes that I’ve been aware of is Illidan
• She has exceedingly negative personality traits – with narcissism at the top, and clearly a psychopath (complete lack of empathy)
• In the War of the Ancients storyline (3 books) she struck a deal with Sargeras to bring the Burning Legion to Azeroth
• During said storyline, she killed a lot of her own people.  She was not exactly popular, but she was nearly all-powerful
• Cue the Sundering which caused massive floods on Kalimdor, which is pretty much where this cinematic begins
• Unless Blizzard is adding a new set of bad guys, that’s clearly N’Zoth.
  • If you’ve played the eastern side of Stormvalley, or the northwest part of Tiragarde…hello.

I was kinda thinking they’d wait a bit longer to you know, old-gods the whole thing.  Not sure how this ties into the current storyline… should be something to watch develop.

I closed off Tiragarde Sound now and have a few thoughts on this zone.  The most important thing that impacts this thinking is that I was 120 1/3rd of the way through, so everything past that point was entirely optional.  Gear was useless, though the rep gain was quite nice, and it’s a pre-req for Pathfinder part 1.  Plus, I wanted to see the whole story.

There are two big differences in Tiragarde compared to the other alliance zones – travel can be done by boat and its’ really 2 different zones in one.  The boat thing to kick off.  You still have flight travel, but the boat is an option.  I find it neater to look at and thematically sound, but seems to be a fair bit slower than actually flying there.  And at 120 with the Flight Whistle, you’re likely never to use them again.  Shame really.

The zone split is important, in that Boralus splits the zone in a 70/30 weight.  70% is is the lower half and relates almost entirely to pirates & shipwrecks.  Super theme, a lot of fun, but not a whole lot of variety.  Freehold is exciting, and the siege break on the gates is great to drive the story forward.  Honestly, after that siege portion completed, I expected the zone to be done…but then there’s the 30% up north.  Which is about a hunting camp, kobolds, and mind-controlled pirates.  It goes on for way too long and doesn’t map with the rest of the zone.  The last bit in the NW has you fight underwater, and has a horrible escort quest (Penny).  It just feels significantly weaker than the rest of the zone.  You do end up shooting a canon at a giant squid.  So there’s that.

In terms of the alliance zones, they each have their own highs and lows.  The highs in Tiragarde are higher than the others, but the lows are much lower.  So depending on what part you hit, your satisfaction will change.  Do the north first, and then things will be fun near the end.

In terms of all-around fun, I enjoyed Stormsong Valley the most, then Tiragarde, then Drustvar.   They are all as good or better than the Legion zones, which is great.

Next steps is to complete the Horde zones for the War Campaign.

‘Cause there will be alts, right?

The journey to 120 was both faster and slower than I had imagined.  I spent the time to read the majority of the quest text, as I had in Legion, so the act of leveling was pretty similar.  I had extra XP from all the herbs I was collecting (more on that later), and there’s what appears to be an insane collection of quests across each map.  I’m sure there’s a meme somewhere being built where you see a ! everywhere you look.  It was slower in the fact that there are only 3 zones, and within those zones, the themes are quite similar.  In Legion, if you didn’t like the look of say, Azshara, you could go somewhere else. If you don’t like Drustvar… tough cookies.

I was about 1/3 complete Tiragarde Sound when I saw that final ding, and then things went a bit off the deep end.

So Much Stuff To Do

• World quests (only if you’re friendly with everyone, which is hard not to be)
• Regular dungeons
• Heroic dungeons
• Mythic dungeons (not +)
• Island Expeditions
• Pathfinder Part 1
  • Exploring all 6 zones (yes all 6)
  • Completing all the main quests in each of your faction zones
  • Raising all factions to Revered
• Getting new gear

Honestly, the direction goes from vertical(get levels) to full horizontal mode in 2 minutes and you’re generally at a loss of what you should be doing vs what you could be doing.  As a piece, all these items are a means to an end, and often cross related.  Right now, my focus is on clearing out the last zone.

Scaling and Entitlement

The biggest problem with Legion was it was good and people kept playing it til the end. Nice problem to have! The second biggest problem is that it gave out legendaries and epics like candy, and everyone was massively overpowered by the time Argus showed up.  8.0 nerfed everyone (7.2 nerfed leveling), but for a max 110, it was generally manageable.

From 110-115, your legendaries still work, and their effects are very noticeable.  You likely have 2 pieces of Azerite gear by 115, though the skills on them are a shadow of artefact/legendary powers.  116 to 119 is hard for some classes, you feel a lot weaker.  120 is a wakeup call since WQ are all balanced for a specific item level – which everyone is missing by 20-30 points.

Players feel entitled to that sense of power because it lasted so long.  Getting an alt decked in full epics was a matter of days, not weeks in Legion.  We now need to redo that treadmill.  I’ve added a few nice pieces but I certainly feel that pain.  But then again, if that carrot on the stick wasn’t there, why do content?

That said, I do agree that there’s a fundamental problem with the initial curve.  The fact that you can unequip items and get stronger  seems to be shoddy design.  Any blackbox test would have shown the curve being an issue, so they obviously accepted it as working properly.  That someone figured out how to bypass that check…how I love crowdsourcing!

Gear Upgrades

Maybe there’s something broken, but world rares only drop i273 items, which I out level by a wide margin.  They don’t seem to scale their drops.  WQ drops are in in a similar space where the bottom of that is i280.  Bad rolls, and the WQ will not reward you with any upgrades at all.

Dungeons do give i310 items, and generally that’s ok.  Except for Azerite gear.  My neck is not yet high enough level to open the 2nd ring slot, meaning that functionally the items are worse than what I have equipped since I’m losing a passive bonus.  For example, I have one head piece that gives healing when I use a DoT attack, and also heals me every 6 seconds.  I’m a tank, that is very useful.  I’ve had a half dozen “upgrades” that were 10 levels higher and only 1 skill available, and a skill I don’t want (like randomly AEing targets, or faster movement speed).  I collect for the ‘mog, then sell the piece.  That is not fun.

Weapon drops are quite rare, yet have a significant impact on player power.  I’ve yet to see any in WQ, and dungeon drops aren’t exactly easy to find.  At the end of each zone is a close out quest with a weapon though, so I suggest not completing those final quests until 120, and then only once the reward level is closer to 290.  Clearly this wasn’t an issue with Legion as weapons always had upgrades through their slot mechanic.  It’s a bit jarring here.

Looks like a long trail to get to a higher level, which I don’t mind too much.  Would be nice to reach heroic dungeons in a week or so.

Professions

I stand by the theory that Legion killed most professions.  BfA has made crafters irrelevant for the most part, with the exception of the always fascinating “start of expansion” burst.  Scribes are selling decks, crafters are selling armor, potions are all over the place, bags for everyone.  There are Bind of Equip items as well, selling for insane amounts of gold.  I lucked out and had one drop, it should fetch ~800k on my server.

Recipe increases are no longer fully gated behind dungeon runs.  We’re back into the reputation unlocks, and making things.

The good side to this is that for harvesters (herbalist here) it is a stupid time to make money.  I sold all the herbs I collected from 110-120 for just over 30k gold.  I’ve max ranked all but 1 herbs – the horde-specific herb.  Anchor Weed is maxed, and I get 5 herbs+ per node.  Each herb sells for ~400g.  That’s right – each node is worth 2000g.  Compared to a WQ that gives me 70g, or a war table 18 hour mission for 50g.  Did I mention that my server’s Auction House is broken?  Makes it feel like a raid boss.

Dungeons

1. This is a new expansion, with new dungeons and mechanics to learn
2. I haven’t tanked to consider mechanics in 2 years
3. My skills/talents set have changed, making the group rotation a bit different
4. I am underpowered for most content
5. DPS still haven’t learned to interrupt
6. The default UI does a horrible job of explaining mechanics
7. Tanks insta-queue!

This above has made the dungeons I’ve run, well, an experience.  I’ll talk about the Temple of Tides specifically.  There are 1-2 specific regular mobs that cast an AE heal that maxes everyone, making for indefinite fights.  Those need to be interrupted.  There’s 1 mob that casts a channeled spell (something like Carving Dagger) that will drain 100% hp from a DPS and cannot be interrupted/stunned.  There’s another water elemental that casts chain lightning – again a 100% hp drop that cannot be interrupted/stunned.  Finally, the placement of mobs and the abundance of ae/knockback make for some interesting pulls.

To be clear, I think all those mechanics are interesting and force you to pay attention.  Start of an expansion is when to do it.  But there needs to be some training wheels for the DPS to understand their role on non-boss mechanics.  Interrupt a heal is one thing… but a non-interruptable 100% hp drain attack?  Now we need line of sight mechanics, or stacking mechanics.  Cool.  Tell people either during the fight, or have them find a way to figure it out in a fight without dying multiple times.

More to Come

There’s still a lot of content to cover, and I’ll have a few posts to address the big things.  So far it’s a lot of fun mechanically.  There are plenty of options for content, regardless of what you like to do.  Quests are generally well done, though perhaps a few too many kill X / collect Y variants.  Only found 2 escort quests (I would have like to let Penny fight her own way out, thank you).

It works, it’s fun, and it’s motivating to come back. So far, a thumb’s up.

From this article.

The crux of this post will focus on the following statement

“There has always been some question as to what the Horde stood for,” said Danuser. “And that has changed and evolved over time. Is it this disparate collection of outcasts that nobody will align themselves with? And that’s why they’re together, out of necessity? Or is it this group that’s driven by honor and courage? Players have been able to identify and pull out parts of the storyline that they favor and maybe turn a blind eye to some of the other things, but all of those things have been part of the Horde’s history.

I call shenanigans.

If the Horde has one problem it’s that it has been given extremely poor leadership post WotLK.  Ogrim Doomhammer was a nutter, fine.  Thrall took over in WC3 and moved away from the fel-rage model and back into the honor/courage mindset.  This was held up through Cairne & Vol’jin.  Thrall was positioned more as a Mary-Sue through Cataclysm and a change was certainly required.

Garrosh was an interesting choice as warchief, as he operated under absolutes.  He went off the deep end in MoP, but that followed the somewhat standard trope of  “die a hero, or live long enough to become the villain” that was all the rage at the time.  (See Batman and Halo franchised for examples). If people can recall, the Horde did not agree with him and joined with the Alliance to take him out.  There was a grey area for a while, but it did reach a tipping point.

Vol’jin came in next for WoD.  WoD as a whole didn’t have any leaders but Khadgar.  The Horde surely didn’t have an Yrel equivalent.  He was there but had minimal impact.  He died on the Broken Shores at the start of Legion, just like Varian – but with way less impact and dashed many Horde hopes.

From WoW launch until Legion start it would be hard to argue that the Horde lacked consistency or values.  I don’t mean the faction leaders, I mean the general Horde.  Goblins are their own brand of mad-scientist and are just as crazy as the gnomes (just less scrupulous).

Undead as a faction, that’s another ball game.  Sylvanas has always looked out for her and hers from the start.  Ruthless and unforgiving, but not petty or emotional.  (Which I think is the main pain point most people have with the burning of Teldrassil, as currently shown.)  Her style of leadership – of victory at almost any cost – intersects a lot with the Horde’s vision of honor in combat and not surrendering.  But it’s crystal clear in player’s minds, and the other Horde leader’s minds that they do not agree with her methods.

If you think about it a bit, you come to realize that aside from Magni acting as the speaker of Azeroth, there are no alliance members who are actually in tune with the planet.  Sure, aligned with the Light (paladins & Draenei) but not nature.  The Horde is about living with nature and finding balance.  Testing one’s limits.  In the D&D alignment spectrum – the Alliance tends towards Lawful Good (with Greymane, Jaina, and Shaw as exceptions), and the Horde tends towards Neutral Good, if not outright Neutral (with Sylvanas being more Neutral Evil).

Back to shenanigans.

The Horde has few questions about self-identity.  They have questions about their leadership.  I’m all in for BfA exploring how the Horde identity comes to terms with the fact that their leader shares only a portion of their values.  I think that would make a very interesting story line – if it’s only within the Horde.  Especially considering they are in the hear of Troll-land, where their shamanistic roots can be further explored.

Legion brought Artifact weapons which were pretty darn amazing.  They generally had some link to the overall lore.  They looked pretty darn good.  The best/worst part was the set of passive buffs that the weapons applied, that certainly modified your playstyle.  Heck, you needed them to make the class even mildly relevant.  To get access to those buffs, you needed Artifact Power (AP) to get more points to invest in the weapon.  It turned the focus of the to have an AP farm as a priority – at least until you reached the “necessary” buffs.  It took a few weeks effort on a given class.  Maxing a weapon took longer.

There was a catch-up mechanic, called Artifact Knowledge (AK).  But you needed to play in order to research AK.  Say you come back after a month, it may take a week to get the AK back to where it needed to be.  At higher AK levels… you would get billions of AP.

The system wasn’t so much broken, but had issues with incentives.  With high level gear, AP was the only target.

Late in Legion, they simply gave everyone max AK.  Then launched a system called Netherlight Crucible.  This gave a left/right tree of choices of passive buffs to the artifact weapons.  Say an fist attack would do extra damage, or heals would double click.  Math showed that some of these buffs were massively better than others, and they were randomly assigned to gear.  You may have gotten a super max level boost to the weapon, but the passive buffs weren’t any good.

Azerite Solution

WoWHead has a good guide to explain this.

The concept made sense, the implementation just needed some tweaking.  AP is still there.  It still acts as a gating mechanism for passive buffs.  You have a necklace and it gains AP, levels up in rank, and gives some minor stat buffs.

The previous AK/AP issue of farming is address by the requirement for the next rank of AP dropping by 30% every week.  The AP drops in the world remain the same number, you just need less for each rank.

The ranks are required to unlock passive buffs on Azerite gear (head, chest, shoulders).  there are 2-3 buffs per piece, depending on quality.  You need higher ranks of Azerite in order to access more of those buffs – very similar to the AP system in Legion.  The road to 120 should get you enough AP to use all the dungeon gear you find.  The folks who are raiding mythic (when it’s eventually unlocked) should be able to unlock most of the buffs.  That means the motivation to farm AP is dramatically dropped.

The next gap was the set of passive buffs and the randomness of those buffs.  It would appear that now the buffs are set in the gear before it drops.  So if you’re looking for a specific set of passives, look for areas that drop that specific piece of gear.  It’s less useful while leveling where you’re replacing gear, and some passives are much more fun than others.  The real test will be in dungeons, where an item may be a generic power upgrade (ilvl) but the passives are less useful.

Time Will Tell

I do think that the worst parts of AP/artifacts are addressed in BfA.  Rather than AP being the only focus, there are clear diminishing returns (30% reduction per week) and a whole lot less randomness to the effects on gear.  Curious to see how this plays out after 4-6 weeks.