So, how does this look any different than WoD going into Legion?

[VoidSeeker199X]

Well, WoD didn't have anything like season 4. It won't exactly be new content, but it's more than WoD had going for it.

Seasons aren't content. They're just a ploy to keep you playing. Unironically the worst addition to the game.

[Tojara]

I didn't like Legion at launch at all. Legion half way through was great though. See that trend? The only thing I'll give Legion is that M+ dungeons were a huge feature, but outside of that everything leaned heavily on slot machines and repeatable grindy features that are debated to this very day.

If you were really hardcore you had multiple of the same class to fish for legendary items because of random hidden caps Blizzard had. If you were semi-hardcore you probably didn't do multiple of the same class, but you probably felt like shit if you hit a bad legendary item. I don't know. It didn't really feel that great.

Personally I think WoD had fundamentally great raids, garrisons were fun (for like 2 months), classes for the most part felt great, and it was also one of my favorite leveling expansions. Legion was good in that it had a great cadence of actual content, but boy, did the systems in the game suck (and are essentially what everyone has been complaining about for the last 4 years).

A lot of people like to ignore that BFA and SL took from Legion design. I think the worst thing about Legion is the class identity was a mixed bag. Nice, you're a FIRE MAGE and that's cool. But if something shifts to say Frost, congratulations. The weapon you grinded Fire with is no longer available to you, in addition to the time investment of having to now farm legendary items that work for that spec within your OWN CLASS. You saw the same dumb restrictions with Azerite in BFA, and more specifically covenants/conduits in SL (although I'd still argue Legions version for half of the expansion was EVEN WORSE).

I'm not putting any stock into DF being good yet because I haven't seen beta. I think part of the reason WoD "sucked" is because too much of the development time got thrown into garrisons with mixed results, and as a result everything else got pushed back to the point that they just started on Legion instead. With no major features being released in DF aside from a new class, I have a slight optimistic look that they can just polish what they have as a baseline instead of trying to figure out a million different things all at once. I realize there's some concern over talent trees, but to me I doubt that will cause much issue considering it's 75-80% of what we already have at a baseline in current retail SL.

[Caprias]

It was great. Questing was neat, the story of the zones was pretty cool, the zones looked great. Order Halls were, for the most part fun, and it actually felt like an adventure again. That's not to say that EM wasn't an awful raid, and that the legendary item acquisition was dreadful.

Opinions about Legion are great to show the difference in playstyle/mindsets.

Legion was naturally great towards more casual-ish players just alone on the basis of having an insane content cadence, sadly that won't ever be sustainable since the only reason that was possible is due to the diablo team joining in development and WoD being cut short quite a bit.

But if you wanted to play more towards the competitive spectrum/mindset? Damn get f@#ked son, artifact knowledge hurting alts, artifact power hurting people with a job, legiondaries (lul), titanforging making you run the last raid ad infinitum for important trinkets...

[Swnem]

In fact, the timing is not that unusual, but we have to take into account the impact that covid had in the development of shadowlands where we saw the biggest time gaps between patches and only 2 actual patches.
So, the logical conclusion is that Dragonflight developmemt was also affected. The thing is, it was. But, they were forced to stick to the usual time frame because of moneys.
So, what they have done is actually cut back on the scope of the project since the start and not make it ambitious.
Just 4 zones, a new class and it's scenario zone (and some fancy flying mounts).

You will notice that so far the new talents have merely been a reshuffle of the shadowlands abilities. There are zero new class abilities going into dragonflight. There is no new content type as well.

They cut on everything to make this deadline. It's a miracle we are getting a new class at all.
So... no. There is no chance this will be another Legion content wise. It will be a Shadowlands 2.0 patch. You get more of the same with 4 new zones.
It may be inoffensive cause that also means less room to screw up the basics. We'll see.

[Biomega]

Seasons aren't content. They're just a ploy to keep you playing.

As opposed to everything else, which exists to not keep you playing.

Or something.

Maybe they're not content YOU like. That's fine. You can just say that. That doesn't mean they're not content.

[Rusken]

Legion is a very mediocre expansion that got hyped up posthumously. It started some of the worst trends in WoW's development that plague the game to this day and it only looks good by comparison because they allocated some of WoD's ressources to prop up Legion.

Possibly the best 2 sentence summary of Legion I've seen. People like it now because it's surrounded by garbage expansions and things haven't gotten any better since.

OT: I'm remaining optimistic for DF, even though it feels too fast. There's no huge no systems or game changing features being added so they have a lot less to "get right" before opening testing, and testing doesn't need to run as long as previously since there's less to test. As long as the talent trees all work, dragon flying isn't a buggy mess and Evokers aren't broken in some way then theoretically the game can launch at any point and tuning can be done on the fly.

If we see Alpha/Beta in July then I'm not too worried about it being ready. 4-5 months should be plenty to hash out issues with the new talents and get Evokers "balanced" decently.

[Itori]

Look if you guys want some reassurance I got a leak for you, my cousins step mom got stuck in the washing machine and when the fire department came there was a guy who also works as a blizzard WoW dev told her that Tinker would be dropping in patch 10.375. Just something to brighten your day.

[AwkwardSquirtle]

Legion looked appealing from the start. It had a hype train going in to it with every major announcement. Boom, we're taking on the Burning Legion. Boom, Illidan's back and you can play as him. Boom, you get Ashbringer now.

Dragonflight by contrast did not hit it big with any announcements. It's much more reminiscent of the MoP announcement, taking us to a new land with a lot of mystery about what exactly is going to happen. This lends itself to concern about how things are actually going to play out.

[Biomega]

Dragonflight by contrast did not hit it big with any announcements. It's much more reminiscent of the MoP announcement, taking us to a new land with a lot of mystery about what exactly is going to happen. This lends itself to concern about how things are actually going to play out.

Which is kind of ironic, since MoP had a pretty shit story/setting but some banger raids and some of the most on-point class mechanics ever.

But yeah, the side stuff sucked giga ass - farming and doing dailies was not a fun time to fill your expansion with.

[Slybak]

The biggest frustration with WoD at the end of the day is that the last content patch dropped in late June of 2015 and Legion wasn't released until August of 2016 because of Legion's uncommonly long testing phase (9 months).

And so probably the biggest reason why they're trying to hit a 6 month testing window with Dragonflight and get it released before the end of December - which is actually pretty normal Alpha/Beta duration relative to past expansions - is that they don't want to have people dicking around in Zereth Mortis until March of 2023.

Doesn't mean people shouldn't be cynical about Dragonflight for other reasons (and you should absolutely be cynical about Dragonflight).

[Tentim]

I felt that legion had a lot more announced then talent trees so dumb you know that you are going to need a weak aura to make sure pugs take kick...

[Nzx]

I'll put this here and run away. Ion Hazzikostas needs to be fired and in his place they need to put someone who is not an ex-raider who only sees fun in things that only please 1% of the player base.

When that happens we will have good expansions and not just failures after failures...

Smooth-brained take from someone who clearly doesn't raid. There is no group of people in the game that hates the mindnumbing, tedious busywork exemplified by shit like artifact power/world quests/time-gated currencies more than raiders. The only thing this game has going for it is fun, somewhat difficult group-based PvE content in a holy trinity setting with gear-based power progression. There are thousands of dull copy/paste games with battle pass mechanics like renown that WoW raiders don't want to play because that sort of shit sucks.

The idea that any of the prevailing development pillars (short of mythic plus) of the past three expansions please the "1%" at all, let alone only existing for them, is fucking asinine. They even removed master looter of all things to please the kind of people who think "hardcore" and "casual" are skill measurements. Get a grip.

[Caprias]

As opposed to everything else, which exists to not keep you playing.

Or something.

Maybe they're not content YOU like. That's fine. You can just say that. That doesn't mean they're not content.

It's literally not, there is nothing new you can call content as in ingame assets/zones/raids/dungeons added, it's all rehashed and a few new systems to help with replay-ability in essence.

I really like the idea of this though and hope (if it turns out that enough people like it) they'll actually do it at every expansion tail end to help with the natural content drought, but I wouldn't for example like to give up a raid tier/patch for it.

[Biomega]

It's literally not, there is nothing new you can call content as in ingame assets/zones/raids/dungeons added

Then heroic and mythic aren't content, either.

That's a nonsense argument.

Just say: I don't like seasons. Or say you do like them.

That's entirely legitimate, no need to try and make this into something it isn't and undermine your own position with absurdities.

[ohwell]

There is difference. Back in WOD days Blizzard didn't pretend, that they had lots of content. SL is about having the same amount of content, but using exceeding amount of content stretching, that is intended to create illusion of lots of content. Like asking player to grind 100k Anima, while giving it at 200/day rate at release, that means not being able to complete xpack's content on alts. As for me, content stretching is even worse, than lacking content. At least WOD content had good quality, so it was great for replaying it on alts. Exceeding amount of stretching causes burnout way too quickly.

No one asked you to grind it. Anima was perfectly fine and progressed fine in terms of the increases each patch. If anything that speaks volumes of the lunacy of the player base trying to grind anything. Also nothing anima related was required. It was pretty much all cosmetic short of the transportation network.

[Caprias]

Then heroic and mythic aren't content, either.

That's a nonsense argument.

Just say: I don't like seasons. Or say you do like them.

That's entirely legitimate, no need to try and make this into something it isn't and undermine your own position with absurdities.

I actually agree with your heroic/mythic example, you don't really see much new stuff except maybe 1 or 2 new mechanics and tuned up numbers, so technically there is new "content" as in art/sound assets but it's miniscule.

I like seasons if well done for replay-ability purposes, but they're not a "real batch" of content, and if they hurt the cadence of content I'd rather not have them at all.

- - - Updated - - -

No one asked you to grind it. Anima was perfectly fine and progressed fine in terms of the increases each patch. If anything that speaks volumes of the lunacy of the player base trying to grind anything. Also nothing anima related was required. It was pretty much all cosmetic short of the transportation network.

Anima was just miss-tuned hard, I don't believe that was on purpose to give you near nothing for the first few weeks (took 2 years to buy out ONE covenant) and come korthia you just get drowned in it, makes you feel kinda stupid for even going out and farming it the first few weeks.

I mean, why would you need a catch-up system (in this magnitude) for cosmetics anyways?

[WowIsDead64]

No one asked you to grind it. Anima was perfectly fine and progressed fine in terms of the increases each patch. If anything that speaks volumes of the lunacy of the player base trying to grind anything. Also nothing anima related was required. It was pretty much all cosmetic short of the transportation network.

It's standard "You're not required to play this game" argument. Because don't do X, if you don't like it, don't play Y, Z, W, etc. leads to don't play this game, if you don't like it. Problem is - this is exactly what players do. And devs want players to play their game. Right?

At the end it should have been major xpack's casual content. And, you know, assuming, that Anima grind would be nerfed in future patches - was bad idea. That's why xpack-wide systems, that work according to "It doesn't work now, but you will be able to complete it in future patches or even xpacks" - is terrible game design. When I think about starting to do some content, first thing I do - is decide, if it's worth my effort. And, you know. Anima grind STILL isn't worth my effort. Even now.

[Coldkil]

-snip-

I don't think it was that bad but yes, it started very roughband got fixed over time. I think 7.2 is the turning point.

Also worth mentioning: we came from WoD which was a shitshow. Legion added so many new things that became a game default, so it was so much better than before just for that reason.

But in terms of pure mechanics and system, it just wasn't good right fron the start. It took time to make it truly good, which is the problem we all complain about now. And it's because we had Legion before, and people expected that after the rough start they had learned what worked and what not, instead for three times in a row we had a total "back to square one" situation and people is just fed up with this.

[Venziir]

No one asked you to grind it. Anima was perfectly fine and progressed fine in terms of the increases each patch. If anything that speaks volumes of the lunacy of the player base trying to grind anything. Also nothing anima related was required. It was pretty much all cosmetic short of the transportation network.

Anima was a complete shitshow from the start. That's why they added achievements to increase the gain later on, and furthermore just increased the gain all across the board by a lot.

[Lolites]

If they are rushing to get it out because of product or financial pressure, then fuck them.
But if they are rushing to get players into the new systems early and stay in the polish cycle longer, then I'm 100% on board...as long as they actually listen to player feedback this time.

they get 100000000 different opinions as feedback, they listen to some, dont listen to other, as its literaly impossible to listen to all...
and even if they ignore all, i couldnt really blame them, even when they add something people literaly asked for response is bitching and whining...

- - - Updated - - -

You say BFA was bad, meanwhile a ton of people used to (still do) hate Legion. Me? I love both. Both are the most amazing WoW expansions IMHO. Plus Pandaria and Wrath.

there never was nor will be expansion that wouldnt be hated by some and loved by others - and usualy more hated while current and becoming more loved after years, when its in "full form" and nostalgia kicks in

My biggest WoW regrets are the netherstorm missing from WoD and BFA not getting Nzod zone/5 man dungeon.

i always had an idea they should do once wow nears its "end", or sooner as "fluff" patches - into caverns of time put portals to all zones/dungeons, that were either removed or cut content - like faraholn (netherstorm) or shatrath raid, or the ogre island, and add to it over time, simple content that doesnt have to make sense with current expansion, it would be about as much work as "brand new" zones, but they wouldnt have to pull them out of thin air or place them anywhere as it would be instanced