Yesterday, World of Warcraft Game Director Ion Hazzikostas sat down for another live Q&A session on Twitch. The list of player-submitted questions was extensive, but perhaps not surprisingly, many of them focused on Azerite Armor, which has been the subject of much contention among the community, alongside a handful of other topics, including Warfronts, the upcoming Siege of Zuldazar raid, and tank and healer class balance.
For example, Blizzard apparently believes that Azerite trait restrictions improve gameplay by providing options, and they’re still hunting for a “middle ground” solution to the way Azerite gear is acquired from Mythic+ raiding. Here’s WoWhead’s recap of some of the motivation behind the system’s changes:
“Azerite Armor is a lot less rigid than other items such as weapons. If you’re swapping for DPS to Tank, you’ll need to get a whole new set of weapons and trinkets, compared to Azerite Armor where you just need to go to the Reforger and swap your traits. If you’re changing your specs often, there’s always the generic traits if you don’t want to respec often. It should be just a few % less effective. Unless you’re pushing World Firsts, you can just use a 370 rather than a 385 but it should get better as the availability of Azerite Armor should increase. If you look back compared to Legion, it’s much easier to swap between specs now but they still want to preserve a benefit to someone who mains an Assassination rogue versus a rogue who swaps to it whenever they feel its best.”
And if the Q&A stream isn’t enough Battle for Azeroth information for you, Hazzikostas also recently sat down with the folks at Forbes for a post-mortem interview. In it, Hazzikostas goes into detail about the trials and tribulations of Battle for Azeroth’s launch, addresses some of the common player criticisms of the expansion, and gives players a look at what the dev team is focusing on going forward. In addition, Community Manager Lore dropped by the forums yesterday to remind players that on Friday, October 12th, members of the WoW dev team will be dropping by the PTR to test the new Darkshore Warfront that will be coming to the game in the Tides of Vengeance update, and players are encouraged to join the fight and provide feedback on the new content before it goes live.
