I disagree with the final statement. I don't want another system like this coming back.When borrowed power becomes a big part of your damage (specially when said borrowed power is passive, like Domination Shards are), it doesn't feel like you're playing a class, but instead the game is playing you.Exactly the same happened with Corruptions in 8.3
And some of us who didn't touch the raid game didn't get a chance to try the system at all. I actually think that would've been fine, normally, but in a patch so incredibly starved for content like 9.1, restricting anything to just one dwindling part of the game was a very odd decision, IMHO.
Imo they should have added currency to bosses and allowed us to craft shards via primus just like legendaries.
The reason i hope that shards don't make a return in any form is because of how horrifically generic all the powers are. Unholy is just your abilities hit hard so line up your cds, blood is you have a dot that does damage and heals you, frost is the most interesting but really you don't interact with it much. Where's my battle cry reduces shield slams cd by 100% type effects? Where's the fun stuff? Where's the stuff you'd actually adjust your talents for and play differently to take advantage of? The shard sets boil down to the same thing that corruption gear did: "equip this to do more damage." And that being the only thing there is. Of course lots of people engaged with it, people want to be doing more damage. But blizzard at some point you have to realize that good engagement doesn't mean that the people like it, that the people are enjoying it.
Too bad the frost set is still broken 2 months after their release, still not proccing on any pet damage at all, severely gimping it for pet-heavy specs (unholy/bm hunter/warlocks/windwalker). It is one of the strongest for some specs (hey rogues), and completely crap for other.Kind of like corruption was in Ny'alotha where certain corruptions would just not work well with pets (up until the very end).
The whole Wow have become a RNG-lottery. I feel I have more chance getting a win in the national lottery than getting loot in this game. I played 2 characters yesterday, did 14 bosses and 2 dungeons, not a single drop of loot. While I saw someone got 4-5 items. The system is unfair, unrewarding and it feels like you chasing a carrot till you die from starvation.
blizz stop being lazy and actually design tier sets for individual classes. in what universe is 'stat buff' a cool set bonus?
Frankly I don't care about the race to world first and I think it makes sense for the raid to drop stuff that makes you stronger and for which you want to farm the said raid. If they don't want RNG to impact the race to world first then they have to make it with adhoc characters like they do for MDIs.The article makes some good points about poor tuning or the sets not adding anything to the gameplay but the race-to-world-first-arguments are not really relevant for the rest of us players who just want to play an MMORPG. The author somewhat acknowledges that when he says "not all systems are or should be designed with us in mind" but I would go even further: no system should be designed with the race to world first in mind.
I disagree with a bunch of stuff in the post. As with most tiers nowadays the actual DPS requirements/checks in this tier were nearly irrelevant. The only fight with a ''harsh'' dps requirement was Sylvanas, and even she went down in the FIRST reset of the tier, so it obviously wasn't ludicriously difficult either. On all the other fights there were basically no serious dps checks, even though on some fight you could argue having the additional dmg from these sets would make them slightly easier. Essentially these sets weren't impactfull at all on 9/10 fights, and by the time any guild other than limit/echo got to Sylvanas p3 confidently they had the 2nd reset worth of gear and shards. If you as a guild bring the player with the shard set OVER the player that never dies, your guild has a failure in leadership. Once upon a time this might have been acceptable, but no longer. You should bring your best players regardless of their sets, as mechnical execution is 10x more important than dps nowadays.
My DH initially got 2 shards of each color. Which is the maximum number of shards you can have and still not have a set :-(
Please don't bring this system back.* We don't need two times RNG. With Tier sets, you got the piece, and that was that. With this system, you need to get the shard, and then the correct item to activate the bonus. With Tier sets, you could at least equip *any* 2 pieces of the set to get the first bonus, and the sets with 4pc bonuses had usually 5 or 6 pieces, so you didn't need them all. They somewhat fixed this by making more slots giving the bonus, but still, having to get loot twice, and the correct loot, feels bad.* Who on earth came up with "They are active in Thorgast, the maw and the raid, but not m+. But actually the individual boni are active, so players have to resocket their gear". Either make them off or make then on, but this kind of half-on, half-off outside the raid/thorgast/maw is stupid and leads to unpleasant gameplay for no reason.* With the next raid tier, we are suddenly weaker in the raid, because the bonuses are off. That won't feel great. It already doesn't feel great to be weaker in m+.Proper tier sets did not have any of these drawbacks. So what about the following: Give us tier sets with upgrade levels. 3 levels are enough. Goiung from current item levels, an item from heroic would be 0/3 at 239. 1/3 is 242, 2/3 is 246, 3/3 is 249. And they are just always active. This would achieve the goal of nerfing the raid over time, but has none of the drawbacks: You get the item and immediately benefit, the more items you get the better it is, and over time, they get stronger. And you don't have to re-socket them, but can properly utilize gear sets again.
Extremely powerful, uninteresting and annoyingly slow to aquire. Not a great combination. But I agree with the idea of slowly nerfing the content through player power.Designing the game to avoid degenerate prep at the top is not a good idea, though. No matter how they try to fix that problem, world first raiders will still be degenerate. No matter how small the gain is.