Why i Think Legion Was so Well Received by Players...

[Mamut]

Legion is terrible. They added a load of content and subs by the last time Blizzard commented on it are comparable to WoD. There is no way you can call Legion a success. They are currently at a point where the content has to be near perfect just to keep subs stable.

Well received? Huh. Last I checked people hated Legion.

Legion is a succes. People enjoy M+ alot and WQs are much better than old dailies. No matter how much you dont like WoW atm, for majority Legion is a good expansion.

[DesMephisto]

What?
Are you comparing WoD popularity to Legion's?

Well for one, I stayed subscribed for all of WoD. For two, when I was last playing which was about a month+ from before 7.3.5, everyone was bitching about the game for over a year.

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

I'm sorry, I simply cannot understand how anyone could have an issue with these matters. It simply can't be any more simple.

People do have issue locating mobs because the design could use some polishing. They give mobs ambiguous names and than put them in areas with similar mobs that is a thing man and it's annoying. Vargus is an example.

[Venziir]

People do have issue locating mobs because the design could use some polishing.

You are the first I've ever seen or heard describe this issue. Ever.

[darklogrus]

Credit where credit is due please.

Legion was the first time where Blizzard tried TONS of new ideas.
Class Halls
World Quests
M+
Artifacts
Legendaries
Honor Talents

So many new things throwed at us. It was amazing, new and fresh.
Ofcourse not all things turned out to be perfect BUT we have to give credit to the game designers who decided to try so many new things...for the first time.

1. It was a barely used feature which got used less and less after each patch.

2. First half was just a blatant rip off of leveling quests an random rares. WQ now suffer from the same fate as the rest of the things Blizzard designs and that its just gets abandoned..

3. We've had Mythics in the past so nothing new outside their Diabloish mechanics. An its popularity only comes from the Ap, leggo world tour. Removing just those 2 things are going to greatly reduce its popularity. Also going forward if Blizzard decides to put a tighter leash on titan forging its popularity will just take another huge hit.

4. Ahh Artifacts the first glaring problem of this expansion. Made worth by those pain in the ass relics ><;

5. Legendaries, Legions second worst design decision. Lets design a class system around legendary 1 an 2 and then lets throw another 12 worthless ones ontop of it. Lets give them a absurdly low drop chance from a select few sources with zero way to target a certain 1. In a system where your dps always matters, this could not have been a more stupid idea.

6. Honor Talents? Really? I dunno, its basically just a generic talent system in which it stole from talents we already had, added in a few random ones that were either pointless or nerfed to the point most have basically 1 build loadout now..

[Venziir]

Well for one, I stayed subscribed for all of WoD. For two, when I was last playing which was about a month+ from before 7.3.5, everyone was bitching about the game for over a year.

Hi, and welcome to World of Warcraft, you must be new here.

[Deleted]

Better than WoD at least. But I wish I have played WoW before Cata to experience Wrath

believe me when i tell you, it was a completely different feeling and different wow, i miss it

[RoKPaNda]

A lot of people still think that T11/T12 were very good raid tiers, myself among them. The fact that T13 was....well, lacking is a nice word for it...shouldn't completely cancel that out. I still think that T11 was maybe the best tier ever. It's true that the experiment with heroic dungeons being much more difficult than most random groups could manage broke the game in a lot of permanent ways for people.

Firelands was a pretty bad raid tier. Ragnaros was a fun fight, the rest of it was just a handful of bosses and trash thrown onto one big platform. Probably the least effort that ever went into creating a raid other than ToC. I'll give you that T11 was pretty nice though. Firelands being bare minimum effort followed by Dragon Soul was pretty brutal.

The primary reason Cata failed was a lack of content, content that was cut, and a lot of the content that made it in being rehashed (like ZG and ZA), not because it didn't cater to soccer moms and disabled vets enough. The "hard" dungeons were nerfed fairly early into the expansion's life cycle. Tier 11 is considered a fantastic tier of raiding, and Firelands is regarded as one of the best raids ever by top tier raiders, something I am sure you are far from being.

Unsurprisingly, you have no idea what you're talking about.

Appeal to authority? Really? Anyway Heroic Ragnaros was fun times, but the rest of the raid was just mobs thrown on a fiery platform. Woo. So much effort. You also don't seem to understand who actually plays this game. You can't solely think about it from the perspective of someone in the top X%. We're probably the most stable part of the playerbase, as small of a minority as we are, we've got nowhere to go. No other MMO has compelling PvE that we wouldn't roll in a day. Anyway, think about firelands from the perspective of the casual raider, the majority of raiders at that time but also at that time still a minority because raids weren't accessible yet. At that point it's a pretty bland raid.

It doesn't matter that the dungeons were nerfed later, by that point the damage had already been done. Or did you expect people to stick around and do nothing at all waiting for a patch? Of course not. ZG and ZA being rehashed isn't even a factor. One of the socials in my guild at the time made a comment that stuck with me about ZA/ZG at the time. "Oh more content that's not for me. Yay." Cata completely catered to us, not to the casuals, and suffered greatly for it. It was in a bad way long long before any content drought for us.

So saying that top raiders liked it and being insulting? Not really a compelling argument. I'm just not so self absorbed that I believe that what's best/most fun for me is what's best for the health of the game. An expansion catering heavily to those at the top and largely ignoring everyone else at launch and shortly thereafter (Cata) is doomed to fail.

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

You are the first I've ever seen or heard describe this issue. Ever.

I'm not I've found similar threads and complaints on wowhead... A lot of legion feature require you do go outside of the game to understand them like the fact the random battleground and brawl give essence. Blizzard communication this expansion sucked.

[TheDeeGee]

Shame it's being stretched to the max by now.

Where are the Silithus Quests? I done a couple 3 weeks ago and that was it?

[Powerogue]

I think Legion balanced reminiscing on nostalgia with bringing in new gameplay. Order Hall campaigns were a wonderful way to tap into what people loved about class specific quests and have motivated me to level alts for the first time since WotLK. The questlines for professions much the same, with me putting non-gathering professions on my characters for the first time ever between that and WoD making it easier to "catch up" to legion level with their cheap mats.

They really succeeded by taking everything that made WoD awful and inverting it. "You hate being stuck in one place an entire expansion? Then we'll take you all over the world through your order hall campaign and world quests!"

Not to mention storytelling has been on point with them taking all the updated models from WoD and using them to convey far more emotion in cutscenes and the like. Subtle facial expressions that never would've been possible in this era. Look at the girl at 0:48 in particular.

[Deleted]

1. It was a barely used feature which got used less and less after each patch.

2. First half was just a blatant rip off of leveling quests an random rares. WQ now suffer from the same fate as the rest of the things Blizzard designs and that its just gets abandoned..

3. We've had Mythics in the past so nothing new outside their Diabloish mechanics. An its popularity only comes from the Ap, leggo world tour. Removing just those 2 things are going to greatly reduce its popularity. Also going forward if Blizzard decides to put a tighter leash on titan forging its popularity will just take another huge hit.

4. Ahh Artifacts the first glaring problem of this expansion. Made worth by those pain in the ass relics ><;

5. Legendaries, Legions second worst design decision. Lets design a class system around legendary 1 an 2 and then lets throw another 12 worthless ones ontop of it. Lets give them a absurdly low drop chance from a select few sources with zero way to target a certain 1. In a system where your dps always matters, this could not have been a more stupid idea.

6. Honor Talents? Really? I dunno, its basically just a generic talent system in which it stole from talents we already had, added in a few random ones that were either pointless or nerfed to the point most have basically 1 build loadout now..

Like i said, many of the new features were not perfect. Far from it.
But we need to give credit where credit is due.
They tried new things for the first time

Tons of new things throwed at us. It was amazing seeing Blizzard doing something "never before done"

[Whatever Dude]

Appeal to authority? Really?

What the fuck does this even mean? Lmao.

It doesn't matter that the dungeons were nerfed later, by that point the damage had already been done. Or did you expect people to stick around and do nothing at all waiting for a patch? Of course not. ZG and ZA being rehashed isn't even a factor. One of the socials in my guild at the time made a comment that stuck with me about ZA/ZG at the time. "Oh more content that's not for me. Yay." Cata completely catered to us, not to the casuals, and suffered greatly for it. It was in a bad way long long before any content drought for us.

A single anecdote does not a strong argument make. Your viewpoint about how dungeons being nerfed too late resulted in a mass exodus of players is completely unfounded, and I challenge you to prove it. As I recall, subs didn't start dropping until the later stages of the expansion, so there's no correlation with hard dungeons that you seem to want to push.

Cataclysm is largely regarded as one of the most casual expansions to date, and much more casual than Wrath. The classes were changed to have much lower skill ceilings. I'm afraid I'm arguing with someone who has no clue of how Cataclysm was actually like, and only remembers a few sparse things. Your view on Cataclysm being some paradise for hardcore players and alienating casuals is absurd.

[Winterstrife]

Mythic +
World Quests
All the class campaigns

This made put in more hours than any other expansion.
In terms of time spent per expansion (for myself at least ) Legion > MoP > WotLK > TBC > Cata > WoD

[Venziir]

I'm not I've found similar threads and complaints on wowhead... A lot of legion feature require you do go outside of the game to understand them like the fact the random battleground and brawl give essence. Blizzard communication this expansion sucked.

It really, really hasn't. I'm sorry, but if you think so, and if random people on wowhead think so... Well, then I'm either a goddamn genius or.... Well

[Varvara Spiros Gelashvili]

It really, really hasn't. I'm sorry, but if you think so, and if random people on wowhead think so... Well, then I'm either a goddamn genius or.... Well

It was to me and the essences gated behind random battlegrounds and brawls are other examples. I had to go outside of the game to find that out.

It wasn't just wowhead but post on the official forums.

[rda]

Mythic +
World Quests
All the class campaigns

This made put in more hours than any other expansion.
In terms of time spent per expansion (for myself at least ) Legion > MoP > WotLK > TBC > Cata > WoD

You are kidding, right?

World quests are the exact same dailies we always had, it is just that the system lights up a different set of them every day. The number of world quests in Legion is about the same as the number of dailies in MoP (marginally bigger), however about a third of world quests are reused leveling quests with the number of mobs to kill / things to collect increased and the number of leveling quests is *noticeably smaller* than in MoP.

Mythic+ is an effing *set of numeric coefficients*. It's the barest grind possible. Imagine a game where on level 1 you are fighting a mob with 10 HP that drops ilvl 1 gear which gives you +1 attack. On level 2 you are fighting the exact same mob, but it now has 20 HP and drops ilvl 2 gear which gives you +2 attack. Etc. Mythic+ is exactly that. It takes no time to implement at all. It does provide reasons to log in, yes, and that's fine, but it is the blandest, most boring, and easiest extension of the same effing instances. If maybe it was generating an infinite instance, it might have been different depending on the level of variety, but it doesn't do even that.

All the class campaigns are just short chains of *quests*. Did I mention they had noticeably less leveling quests this time? Here's where the rest of them went to - those class campaigns. If they didn't do the sillies thing of slicing those quests fifteen ways (I'd put the number of specs here, but many of the quests were very minor modifications of each other or downright shared), you'd be able to do all quests for all those campaigns on the same character. Just without all the grandstanding and calling them "class campaigns". The split was a step back, they did wrong here, they reduced the amount of content for players here.

Your list is just laughable.

In terms of effort, Legion is the lowest of all expansions. This is completely unequivocal. It does have way more grinds than prior expansions that do give you reasons to log in, and reasons to log in are something that is nice to have, but in terms of effort it is absolutely, totally LOWEST. (And BFA is seeming to go LOWER. Because that's what their overall direction is. Less effort, compensated by cheap reasons to log in, producing preferably same money as before, and if it is slightly less, it is fine, because the thing is dying.)

- - - Updated - - -

PS: Maybe I got you wrong and you are talking about the time *you* spent in the game, not the effort *Blizzard* spent developing it. If so, that's fair enough and it's OK to like different things and with what they did, you spending more time in the game is exactly what their changes were aiming at = do a bit of content but make you repeat it a hundred times, so it's unsurprising. I am talking solely about the latter.

[Mamut]

3. We've had Mythics in the past so nothing new outside their Diabloish mechanics. An its popularity only comes from the Ap, leggo world tour. Removing just those 2 things are going to greatly reduce its popularity. Also going forward if Blizzard decides to put a tighter leash on titan forging its popularity will just take another huge hit.

So much bullshiit in this one point. People are doing M+ because they got finally challenging PvE content that is not tied to raids. Many people enjoy competing with each other and push as high as they can. Ap, loot does not even matter.

Mythic+ is an effing *set of numeric coefficients*. It's the barest grind possible. Imagine a game where on level 1 you are fighting a mob with 10 HP that drops ilvl 1 gear which gives you +1 attack. On level 2 you are fighting the exact same mob, but it now has 20 HP and drops ilvl 2 gear which gives you +2 attack. Etc. Mythic+ is exactly that. It takes no time to implement at all. It does provide reasons to log in, yes, and that's fine, but it is the blandest, most boring, and easiest extension of the same effing instances.

Yeah ofc, they just clicked Ctrl C and then Ctrl V and thats how they created M+. Gotta love all those armchair developers.

[Deleted]

In terms of effort, Legion is the lowest of all expansions. This is completely unequivocal. It does have way more grinds than prior expansions that do give you reasons to log in, and reasons to log in are something that is nice to have, but in terms of effort it is absolutely, totally LOWEST. (And BFA is seeming to go LOWER. Because that's what their overall direction is. Less effort, compensated by cheap reasons to log in, producing preferably same money as before, and if it is slightly less, it is fine, because the thing is dying.)

Are you kidding me?
"Effort" is the name of this expansion.

I dare you to show me an expansion that introduced this many new features to the game. I dare you.

This is the first expansion where Blizzard tried an absurd amount of new features and systems.
We were showered with "new" stuff.

Legion was pretty much historical on that regard.

"Effort" is the name of this expansion. We can only hope they will put this much effort in BfA. I fear not, but i always fear.

[Jujudrood]

General opinions seem to favor World Quests, which are another iteration of the daily system, which started in BC (5 per day, eventually 25 before the end) and continued as fixed daily quests. World Quests now rotate 'caches', which in turn offer rewards of a varied nature (as opposed to previous dailies being the individual quests rewards only), so they feel like they pay out better, and you have a choice of which ones to do, which is also nice because some of them are annoying/take too long/whatever, and before, you couldn't ignore them.
I favor this system as I feel it's better than previous iterations.

General opinion also seems to favor M+ as it extends the life of dungeons, which were essentially only useful for the first few weeks of previous xpacs, then just a 'daily chore' to most. If it was just harder/more HP, it would be boring, but the affixes give it a little bit of varied life. There could be improvements on the system, such as making different 'tiers' of M+ have additional things (such as M+1 through M+5 is basic, M+6 through M+10 add new boss/mechanics) as well as the option to include additional affixes on top of the weekly set (for a chance at more/better rewards), there could be additional challenge and life to them.
I favor M+ as well as it makes dungeons relevant for longer, to me at least.

These changes have done a wealth of good for the game as a whole as many people are engaged and doing the things, which in an MMO is the goal.
Sure, some people hate them or see it as busy work, and that's fine, but I think the majority are okay with these two main systems above.

Other changes, such as going from a single expansion-long leggo to a wealth of rando ones, wasn't a great choice, and I'm glad that's gone.
AP is converted to Azerite armor, I guess, so we'll see how that plays out.
I am intrigued by the new island scenarios and warfronts, which I think can add some flavor to the small group/queue system (hopefully they feel like MoP scenarios but more involving) as well as a raid alternative in warfronts for when you are burned out of the current tier.
Variety will be the key here because if there isn't enough variety, these can get stale pretty quickly.

I think the stuff coming is "change" enough to add some of this flavor OP speaks of, but it all comes down to execution.
They've tried ambitious things before (*cough*garrison*cough*) that fell flat on its face, thus giving us nearly no non-raid content (hi, WoD), so cautiously optimistic is where I'll stay for now and hope that the changes coming, either to existing or the implementation of new features, hit the mark and keep me entertained.
If they miss, well, then BfA may be a "filler" xpac with the raid-or-die feel to it like WoD ended up.