Legion did the rare thing of actually growing its playerbase when the expansion was current.
It´s mostly complaints from the top 1 % about being ´´forced´´ to grind AP, being ´´forced´´ to grind LFR (which never made sense mathematically) and AP that makes the expansion seem less well received than it was.
Casuals loved Legion. RnG legendaries didn´t bother them, and was clearly made for them in mind. AP and titanforging meant that everything was in theory worth doing for bad players.
The irony is that despite all it´s supposed terrible flaws, even top players will rank Legion or Legion patches above all the later expansions. Just shows that deep inside even top players rank fun over everything else. Same goes for BFA S4.
Legion was like an addictive girlfriend or boyfriend that made you want to ruin your life.
Warwithin makes you want to post on the WoW forums.
Legion started the lore speed-run that continued into BFA. It ushered in the era of Systems. Everything unpleasent, unenjoyable and memed upon in the BFA → SL era of Warcraft has its uttermost origins in Legion.
I think people confuse the specific features on what made Legion unique with being the reason on why Legion was memorable.
Legion was memorable because it represented probably the single biggest shift in how the game works in basically forever. MoP is the closest example I can think of, but even then it wasn’t nearly as groundbreaking as WoD to Legion was.
I would argue not all those shifts were positive, with Legion being directly responsible for the “borrowed power” aspect that dictated the game until Dragonflight.
But Legion was novel. Basically every aspect of the game was majorly shifted and people remember that.
Repeating what made Legion good won’t get you an expansion as good as Legion was. It would just get you Legion-lite.
That being said, the focus on class fantasy over faction or race fantasy was very welcome.
The ONLY bad aspects Legion had for me (well, beyond legendary RNG) is because it was the very beginning of the overuse of parasitic borrowed powers with limited shelf life that plagued BfA and still present in SL.
For me, Hallowfall has a bit of Legion vibe to me in the fact it’s not completely goofy or just boring (sorry, I found the Earthen boring, I found all of DF to be pretty bland, and the less said about SL the better). So I like that zone a lot.
The rest of TWW is just ok. It’s not terrible, I like it a bit more than DF, which was just really really…meh…overall for me, and it’s definitely better for me than BFA or SL was.
Not as good as Legion though. I liked Legion better than TBC frankly, because it felt like TBC a little bit just due to the themes and all the demons (lol), but far less grindy and punishing. I loved vanilla and TBC, but I just don’t have the time or energy for that style of gameplay anymore, Legion hit the sweet spot and still felt very much like the WoW universe I knew and enjoyed.
Lots to do though in TWW for casuals – which is great because I think the majority of the playerbase are pretty casual these days (older people just have less free time in general, and WoW’s playerbase is mostly adult-with-family-and-job age) picking my way through it and it’s fine. Better than the last couple expansions anyway.
Fun fact - There is a subset of forum users that hate Blizzard, hate WoW, but still maintain their subscriptions strictly for the ability to express those views on this forum.
I personally don’t understand the logic of paying a company for the privilege of being able to slag them off on their own servers.
Why class halls weren’t kept as staples to the game is beyond me. Legion gave players the class lore they had been begging for for years, and it was a huge win with the player base. The only thing I can think is it was too much work that they weren’t/aren’t willing to put back into the game.
I can’t agree there. It’s alright. Not terrible not great. Legion was just FUN. Yeah some specs got hosed by legiondary reliance and not getting their BIS drop. But for a ton of people it was clearly just a blast to play.
Class halls were a great touch especially with the mounts tailored to each spec. Mage tower was a very good challenge and there was even a reward for the tryhards that did all of the challenges
TWW there is literally ZERO reason to go out into the different zones outside of Narubian one…
There is a reason why nearly every zone is a ghost-town outside of farming bots and 20 alliance humping the warchest.
World quests? Why? Rep gear? Why??? The professions are horribly overengineered and unbalanced between each other. Leveling up enchanting is basically shoved down your throat… lvling alchemy is like getting a tug of war while missing hands.
Enemy NPC’s aren’t really significant, either. There’s nothing that really sticks out, besides the Nerubians, and that’s largely because they’ve been in WoW for so long.
Legion may have been my favorite expansion, but TWW is fun too. I loved both the Nerubian and Hallowfall zones. I love the attention they put into music and ambience for Azj-Kahet - did you notice it’s all strings? For the spiders? There was a video about lengths they went to to get sound effects just how they wanted.
I wasn’t around for Legion when it was current but its one of the expacs I’ve gone through and done a fair bit of. Like Balance of Power, loads of class halls, mage towers, etc.
Lore and immersion was great, much prefer that angle
There was a video about lengths they went to to get sound effects just how they wanted.