First Two Attempts at Artifact Challenge

Well, I got impatient and attempted the Protection Paladin artifact challenge (after getting the last of the hidden appearance color schemes and Prestige 1 (though still 50 ranks away from the first of the PvP appearances, which... meh.)

First off, this is oddly hard to find on Google, so let me just say: You get one free challenge (for any spec) and then any subsequent attempts at an artifact challenge (even for other specs) costs 100 Nethershards. Not a horrible price, though if you keep wiping it'll add up.

I went in with an item level of 906 (equipped) and the four-piece tier 20 bonus. I used Prydaz (or whatever that legendary neck that gives you the shield is called) and Sephuz' Secret (on the recommendation of a guide.)

This challenge is tough. I was hoping that, given that it lacked the class-specific requirements of the Warlock green fire quest, it might be easier to kind of brute-force through it. That might still be the case, but I don't have the brute force to do it yet (the WoWhead guide recommended 915 as an item level.)

I think I'm probably going to wait until I have some Antorus gear (LFR at least, though presumably a couple pieces from World Bosses and such) before really trying again. I hope that the Mage Tower will be up with decent regularity in order to do this.

I honestly feel a little ticked at Blizzard for making so many of the artifact appearances hard to get. One of my fears with this system was that there would be little variety in appearance between players. Hidden Appearances can be relatively easy to get, but that depends heavily on the class (Beast Mastery literally just needs to purchase it, and some similarly just need to grind certain reputations, while some like Retribution Paladins, have to endure hours upon hours of extremely low droprates multiple times.)

I had also hoped that we'd get more appearances as the expansion went on, but the only "new" appearances, the challenge ones, were there in the Beta files.

The handling of artifact appearances (and mostly just the appearances, though I'm certainly not complaining about artifact knowledge becoming something automatically acquired over time in 7.3) has frustrated me a bit in an expansion that overall, I like a whole lot (it's hard to gauge if the expansion itself actually surpasses Wrath of the Lich King in my mind, as Legion has the benefit of several more years of WoW's evolution and my own personal experiences with Wrath were so good - having a guild that really raided a lot - something that we've been a bit better about this expansion, but my frequent absence this year has hampered that a little, as I'm the main tank.)

Anyway, when (when, dammit!) I beat the artifact challenge, I'll put more details about it in post form, but for now I've gotten the first major bad guy down to like 20% and haven't even faced Kruul yet.