Is Legion the best effort Blizzard ever made, or can make?

[Cainium]

IMO they should take the following things from each addon:

Classic: Class identity. Healthstones should heal more than potions, Non-Healing Druid specs should have healing cooldowns like Tranquility and such stuff. Removing class identity does not prevent class stacking as long as damage numbers are noticable different and abilities like cloak of shadows, iceblock, and other immunities exist. The gear and ilvl scaling. +/- 5 main stat should matter, not having +/- 500...
BC: The difficulty of dungeons. Using CC and controlled focus damage needs to come back (more!).
WotLK: The athmosphere.
Cataclysm: -
MoP: The storytelling, raid difficulties and sizes, fixed 20 man for mythics doesnt worked out as it was promised. The PvP system (stat templates and pvp templates aren't working well either).
WoD: Garrisons. WTF? Yes, but inside the main city hub and for guilds to build. With consequent updates and expansions, and better inclusion into the story
Legion: World quests but less of them (more like daily/weekly). Make them interesting and not a grind fest. It is like always: the least challanging content has the worst rewards, and to keep it relevant it gets grindy. The gearing system, but with reduced margins. Having always the chance for an improvement is great, but not if you have to be so superlucky to upgrade 50+ itemlevels.

What to remove:
Group finder, LFR, artifacts, legiondaries, the lead game designer.

[Berengil]

Its really funny how one of the darkest story arcs in WoW get handwaved by some.
Yet the saturday morning cartoon gets praise everywhere.

"I'll get you next time Gadget!" XD

I liked Wrath, i just liked MOP more, best story(telling) in WoW so far.

I fully agree with Calfredd, a good mix of MOP and Wrath with just a sprinkle of Legion and BC would be king of the hill in my book.

I get what you're saying, Zat, but you have to widen your perspective.

WotLK: undead x2567512512512 , Anakin ..."cough cough" sorry, Arthas ( the guy everyone had been gunning for since WC3), Norse/Viking theme stuff, Titan space god city, and etc

MoP: Kungfupandacraft ; i know pandaren were first, but by the time of MoP, most people playing had never touched the RTS, but rather had started with the MMO; I mean people see humanoid pandas and their brain just lols even if they hold it in. BTW, I liked MoP. GoSac Destrolock ftw! Old God boogers under the land, and I very much liked the Dread wastes and IoT. But seriously, humanoid pandas. How they could not see what lots of people would say... idk.

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Group finder, LFR, artifacts, legiondaries, the lead game designer.

And along with that, remove most of the current players from the game. You may disagree that would happen, but I'm certain of it.

Lots, I mean lots of people only do things they can either solo or queue for.

[Redroniksre]

so first you are saying locking away a) flying, which is the most used feature in the game probally and b) locking content, as in the dungeons were not in the dungeon finder are not a big deal but then you claiming "removing" (which is wrong) content is a big deal

ok then

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wow i think the most laughable shit in this excuse of post is putting no content in brackets, like this is a hyperbell or something that isnt true, lol

The attunement itself was not hard or a problem. Having the dungeons be mythic only or having raids be normal only are issues. Essentially forcing people to use group finder is going to cause losses, queueing should always exist for content

[Osmeric]

Another thread illustrating Betteridge's Law.

[Manabomb]

Legion is the most effort I've seen Blizzard put into an expansion since WotLK tbh. That definitely doesn't mean WotLK was the pinnacle of perfection by any rights, it just means the current set of developers are finally at the same level they were 7 years ago. Legion itself has a lot of glaring design issues, but it atleast has a core gameplay for end-game.

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Another thread illustrating Betteridge's Law.

You're not going to find a lot of professional journalism on MMO-C threads, so kindly take journalism rules and fire them. Into the sun. With a cannon.

[rda]

It's a simple fact that modern blizzard make bad / mediocre games with amazing worlds and production value.

Filing Diablo 3 / WoD / Cata under 'bad', and everything else including Legion / Overwatch under 'meh'. They're not -terrible- but honestly nothing about them really stands out beyond game world full of potential and detail, and amazing production value.

They really need to do a company-wide shake-up in the departments of: writing (it's so much fan-cocksucking it hurts), management (those production times are unacceptable, most of their 'content patches' could be finished in two weeks by a kid with a warcraft 3 map editor), system design (everyone defending legendary system should just be fired), pvp (no comment) and marketing (re-rout 50% of the marketing budget to the other guys because word of mouth + good game > many ads and crappy game. See also: WoD).

I do believe they try to make a good game but they've proven time and time again that their company structure and people in charge need a serious reality check. Or in some cases like Holinka an untimely leave and a court order to stay away from game development at a distance of at least 40 yards at all times.

So... Yes. In their current state, I do believe it is their best. But should it be their best? Hell, to the F, to the no. There's literally no excuses for so many ignored / unfinished / tiny sloppy things they get away with for how much money they rake in every month.

This is a very good post.

+100, etc

[Cainium]

And along with that, remove most of the current players from the game. You may disagree that would happen, but I'm certain of it.

Maybe this is true. Don't want to argue about that, we now how such discussions end. But let me explain it anyway... Its just one part which made the game worse for me since Wrath (more tied to group finder than LFR). My problem with it is that it makes heroics worse than they could be. There is mythic? Yes, but the regular mythics are a joke as well. Mythic+? Not the solution, 'cause any group wants at least 2 chests. There is no "time" to fail or learn. If the group fails, they just drop the key 'cause "one chest isn't worth the time to tryhard". For the broader audience normal mode should be more than enough, and in an MMO everyone should at its worst have the social skills to group up for a normal dungeon. And if we wouldn't have 13 difficulties, they could be more rewarding and not a simple and boring grind fest.

Well, just my opinion. I know most people disagree with that thinking and Blizzard would never ever revert the game into this state. And may be i'm wrong that such a change would turn the game into the better, i don't know, and i'll never know.

[Eggroll]

I think MoP is the best effort Blizzard ever made, but that's just my opinion

The quality of Legion is miles ahead of WoD obviously, but it cannot compete with expacs pre WoD. I don't think the outlook for WoW is too good. I assume it just might be pretty hard to recruit top notch developers for a 13 year old game, so basically we are getting the "leftovers".

My overall feeling is that they tried very hard for a thing that is their job, but their hearts are not truly in it. And at the end of the day it shows. Legion just never becomes more than the sum of its pieces.

These are my two cents anyways.

[Deleted]

Its really funny how one of the darkest story arcs in WoW get handwaved by some.
Yet the saturday morning cartoon gets praise everywhere.

"I'll get you next time Gadget!" XD

I liked Wrath, i just liked MOP more, best story(telling) in WoW so far.

I fully agree with Calfredd, a good mix of MOP and Wrath with just a sprinkle of Legion and BC would be king of the hill in my book.

I skipped MoP because Cata was so bad. I use the same expression to describe the storylines as you, Saturday morning Cartoons.

Cata was a big Saturday Morning Cartoon.

Unfortunately what I trialled of MoP was a dungeon with big bunnies and drunk monkeys and I thought I was in for the same shit, so I missed MoP and WoD. MoP looks excellent now in retrospect and I wish I had played it.

I also like the look of WoD zones however the storytelling is becoming a bit comic book for my taste. I preferred the organic story telling methods of the past, where you would roam around doing quests as an adventurer rather than being some hero.

I see myself as an adventurer, skilled in my art but not a hero of the Alliance or w/e. I have had my hand in helping save the world but certainly wasn't even remotely responsible for our successes against the "big bads".

I hope the next expansion isn't "another level" up in heroism. I'd like to be an adventurer, not a hero.

[Sansnom]

After warlods of great youtube videos but shitty gameplay and pandaland group hug adventures skip to Ally vs Horde part thx expansions, the dev team had a lot two live up to.

Pandaria was a much better expansion than Legion in my opinion. It was fresh and different. The problem is portion of the community cannot, will not, look beyond "LOL Kung Fu Panda". The only people at fault with this are those people themselves.

One, getting back in touch with what the majority of players wanted, and not some whimsical impression of what players wanted based on some random joke back in Warcraft 3.

It may have been a "joke" back in WC3. But, I recall Blizzard themselves mentioned that people did wanted Pandarens in the game. So it is not some "whimsical impression" of what players wanted.

Players wanted Panadrens. We got that.

Players wanted to return BC. We got that.

Players wanted continuation with the Burning Legion. We got that.

So in effect, all three recent XP were based on players wanted.

[Saberstrike]

Can someone point me to that ever-elusive person that before MoP was like "Cata's garbage; You know what WoW truly needs? Pandas. Pandas will make this game great again!!". Pandas came and went, big whoop. The real reason people hate MoP is because despite how much content it offered it was so mediocre and unmemorable it puts the freaking wrath Collesium to shame.

It's like ToC: The expansion. The pieces are there, the scenery is there, the idea is there. But it just didn't really work together. Gating behind gating (valor points gear locked behind reps that were locked behind other reps ???) was bad, and 7.2 shows they haven't really learned that. Thunder King plot was interesting but other than that the expansion had no story. The dungeons were dull. The raiding was ok but WoW doesn't get points for that any more -- though that might just be because I'm not a raider. And the less I say about PvP the better.

I'm also thinking that a lot of people that miss MoP are warlocks and hybrids, as it was truly their paradise, in both pve and pvp. I'll forever have nightmares about invincible warlock in top tier heroic epics with 2.2million hp oneshotting people with chaosbolts on timeless isle.

The problem with legion is it feels like they haven't really learned much from the mistakes of MoP. They were so scared of repeating mistakes of WoD that they missed the forest for the trees. Or in layman's terms: behind servicing fans and trying to not screw up as badly as last time they forgot to design a coherent, fun game that wasn't just a giant number grind. WoW was never about much more than numbers, but AP is -literally- a huge numbers' grind and nothing else. That's what's bugging me about it. At least previous grinds had enough of a convoluted veil to make them seem less so. This one is just straight up 'Fill the bar this entire expansion'.

Hell the more I think about it the more I'll find parallels between MoP's and WoD's bad design somehow coming into legion, so I'll just stop here. But not before mentioning the command table and hoping it'll never re-surface again.

[Demithio]

Legion is just another gimmick expansion trying to keep what player subscription base they have left. The real problem is that Blizzard lost sight of what made WoW addictive and compelling to start with. So, now they deploy a collection of gimmick features trying to compensate instead of reintroducing the core elements needed to make the game compelling to play again. As we've seen they've been doing this gimmick routine for a while now, but seems to get worse with each new expansion. Its either that the developers simply do not know how to restore WoW in a real sense, or this is simply the way of things in terms of minimizing development expense and maximizing profit, or a combination of both.

[Golden]

I think WoD and Legion are my least favorite expansions. Part of that may just be burn out, but it seems like the game is becoming less of an RPG and more of just a mechanical combat simulator.

[Raiju]

Its really funny how one of the darkest story arcs in WoW get handwaved by some.
Yet the saturday morning cartoon gets praise everywhere.

"I'll get you next time Gadget!" XD

I liked Wrath, i just liked MOP more, best story(telling) in WoW so far.

I fully agree with Calfredd, a good mix of MOP and Wrath with just a sprinkle of Legion and BC would be king of the hill in my book.

MoP has never been the darkest storyline in wow, it's just the first time the lore was in your face rather than something you had to read. By the same logic, legion is far darker than MoP would ever be.

[hulkgor]

Not the best they can make, but certainly one of their best efforts since WOTLK. I hope they keep it up, or even go further next patches\expansions.

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So in effect, all three recent XP were based on players wanted.

There's a difference between a QUALITY product, and just pandering to players demands\whining.

[Sansnom]

There's a difference between a QUALITY product, and just pandering to players demands\whining.

Given the opinion among players, quality is subjective. Many players here on MMO-C did not consider MoP to be a good XP. I personally rate it the second best XP I enjoy after WoTLK. Many players here consider TBC to be the best XP. I personally consider the same as Cata and avoids levelling it with my alts.