Doubling down on a system universally hated. Fantastic.
"Post-Mortem" is so fitting, bravo.
I actually liked the Forbes author's questions. Well informed and interesting (more so than any WoW Q&A). Ion's answers are lackluster (as expected from a former lawyer).
Wait. Wait, wait, wait....A video game launched with bugs and still in need of balancing and tuning?When did this happen? Why isn't CNN reporting on this? Why isn't Trump stepping in to make gaming great again? Wth is wrong with this world? When will this hellish nightmare come to an end? /sarcasm off.....
I have to agree with that last point. I always throw my gear into some sim tool to see what will give me the biggest damage bonus, but I always enjoy the rings that the sim tools have no suggestion for. Even if it's something not that exciting I like looking at them and knowing that the choice is 100% personal. I think they made a big mistake in making most of the traits on the outer ring different spec specific with the only "choice" being between the universal one or the one for your spec. I think they should have had all the traits same spec specific and had them dynamically change for each spec. Even if they had the act of picking a trait lock that piece of gear to a spec, just the act of having more choices over all would make things so much better.
"Swimming in the stuff"? Yeah if you mean ten of the same piece for each slot, none of which came with any useful traits. Ion acts like the dumpster fire that is Azerite Armor is the only thing keeping the world from being plunged into another Ice Age.
He STILL doesn't get it. The main problem with Azerite is not only availability or traits locked behind Neck's level but also depends what item you get, you suddenly "loose" the whole damn trait to begin with.And it is bad for two reasons. One, if the trait involves changing your rotation or using a certain talent / secondary stats, it completely changes your play style and to a degree some gear choice too. Second, if a trait is underwhelming then no matter if it's 15 or even 30 ilvl higher, it's still NOT an upgrade and sometimes barely makes a side grade.In Legion, relics "added" a rank in your already existed permanent traits and abilities, if something was good you could try to get relics for same traits but even if you didn't get lucky, almost every time a higher ilvl relic was an upgrade (very few exceptions on minor upgrades, having a BM Hunter I know that).Azerite System is nothing like that. They can add all the traits they want on "different" gear but as long as traits are part of the "item", it still won't matter if you can't get the drop to begin with and then of course to unlock other rings you will have even higher Neck level requirements.
Nobody complained this much about WoD, just think about that.
It's amazing how Ion can use so many words to say so little.The other thing that stuck out to me was his responses to questions about Island Expeditions and their reception. He comes across like the team was blindsided with how repetitive and boring the system turned out to be. You'd think they outsourced it to an indie dev studio and had no idea how it was actually going to work until beta, or something.They know fans have come to expect fairly well done procedural content in games like Diablo, so it should be theoretically possible to develop a kind of "infinite dungeon" like that for WoW. And that was more or less how they pitched Island Expeditions.
Worst part of the interview was he called Uldir a success, including mythic, which has severe encounter design flaws leading to class stacking unseen since spine of Deathwing. Well nevermind, he called warmode a success despite alarming amount of reports that pvp shards are faction imbalanced.
They should have asked him why they hate Shamans and why only 2 melee classes dominate the entire leaderboard for M+
*Glares at Ion in spanish*
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