After a lengthy post on the World of Warcraft forums that collated player concerns about Battle for Azeroth gear (Azerite armor), Community Manager Josh "Lore" Allen wrote a lengthy rebuttal to each point. The original post cited several issues such as "Azerite - Worst Itemization in WoW's History", "Traits are Useless & Uninteresting", "Trait 'Farming'", "340 Traits Outperforming 385 Traits" and "Power Swings".
Allen came in to the original thread on the World of Warcraft community site and responded to each concern:
- Worst Itemization: "Even if phrases like "Worst Itemization in WoW's History" are a bit hyperbolic"
- Useless & Uninteresting Traits: "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."
- Trait Farming: "I don't have a solve for that issue to share today, and to be completely transparent it may be something we simply have to accept as a downside to the system for other reasons."
- Low-Level Traits Outperforming High-Level Traits: "With this most recent round of tuning, we think we've gotten most of the really egregious outliers dialed in, but please let us know if there are any you still feel are so good that they're worth huge sacrifices in terms of item level."
- Reforging Costs: "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). Maybe the current system isn't achieving that, but if it isn't, we're likely to become MORE restrictive on reforging, not less."
- Tuning Passes: "There's likely to still be some adjustments here and there, but we don't believe we're going to need another big wave of Azerite trait tuning like you've seen over the last few weeks."
Interestingly, in the recent Reddit AMA, Game Director Ion Hazzikostas wrote:
The only metric we care about as a development team is whether you're having fun. And even if you don't believe me and take a more cynical approach, from a business perspective, one of the nice things about the subscription model is that our only commercial incentive is to make a game that as many people as possible think is worth their time and money. Which pretty much comes back to us just wanting you to have fun.
However, Allen's comments seem to indicate that sometimes "not having fun" or something that "doesn't feel very good" is just the way it is.
You can check out the community response to Allen's post by visiting any of the links provided above.
What do you think?
