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

[Biomega]

Azurite gear? Garbage.
Getting a shit legendary instead of your BiS dps legendary? Enjoy a 25% hit to performance! Absolute garbage.

Mixing up your xpacs there buddy.

Azerite was BFA, legendaries were Legion. Same with the NLC - was in Legion, and wasn't together with Azerite.

[Coldkil]

Legion was great from the very beginning.

It wasn't. It had some mechanics issue that got solved over time.

The fact is that were were stuck in WoD with nothing to do and Legion came with a plethora of new systems - WQs, M+, a reliable and consinstent patch schedule, etc. The stark difference between before and after made it looks like better than in actually was.

BfA and SL have the basic same core system Legion had (with a twist) and they're bad expansions because instead of starting from where Legion was, the went back to square one and all the issues that were solved returned in full force. Players simply got tired of it, and didn't in Legion because it was all new.

[klaps_05]

Right now it looks a lot more like going into WOD. Essentially no content outside of raiding, pvp and m+ as there are no power systems except talents and tier.

[Venziir]

It wasn't. It was alright. Raids were satisfying, initial quest playthrough and music were fine as expected.

World quests can go die in a fucking fire.
Forging can go die in a fucking fire.
Azurite power can go die in a fire, get resurrected, then eat cyanide, then burn in hell for the rest of forever.

Azurite gear? Garbage.
Getting a shit legendary instead of your BiS dps legendary? Enjoy a 25% hit to performance! Absolute garbage.
The way they turned the burning legion homeworld into a sidequest show the size of a single zone instead of making THAT the next xpac? Utter. Garbage.
And the absolute worst offender: NL crucible. Fucking what? Like Azurite wasn't bad enough, now we get random gear shit that (again) has huge impact on performance? AND we have to level THAT up? Absolute worst thing ever introduced to the game.

The aesthetics and story were fine. The systems, endless grind, and heavy reliance on RNG for massive amounts of power make it the absolute worst xpac for me.

Fuck Legion.

My ideal xpac is a raid every 2-3 months, some good dungeons, and EXTREMELY deterministic gear. WOTLK was about the only xpac that did nearly everything right. And, while ICC was long-in-tooth, every other raid drop was perfectly timed JUST before the previous raid got stale and people dropped off the face of the earth.

Azerite and Crucible weren't Legion though......

[Nymrohd]

BUT ON LAUNCH, LEGION WAS TERRIBLE.

On launch, Legion was terrible for hardcore players. For everyone else, it had an insane amount of content and some of the most beautiful cosmetics the game ever had. Casual players who just wanted something to do when they log in, F&F and Heroic raiders who want a raid that is challenging but not frustrating, collectors who want beautiful mogs and mounts, people who love the lore and were handed insane amount of fanservice, altoholics who actually had significant chunks of completely new content to do every time they rolled an alt. All those people had reasons to love Legion from day 1.

Competitive players absolutely had every right to trash it; never before did we have an xpac where if you lucked out on the first two legendary drops in the grind you were completely out of the competition (especially for some specs whose best performing spec was entirely defined by a legendary) since even if they rerolled they'd never catch up with AP. By 7.2, well before the vendor, the vast majority of competitive players would now have at least one of their two BiS legendaries and the AP grind was far less important and most of the specs worked beautifully (a few really did not work properly until all the way to 7.3, I think feral was one of those?)

[Dejiko]

But you are making a HUGE assumption here - that more time would in any way impact their decision making. They had feedback during bfa from the moment some systems were announced. They just kept saying "just wait till you see the fully fleshed out system!". Even with constant and consistent feedback, they chose to push forward with it anyway, only making requested changes in the final patch of the expansion.

We have multiple expansions of this as evidence that they will not make any meaningful changes once alpha / beta starts, and yet your entire argument is based on the assumption they will.

History is not on your side.

History is not on my side when considering that recent expansions have been rushed, buggy, launched with features implemented in problematic ways, which was highlighted by player feedback during beta testing?
Interesting way of looking at it.

Can't say i agree, having more time available to rigorously test these changes and systems on a scale not afforded to them in studio is a near exclusively good thing.

I don't have the exact qoute on hand at the moment, but i think blizzard has said something along the lines of, that they can never foresee exactly how the game will perform until it's played by the masses.

[WowIsDead64]

That's not FOMO.... that's "I want this but I don't ever want to do what is required to do them". FOMO applies to temporary things. The mission table is yet again 100% optional and has nothing to do with alt unfriendly. You want a team of mains with a fully operational max level table that is pumping out gold for you.

No. No FOMO means "I can do X, then Y, then Z". FOMO means "If I don't do Y to unlock Z RIGHT NOW - I lose time and time is major resource for Z, so I have to do Y instead of X, but I want to do X, or X and Y at the same time, but I burn out due to it". If only I would need to just unlock followers via doing Torghast - it would be ok. But I need to level them. And leveling them takes 1d/lvl at best. So, around 2-3 months min to do it. May be more. Too long to start doing it later.

[arkanon]

History is not on my side when considering that recent expansions have been rushed, buggy, launched with features implemented in problematic ways, which was highlighted by player feedback during beta testing?
Interesting way of looking at it.

Can't say i agree, having more time available to rigorously test these changes and systems on a scale not afforded to them in studio is a near exclusively good thing.

I don't have the exact qoute on hand at the moment, but i think blizzard has said something along the lines of, that they can never foresee exactly how the game will perform until it's played by the masses.

You are dodging the issue - there is ZERO evidence that a lack of time or being rushed is a factor at all in how the game turned out, and you have zero evidence that having a longer testing phase would mean they would have made those changes.

[Dejiko]

You are dodging the issue - there is ZERO evidence that a lack of time or being rushed is a factor at all in how the game turned out, and you have zero evidence that having a longer testing phase would mean they would have made those changes.

No dodging the issues here.
I remain unconvinced they can ship the expansion in a quality state, based on amount of time for testing purposes, and the general lack of
information provided, that`s it.

I`m not arguing that there`s a guarantee it fails, merely saying that it seems exceedingly likely, it`s my impression of the development of the expansion.
I said that i hope they pull through, but i`m sceptical that they will, a sense of very cautious optimism.

After all i don`t work for the studio, nor do i have enough information to make any definitive and objective claims, rather i`m presenting my perspective, as that is the only entity/person i can speak on behalf of.
This isn`t a debate, it`s just a discussion wherein ones own personal beliefs and views are presented.

But to reiterate, i do hope they manage to get it right, even if i have to preserve that hope with no small degree of naive optimism.

[loras]

On launch, Legion was terrible for hardcore players. For everyone else, it had an insane amount of content and some of the most beautiful cosmetics the game ever had. Casual players who just wanted something to do when they log in, F&F and Heroic raiders who want a raid that is challenging but not frustrating, collectors who want beautiful mogs and mounts, people who love the lore and were handed insane amount of fanservice, altoholics who actually had significant chunks of completely new content to do every time they rolled an alt. All those people had reasons to love Legion from day 1.

Competitive players absolutely had every right to trash it; never before did we have an xpac where if you lucked out on the first two legendary drops in the grind you were completely out of the competition (especially for some specs whose best performing spec was entirely defined by a legendary) since even if they rerolled they'd never catch up with AP. By 7.2, well before the vendor, the vast majority of competitive players would now have at least one of their two BiS legendaries and the AP grind was far less important and most of the specs worked beautifully (a few really did not work properly until all the way to 7.3, I think feral was one of those?)

Are hardcore competitive gamers a relevant benchmark though?
They're low in numbers, often cling to the flavor of the day, efficiently burn through content and are ultimately in it for "the thrill", which can never be satisfied for long and is a far cry from the loyalty some profess.

If anything Legion demonstrated that ignoring the hardcore competitive scene is an outright superior strategy to coddling them.

Though i must caution for an often made mistake: Balanced and fair systems are not only relevant to hardcore players, especially since they'll just shift with the tides to whatever's the flavor of the month. Casual ones on the other hand...

[Nymrohd]

Are hardcore competitive gamers a relevant benchmark though?
They're low in numbers, often cling to the flavor of the day, efficiently burn through content and are ultimately in it for "the thrill", which can never be satisfied for long and is a far cry from the loyalty some profess.

If anything Legion demonstrated that ignoring the hardcore competitive scene is an outright superior strategy to coddling them.

I am not making judgments here. I think almost every customer niche for WoW is valid and should be offered content. Just saying that the idea that legion was bad at launch is valid but only from that very limited perspective.

[Neuroticaine]

It was though.

It was definitely one of my least favorite expansions.

[HansOlo]

Right now it looks a lot more like going into WOD. Essentially no content outside of raiding, pvp and m+ as there are no power systems except talents and tier.

Exactly what WoW is. We play this for raids, dungeons and PvP - who gives anything about wierd systems.

Maybe a ring or generic cloak legendary for everyone to grind.

Let's go back to MoP!

[VinceVega]

I honestly and wholheartedly don't think blizz will make anything better with a longer public beta.
They will ignore gameplay imput form player because they just don't agree or it is to late to rework something as big as system XYZ.

Also i never though wow ever was a really big buggy mess in any expanision. I played all of them and the only time i knew of a repeatable error that actually made the game unplayabale was in wod when you got stuck in the garrison flight. And even that got fixed in a few hours. Annoying sure... but not horrible game is broken death to blizzard bad.

Every other expansion was ok. System was bad. But never a huge unplayable bugfest like some early acess on steam.

And if the systems are bad... well... then it is to late now. Blizz would calculate how much money they will loose with another 6 months of no new players. Or release right now like planned with a system that is not well received but get an immediate return in people buying the expansion AGAIN. Like every last one of the big wow is dead and shit game on this forum. YOu buy it anyway. Don't lie. People know way to much about a game they "don't even play since wod"....

[Aydinx2]

This but also WoD wasn't as bad as people make it look imo, as well as I believe it didn't deserve it's fate. It needed more attention and content that was cut cout of it and glued to Legion to make it seem "all that much better" but it was all at the expanse of WoD.
Didnt liek it.

WoD was stellar for raiding. It just lacked in other departments.
That and the content droughts. I'm actually looking forward to Cata and WoD classic, because the content drought are considered the largest problems those expansions have but that problem doesn't exist in classic.

[Nyel]

This but also WoD wasn't as bad as people make it look imo, as well as I believe it didn't deserve it's fate. It needed more attention and content that was cut cout of it and glued to Legion to make it seem "all that much better" but it was all at the expanse of WoD.
Didnt liek it.

WoD was great, it just had no content and nothing to do. Great gameplay taken down by the lack of content. In Shadowlands and in BfA there were other problems and lack of content not really was one of them.

[Swnem]

WoD was stellar for raiding. It just lacked in other departments.
That and the content droughts. I'm actually looking forward to Cata and WoD classic, because the content drought are considered the largest problems those expansions have but that problem doesn't exist in classic.

I would say classes were still pretty good in WoD as well. So, class gameplay+raiding was great. I like housing a lot so i liked the garrison, but it was a barebones realization of it with gameplay features designed around it, which was silly. The garden and mine were too good as well. But, otherwise it showed the potential of housing. In terms of content WoD was horribly dumped on by the devs cause of Titan's cancellation. I still wish we had gone to the island they scrapped that was the progenitor of netherstorm. Would've loved to see the Ogre continent as well. Draenor had a lot of promise, but they dropped the ball on it.
But, in retrospect, WoD just lacked content and had bad garrison centered systems, but otherwise it was decent comparing with the abominations that came after. It was also pre-world quest systems which would've helped with the garrison complains and pre-mythic+ which would've given more content to dungeons.

[Coldkil]

I am not making judgments here. I think almost every customer niche for WoW is valid and should be offered content. Just saying that the idea that legion was bad at launch is valid but only from that very limited perspective.

Agree to a degree. One of the issues for example was such hardcore players nolifing their artifacts and reaching lvl 40(?) way ahead than what Blizzard thought would have been the natural progression. This made the first tier much easier than expected and later raids had to be balanced around the fact people way way ahead the predicted curve.

Problem is, only a limited % of people did that, and all the others had to play the catch up game hard to get to reliable power level - it was fixed by making the AP multipliers insane and then basically removing the artifact progression itself in favor of the relic system.

This is just to say that in the end it really doesn't matter what gamer category you fit in, changes to the game often happen as a broader thing that affect everyone, mostly because everyone is tied to the same hardcoded progression system and you can tackle that in multiple ways. Dragonflight not having any of this shit is a great thing in my eyes (i love personal long term progression systems but they shouldn't really be tied to player power - that should exclusive as a reward for content consumption).

[Nymrohd]

Agree to a degree. One of the issues for example was such hardcore players nolifing their artifacts and reaching lvl 40(?) way ahead than what Blizzard thought would have been the natural progression. This made the first tier much easier than expected and later raids had to be balanced around the fact people way way ahead the predicted curve.

Problem is, only a limited % of people did that, and all the others had to play the catch up game hard to get to reliable power level - it was fixed by making the AP multipliers insane and then basically removing the artifact progression itself in favor of the relic system.

This is just to say that in the end it really doesn't matter what gamer category you fit in, changes to the game often happen as a broader thing that affect everyone, mostly because everyone is tied to the same hardcoded progression system and you can tackle that in multiple ways. Dragonflight not having any of this shit is a great thing in my eyes (i love personal long term progression systems but they shouldn't really be tied to player power - that should exclusive as a reward for content consumption).

For most of the players though the power difference did not harm much. It was very problematic for a few specs were the playstyle completely depended on a specific legendary to the point that the spec was balanced around it (e.g. if I recall correctly, Fire Mages with braces). Meanwhile you had one of the most rewarding experiences we ever had in WoW, between Suramar, grinding and searching for hidden appearances, so many small collectibles, world quests and emissaries that were actually rewarding. And ofc M+ which was far more player friendly in Legion, and more importantly perhaps, extremely tank friendly. Even LFR was worth doing for most of Legion both for TF (especially TF Nighthold sets), hidden appearances and ofc legiondary chances and AP.

[Coldkil]

But, in retrospect, WoD just lacked content and had bad garrison centered systems, but otherwise it was decent comparing with the abominations that came after. It was also pre-world quest systems which would've helped with the garrison complains and pre-mythic+ which would've given more content to dungeons.

It's fun because while WoD wasn't a good expanson, its core was fine and often good (excluding the garrison, sorry but imho it just sucked) - people complained about the "raid or die" situation. Which is literally "we as casual players who don't raid have nothing to do in game in terms of meaningful progression".

And Blizzard heard that. And they added a plethora of systems that were/have been all basic steps towards raids (with the exclusion of M+ obviously). So, in the end, they did nothing about the issue WoD had, and instead just padded the road towards the endgame with stuff to do in the middle. Think about people asking different sandwiches, and they gave you the same as before, but with quadruple lettuce. You eat it, it tastes fine, fills you up more than before but it's not satisfying - and you get bored of it and go to another place.

All while the open world, which i cannot recall an expansion were it REALLY sucked (even Vash'ir wasn't really good but not terrible) is left there in the dust in favour of expendable stuff that gets ditched when it doesn't work and fixing it would require too much effort to the point it's not feasible.

- - - Updated - - -

For most of the players though the power difference did not harm much. It was very problematic for a few specs were the playstyle completely depended on a specific legendary to the point that the spec was balanced around it (e.g. if I recall correctly, Fire Mages with braces). Meanwhile you had one of the most rewarding experiences we ever had in WoW, between Suramar, grinding and searching for hidden appearances, so many small collectibles, world quests and emissaries that were actually rewarding. And ofc M+ which was far more player friendly in Legion, and more importantly perhaps, extremely tank friendly. Even LFR was worth doing for most of Legion both for TF (especially TF Nighthold sets), hidden appearances and ofc legiondary chances and AP.

Oh for sure. The point was just about the fact that sometimes a small but very active/loud part of the playerbase affects how everyone plays the game.