Quote Originally Posted by Awful View Post
I agree with everything other than the Artifact weapon it may have been small to add but a lot of classes lost so much in BFA and alot of them don't function properly now and Blizzard is trying to fix them with Azurite Traits but it's created a problem with 3 imbalances. 1st one is that PvE Azurite traits are too strong, 2nd it overshadows the PvP traits which no one takes, 3rd the way of gearing up to get the trais are ass backwards as you can only get them from top tier raiding and left Mythic+ in the dust. Basically you run old dungeons and hope for an ilvl boost and do world quests which is the worst way: RNG which makes the Azurite system backwards compared to the Artifact Weapon route as I felt it was quite well done but I knew after the xpac they'd be getting rid of it which caused all these issues.

With this being said I wouldn't be opposed to XIV doing a Artifact Weapon/Relic Weapon for 5.0 where the weapon grows with you and you get abilities from a tree and grow but I know that it won't happen as they already said XIV wanted to be as far away as possible from talent trees. That and Mythic+ are the big things I want for the next expansion I feel that Mythic+ is a great system that provides great rewards and benefits as well as a challenge that lasts vs 2 new dungeons every odd patch but that's just me.
There's virtually nothing I can say in defense of Azerite Armor. Any of the alleged advantages could have been provided more effectively, efficiently, and easily without that system. It's been a ton of extra resources, and yet none of it led to a better gameplay result. So far the only truly positive change has universal allocation of AP (not having to choose which weapon to spend AP on, and thus filling your bags with AP items in the meantime), but even that was countered by needing 15+ pieces of gear to swap per spec and potentially per fight.

Tons of technical time. Tons of complaints. I just hope the XIV devs don't follow BfA's lead in that regard, or blame system development for the blatant issues with that system (each fundamental and irrelevant to moving the granular, little-to-no-RNG progression from the weapon slot to 3 pieces of armor + necklace).

Quote Originally Posted by Berethos View Post
How much of that "working" was intentional innovation versus stumbling on a formula that worked, I wonder?

Considering how much of that was tossed for BfA, I'm not confident it was the former.
My reference was to the few times reward systems seemed to sync up historically -- i.e. between Vanilla and BfA -- not just on BfA itself. And I imagine it was mostly just a lot of guesswork that rarely someone made a better (informed) guess as a result of.