Q&A Thoughts

Arcanocrystal Functionality
It is obvious that Arcanocrystal is over item budget due to not having main stat. However, the issue with Arcanocrystal being so good is two fold. Not only is it over budget, but the instances are littered with horrendous options for trinkets. The item team seems incredibly dead set on shoving AoE damage proc or ground effect procs down our throats. In Emerald Nightmare two of the trinkets were essentially unusable for casters (Twisting Winds and Unstable Horrorslime) and were relegated to disenchanting from first drop for TW and an M+ trinket for the Horroslime. The issue was alleviated somewhat by getting random rolling stat sticks in Trials of Valor, because all we wanted was consistent usages out of trinkets. We are used to getting a certain level of power out of trinkets that we were just not seeing. Then, again, going into Nighthold, the item team let us down. We have just an uninterrupted garbage party of AoE trinkets that are incredibly niche and feel awful both as drops and as bonus coin rolls. Fury of the Burning Sky, Icon of Rot, Pharamere's Forbidden Grimoire, and Star Gate all feel awful. This leads to a raid full of casters battling over 2 trinkets and stat sticks from ToV while rueing the day that any of these horrific garbage bin trinkets graced their bag. This is more of a failing of designing and releasing awful trinkets than Arcanocrystal being dominant. I know that I would much rather just have a good trinket from Nighthold instead of praying and coining every time Withered J'im is up.

Random Relic Rolls
This is a great idea. Plain and simple. Great idea. The "always a throughput trait" caveat is also great. No complaints.

Legendaries
You touched on this in a lot of places in the Q&A. First you touched on the idea of spec swapping legendaries, and how everyone knows when you get the "Pyro Bracers" and everyone knows what it is when you get "Prydaz". Unfortunately, because you dont just get "Mage Bracers," there is a tax on you. Where you need 3 drops at the Bracer slot instead of just one; whereas a moonkin, feral, shadow, etc only need to find one set of DPS legendaries.
The crafted legendaries sound incredibly 'meh'. The idea of swapping them in for a given fight seems pretty pie in the sky.
Again, the changes to the legendary setup to make the BLP spec dependent doesn't feel like a solution that helps people who are actually in horrible positions. I have 8 legendaries, and 4 of them are universal legendaries. That means that I go into a specialization that has 'required to enter' style legendaries with myself looking for my 5th legendary. I realize that I am a special case, but I know there are multiples of this special case even in my guild.
As far as tuning legendaries, it needs to come sooner rather than later. People with bad legendaries in my guild are constantly being benched. It has nothing to do with them being good or having good attitudes, because we recruit to have those kinds of players. It is an issue of tuning. When you tune an instance for people who are going to run 5 split runs and raid 80 hours a week, you essentially leave guilds like mine in a position where we can't compete unless people have level 54 weapons with great legendaries. Bosses that gave Method/Serenity/Exorsus/Etc no problems are horrific DPS checks for us, sometimes even on heroic. Going into a first week of mythic with 5x the tier and offpieces is a huge deal. People have to get sat if they are stopping us because there is a level of expectation. A lot of us have been playing the game for the better part of a decade.

AP Obligation
I touched on this before, but what is really important here is the feeling that we are not allowed to play the game the way we are used to. It feels like talent is no longer the guiding factor of playing World of Warcraft. It has become who got luckier, who had more gear, who got the better legendary, who has the better raid comp, who could add more time. For years people in this guild were capable of playing the game a certain amount of time and getting by on it. We raided 3 nights, people have kids and jobs, but really enjoy spending time with each other on raid nights. We were incredibly talented, and got by on the gear we had because there were not extra factors scaling the strength of the raid. Getting a weapon to level 54 has become a horrible chore. Not only that, it is a chore that we have to do on multiple weapons if we want to continue to play the game in the way we are accustomed. On top of that, and this part seems ridiculous to me, raiding was not the best way to accomplish level 54. You could get as much AP in 2 runs of Maw of Souls as you could get in a weekly lockout of Mythic Emerald Nightmare. The underlying issue is that we absolutely feel like we are the group being pushed out of World of Warcraft. Why, after 10 years, does it feel like raiding on 3 nights in difficult content suddenly is a constantly growing mountain that we can only hope to climb? I think that after having so long in this game, with a lot of success, and consistent scheduling that the hardcore 3 night guild should not have the game changed so horrifically around them.
I know that you said in the Q&A that change was coming, but it has been both the release patch, and the fix patch after it and the change isn't here. I think that this is going to fall under "I'll believe it when I see it."
You answered a question about artifact power being class wide instead of having to power up each weapon individually. You actually brought up the idea that it would be weird to have a fully powered Ashbringer if you were a Holy Paladin just picking it up. The problem is that this not being in the game taxes pures and 2 DPS spec classes, and alleviates the pain on single DPS spec classes.
Tuning And Mythic Burnout
You said yourself in the Q&A, and said to me privately that you don't want to have to balance content around people willing to raid 80 hours a week, and that it would be irresponsible as a company for you to continue to push out content with 80 hour raid weeks in mind for the people doing them. The simple answer is "don't." The arms race is incredibly real. People just pull out more and more hours to go after the goal.  I know that the tuning of content has led to me having to be upset with people that I really don't want to have to be upset with. People who have played with me for years. People I consider my incredibly close friends. Because they don't have the time to grind out 3 level 54 weapons (where specs seem to be balanced at the whim of god knows who - especially since we were told up front that we wouldn't be shifted from best to worst -- of course that didn't work out for fire mages or unholy death knights), I have to sit them on content, or punish the rest of the raid because there is an arbitrary scaling damage buff that comes with grinding time. This wouldn't be an issue if the content was also not directly tuned to people who have this capped. These big guilds are not the only ones feeling overwhelmed. We have, like you said in the Q&A, had to peer pressure people into putting time into their weapons outside of raid when no such albatross has existed in the last 6+ years of raiding.

I realize this was all very rambly. I think that the issues, currently, with the game come down to a few major points:
•	Legendaries, and really specs in general, are poorly balanced. Melee is balanced around doing 15% more damage standstill than ranged at this point. On top of that ranged lose damage while moving, but are also forced to carry the brunt of the mechanical load.
•	Content is tuned with the top 4 guilds in the world in mind. Getting to 54 wouldn't be a problem if content was tuned so that someone who is great at their class, but doesnt have time to get to 54 could still be useful on fights. Guilds like mine, which have thrived for almost a decade, cannot hope to kill content with 1/5th the gear going into the first week of mythic when content is tuned like this.
•	Blizzard forgot that people have grown accustomed to playing the game a certain way. People don't want to take a game that they have played for 10 years and suddenly be forced to play it a different way.

Here are some thoughts on possible solutions:
•	More proactive nerfing and buffing of specs. It should not take 3 major patch cycles to fix some of the issues that are happening.
•	Make raiding EASILY the most lucrative source of AP. There is no reason that someone should be downing incredibly difficult content and essentially getting the same amount of AP that they would have gotten from running a Maw of Souls +2.
•	Make any gains in AP that would get you far ahead trivialized by the next point of Artifact Knowledge. This would allow for a soft nerf to content, since people getting there a week early might benefit a lot from having extra points, but people getting there next week would have a large power gain simply from waiting for another point. It would allow guilds like Method/Serenity to grind their hearts out if they want something dead in the first week, but for guilds like mine who might not see the 8th boss until a couple of weeks in to be at a relative strength level.
•	Put universal and utility legendaries in their own BLP spec. Make only spec specific legendaries count against that spec. I should not be pulling at my 5th legendary for Arcane because I have a Timewarp Ring, Sephuz, Prydaz, and Norgannon's.
•	Stop pushing out so many terrible items in a dungeon. There does not need to be items that are instant disenchantable on drop. It leads to people feeling awful about them dropping both in the raid or in their random cache. There is no requirement for there to be unequippable items as a matter of course.
•	Help people who decided to play a pure class continue to enjoy the game. One of the best parts about playing a pure was that you could change specs to suit a fight. The only barrier of entry was your talent level. You had to learn how to play all 3 specs at a high level and have a decent enough level of gear to play it. Now you need to have dominant relics for all 3 specs, all 3 weapons leveled, and good legendaries for all 3 specs. The pure tax has really taken on a life of its own.
•	Help people help themselves. Put a cap on titanforging outside of the most recent content. We feel like we need to grind gear (even so much as people wanting to go back and do EN during raid time) because it has a chance to lottery forge. This isn't really healthy for the game. The new instance should be the place that people go to get the items they need. Make the items in the new instance better as far as design, and make it the place you need to go to get the highest item level items. This allows for proper phasing out of items like Arcanocrystal as well.