I read a stated reason that the reason why mythic + does not drop azurite gear is blizzard is scared that if they put a farmable way to earn azurite gear into the game, that players will just farm out that azerite gear for days.
I really can’t see why this is considered an issue, as due to the fact azerite gear cannot titan forge, the best possible azerite gear from a mythic + is item level 370. The same level you get from faction invasions once a day. I only hit 120 less than 2 weeks ago, and I have already had many 370 ilevel azerite pieces.
It seems to me that the only people seriously likely to do the kind of farming blizzard are scared of are mythic raiders. Mythic raiders though I doubt would do such a farm for 370 azerite pieces. I also fail to see how it’s more harmful than them continuously farming a certain mythic + for a warforged/titan forged trinket.
I really can’t see how letting azerite pieces drop in mythic + would harm the game at all, or create any large grind.
Are you forgetting Titan Residium? It’d encourage people to farm for an ungodly amount of hours to get the specific pieces they want through Residium or hoard it for future drops.
We have a healthy amount of Azerite acquisition sources now, without having to have azerite drop in dungeons. All that’s needed is for the azerite system as a whole to get some improvements which is happening with the first raids azerite pieces and ultimately 8.2 for the rework.
They only had to introduce that as a currency because they for some odd reason wanted azerite armor to be some kind of exclusive instead of letting it be obtained like any other piece of gear.
There’s rarely anything interesting about azerite pieces that merits them being “more” than another stat stick and certainly not to the degree they went with. I don’t know if this is a leftover from azerite being planned as a bigger system early on, or if they really think the players would find it fun to be “gated” on obtaining BiS pieces by random weekly chances, but i honestly don’t think it has worked in any shape or form.
Maybe patch 8.2 will turn it into something that doesn’t feel contrary to a fun gearing path and game feel, but until then we have to make do with a band-aid vendor that at least makes it bearable.
Which stems from not making azerite pieces obtainable like regular gear in regards to M+ and to a lesser degree PvP. If your BiS azerite pieces were from M+ or PvP then the only way of getting them was at random from a weekly box, leaving a 1/6 chance to get the right PvP one and something like a 1/26th chance from M+.
If we instead could run specific M+ to target those pieces, maybe adding the 385 version to +15 dungeons, then a vendor wouldn’t be as necessary.
All of it comes down to the developers wanting azerite armor to be a special and exclusive system but it just falls flat by largely not being engaging and having certain traits being so good that not having those pieces just feels bad; a bit akin to getting the wrong legendary items in Legion.
They put a band-aid fix on this from the M+ side, but PvP is still severely damaged from the continuation of the Legion gearing.