More importantly though, the Heart of Azerite is key to unlocking the latent powers hidden in the new Azerite Armor earned from all sorts of sources. It's a bit of a complex system, but each piece of Azerite Armor is like a skill tree where you choose from one of several traits at each tier based on the level of your Heart of Azeroth. When you first find a powerful piece of Azerite Armor, you might only be able to choose from traits in the first tier WoW Classic Gold. Then, as your Heart levels up, more tiers will unlock and you can make more choices. On paper, it's a pretty cool idea that clearly borrows from Legion's Artifact Weapons.

The problem is that Azerite Armor is a piss-poor replacement for the Artifact Weapons in Legion. Their traits can be powerful, but in a very passive and boring way. Very few of these traits require players to change up their approach to combat in the way Artifact Weapons did and that makes them feel underwhelming across the board.

In previous expansions, those who managed to complete a full set of raid armor unlocked an extra bonus ability that could really push their character into overdrive. It was sometimes unbalanced but it was always a lot of fun. To emphasize Azerite Armor, however, Blizzard also removed raid armor set bonuses along with Artifact Weapons. The end result is that Battle for Azeroth strips a lot of flavor and fun out of each class and does little to replace it.

Not only is the reward less appealing, but how you get it feels unnecessarily grindy too. The Heart of Azeroth levels so slowly that players are frequently getting pieces of Azerite Armor that requires their Heart to be a dozen levels higher than it is. Players have to then spend exorbitant amounts of time leveling their Heart of Azerite just to unlock the traits on gear they already own.

For example, TheJavaPirate posted to Reddit showing off his swanky (and supposedly very powerful) shoulder armor he found that looks like an upgrade, but actually isn't. Gear is complicated in Warcraft, so Blizzard created a system called item level ('ilvl' for short) to weigh just how powerful gear was and to help players figure out what is or isn't an upgrade.

TheJavaPirate's new shoulders have an item level of 370, which Buy WoW Classic Items should be a massive improvement over his meager item level 325 shoulders—except that his Heart of Azeroth isn't leveled up enough to unlock any traits in his ilvl 370 shoulder armor. Because of that, this amazing piece of gear is actually a downgrade over what he is currently wearing. Right now it feels pointless to challenge Battle for Azeroth's most difficult activities, like the new Uldir raid, because there's no guarantee that the coveted loot that drops will even be an upgrade.