Every time I get a new piece of Azerite gear, I go look up on Icy Veins what the best trait from it is. I also check to see how it compares to other pieces I have. But I tend to go with higher item level pieces, and that actually makes me less of a min-maxer than I could be.
Azerite armor is definitely a different system that what we've had in the past. The question is whether it's a good system. At the moment, I don't think so.
First let's address the grind.
In Battle for Azeroth, you have a special necklace, the Heart of Azeroth, which levels up in a pretty linear way - you get more Artifact Power (it's an artifact like our weapons in Legion were) and it gradually grows in item level. In a vacuum it's extremely straightforward. The Heart of Azeroth has a certain level to it, which, while it corresponds with these item level increases, is otherwise irrelevant to the necklace itself.
But the gear you get for your helmet, shoulder, and chest slots are now "azerite gear." They do not have secondary stats, but instead have a number of traits that are unlocked by leveling up your Heart of Azeroth. They only come in Rare and Epic varieties. Azerite armor has an initial choice of traits that generally correspond to one trait for each spec of your class (a piece will have different traits for each class that can equip it) as well as a spec- (and class-) agnostic trait.
From there, there are additional rings of traits that can be unlocked as your Heart of Azeroth levels up. Rare pieces have one additional ring followed by a single 5-item level increase, while Epic pieces have two further rings before that central 5-ilevel bump.
The intention here is that you get excited to level up your Heart of Azeroth, because this unlocks further traits in your gear.
In practice, you have a bit of that, but you also sometimes have the feeling that when you get a new piece of gear that perhaps requires higher HoA levels, you feel as if you're getting a downgrade. This is particularly notable when you can't even unlock the first ring of traits, meaning your new helmet is just a chunk of armor and primary stats until you grind out more levels.
If this were the sole problem, I think there would be an easy fix - simply remove any HoA level requirement from the first ring of traits. You'd still be motivated to level it up in order to get some of the other traits farther in, but it wouldn't feel worthless before then.
The other problem is the variety of the traits.
Now variety is usually good, but you can run into problems. Some of these traits are very powerful, or might just be very cool. If you get a new piece of gear, it might be an upgrade in item level, but if its traits aren't as good as what you had before, you can actually see your performance suffer despite having ostensibly better gear.
On top of this, players of hybrid classes or even just those who like to play different specs - maybe you love Frost for soloing but prefer Arcane for raiding - are now expected to keep multiple sets of gear. Admittedly, we hit some of this in Legion, with artifact weapons and legendaries, but this is set up to be a constant churn of gear through the entire expansion.
Players are not crazy about it. I think I would rate it as one of the expansion's least successful features, which is unfortunate given that it's meant to be one of the headlining mechanical features of the expansion. And given the popularity of Artifact Weapons, if you consider this to be their attempt at a follow-up of that feature, it's really hard to argue it as anything other than a failure.
The thing is, I don't really see how they can back out of it until we go to the next expansion.
The Heart of Azeroth is performing a story function as well as a mechanical one, and it's clear that we're going to need to keep it relevant until the expansion's close. But without Azerite armor, the necklace itself is extraordinarily dull - just a neck piece that gradually gets bigger stats over time.
Ideally, Blizzard could just throw a bunch of Azerite traits out there and they'd be balanced enough that people would simply choose from personal preference. But between the hybrid question, the imbalance of traits, and the grindiness of the system, it's going to be a delicate balancing act for the entire run of Battle for Azeroth.
There's a part of me that thinks that maybe they should have just patted themselves on the back after artifact weapons and gone back to conventional gearing like we had from Vanilla through Warlords. If you take the systems from Legion that Azerite replaced - artifact weapons, legendaries, and tier sets - it really does not seem like Azerite is doing anything better than these systems did before.
I hate to complain without a suggestion. To be frank, I think Battle for Azeroth has been a group of admirably ambitious experiments, and some have been far more successful than others (the two continent thing I think is really cool.) I think Azerite gear is ultimately tolerable, but could definitely use some major-patch tweaks to make it feel like less of a burden on the game.
I might have, for example, instead of making each piece of Azerite gear have its own somewhat randomly-assigned set of traits, instead given the Heart of Azeroth some sort of talent tree, and that different armor pieces could have empowered certain traits within it - a bit like how artifact relics would give you another rank in one of your artifact traits, but perhaps instead do something like make each earned Heart of Azeroth trait correspond with one of the different types of, say, helmet you could get. Maybe as a Prot Paladin you'd want to buff your green helmet traits and your purple chest traits, for example.
But that's very much a back-to-the-drawing board kind of solution that is probably too late to implement by now.
I expect we'll see some evolution to the Azerite system over the course of BFA, but even with improvements, I'm skeptical people will look back fondly at it like we do with artifact weapons.
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