Don’t you hate when people show up for content in World of Warcraft but then promptly pop AFK and expect everyone else to do everything? Blizzard isn’t fond of it either, so players who do that in Warfronts can now expect to get a shiny new kick right out of the instance. It’s part of the most recent set of hotfixes, along with a few bug fixes and some adjustments to Coagulated Blood on the Raid Finder difficulty.
Meanwhile, Blizzard has heard common player complaints about the Azerite system and has responded with a shrug and a “well, too bad.” The full response is well worth reading, as it includes gems like not understanding the difference between “uninteresting” and “requires math to optimize,” or stating that the best fix for different traits being useful or useless at certain times is to carry around multiple sets. To pluck those particular quotes out for further analysis:
The point about traits being “useless and uninteresting” is interesting considering that you also make the point of “every gear change requires simming.” These two points are kind of at odds with each other. The way to solve the simming issue would be to make the traits more simplistic in nature. Similarly, making traits with more outside-the-box designs leads to more complicated questions of “is this better or not,” which in turn encourages more simming. Either way, it’s an interesting challenge, and one we’re taking to mind as we move forward with traits in future updates.
As to the point about reforging costs: these costs get so high because we want the behavior you’re describing — reforging constantly depending on what you’re doing — to be unsustainable. Our intention is that you either build out multiple sets of gear for different situations, or you lean towards traits that work in a variety of roles (even if they’re maybe not the absolute best for each in particular). We added the reforging system to help ease cases like, for example, a DPS who suddenly finds themselves needing to transition to being their guild’s main tank, not as a means for constantly re-adjusting traits like a second set of talent points. Maybe the current system isn’t achieving that, but if it isn’t, we’re likely to become MORE restrictive on reforging, not less.
Basically, if you were hoping for things to get better with Azerite armor, now is the time to stop hoping.
