Azerite Armor was meant to be BFA's evolution of Legion's artifact weapons. Indeed, it was meant to be an improvement on the system. In practice, however, Azerite has wound up being one of BFA's most unpopular features. Blizzard is well aware of this fact, and as such, we'll be seeing a vast reworking of the system in 8.2. How exactly that's going to work is, I'm sure, a bit of a work in progress, but the current idea is the following:
Customization is going to shift away from individual pieces of Azerite gear and move instead into the Heart of Azeroth necklace, which will get is own branching tree of traits - presumably something similar to the Artifact weapons (pre-Netherlight Crucible.)
Azerite gear itself will now simply have its traits unlocked immediately. I don't know if you'll still be choosing from a number of them, but the level of your Heart of Azeroth will not have any bearing on whether those traits are unlocked.
Some traits (I don't know if it will be on armor pieces or the necklace or both) will be active abilities.
The intention of these changes is to still give you a progression path - unlocking higher HoA levels to get more player power - but to no longer punish players for getting a new piece of gear - this will prevent you from getting new shoulders in the Azshara raid, for example, and have to grind out more just to get the same traits you had on your Dazar'alor piece.
I think it's a noble goal, but I also think that it is still missing a key thing that made artifact weapons fun.
Blizzard tends to have an attitude that gameplay trumps all things. Their attitude has tended to be that any new feature needs to be fully integrated into the core gameplay and player power for it to be worthwhile. Unfortunately, I think this often steers them in the wrong direction.
Never has this been on display more than the Garrisons in Warlords of Draenor.
While they walked it back later, they did pitch Garrisons as WoW's equivalent of player housing. Around this time, Wildstar - one of the many would-be WoW killers that never took its spot - had a robust and customizable housing system in which players got to put together their character's home with a lot of unlockable furniture and architectural features. Ultimately you simply got a bigger rested experience bonus based on what you put there, but it was a chance for players to express themselves and become more invested in the personalities of their characters.
Garrisons, on the other hand, were made with a single set of architectural styles - standard Human and Orc looks cribbed from Stormwind and Orgrimmar respectively. Indeed, while Horde professional buildings got a bit more specificity, like the Alchemy Hut being Forsaken themed or the Engineering building Goblin-themed, the Alliance had only basic human designs and human NPCs at their buildings.
While a couple decorative features were added, at best these were superficial decorations. My undead rogue, who would have loved a gothic castle-looking garrison, was instead left with standard orc spikes.
On top of this, because the design was that the only buildings you could pick out would have functional services, some game systems suffered as a result. Professions all became gated behind one-a-day reagents you had to make that you could make slightly more of if you had the associated building. Likewise, there was no incentive to look for ore or herbs out in the world because you could just go through your Garrison's facilities. And then, as a result, other professions needed to use those resources to justify, say, a Tailor/Enchanter having a mine and and herb garden.
It became a solution in search of a problem.
And on top of that, the dream of having a space that players could make their own was never realized - Lunarfall and Frostwall were really just Lunarfall and Frostwall, not "my character's own idiosyncratic fortress."
To return to the point here:
Artifact weapons were, I would posit, not popular because of the systems they came with. Sure, artifact power was a way you could keep progressing even if you didn't get gear drops. But you know what the real reason we loved them so much was?
They told a story.
People engage with games for different reasons, to be sure. A lot of people like games as a kind of mathematical, mechanical challenge. But even if you look at a game like chess, which is really almost purely a logical/strategic challenge, there's still a flavor to it. It's not just a bunch of pieces with different rules attached to them - it's the story of two clashing kingdoms at war.
RPGs take the notion that a game tells a story and put that at the forefront. We're excited to fight, say, Azshara, not because she's the final boss of BFA's middle-tier raid. We're excited to fight her because she's a figure who has been so important to the fictional history of the world of Warcraft.
And with artifact weapons, we got to wield these weapons of legend - the Doomhammer, the Ashbringer, the Scythe of Elune, or, sort of, Frostmourne. We got to feel like we had now stepped into this role of being part of the grand story. Most of the artifact weapons were invented for Legion, and yet there was enough care put into each of them that almost all really had something of a personality (especially the three that literally had a personality.)
Now, had artifact weapons been simply what they became post-8.0, only going up in item level as you progressed through the expansion, would they have been as popular? Probably not. But the mechanics enhanced the story - the fantasy - of it.
Azerite armor has the following problem: I get why the Heart of Azeroth is important, even if it's really ambiguous whether it's even supposed to be unique (lorewise.) But why do the shoulderpads and helmets you get on Kul Tiras just happen to interact with this necklace when the ones on the Broken Isles didn't?
There's just not a lot of story to it.
And I think that's been part of the problem with BFA. On one hand, there's some really interesting plotting going on, seeing the way that both Zandalar and Kul Tiras - and the major players in both - have been acting in the face of this big war. But after Legion, when there was so much to discover that the mechanics existed to support, it still kind of feels shallow.
To step into another game:
I haven't really played Magic: The Gathering much since college, but I've followed it since then. One of the most popular sets (and settings) they came up with was called Innistrad - Magic tends to jump around to different planes (aka worlds) with each set, returning to the popular ones. Each plane has a theme that can be broken down into a couple words. Innistrad was the Gothic Horror setting. And when the approached that set, they started with "top-down" design. The idea was that, rather than coming up with some cool mechanic and then figuring out some lore or flavor to justify it, they would instead come up with a good gothic horror trope and then try to portray that through mechanics.
The result was one of their most popular sets.
Now, Magic certainly succeeds as well when they go the other way - my favorite Magic setting, Ravnica, created its ten iconic guilds simply by building around each two-color combination of Magic's five colors.
But the point there is that even if they started with a mechanical conceit, Ravnica has gone on to be an extraordinarily flavor-rich setting, to the point where they have now introduced it as an official D&D setting as well - a game that has no concept of "colors" the way that Magic does.
So, to boil this down into a thesis: Game mechanics are crucially important to making a game work, but they are still ultimately in service of another thing, which is player investment. I think Azerite Armor has failed so far in part because of mechanics, but more crucially because it isn't a very compelling story.
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