I’ve been back playing World of Warcraft for roughly a week now, and have spent most of that time catching up on the storyline. One of the systematic problems I had with Battle For Azeroth’s design as an expansion is coming back to bite me in the butt however. During the entirety of Legion, weapon drops were not a thing because we were leaning upon the Artifact Weapon to always be relevant. As a melee this felt amazing since the most important slot we have is our weapon. You can drag along with some pretty shitty armor so long as you had a really good weapon.
Unfortunately as we went into this expansion, it feels as though the game designers forgot they took away our artifacts. I remember at launch it feeling exceptionally difficult to get viable weapons while leveling and especially so once I capped out at level 120. The Demon Hunter was a little easier because I had the IWin button that was leatherworking being able to craft fist weapons for the first time this expansion. The challenge there is now that I am coming back and the item levels greatly increased… there is seemingly no updated version of these weapons.
I’ve been spending most of my time doing either Mechagon or Nazjatar, which are decently laid out but so big and dense that I find trouble doing both in a single night. I’ve managed to get both factions to Honored, and I am more or less exclusively grinding to unlock flight which happens at Revered. I did manage to get a lucky drop while in Nazjatar of a 415 fist weapon, and I managed to pick up a 380 off of a world quest, which is infuriatingly low given that my cumulative item level is 402 at the moment.
My chief frustration is that I feel like I don’t have an awful lot of great options to work towards. With Nazjatar they added in some really neat Benthic armor that you can work towards upgrading to I believe a maximum cap of 425. The problem there however is that once again… the designers forgot that we didn’t have artifact weapons and left those slots out of the system. There is currently a 400 sword available from a Dungeon World Quest, but I sat in queue for 30 minutes last night as a tank… and was not even seeing an estimate for how long the queue might last.
I noticed that a Heroic Warfront option went into the game since I left so I gave it a shot last night thinking the 430 chest might spawn a weapon. Like the mythic dungeons however they left off a queue system which meant I had to rely on the group finder tool. I was rejected for seven different groups until I finally found one. I have no clue why I was rejected apart from maybe people disliking Demon Hunters? Once I got a group it went quickly enough and counted for both the normal mode and heroic mode weekly quest. I got a cloak, which is fine but I really needed that weapon.
I noticed there was a decent looking fist weapon available through the PVP Conquest system, and it was enough to make me willing to throw myself at a system I have no interest in. I queued up for a few random battlegrounds, at which point I realized… there is no consolation prize worth chasing. If you win you get a meager around of conquest points… 40 to be exact out of the 500 that I need to get the weapon. If you lose however you get nothing at all but some honor points, which I am guessing won’t get me a weapon upgrade.
This is largely a case of me not correctly reading the tooltip. I was willing to throw myself at a generally unfun experience 13 times to get a weapon. Even if a loss would have given half conquest… I probably would have been willing to throw myself at the wall 25 times to finish that out. I am not however willing to play enough battlegrounds to get good enough to start winning matches and instead will just deal with the fact that I have a 415 main weapon and a 380 offhand.
I still have the raid to attempt… but the queues there were also atrocious with at one point reporting 50 minutes. I waded through the queue once to get a group that had finished the first two bosses… aka the ones that have a chance of dropping a weapon. I was a good sport and finished the raid. The thing is… I realize that I won’t care at all about any of this come Tuesday when I am playing a vastly different World of Warcraft. More than anything coming back has cemented my opinion that Battle for Azeroth was not a good expansion.
I’m in a similar spot but with trying to replace a blue ring piece.
Mechagon does allow for crafting of epic ring pieces, 420 ilvl ones at that. But when you craft them, with their incredibly hard to get materials, you get a random chance of getting either a trinket or a ring.
I’ve gotten a trinket four straight times.
This expansion hasn’t really improved upon the loot experience, just made it a different kind of annoying.
How did you feel about this exact issue prior to Legion then? Warfronts didn’t exist, and PvP weapons certainly weren’t on the list of “easy” to get.
For the record, I much prefer a token system to cover the “bad luck” protection need.
Prior to Legion it seemed like weapons were just way more common to get. Lots of quests rewarded them, they dropped plentifully from various content. It just seems like this expansion weapons are itemized to be super rare.