This is alarming, because this kind of argumentative style doesnt help us get to a solution. Being caught between the dichotomy of someone who thinks that everything is terrible and everyone should be fired and someone else who thinks everything is great and “Legion breathed new life into the game.”
Is it a stretch to say that solutions lie in the middle 99.9% of the time, so you shouldnt bother to sit on the extremes?
Yes, Satan, adding Action RPG itemization mechanics to an RPG has had negative effects. However those employees from the Diablo 3 team have very little to do with the state of the game, and targeting them alone is not going to change anything. They’re only doing what is being asked of them- tuning the numbers and creating adjustments or fitting systems to match a game plan that was given to them by those who control the game as a whole. They were transferred over to WoW with the approval of the project lead, and all moves have to be okay’d by a supervisor, including the head game director. They didnt ruin your game, they did their job to someone else’s specification.
No, Warpgate, Legion did not breathe life into the game. The game is still breathing on its own, coasting off the success of its first 3 iterations and nostalgia. Legion was a “cash in on nostalgia, let the long term be damned” expansion, and a really bad step that was taken to try and hype up the player base by giving them everything they wanted- legendary weapons, an army, being the big hero, class fantasy etc. But they blew everything at once, and we’ve come up empty handed now. They even stripped the classes down so hard to make up for the power they needed to give the weapons to feel meaningful that without flat out adjusting the toolkits to include all legendary effects all the classes felt incredibly hollow, which is what the 8.0 class backlash was about. Many things of the Legion system actually left classes feeling worse, and it was only once you had your full weapon loadout and preferred legendaries that your class became truly memorable. That’s really, really bad for the long term, as they have to either find a way to copy that every expansion or we play with broken characters.
Legion was an untenable “throw everything at them to get them to come back” experiment, it took twice as long as the normal expansion to make even partially correct and now they’re suffering for it. To say the people in corporate are why they decided to gut the classes, why they’re trying to throw blanket abilities for all as a solution- as if an arcane mage, blood dk, holy paladin and enhancement shaman will all have the same toolkit gaps that are covered by these- why they arent listening to feedback, why they’re disregarding player wishes, etc. is foolish. Corporate is forcing monetization practices and metrics into the game, the gameplay itself falls down to the heads of the game and its various departments. Corporate surely didnt ask them to make professions less important, to take away gem sockets, to make them random and not have them automatically on powerful endgame gear, to lessen the enchants and item optimization systems, to get rid of stat reforging and everything else. Corporate HAS ruined the player support experience of live right now by cutting positions. And they are complete tools for how they treat their employees. But their future development team as far as I can tell is strong and growing, adding dev positions constantly.
So yes, neither is correct. Some Action-RPG mechanics would have helped the flow of gameplay in areas OTHER than loot, professions and core RPG experiences. That said, this is entirely up to the game leads. Legion was neither good nor bad but a leap of faith that didnt need to be taken- so much reworked for the worse, things nobody asked for, things cut that people did want, Diablo 3 style loot and world quest checklists became the norm. But it was flashy, had significant lore implications and brought back fan favorites left and right so it was an easy sell from that perspective. It did fanservice right even if it did the longterm wrong.
TL;DR- If you dont like the way someone else’s child acts, blaming their adult cousin’s first grade teacher is not really the best way to show it. If you dont like a game, blaming someone who worked on a small yet integral aspect as part of a transfer team in effort to fit someone else’s grand design is not really effective either. Neither is praising a car that drove through your house’s wall because it took out that bush you have been procrastinating on removing.