I wasn’t around when artifact weapons were usable, but I imagine they were pretty cool at the time.
When I got my first artifact weapon, I was so god damn excited. During the quest to obtain it, the NPCs were making this big song and dance about how powerful it is and my mouth was salivating at the prospect.
But then I obtained it.
Yeah, it was like x3 worse than some random green axe I got from a basic quest reward that took me 5 minutes to complete. “Ah well, it has that effect attached to it, right? :D”. Wrong. Apparently that has been disabled as this item is deemed Legacy.
Why exactly were these weapons phased out? I kind of liked the idea of having this base weapon specific to my class that I can progressively make stronger. It obviously shouldn’t be stronger than stuff you get from dungeons/raids, but it should be somewhat comparable once you increase its power.
I might be alone here, but I really wish they’d bring back these artifact weapons to their full potential, because it looked like a really great idea.
Lets say it like that. Artefact weapons were the best idea that blizz came up with. They were the very best version of this azerite madness. Balance ration between grind of relics and cool and useful instrument.
I personally think that they should have go on with them but unfortunately they choose bad option and version. Lorelike its also bad choice because you have some high status legendary weapon and you throw them away.
Ah, so they did away with them in favour of that abomination azerite? As for the lore, that is why I was scratching my head. Why go through this trouble of obtaining such a “powerful” artifact when it’s actually garbage.
I felt epic when I finally picked it up, but then my mood quickly deflated when I found out the effect doesn’t work and its stats were outshined by a common green weapon.
I’d be rather content if they got rid of azerite and made artifact weapons a thing again, or at the very least gave them a little buff so they were at least usable.
Well the reason why they are “legacy”, are because we destroyed them at the end of legion to remove some malicious power in the sword of Sargeras. This overloaded the artifacts making them super powerfull untill they cracked entierly.
They left the questlines involved with the weapons and made the weapons a bit stronger then heirlooms however the purpose of them have been consumed.
Due to massive criticism of the artifact weapon system early on in Legion(people feeling locked into specs. etc.) they invented the heart of azeroth and the Azerite system for BfA. HoA + Azerite are just worse, but well… at least you don’t have to swap around and gather tokens etc.
I still think they should only take the abilities and stats of artifact weapons away once you move on to BoA content so you can actually use them during Legion content
I think they should had just realized the succees of the Artifacts and tied similar progressions directly to the character after BfA. That whould had granted both the “I love paragon systems” player base and the “I want talent trees back” players togheter.
Perhaps even make the system functionable already from character creation or a level 10+ questchain. They could had called it Titanic essence “a power absorbed/granted by the sleeping world soul of azeroth”. That whould both given us an explaination how the “absorbing” made us more powerfull… powerfull enought to fight nearly omnipotent beings like titans. As for the azerite itself, it could just had been a crystalized form of this power not to infringe on the story of BfA.