Blizzard made the same mistake with shards of domination that they did with the Heart of Azeroth, and it demonstrates how out of touch the development team is. More inside, TL;DR Pay for art assets you cheapskates, flavor sells, numbers don't

So basically, we had Legion, right? It had one of the most popular systems in recent years, being Artifact Weapons. Sure, they had their issues, but they did a lot of things right - most importantly, being incredibly flavorful and badass.The developers saw the popularity of artifact weapons, and wanted to get the same reaction from BFA - hence the Heart of Azeroth.But you see, there was just one problem with that.Artifact weapons took time, care, love, and art assets - unique ones for 32 different specs. Assets with no class overlap - each one is only for their class, nobody else. No double dipping.Whether or not it was time constraints, or different priorities, the Heart of Azeroth fell flat - it had none of the flavor of the artifact weapons, and instead of feeling somewhat unique, EVERYONE had the same one. And, at first anyway, they changed nothing about your rotation, didn't give you any exciting new options for your class - just passive numbers increases.It's fucking lazy. Unacceptably lazy for a game that charges a FUCKING subscription feeThey pulled their heads out of their asses by the time the last patch was out, but they demonstrably Did not understand what made legion artifact weapons popular. Or, worse, they did understand, and decided that it was cheaper to make a boring one-size-fits-all item with no flavor.The same expansion saw the removal of tier sets for sets "based on the instances". That's a flawed idea from the outset - people are far more invested in their characters than they are some random raid instance. But further, it enabled them to cut down the number of sets they made per raid dramatically, to one per armor type rather than one per class.If you think the art asset angle wasn't a reason for this change, you're naive. They wanted to pay less, and get the same hype and subscription money.Now, players are very often wrong about solutions, but almost always correct with their sentiment. The thing a developer (well, a good developer at any rate) needs to do is find out what the problem is, based on community sentiment.The community has been clamoring for the return of tier sets since last expansion. The developers answer? Shards of Domination - an utter failure of the developer team to understand player sentiment. Numbers buffs are cool but they aren't what gets us excited for a tier set - it's the actual unique art assets, and class-specific changes from the tier set buff.Same problem as Heart of Azeroth - lazy, cheapskate designAll milquetoast one-size-fits-all content because it's cheaper and takes less time/dev resources. Doesn't adjust rotations or change how you play the game at all, and most importantly, has NO unique flavor. None. Zip. Zilch.They want the fanfare of the tier sets, but they are unwilling to commit the resources to it.It's all pointing to evidence of one of two things, and neither of them are a good look for a dev team of a formerly-beloved multi-million dollar enterprise.Their developers are literally so out of touch with the playerbase that they don't understand why people liked artifact weapons and tier setsThey do know, but big daddy Activision wants more money for less resources, so they design the same systems and water them down to be one-size-fits-all.So, they're either incompetent, cheap, or both - why does this game have a subscription fee, again?"To keep out bots!"Right, as if that was stopping them. Group finder is polluted, even WITH a sub fee. I ask again, why?If they're going to ask for a sub fee, we the players deserve an appropriate amount of content for that fee. Instead, we get patches with distressing infrequency, and when they DO launch, the content is hamstrung, parsed down, watered down to save money. Come the fuck on. Devote the correct number of resources to your MMO for FUCKS sake.[edit] Forgot to even mention the asspull it was to have your Legendary Item models just be the raid models. Double dipping on content once again.