Azerite Versus Artifacts

Azerite armor is an interesting idea. It's one that is going to largely define BFA's gearing game. Rather than looking for secondary stats, we're going to have to know which traits serve us best, and thankfully at least, pieces have a set array of traits, so you can target the piece of gear you want.

But it's a pretty weird system.

Artifact weapons were far from perfect, but they had a few elements that I find lacking in the Azerite system.

First and foremost, there was the flavor. Each artifact weapon had a story to it, and while some had more interesting ones and some had stories we already knew, the fact that your weapon had a number of different looks that all tied in to that singular identity was pretty cool.

The Heart of Azeroth is, of course, identical between each character that is playing, and its own actual stats as a piece of gear are static other than its gradual upgrading - there's nothing particularly special to the Heart itself, except how it affects your other pieces of gear.

Artifact weapons brought back a lot of bonuses to various abilities - you had shorter cooldowns, stronger-hitting abilities, and other various interesting buffs. It was a real call back to the old days of the pre-Mists talent trees. While I generally think the Mists rows-with-three-choices model is overall superior, one thing that they've acknowledged as a problem is that you don't feel that gradual building power you used to. In Wrath and earlier, we got a talent point every level, which meant that any time you dinged (starting at level 10) you got to be a bit more powerful.

Artifact weapons had a bit of that - you'd generally be able to unlock maybe a trait (or a rank of a trait) per level while working toward 110.

Azerite gear might get more interesting over the course of the expansion, but while leveling you run into the following problem:

Azerite gear starts at 280, meaning that you're not likely to get a straight upgrade on those pieces while leveling, at least until you're close to 120. And those early pieces only require a few Heart of Azeroth levels to unlock, making them rather static once you hit level 3 or so.

But when you do get higher-level Azerite gear, you have this issue where you might have some nice traits, but you can't access them because of the gating from the Heart of Azeroth. It doesn't feel great.

There's also the limitation to abilities - though this of course could be a result of how early we are in the expansion, of course. There's basically a few traits we can hope for and we try to get pieces with those traits. It's very much like the Netherlight Crucible, which was probably the least exciting thing about artifact weapons.

I get that they didn't want to just have us use our artifact weapons forever onward, which makes perfect sense (especially for those specs that maybe wanted a change - I'm sure some Fire Mages are happy to get staves back.) But as a follow-up, I'm not really convinced by this new set-up.