Top 10 Worst Azerite Traits

when azerite traits were first introduced they were promoted as being spec defining traits that would change how you play your class similar to artifact weapons and the legendaries of legion and while that was true for a small handful of them most of them were pretty mediocre or just provided flat bonuses that you'd mostly forget about and in this list we'll be going over a lot of that ladder and at number 10 we have snake eyes this is an outlaw rogue trait which has the ability that after using roll the bones or slice and dice your next 10 sinister strikes deal additional damage based on the amount of combo points you spent sinister strike is simply the main basic attack that outlaw rogues use in order to build their combo points roll the bones just above the outlaw rugs used to cancel themselves slice and dice is a town g pickup which replaces roll the bones so in the most simplest terms the rotation for the outlaw rogue and bfa was to use sinister strike until you had five combo points then you would use those five combo points on roll the bones then out of combo points you would build up five more combo points again and this time you would use your five combo points on dispatch a hard hitting single target ability unless you had to refresh your stacks in addition to the normal procs and cooldowns you use in between all that so this trade pretty obviously just gives you extra damage on your main combo point builder after you use your combo spender buff ability so what's so bad about this trait actually when the trait was first released it was really good and in fact was part of a meme build which did competitive damage you see outlaw rogues are supposed to use one-handed weapons that are not daggers and in order to force them to do this the main damage dealing combo point spender ability dispatch requires you to have a non-dagger one hidden weapon in order to use so outlaw rogues were actually able to use snake eyes of the dagger in the main hand by just never using dispatch and only using their combo points in order to activate slice and dice slice and dice is a talent that replaces your roll the bones and makes it so when you spend your combo points on it it just increases your attack speed at 15 as well as your energy regeneration the mastery for outlaw rogues gives your main hand attack a chance to proc an extra offhand attack so if you have a very fast dagger in your main hand and then just have whatever is your hardest-hitting one-handed weapon in your offhand you can proc your mastery a lot more often with a very fast dagger using slice and dice however you wouldn't be able to spend your combo points on your main damage dealing ability which was offset by taking three snake eyes traits and making it so your sinister strike was doing so much damage especially if you took the weapon master talent so i had a chance to hit twice that you didn't need to use dispatch so the whole rotation was just spamming sinister strike until you used up all of your snake eyes charges and then refreshing it with the five combo point slice and dice however blizzard didn't like that rogues were not playing their class correctly since you were supposed to use dispatch in rotation so they nerfed the build and the way they did it was by targeting the trade itself the original version of the trait used to buff your next five sinister strikes for a large amount of damage so what they did was just increase it to 10 and then cut the amount of extra damage in half essentially adding the same amount of extra damage to your next 10 sinister strikes instead of the next five which meant you could no longer use your combo points on slice and dice in order to deal competitive damage by just spamming sinister strike five times in between which would force you to use your combo points and other things and require you to not have a dagger in your main hand so basically they super nerf the trait to stop a meme build which also just made the trade really bad for everyone else they also didn't even increase the duration of the buff so you only had 12 seconds to use up all 10 stacks of the trade which meant it was almost impossible to even use the full benefit of it so this trade was nerfed pretty early on in bfa and was almost completely useless for the rest of the expansion however since the trait was useful for a time and wasn't removed it's only the number 10 spot on this list but for a majority of its lifespan and bfa was the absolute worst trade to pick up for outlaw rogues and at number 9 we have masterful instincts this is a trait available to feral and guardian druids and has the effect where you gain a pretty significant amount of mastering armor for 30 seconds after survival instincts expires survival instincts is a defensive cooldown which reduces all the damage you take by fifty percent for six seconds now the mastery provides is actually really good including the extra armor so it was one of the most taken azerite traits for feral druids in high-end arenas however it didn't really perform well anywhere else because generally you want to save your defensive cooldowns for emergencies and this trait actively encourages you to use your defensive cooldowns as an offensive cooldown for that 30 second buff afterwards in pvp we're using defensive cooldowns all the time anyway this isn't really a big deal if you're a tank or dps player in a regular raider dungeon generally you want your defensive cooldowns for specific phases or fights or for emergencies and while survival instincts did have two charges in bfa you could always just use one of them for the 30 second buff and then save the other one for an emergency or just pick any other trait which would increase your damage survivability without relying on using up one of your major defensive cooldowns and at number eight we have moment of compassion this is a trait for holy paladins and has the effect where your flash of light will heal for an additional amount when you use it on the target of your beacon of light beacon of light is an ability that paladins have where you place on one target which lasts until you move it to another target that makes it so 50 of all of your healing is duplicated to your beacon of light target so it's an excellent ability where usually you just set it on a very high priority healing target like a tank and then you don't have to heal them because beacon of light is constantly duplicating your heels towards them flash of light is just the fast cast high healing single target healing spell that paladins have here's the thing with beacon of light though normally you don't want to spend your direct healing on your beacon of light target placed a beacon of light on a target has the excellent benefit where you don't have to heal them it's an incredibly strong ability because it allows you to always split your healing to another target so having an azerite trait which only benefits you healing sub-optimally is obviously not very good however there are situations in which it is somewhat useful paladins have a talent called vegan of virtue which on a 15 second cooldown allows you to place a beacon of light on one target and three other targets within 30 yards for eight seconds so with four beacon of light targets out in the mythic plus dungeon scenario then this azerite trade would be live on half the party even then pretty much every single other trait is better and it was almost never taken easily being the least taken trait amongst holy paladins especially since the holy paladins had arguably one of the best azerite traits ever in the form of glimmer of light glimmer of light was so good that pretty much all guides in bfa told you to get three of them as soon as possible because it was going to define your entire healing rotation you can only have six major traits and with half of them taken up by only one trait you would definitely not want to waste one of those remaining slots on moment of clarity which was almost completely useless in raids and only sometimes useful mythic plus dungeons if you have the right talent although in pvp killing your beacon of light target is pretty common so it has more staying power there and at number 7 we have flames of alacrity this is a major fire mage trade which would grant additional haste whenever your enhanced pyrotechnics was activated enhanced pyrotechnics would activate every time your fireball spell failed to critically hit in which case it would increase the chance of your next fireball to crit buy a stacking amount until you finally landed a successful critical strike as fire pages are all about getting crits so they can spam instant cast pyroblasts now where this trade comes into practice is if you're hard casting a lot of fireballs back to back and are unlucky with none of them quitting then you can benefit from this azerite trait and get the extra haste when the trait provided a significant amount of haste before it was nerfed it was used occasionally but other than that it was mostly ignored in favor of traits or abilities which actually played towards what fire was trying to do rather than only benefiting from a failure state because as soon as you successfully landed a critical strike with a fireball the trait would no longer be active and at number 6 we have killer frost this is a trait exclusive to frost death knights and it has the ability where your frost strike deals additional damage and also has a 15 chance on your critical strikes to grant killing machine killing machine is a proc which makes your next obliterate a critical strike now frost strike is the basic ability that death knights use when they need to spend their runic power as it's a great way for them to deal damage with it and obliterate is just one of their hard hitting abilities so passively allowing it to crit more often is only a good thing plus the trait increases the damage of the rune expender so what's wrong with this and why was it the least picked trait for frost death knights well the extra damage it would give to froststrike was fine it's just the proc chance would only happen if you critically strike with frost strike instead of just using any frost strike you see azerite traits would not stack when it comes to percentage-based things so if you stacked three copies of killer frost you would still only have a 15 chance to grant extra killing machines on your crits which sure overall it would give you more procs over a boss fight but also any of the mediocre generic traits would increase your damage more and that's kind of the threshold for some of these traits is it better to take the trait than just one of the bad generic traits like don't get me wrong some of the generic traits are super good so saying a spec specific trait is worse than one of them isn't that big of a deal like the heart of darkness trait for example which was good for pretty much every class killer frost was usually worse than traits like rizon's fury or even inside the pack which were definitely great traits for some classes but pretty mediocre overall when it came to generic traits killer frost wasn't especially good at single target or aoe it technically did increase your damage but it wasn't more useful than a generic trade and that's kind of the benchmark for a lot of the traits that appear on this list and at number five we have up close and personal this was a survival hunter azure trait which increased the damage of your next mongoose by to raptor strike by a set amount after you use your harpoon ability while also reducing its focus cost by 10. harpoon is like a charge where it pulls your character towards your target and roots them in place it had a 20 second cooldown and cost a minimal amount of focus and raptor strike was just one of your focus benders with mongoose bike being a talent you could take which would replace it now this trade functions more like an optional talent you might take while leveling up rather than an ability you choose on a piece of gear at end game content that you want to stack other copies of on top of it in order to grant more of the effect because you see harpoon has a minimum range of 8 yards so if you're in a raid fight and you want to make use of this azerite trade on cooldown you'd have to run out of the fight in order to harpoon back in just for the buff and losing that down time was just not really worth the minor buff to one of your attacks especially since you had to give up that global cooldown assuming you didn't lose any other global cooldowns while running out of range there was a talent however called terms of engagement which would reset the cooldown of harpoon after killing an enemy so the azerite trait seems like it'd be more useful while leveling up in conjunction with his talent or maybe even in dungeons situationally although i don't know if that makes it good the trait was actually removed from the game in patch 8.1 and replaced another trade called primeval intuition which increased your maximum focus to 120 and gave your raptor strike or mongoose by a crit buff each time they did damage and stacked up to 5 times and also funny enough 8.1 is also when they removed the global cooldown from harpoon which would have made the trait a little bit more useful in the type of content that it was probably designed for and at number 4 we have synapse shock this is a shaman trait available to all specs which simply has the effect that each time you cast lightning bolt or chain lightning you increase your intellect by a set amount for each target hit for 15 seconds stacking up to five times so after you stack this thing up five times you basically have a permanent intellect buff as an elemental shaman and one that could be used with the other two specs as well although none of the shaman specs really use the trait when it first came out the launch of bfa it provided so much intellect and was so easy to have up 100 of the time that it was kind of the go-to pick for elemental shamans and since the trait was so incredibly easy to use and was basically just an extra buff that you didn't have to think about blizzard nerfed the trait so it wouldn't be an autopick then it became grossly undertuned to the point where it was one of the worst possible options you could pick while also still being the same boring trait from before and that's kind of how it stayed for the rest of the expansion they never really touched it again there were a couple of other shaman traits which were also incredibly undertuned to the point where they competed with snap shock and which one was the least useful and at number three we have moment of repose this is a trait for disciplined priests which had the ability that when you applied pain suppression to a target it would also apply atonement to that target and instantly heal them for a set amount which was usually a significant amount either equivalent or slightly higher than what you would get from cast in a single target big heal pain suppression is a longer cooldown that you can apply on yourself for a friendly target which reduces the damage you take by 40 for 8 seconds and it's actually a super good defensive cooldown in pretty much all types of max level gameplay it's useful as an emergency button to push if you know you're about to take a lot of damage it's useful to throw in the tank if they ask for a defensive cooldown or just on someone who's about to die in a dungeon or raid and in pvp it's absolutely crucial to the disprice survivability now the trait adding a heal and applying atonement which is a good buff that allows you to kill the target for some of the damage you deal is just straight up a plus to the ability and in pvp this could be amazing to add an extra heal whenever using pain suppression on a target everywhere else though it was a huge shame this took up one of your major azerite traits because it is incredibly lackluster outside of pvp the ability the trait is tied to is only used for emergencies unless you're doing some kind of mechanic where you're going to be using pain suppression off cooldown and because it's an emergency ability chances are you won't even use the ability a single time in an encounter or you can go through an entire dungeon without having to use it a single time which is great that you never had any emergencies but that also means you had a useless major azerite slot being taken up by an ability that didn't help contribute at all the situations which you might need to emergency pain suppress the extra heal provides is pretty nice but pain suppression is so good on its own that it's not really needed and when you preemptively use pain suppression you don't need the healing at all because most of the time the target will be at full health so while it's technically a beneficial trait like most of the azerite traits on this list it's definitely not as useful as pretty much anything else you could take which could meaningfully help you at all times instead of maybe sometimes in emergencies that things are going wrong and at number 2 we have rumbling tremors this is a trait that definitely won out when it comes to being the least useful shaman train rumbling tremors is a trait which allowed your earth elemental to pulse aoe damage every two seconds while it was out in addition to increasing its auto attack damage both the pulsing aoe damage and the auto attack damage increase would be based on the item level of the azerite piece as well as just additional stackings of the trait the earth elemental is a five minute cooldown ability which summons an earth elemental guardian for one minute which you can vaguely control and has a tauntability which doesn't work on raid bosses the biggest use of the earth elemental is to bring it out as an emergency tank because its damage is not suited for dps so the trick was obviously trying to turn the cooldown into a much better dps cooldown however it was horribly under tuned so if you did bring it out for its damage thanks to this trait it wasn't going to contribute very much in patch 8.1 they actually removed the trait and replaced it with tectonic thunder which is an elemental trait that increases the damage of earthquake and gives it a 25 chance to make your next chain lightning instant cast which was a lot more useful than rumbling tremors but was also one of the least picked traits for elemental shamans even less so than synapse shock which is why it's slightly higher on this list and you can also see why people complain so much about elemental shamans and bfa for being in a poor state and at number one we have fit to burst a major trait for brewmaster monks this trait has the ability where while you're at heavy stagger and you drink purifying brew your next three melee abilities will heal you for a set amount brewmasters are the tanking speck of monks and have a special ability called stagger where they delay about 40 of the damage they take over 10 seconds instead of taking it all at once so brewmaster monks are constantly taking damage from their stagger ability because it's just delaying the damage and purifying brew is an ability they have which allows them to clear 50 of that stagger and stagger has certain amounts and thresholds to it to let you know just how much damage you're taking from the current stagger that's constantly adding up as you take damage in a raid fight and a heavy stagger is with the amount of stagger is 60 or greater than your maximum health so in order to activate the trait you'd need to use your purifying brew to clear half of your stagger while you're at a very high amount of stagger and your reward is a little bit of self-healing now in normal raids or dungeons your healers are going to constantly keep you topped off generally a healer will always throw a heel in the tank every couple of seconds or so so they're constantly being healed by all the healers in whatever environment you're in a brewmaster monk that clears their heavy stagger won't really be able to benefit from the minor kill spread out over three attacks as they'll most likely be at full health with that extra amount of stagger dot stagger.gone however even under ideal circumstances where you're constantly using purifying brew while you're at heavy stagger and not being topped off immediately afterwards the trait still doesn't provide enough healing to compete with virtually any other available azerite trait which is kind of hilarious not only is this trait hard to actually use once you actually get the effect it's not even that good at least moment of repose provides good healing and actually scales pretty well as far as azerite trait stacking goes which is why fit to burst is at number one on this list most of the mediocre traits were purged in 8.1 but this one managed to stay all the way until the end of the expansion [Music] you

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Length: 17min 54sec (1074 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 13 2021