So now that the community has successfully complained hard enough to have a drop-based legendary item have a threshold of guarantee, what does this mean for the future of the game?
Those of us that have been around the game since the early days have seen the evolution of the “legendary” item. The classic era items were low chance, drop-based items with an element of end-game crafting to finish the item out. Gave it a truly legendary feel for the elements required, and while inspiring envy, there was never a cry to increase availability, as it diminished the grandeur of the items. They were noticeably stronger than any other item in their tier, Thunderfury itself stretching well into Burning Crusade before facing obsoletion. TBC removed the crafting element and maintained the low drop rate element, again remaining unadjusted even to this day in availability.
Wrath introduced the concept of a questline with the Shadowmourne experience, which created a guild-effort oriented, long-term grind experience that became the format through cataclysm with the Fangs of the Father, and then into a less class-specific, more casually available experience through MoP and WoD with the cape and ring versions.
Legion changed the game completely with the Legiondary iteration, which in conjunction with the Artifact weapons and the grand scale of the whole “going into space to fight a literal God”, kind of thematically fit the bill with random awarding and letting the players feel overpowered as all hell before departing for Argus. The 3 item limit bad luck wall removal and a vendor to purchase them directly fixed most of the complaints with this format by expansions end, but certainly diminished the “legendary” feel of them.
The BFA Ny’alotha cape was a thematic masterpiece and interacted with the content it was based around perfectly. The utter chaos that was the end of BFA is divisive amongst the playerbase with corruption, for sure, but you don’t see a whole lot of people complaining about the cape itself.
Shadowlands once again returned to the straight, single class, low-drop chance, and was largely well received.
What we had experienced through the game up to this point was a continuing trend of the Legendary items themselves creating large power boosts to those who received them, but at their core they never felt necessary to be competitive. If you had the leggo, or in the case of legion, the correct arrangement of leggos, you would have a noticeable power boost which could clearly be attributed to it.
So what has changed with Dragonflight? Class tuning around the legendary itself. It was pretty obvious, and continues to be obvious that the STR-based classes are all missing a piece of damage, which is expected to be normalized by the axe. Instead of having that “legendary boost” that we have seen through every other iteration of these items through the game, it instead felt necessary. This discrepancy was been what has led to people calling the axe “underpowered”, while SIMULTANEOUSLY causing people to cry out in anguish about not having acquired it yet.
Which is it? Is the axe bad and not worth it, or are people desperate for it? The answer itself lies in the tuning factor. If the classes that can use it weren’t tuned with the axe in mind, they wouldn’t feel such a desperate necessity for it, and the boost it provides wouldn’t feel as underwhelming if it wasn’t brining them in line with other classes, but instead gave them an actual legendary power boost.
So what comes next?
Do we continue to tune classes with their full BiS (legendary items included) in mind, or do we allow items to start feeling strong independently again?
I will always fall back on WoW as an RPG at its heart. RPG’s have those RNG elements, those secret items, and powerful items, and legendary items that create a buzz and a mythos around them. The incentive to get them IS to have that extra boost. There is an obvious effort to continue to make PVE WoW an ESport of sorts (probably cause PVP is just an utter gong show but we’re not getting into that). The RtWF and MDI are very clearly becoming the focal point of game design. These last patches of Dragonflight have been the most guilty of tuning classes around the full BiS, complete, end-game builds for purposes of these events, and has sacrificed its RPG elements as a result. The Legendary item being the most recent victim of this.
So I ask you good folks, the ones who have read this far… where would you like to see this game go? Consider that at Dragonflight’s launch, the game was celebrated for having gone back to its expansive world explorative roots and subtle RPG elements, but as the patches dragged on we saw the introduction of the Aug Evoker and the M+ shenaniganery that came with it, and the knee-jerk “balancing” moves by the devs that followed, leading to where we are now. Do we want to see WoW continue toward a numbers driven, micro-tuned to the top 0.1% ESport, or calm it down back to its origins as an MMORPG? Its quickly becoming clear we can’t have both.