WoW: Goodbye forever, dominion shards - I won't miss them
Even in patch 9.2, do I still need to farm and upgrade Domination Sockets? Do I really have to collect Stygian Embers every week again with the character I grew especially for patch 9.2? I asked myself these questions a few weeks ago and thought to myself "Please don't" ...
Then, five days ago, the redeeming news: Domination gems will have no effect in the content of patch 9.2. Phew, what a luck. With this, Blizzard draws the right conclusions and has itself recognized that dominion shards were probably the worst feature within a raid, which we have ever seen in WoW (buy now ).
No one will miss them
Domination shards are one thing above all else: a boring, passive power gain that has zero effect on how your character plays. You do two percent more damage here, 3.5 percent more damage there. Only generic set bonuses from old expansions were less imaginative, but even those still somehow felt like they were special. If the Dungeon Master's Lair was a raid, they'd be the Ruby Sanctum!
Speaking of set items, they still perform worlds better as a raid type feature than the shards from the Sanctum of Domination. Getting the right set item was difficult without a token system, because the boss had to drop the right item. So a bit of luck was required.
04:37WoW: Shattered Legacy - German version of the Sylvanas cinematic
However, the shards of dominion dropped entirely at random. Do I get a shard from this boss? And if so, which one? Well, you couldn't do more than pray to RNGesus. And when you had all the shards together, the matching item had to drop, which would activate the matching bonus for the shards. This RNG festival made even seasoned Mythic raiders from top guilds almost cry.
For example, if you were only able to participate in one raid night a week on your guild's two raid days, you usually had no chance at all to get a shard bonus if the right bosses had already been defeated on the previous raid day.
Will the boss drop my item this week, or will I leave the raid without a shard bonus again?
Source: Blizzard
Splinter bonuses were not understood to some extent until today
Blizzard didn't really explain the stacking effect of the shards. For example, how many players have you seen with the Unholy bonus who had two shards at rank 5 and the speed shard from Oth at rank 1, "because speed just doesn't do much". True, but it's just stupid that your stat-proc of the Unholy bonus is only very low, because the value is based on rank 1 of your shards.
Shards have to be upgraded at the same time one after the other, because only the lowest rank of each set bonus provides the powerful proc, which at its final level gives some specs more than 1,000 DpS by the way.
I can't remember a worse feature in a raid that was so poorly designed and had such dirty timegating as the domination shards. I hope Blizzard learns its lessons from this and I will absolutely not miss Domination Shards in patch 9.2. What about you guys?
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