Should you play Legion? Is Legion good? Or is Legion dying?

[SoulSoBreezy]

Heya.
This's a mostly full transcript of my video review of Legion from a broad perspective. It's uh, long.
You can watch it here.

TL;DR:
Yes, you should try it out. RNG threatens to define Legion. In my opinion, it does not; just depends on your competitive attitude and the approach to your desired endgame.

Intro

World of Warcraft: Legion has just completed the first big leg in its delivery of content.
You’re here because you might be looking for someone to share their thoughts on this expansion.
Or you’re not playing WoW currently, and you’re wondering if now is a good time to jump in.

Hey it’s Soul, and I’m going to give an almost review of World of Warcraft: Legion.
But reviews of an MMO are hard, aren’t they? The Legion experience will be very different if you’ve played it since its launch or just jumped in during the last month or two. And it really gets complicated when it comes to different people’s playstyles.
On top of that it’s difficult to give a review when MMOs change constantly. Legion has its core components in place but a lot’s changed since its announcement a few years ago, up to where we are as of March. So throughout this video I’ll hope to answer two questions: Has Legion been a good expansion up to this point? And is Legion worth picking up now?

So let’s set things up.

The World of Warcraft has carried the boon and burden of being the number one MMO for years, defining an MMO generation, and maybe even holding it back from innovating.
With every expansion it’s been pressured to change things up, to stick to its roots, to revolutionize and innovate or refine and polish or just give up and release Legacy realms. For every review you’ll see of this game including this one you’ll find no less than fifty fans who disagree.
The World of Warcraft over its 12 plus year history, is a perfect flaw. It’s an anomaly of a success, a perfect storm of design, timing, and luck.
But when you break WoW into a sum of its parts you see the details, the cracks in the armor, the flaws that both marr and define it as a game. But so many will compare its iterations based on its expansions. Legion follows in the footsteps of Warlords of Draenor, an expansion that, in so few words, was a weak delivery.
In a way, you’d want to think that after an expansion like Warlords, which is often argued specifically as having too little to do except raid and diddle around in front of a table, Legion has got to be a better expansion, right?

The answer is yes, but it’s not because Warlords set the bar so low. Granted, by comparing the first five months of Legion against the first five months of Warlords we can say that Legion has delivered more raids, dungeons, world bosses, organic content platforms and available activities to do on a daily basis. If we look at Legion as a vessel of potential, it certainly has it. We’ll soon have the Tomb of Sargeras and Argus to look forward to while Warlords’ last major delivery of content came in the form of Tanaan Jungle and Hellfire Citadel, which in my opinion, was still a good raid, but with regards to premier content delivery, that was about it.

But let’s move away from the comparisons, otherwise we’d be here all day. Legion ought to be measured on its own merits and not compared to an expansion that’s demonstrably worse. Nor should it be compared to any other expansions or Classic WoW.
Legion brings players a delivery of content and progression paths that’s borderline overwhelming in its ambition. More than any expansion, Legion has empowered players with choice, which has so far proven to be a double edged sword; it’s liberating for some, but a door to endless gameplay for others.

Demon Hunter

The Demon Hunter has been a long awaited class to finally be introduced in World of Warcraft: Legion. It was more than an obvious choice to bring in the glaive wielding, demon slaying edgelord. As the third class to be added since WoW’s launch, and the second “hero class,” it was predictably met with mixed reactions despite the fanfare, nostalgia and the inclusion of its godfather, Illidan Stormrage, making his return.
Some players were unhappy that this iconic class only included a melee and a tank specialization, making this the first time a class only had two to choose from. Blizzard came back to state that despite their efforts, they couldn’t come up with an effective third spec, be it another melee, ranged or even healer, that fit the class’ theme and fantasy.
Nonetheless the Demon Hunter is here, and is reasonably well represented among the raiding community, including the reigning World First guild, Exorsus.
Looking away at representation at the higher skillband, the Demon Hunter is just fun to play. It somehow has its own unique feel thanks to the usage of sigils and demonic abilities. Even what I thought was just a gimmicky gliding skill proved to be part of the Demon Hunter’s iconic look and feel.

Artifact weapons

Every class and spec is given its own unique, named weapon to complement its role in Legion, naturally to either directly or indirectly beat up bad guys, who we know as the Burning Legion. This was one part of a paradigm Blizzard calls “class fantasy,” which may or may not have obtained a meme like status, but this was a partial answer to players’ outcry for more class or spec specific quests that were around in previous expansions.
Artifact Weapons serve as both an instrument of pain as well as a content delivery system. It’s essentially a weapon that gains experience well beyond the character’s maximum level, clocking at 110 in Legion. It comes with its own questline to develop and later, upgrade. To supplement the boredom of otherwise having only one weapon or dozens of Ashbringers flailing around, numerous skin unlocks have been made available since Legion’s launch, with more to come in future patches.

The artifacts weapons themselves encompass the history of Warcraft itself, partially embedded thanks to its games and books, but most of the weapons have a story created specific to its deployment in this expansion. Weapons like the Ashbringer and Doomhammer are easy to identify, but what’s Ebonchill? Each of the few dozen weapons available to all the game’s classes and specs were given its own backstory or additional story to back up existing lore. Some weapons feel more epic than others, but personally I applaud the effort if not the result.

Artifacts gain experience through Artifact Power, a progression currency that is obtained through various activities and strengthens the weapon as well as the character’s stats throughout the expansion’s lifetime. It’s been marred by the player sentiment around the social pressure, or need to power up the weapon as quickly as possible, even though there have been systems introduced since Legion’s launch that help speed this process along for latecomers, alts or for players who just want to enjoy the game casually. The features of the Artifacts and its progression defines a system that frees players from feeling forced to meet a daily or weekly cap of activity, and instead, farm or grind to their content. On the flip side we can also look at the system as a long, long race to the finish, a challenge to players’ self control and maybe a test against human limitations. I’ve reviewed this system exhaustively over the months and have decided that this is an attempt by Blizzard to do a lot less hand-holding when comes to a player’s personal progression, and as usual, conduct their own study to see how a system like this plays out. It’s my opinion that the system may be an evolution of more dated progression systems, but in one way it threatens to draw a line between vague labels like casual and hardcore. Players just coming into Legion will have a speedier experience when it comes to powering up their weapon thanks to a few mechanisms, so you can get closer to the action as soon as you hit level 110. This has been Blizzard’s thing for a while now, to not want to punish players who happen to join in during an expansion’s lifecycle as opposed to the very start.
Each day, more and more players are obtaining the current maximum ranks for one or more of their weapons, much like how a player runs out of options to spend Valor points on. Future content hopes to further enhance the overall longevity of the system with more milestones to hit, skins to unlock and ways to catch up. The reaction to the eventual shifting of the goalpost has been mixed among players. Those who think of progressing through their artifact weapons as a race to complete see this as an endless grind. On the other hand, those who play under the premise that they will always be a little bit stronger at the end of a play session see this as a more passive, automatic system.
It’s been stated by Blizzard that this feature isn’t likely to advance to future expansions, but the question remains as to what if any components of this system will.
I’m skeptical about holding onto such an iconic weapon, but I really dig the idea of having a weapon that we build up over a long period of time, as opposed to replacing it as soon as we kill the next boss on our best in slot list. It brings back the feeling of role playing again, and I hope I get to see myself creating and powering up a weapon or item entirely of my choosing.

Legendary armor

Legendary gear isn’t new to WoW. They’ve come in various forms of delivery and inclusiveness. In the most previous expansion they were more of a companion item; it came in the form of a single ring that advanced over the course of the expansion’s story. In Legion there are dozens of legendaries available, but only obtainable through chance, and not a pre-defined event or quest.
Legendaries are, at the moment, the most visible centerpiece of dissatisfaction among players who don’t like this or any system that limits control of their own destiny. It’s nothing new; results from a random number generator or RNG have been around the block for a while now, but having zero control over the drop rate of a highly coveted item is a thorn on the side of players under the influence that gear = power = success. This might not be the majority mindset of WoW players, but it’s certainly a reasonable argument that has warranted a response from Blizzard, even if they’re small steps that come in the form of craftable and targeted legendaries in a future patch.
The current director of the World of Warcraft has admitted that Legendaries are a flawed system due to the items themselves and not so much its drop rate. Some Legendaries provide some utility while others provide a significant damage boost. This has led to the obvious perception that obtaining a dps legendary is good and everything else is bad.
Couple that with an uncontrollable chance of them dropping and you have a recipe of social toxicity between haves and have-nots. Blizzard is making efforts to blur the differences between these dps and utlility legendaries in a number of ways. Personally I think that for new and casual players, Legendaries are a neat bonus to enjoy whenever they drop. And if they don’t, it’s nothing to really sweat over.

Setting

Let’s move on to where Legion will take players, to the Broken Isles themselves.
With little doubt, more effort and detail has been put into building the Broken Isles than in any previous continent introduced in WoW. Each turn you take can lead you somewhere, and rewards you with a rare encounter, a treasure chest or mini event. Nooks and crannies are peppered throughout the zones that help players cut through the beaten path even if flight won’t be available until after completing a lengthy series of objectives in an upcoming patch. Thankfully there’s an item that helps you get around at endgame, too.
New lighting and graphics effects have also brought about more vivid colors and maybe more importantly, darker nights. Another strong delivery of voiceovers helps shape the day to day experience, although some voices are more enjoyable than others, and even the biggest fans can only handle harpies for so long.
Legion’s strongest and most immersive delivery comes in the form of the full on city that was created in the Suramar zone, complete with a zoo, winery, and a lot of guards. It’s easily one of my favorite World of Warcraft zones of all time.
But a plus and a minus regarding the Broken Isles as a whole lie with its density. The zones thrive with activity thanks to daily activities and their relatively close proximity to one another, but somehow Legion continues a direction by Blizzard to shorten the physical gaps between points A, B and C. This’s just speculation but I feel like it’s related to the ever constant debate on flight which won’t be accessible until patch 7.2, and the design of traveling between objectives. The world of Legion feels almost too dense. In any story, there’s an origin, a journey and a destination. It’s been argued that flying compromises the journey, but I question whether or not the high density of the Broken Isles has also helped compromise the experience.
Meanwhile, dungeons and raids continue to push the boundaries of WoW’s engine with contrasts of themes. From the depths to Helheim to the Halls of Valor, from the Nightmare to the Nighthold, you see a lot of thought and care went towards building this world. Legion continues a tradition of taking several dungeons and inserting them into the game world to really bring the world to scale, and I find that really cool. Instances like the Eye of Azshara, Court of Stars, and even the Trial of Valor and Nighthold raids are viewable out in the open world and used for their own quests and other activities.

Story

Of course, there is no game without an adequate story, and Blizzard went pretty far, perhaps too far, with trying to deliver a story that paints the urgency of a Legion invasion.
Heroes fell and Legion starts off with a desperate search for items called the Pillars of Creation that will stop the Legion’s invasion and their efforts at destroying the world. Meanwhile we’re sidetracked by the looming Nightmare, an incursion from Hel, a Naga invasion and of course, the Horde/Alliance conflict. It’s pretty loaded.
For players like me who enjoy a decent story, I can say it’s a decent story considering what there is to work with. Every class and spec has a story to work with thanks to Class Orders, basically a club for each of the 12 classes complete with their own questlines and characters who all decided that since the Alliance and Horde can’t stop killing each other, Class Orders will take up the reins of defending the world, and we players get to be the leaders of our Order.
Nice promotion, even if I don’t want it.
With our Class Orders come Order halls, a special little clubhouse for our special little club. Every class gets a uniquely themed instanced zone, with very different levels of scale and spectacle. Sure, a lodge in the mountains and a hidden society under Dalaran is cool. A giant church under a much smaller one is a bit tough to swallow.
But there are order halls in space too, be it a spaceship, interstellar temple or another freaking planet.
Even professions have a questline and narrative built around them to deliver a more meaningful experience than to simply learn skills from a trainer, but I’ve got to admit that from an alt standpoint, this can be kind of a pain in the ass.

World Scaling

The environment, story and questing experience is wrapped with a scaling system that applies to each of the Broken Isles zones and dungeons with a few exceptions. In a nutshell, creatures will always match the player’s level regardless of what zone they travel to, and players will encounter creatures the same way even if their levels are different. Despite the technical complications behind the level scaling system, it’s created a natural experience for players who all experience the world similarly, whether they just landed on the Broken Isles or they’re at max level. And it feels pretty cool.
In a way you can think of the story and questing experience to be like an open world game that allows the freedom to go almost wherever you want and not worry too much about your current level. The success of this system has started numerous conversations among players asking for this to apply to the rest of WoW’s previous content in order to breathe renewed life into these old zones.
Another part of the success comes from the fact that leveling just doesn’t take very long at all, and in fact it doesn’t matter thanks to the scaling. Levels are just a brief prerequisite to accessing more story and gameplay that would otherwise feel disjointed if you were able to say, jump into raids and high level dungeons from the get go.
Other features made their way into Legion, including more pets to capture and tame, and the return of the Brawler’s Guild. Players now have wardrobe interface that saves your earned cosmetic gear, and with the WoW Token system, not only can players purchase gametime with gold, they can resell that gametime for Battle.net balance.

Professions

Professions have had different individual impacts in Legion. As stated earlier, building them up involves a series of quests that take players to different zones and even instances. It’s a nice and immersive approach, but as an endgame system I feel like it falls flat. Professions are supported by a rank system that improves your ability to efficiently gather or craft, and especially for gathering, a lot of luck is needed in order to rank up and receive bonus resources for whatever they harvest, which in my opinion is okay.
Cooking on the other hand, didn’t receive the same treatment, subjecting players to rely on pure chance to learn more efficient recipes by depositing resources into what I consider a panda shaped black hole.
Armor crafting professions in my opinion got a significant nerf to their ability to make decent gear. Previously, players were restricted to either craft or wear a set amount of crafted gear in order to not trivialize other paths to gearing. Legion’s crafting allows players to wear any number of crafted gear and upgrade it with a special forge, but this comes with a fatal drawback: its maximum potential appears to be trivial compared to what’s possible at endgame.
In short, armor professions, in comparison to consumable professions and gathering, fall short of my expectations.

Endgame

Starting with PvP, a massive overhaul was done with the gearing system in that it was outright removed. In its place are stat templates that activate when in instanced PvP like arenas, and the only external influence comes from whether or not you have a high item level. Even then this doesn’t make a huge difference.
Also replacing it is a prestige-like system that rewards players with titles and other cosmetic accolades once enough honor has been earned.
This has done strange things, most notably to water down the feeling of obtaining powerful gear designed strictly for PvP combat. On top of that, obtaining this gear has so far been entirely by chance in the form of strongboxes and other mostly random elements. Many players haven’t responded well to this approach due to the unreliability of the gearing system and as a consequence, an unreliable feeling of accomplishment. Changes will come in a future patch, allowing players to take unwanted gear and basically trade them in for something more desired.
Meanwhile while brand new battlegrounds weren’t released or announced for launch, remixes of previous battlegrounds will launch in the near future.

Most players at max level will participate in a system known as World Quests, an ever rotating selection of hundreds of quests based on the adventures players took part within each zone. This is one of a few new content platforms in Legion that deliver a continuous nag of there being something to do, as world quests will appear every few hours as opposed to each day. WQs share similarities to quests previously completed while leveling but include new activities including basic kill and collect quests, and PvP objectives as well as non combat WQs like completing profession work orders, collecting resources and cheating at a shell game.
To not overwhelm players, WQs are sorted into requests by emissaries that appear each day, asking players to complete a number of WQs related to their needs. Doing this earns a snazzy reward, but of course players can complete WQs to their heart’s content. I think this is a brilliant if incomplete system that takes advantage of the entirety of the Broken Isles zones as opposed to earlier expansions that used a significantly smaller piece of real estate for repeatable content. A rotating system of rewards ensures that collecting nuts and squirrels won’t always give you the exact same reward, offering players opportunities to complete different quests for the rewards they want.

Legion brings players a wide array of dungeons with a lot of fun and varied encounters. From a haunted stronghold to deep underground caves to basically Asgard, Legion’s dungeons help to once again serve as a capstone to the questing experience in each of its zones.
Dungeons have always played a part in WoW’s endgame but until now it only felt relevant up to a certain point. Legion brings us Mythic Keystones, a special modifier that turns a Legion dungeon into a timed challenge mode, and with awesome loot to go with it. Imagine a dungeon where bosses hit twice as hard and apply a healing debuff with every attack while the party has to constantly watch the ground for volcanic explosions, and this is on top of the boss’s normal abilities. This is another content platform that builds the premise that for players not interested in the sometimes unforgiving requirements of raiding, completing high level mythic keystone dungeons is a reasonable alternative that balances challenge and variety with fewer logistical hurdles.
Of Legion’s content platforms, this one is definitely my favorite. It’s kept dungeons relevant after having gone through expansion after expansion of farming trivial heroics time and time again for little to no gain. Like so many things in Legion, keystone dungeons offer a choice to push player skill, challenge player’s ambitions to quickly farm, or both.

In a very welcome addition that hasn’t come since World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, new dungeons have been introduced during the course of the expansion. Karazhan, a old favorite raid from the Burning Crusade days, returns in the form of a dungeon. Meanwhile a new Legion-themed dungeon will make its way to live servers in an upcoming patch. In the past I was less thrilled with dungeons being introduced mid expansion because of the short shelf life dungeons used to have, but thanks to keystones and timewalking, these dungeons will continue to be a worthwhile investment.
Except for Violet Hold. Poor Violet Hold.

Of course, what’s an expansion without some solid raid content? Following a generally positive streak of solid raids that came since the start of the Mists of Pandaria expansion, Legion brings a strong delivery of higher end PvE that, while it wasn’t without its hiccups and balance missteps, has been a generally gratifying experience. Players tackled the Emerald Nightmare, endured the Trials of Valor and purged the Nighthold of Legion influence. The top end band of raiding pushed the boundaries of Blizzard’s raid design as usual, exposing a tuning flaw at the end of the Emerald Nightmare and the Trial of Valor, Legion’s first two raids.
The Nighthold raid was very well received by the raiding elite without significant hiccups and is a satisfying conclusion that will take players to the next chapter in the defense of Azeroth.

Reward and activity systems

All of this PvE content, the raids and dungeons and world quests and all of its variations make for a lot of options for WoW’s diverse playerbase. At endgame there is a lot a player can do in a single day.
This came after Blizzard sat down with themselves and pointed out the obvious, based on their previous experiences. Eventually, as players progress into higher content, they say goodbye to the activities that were no longer worth the rewards that came from them, no matter how easy they became thanks to obtaining better gear. In other words, older content had to make way for new content, and this older content was largely forgotten while in the same expansion.
Blizzard had a goal to challenge that process and try to make all of their activities relevant. The hardest content in the game still gave out the best, most prestigious rewards, but endgame activities should always have a value to them, even when it’s pretty transparent that farming easy content should not get you the best gear at the same rate. Mythic Keystones did the job for dungeons with its wide spread of options, but what about everything else? Blizzard made the decision to implement a random bonus attribute called Titanforging, which is probably going to be looked back on as a controversial feature for players, but probably a necessary system, or at least a first step, to achieve Blizzard’s goals.
Titanforging is an item level bonus that can occur as soon as you kill a boss, open an emissary chest or otherwise receive loot. Unlike Warforging, which is a smaller item level bonus that also exists in Legion, Titanforging is a very large bonus. In short, drops have the small chance of turning what’s otherwise a normal dungeon or world quest drop into a maximum Titanforged piece of gear on par with hard-earned loot from mythic raids.
It sounds crazy, and in practice it has been, with stories going around about players fetching gear that would otherwise have no business dropping from a regular dungeon. This is on top of the possibility of Legendary gear dropping.
In defense of this approach I’ll once again bring up Blizzard’s desire to keep activities relevant.

When you take an activity like say, completing a round of WQs, add in awesome things like the chance at Titanforged and Legendary drops and add in a constant source of progression that comes with Artifact Power you now have an activity that’s always relevant. Blizzard wanted to give players a reason to do whatever they want and come away from it feeling just a bit more progressed than they did before.
There’s nothing wrong with that until we step back and look at the many different levels of dedication that exist between players.
Grinding and RNG are the trigger words of this expansion, and represent many of the negative feelings from players regarding this type of reward system. It’s easy to sympathize with the feeling that gearing could feel endless because even if something nice dropped, maybe it could have been better. Maybe a Legendary could be lurking around the next corner so you might want to farm that one or two or seven more dungeons.
But that feeling is pretty darn subjective and doesn’t apply to every player of WoW in the same way. In the context of a review it’s more fair for me to admit that yeah, Blizzard’s definitely opened themselves up to criticism by making a system that effectively denies fulfillment but until Legion, WoW’s endgame system has mostly summed up to “raid or die,” thanks to the hard caps on rewards below raiding, and alternative systems like crafting and valor points didn’t do much to make activities like dungeons very attractive.
Preventing activities from becoming totally irrelevant is a step in the right direction. But giving the chance for some of the best gear to drop from trivial activities, even a small one, feels misleading. Blizzard hoped that this system could bring back those feelings of awesome moments, but instead the system backfired, creating a warped sense of expectation that snowballed into a gambler’s obsession for some players.

This system of chance threatened to define Legion. In my opinion though, it fortunately has not.

Developer Response

The last part of the review isn’t directly on the game but the people behind it. Blizzard’s developers and community managers have been more outspoken than they’ve ever been with a stream of live Q&As, posts, tweets, and blogs, though I can’t say with confidence that it’s been a consistent stream.
Like any game with millions of players invested into a few dozen different classes and specs, playstyles and attitudes, and I guess there are only a few of those, Blizzard continues to struggle to reach out to these players who feel like they’re forgotten in their own microcosm. A lack of robust patch notes, responses to specific concerns and misunderstandings mean a lot for public perception, even if the large majority of players don’t pay attention to such things. As someone who’s kept track of ongoing news constantly, I can get behind that sentiment but I stand by my earlier statement - they’re talking to players more than ever. It’s just that they might be saying things or making changes players don’t like, and it’s hard to say whether it’s because they’re not listening, or are cognizant that these complaints from players don’t speak for the majority.

So ultimately, how is Legion?

Legion makes WoW the best it’s been in years. It brings technological advances that fans have been yearning for. It’s a spectacle on a scale of detail that previous expansions ought to be jealous of. It’s daring, as all expansions have been, bringing systems to keep the game fresh while trying to keep its identity after over 12 years. It does sit on a bed of controversy with its randomness but it’s not enough to convince players to not give it a try. Maybe the pendulum swung too far this time, but personally I like having plenty of options available to me.
And it’s only been six months. We’re not done yet.

Should you play Legion?
Absolutely.
Legion has fully embraced the idea of letting new players get closer to the action. Pick up a box, boost a new or existing character to 100 and get started on the Broken Isles right away. Systems that help you catch up to your friends faster are there in Artifact Knowledge, WQs and more ways to catch up will come soon.
And it’s fun.
Fight the Legion.
Have an adventure.
Make some friends.

[HordeFanboy]

Imo playing Legion is wasting time.

[Beckers]

It was a very nice read to be honest!

I enjoy myself very much, raids are great, story is fun.

Also gearing and AP is not an issue if you are capable of logical thinking and do not demand instant gratification.

[Raetary]

Imo playing Legion is wasting time.

gaming in general is a waste of time.
that's the entire point of gaming.

[MeinKyzr]

Legion takes the RPG out of MMORPG. It's turned WoW into a Massively Multiplayer Template Simulator Game.

Have fond memories of your 5+ year old WoW character? Well too bad, we've pruned upwards of 90% of what made your class unique. Miss the interplay between Feral Druids being able to Hibernate Hunter pets while the Hunter tries to land a Scare Beast on the Druid while they're in cat form? Well too bad! Literally 100% of the skills I just talked about have been removed from the game.

Why? Because WoW Devs have given up on trying to maintain their character base, and instead want to cater towards either new players or braindead Achievement Hunters. Put in enough "Low Dev Effort / High Player Grind/Retention" to get as many of those $15/mo ticks they can. They figured that their business model should be attracting new people and keeping older players around with as long a grind as possible, because that means more sales come Expansion time.

Legion may not be the death of WoW, but it was the birth of a new genre: MMORNG.

[rda]

Since that was a ton of text, I started by looking into what you are saying regarding PVP. I found a completely superficial description of a small portion of changes, with no mention that these changes put PVP into a terrifyingly horrible state.

It is not surprising that in times where Legion is losing subs at about the same rate as WoD did, you have a laughable takeaway of "Legion makes WoW the best it’s been in years."

A fanboy piece.

[snusrage]

TL;DR op is a fanboy of rng on rng on rng with AP grinds

[Saucerian]

Should you play Legion? - If you enjoy WoW lore and/or raiding, sure. If not play a more relevant solo RPG or MMO.
Is Legion good? - Compared to WoD, yes.
Is Legion dying? - No, it's in a content lapse, but 7.2 and 7.3 are coming.

[anon5123]

My main issues with Legion are the dumb RNG of legendaries, the boring and repetitive grind of AP, the constant addition of Diablo 3 mechanics, and the fact that there continues to be so many broken and unbalanced things that the game feels like an endless beta test.

I get that Blizzard is struggling to retain subs, but adding in repetitive RNG grinds is not the way to keep people subbed. Legendaries being RNG drops causes the same problem as they do in Diablo 3: Without those legendaries, your class/spec plays like crap. With the legendaries, your spec actually feels good to play. But you can't choose which legendaries you get, and they come to you at random, so you have to sit through a frustrating RNG grind just to be able to have your spec play well.

I quit Diablo because of the frustrating RNG of legendaries and boring, repetitive grinds of "fight the same thing but with higher health/damage". That crap coming into WoW doesn't really make me happy.

[Azarak]

Despite some pretty annoying issues like the AP grind being huge, RNG being too common of a factor, and warlocks being clunky and awful as shit to play, Legion is the best WoW has been in a very long time and is overall still really good. Of all the MMOs, WoW is still king. Currently 7.1.5 with Nighthold has been out for quite some time, so there is a bit of a content drought currently if you're not raiding, BUT 7.2 is coming very soon with a lot of new content, with Tomb of Sargeras soon to follow.

[SoulSoBreezy]

Since that was a ton of text, I started by looking into what you are saying regarding PVP. I found a completely superficial description of a small portion of changes, with no mention that these changes put PVP into a terrifyingly horrible state.

It is not surprising that in times where Legion is losing subs at about the same rate as WoD did, you have a laughable takeaway of "Legion makes WoW the best it’s been in years."

A fanboy piece.

1. I don't speculate the numbers. And before you link that graph again, I'll remind you again that the site's been outdated for years; at least add that part to your image =D.

2. As a non pvp expert, yeah I kept it high level and stuck to the pain points of gearing up. Getting into how specs 2-6 are in way worse shape than 14-19 but spec 1 is somewhere in between would make for well, an imbalanced review.

3. It's an opinion. Ooh scary, right?

Edit: Yes zcuric, it's me =).

[Deleted]

Yes, you should play legion. Yes, legion is good. But yes, it is dying.

No wonder, the content is not infinite.

[SoulSoBreezy]

Despite some pretty annoying issues like the AP grind being huge, RNG being too common of a factor, and warlocks being clunky and awful as shit to play, Legion is the best WoW has been in a very long time and is overall still really good. Of all the MMOs, WoW is still king. Currently 7.1.5 with Nighthold has been out for quite some time, so there is a bit of a content drought currently if you're not raiding, BUT 7.2 is coming very soon with a lot of new content, with Tomb of Sargeras soon to follow.

That's the neat/tragic thing bout WoW these days; being able to jump in and complete the non-grindy content reasonably quickly, dip out and come back for the next content delivery. Personally? I don't see much of a problem with that because it's not like those folks stay around long enough for me to build any meaning associations with in the first place.

I'm not interested in total sub numbers at all, but I'm very interested to see data on the number of subs that have been consistently active for 6, 12, 24+ months and so on. Unfortunately that's pretty much impossible to extract from out here.

[clevin]

I'm not interested in total sub numbers at all, but I'm very interested to see data on the number of subs that have been consistently active for 6, 12, 24+ months and so on. Unfortunately that's pretty much impossible to extract from out here.

Even that wouldn't tell us everything. A friend of mine came back for Legion and laughingly told me that his sub had been on auto renew for 3 years but he'd not even noticed it and hadn't played at all during that time. I imagine a lot of people just sub for 3 or 6 months at a shot so they don't have to mess with renewing every month but that their activity varies a lot over time. Things like http://www.warcraftrealms.com/weeklyfactionactivity.php are probably the best we can get outside of the internal Blizzard data.

[Justpassing]

Could use a tl;dr. No offense OP but there's a lot of walls of text being posted on MMO-C and it'd take several lifetimes of he who would read it all.

[Zenfoldor]

Should you play Legion? - If you enjoy WoW lore and/or raiding, sure. If not play a more relevant solo RPG or MMO.
Is Legion good? - Compared to WoD, yes.
Is Legion dying? - No, it's in a content lapse, but 7.2 and 7.3 are coming.

Quoted for truth.

[Heathy]

I've had fun so far to be fair, over the last week i've slowly started playing less and going back to the old, log in to raid. i'm trying to not burn myself out so i've been playing some minecraft mods instead of just being soley focused on hammering wow.

I've definitely played too much these last 3 months. but in that time i've managed to make myself ready for the next tier of content so as far as my bias goes i've been pretty lucky with legendaries and tf rolls.

the main problem with legion is its not very alt friendly, because of the class hall gated content, ap farming & legendary lotto having more than 2-3 alts is probably going to be impossible for most ppl who can't pour every waking hour into the game. it'll probably be a lot easier to have alts raiding the first tier during 7.2 but i think the same sort of bottleneck will happen again toward the end of the next tier.

I don't mind the wf/tf randomness, it keeps content not feeling so much like a repetitive chore when something could drop and be an upgrade.

I don't overly farm for things, my game play is usually emergent, ill do, whatever everyone else is doing, if ppl wanna run m+ ill run m+ if me and the bro wanna pug some raids, we'll pug raids. I very rarely plan to do anything I like letting the options play out on their own.

I feel the m+ is a great extension of the heroic system in keeping 5 man content challenging and relevant. pugging seems to be at an all time high, wrath had more pugging than ever before but this expansion with the group maker you can always pug something.

[darklogrus]

TL;DR op is a fanboy of rng on rng on rng with AP grinds

You forgot they play an Outlaw Rogue.

[kazas]

WoW has been dying since 2004..


Want proof? Check the forums each expansion

/S

[Lochton]

Imo playing Legion is wasting time.

WRONG to a point...

Playing a game you don't enjoy, is to waste time.

- - - Updated - - -

WoW has been dying since 2004..


Want proof? Check the forums each expansion

/S

I had to go find it because of your comment..