So what's the quickest way to gear up? Grinding it out on my hunter is getting boring so if you know a short cut I'd love to know so I can stop wasting time doing shit inefficiently.
In short:
- Do Incursions every time they are up if you're around (Timer: http://www.wowincursions.com/)
- Do the Warfront scenario once when it is up. Repeating it will get you more gear, but the first time each lock/unlock cycle will get you a bonus higher ilvl piece of gear from a quest.
- Join a Group Finder raid for rare mobs when the Warfront world zones are controlled by your faction, follow the horde to kill everything once per lock/unlock cycle.
- Kill world bosses each week. Use your bonus roll on them.
- Do any world quests that offer ilvl rewards.
- Pick up the PvP weekly quest to kill 25 players outdoors for a 370 piece of gear. Turn on warmode when an Incursion is on your faction's continent to easily complete it without having to group up or organize. All you need to do is get tags on people that die, you don't need to know how to PvP well or even have your faction "win" the world battles.
There are also crafted PvP focused armor and weapons in 8.1 for each profession at ilvl 340 that are easy to make and should be pretty cheap in the AH. If you have some gold to spare you can probably drop a few thousand gold to get a full set of 340 gear. I did this for the few slots that the sources above didn't quickly cover, and it'll improve the ilvl rewards you're getting from the sources above too.
Spreaking of islands, I didn't follow a lot of beta stuff due to spoilers but they were hands down the thing I looked forward to the most in BFA and it sucks that they're so disappointing.
The weirdest thing for me is that they keep advertising & including new Island Expedition maps as features in new patches. 8.1 added 2 new Island Expeditions, a Vykrul and a Gilnean one. 8.2 is going to add 2 more, a Kul Tiran and Pandaria one. That means there are currently 9 in the game and will be 11 as of 8.2.
Did we need more than like ... 3 of these? They all feel identical. I never queue for an IE and think "oh cool, I love this map!". It's the same rush through trash mobs, mining nodes, and rares every time. I would never have time to appreciate the architecture given that they are a race between your team and your opponents and since the maps are flooded with trash mobs. Any unique identity the maps might have had is further eroded when the randomized invasion kicks in after a few minutes and suddenly the map you were playing on is filled with enemies and visual effects for an entirely differently themed enemy, one that can also show up on any other IE map.
There is a huge disconnect between how Blizzard designers thought BfA features would be used and received, and how players actually used and received them. It doesn't feel like their internal teams were even on the same page, or fully thought features out before committing months of dev time to them and locking them into the patch roadmap for the first 12 months of the expansion. With IEs the intent seemed to be "Creating a large number of maps and filling them with many different enemy types, objectives, and events will keep the content fresh and encourage players to explore". That goal was sabotaged by the balance of earning Azerite in IEs for the objective, where AoE'ing down massive trash packs and hunting rares became the only thing players did because it's what reliably got them the most Azerite. It was then sabotaged again by the way rewards were earned from IEs, where players noticed that only extremely specific Azerite sources in IEs were capable of rewarding the specific item they were trying to acquire. It was then sabotaged
again by mob density and type randomization in IEs, leading every map to feel like a massive field of random trash enemies and therefore every map to feel the same. Even at a conceptual level, "players will explore IEs and discover a variety of sources for Azerite" seems totally at odds with the fact that IEs are on a timer, and against a competing team which they will lose against if they don't earn Azerite efficiently enough. If a new quest spawns on an IE that I haven't seen before and it's not
immediately obvious how to solve/complete it, I'm going to ignore it and go back to killing trash and rares because I know that's going to get me Azerite efficiently and consistently and I'm on a timer.
I think Warfronts are the most striking example of this disconnect. I went through the Darkshore Scenario on a new alt recently and knowing what groups focus on to win and how the scenario plays out makes the long series of tutorial quests feel like a painful walkthrough of how much wasted effort went into the feature. You're guided through a dozen quests showing you all these areas and buildings you can unlock that allow you to do things like summon hired NPC helpers, summon friendly AI boss mobs, boost the armor/weapons of your AI teammates, etc. You can even summon like 4-5 different Heroes to play as that have several unique abilities and control like a vehicle. All of these, and more, unique to each faction, when the actual strategy groups use on the alliance side is "build glaive throwers ASAP and we win".
The dev team put in dozens of things you can do to increase your chances of victory, but then the dev team also says "warfronts are designed to be won" and they are balanced to be so easy that none of it matters. Most of your team can even AFK and you'll still win as long as a few players are working towards the small number of objectives that are crucial.
Like how much time did they spend testing and designing all of these vehicles, AI teammates & upgrades, and map objectives only to render 99% of it inconsequential because of difficulty balancing?
When you think about great RPGs systems you think about features that all work in concert with each other, augmenting and supporting each other into something that feels like one unified and well-thought-out vision. Like the way professions in WoW used to allow you not just a way to make money and participate in the economy in-game, but also to strengthen your character for raiding, or to customize for PvP, or to solo more easily, etc. and those content destinations might drop materials or recipes that fed back into the profession. In BfA all the features feel like the opposite: they don't support each other and feel at-odds with themselves, poorly thought out and unsatisfying to play with.
"Here are a dozen ways to increase your chances of winning this Warfront" vs. "The Warfront scenario will automatically guide players along a path to guaranteed path victory, but they need to contribute resources towards this one single AI vehicle before they can win so the Scenario won't end too quickly".
Did they expect players to spend resources on any of the other upgrades in the Warfront, knowing that success was guaranteed and that only thing you could spend resources on actually mattered?
"Here are 4 difficulty levels for you to tailor your dungeon to the experience and gear level of your group which offer increasing rewards" vs. "World Quests and Warfronts will drop higher ilvl gear than anything except M+ dungeons about ~2-3 weeks after the expansion launches"
Are new players who reached the cap casually after 2 weeks supposed to run dungeon content that drops no rewards that are actually relevant to their character in order to learn the dungeon and how to play in groups? Are they supposed to jump directly into M+ where the content is on a timer and everyone expects them to know the specific mechanics of the dungeon already?
It all feels so amateur.