World of Warcraft: Battle for Azeroth has arrived about a month ago, bringing with it a variety of new zones to explore, storylines to experience, and naturally, loot to acquire. While the first two have so far been met with a decent amount of success, the new gearing system has been a bit of a contentious topic, as I've noted in my review. Long story short, the Azerite Armor was supposed to be a replacement for legendary items, raids sets and Artifact Weapon talents, yet it is currently so boring and uninteresting that it has failed to be a worthy successor to even one of those systems, let alone all three.

While the whole concept behind Azerite Armor is unlikely to change, I am glad to say that Blizzard has now announced some major tweaks for it. The goal, as you might imagine, is to make Azerite Armor more readily available for all sorts of players, as well as to make each trait more desirable and impactful. You'll find the full developer update over at the official forums, but here's the most important part:

1) "We need to make Azerite Armor more available, for all types of players, through a method everyone can utilize. So we’re actually looking at Emissary rewards for that. The plan is to make Azerite Armor rewards from Emissary quests scale all the way up to 370 (based on your item level), which gives everyone a new, reliable source for appropriate gear. Further on, we’re looking at making some further improvements to the ways Emissaries reward gear, but getting more Azerite Armor in your hands is the higher priority for the immediate future."

2) "When we add new Azerite Armor in what we’re calling “BfA Season 2” (starting with Siege of Zuldazar and its corresponding Mythic+ and PvP seasons), we’re going to add another outer ring to those pieces of gear that has two spec-specific trait options for each spec. This effectively means that your favorite traits will be available on a lot more items, while also opening up a lot more options across the scope of all of your Azerite pieces (and thus, we hope, create more interesting decisions)."

3) "We’re also going to continue to work on the individual traits themselves. We’ve done some basic tuning so far, but we’re taking the lessons we’ve learned from these first iterations forward, and Tides of Vengeance will bring new traits into the pool that reflect that. Our goal is to make the more generic traits be decent middle-of-the-road options for when you want to use a single piece for multiple situations or specs, but make sure the spec-specific options (which are generally the more interesting traits) win out in their respective environments."

This is definitely a step in the right direction, but personally I would prefer it if Blizzard simply scrapped some of the relatively useless traits that are currently available, and just replaced them with ones that actually change up a character's playstyle and rotation. As it stands I barely even notice or care when I unlock new traits, because while they may be a significant damage upgrade, there is very little interesting or interactive about a laser randomly zapping my enemies while I do the same rotation I always do. 

To end all of this on a positive note, it is important to mention that massive changes like these simply do not happen overnight. So even though we're only getting an improved version of what's currently available, there is a good chance that Blizzard has heard our feedback and are now working on incorporating it into the next set of Azerite Armor. I certainly hope so anyway, because while the system might be currently flawed, it really does have a ton of potential to shake up how each class is played.

Should Blizzard reveal any more information I'll make sure to let you know, but until then I would recommend you go and check out the PTR.