Why the AP grind doesn't make sense.

#1 - Feb. 14, 2017, 1:40 p.m.

So we've heard, I know it's not final but it honestly doesn't sound unreal for Blizzard. With AK40 it will take 1000 mythic+ dungeons to reach max artifact weapon. 1000...even if you cut that in half, that's too much. It's so unrealistic. I haven't even done 1000 mythic + yet and I'm almost max 3 weapons (54). Not to mention I've never been so burnt out in WoW in my entire WoW life. It's taxing.

Why it doesn't make sense?
Who are you really aiming these insane goals for? I would certainly not hope for the top raiders so they play the game 24/7, every single day. Everyone I know hates this grind, it's so repetitive and it's really really old now. So then like they should, are they making this for the casual player? If so, that makes no sense at all considering they will never ever reach even ONE max weapon in the first place. They don't have the time nor play enough, hell even people that play 24/7 this will take them months of straight dungeon grinding, like REALLY? So how does that make sense? The top raiders hate it and the casual player base will never even reach a max weapon of their own. So who is this design for? It just doesn't make sense to me. Really hope they rethink this and tone it down, by a lot. You're losing top raiding left and right, top raiders quitting on the daily. I understand they shouldn't really care about the people that play way more than others. But like I said, the casual player base will never reach the max anyways or even half way to max, what's the point of this grind design? So how does this make any sense at all!? Also what about classes with 3 DPS specs? LIKE WTF.

Lore

Community Manager

#10 - Feb. 14, 2017, 9:05 p.m.

I just posted this in a thread on the EU PTR forums, copying over here for visibility:

The 7.2 Artifact Knowledge and Artifact Power curves that have been datamined are not final - what you're seeing is just temporary values. With those temporary values, the increase from Artifact Knowledge scales linearly, while the Artifact Power required to purchase the next trait increases exponentially. This makes it seem as though the new traits are intended to require far more effort to earn than was the case in 7.0, which is not the case.

The PTR build coming today doesn't yet have the correct numbers, but next week's build should. At that point, you should see a much lower expectation for how much effort will be required to unlock the new traits.

Lore

Community Manager

#40 - Feb. 14, 2017, 10:56 p.m.

It's important to remember that the PTR is very much a part of our development environment. When we pull a build to push for public testing, it's basically just a snapshot of wherever we happened to be at that moment in development. This means you're going to see a lot of placeholder and unfinished work. This is one such case.

Feedback is certainly helpful for us in determining exactly what the final state should be, but please remember that there's a very reasonable chance for anything on the PTR - especially datamined content that's not yet fully available for testing - to simply be unfinished and/or temporary.