Making Solo Farming in Old Legacy Raids Less... Annoying?

Community WoW Community Council
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Okay, I searched twice and asked other CC members if there was an existing thread this time, and there doesn’t appear to be. :triumph: So, this is a topic that is honestly rather close to my playstyle and something I’d love to see addressed in the future in some regard. I’m going to try to make this my last thread for a while, as I feel like I’m posting too many threads compared to other Council Members though. :sweat_smile:

For a lot of people, going back to farm old raids and dungeons for the mogs, the mounts, the achievements, is what they love doing in this game. However, as time has gone by, design philosophies have changed and it’s become more of a chore for some of the raids than others. I’m hoping to address all of the common concerns I see posted here, feel free to ping me if I left something out.

Lack of Skips

So, starting with Hellfire Citadel, raid skips were introduced to let you skip the last/couple bosses in a raid, to help guilds farm those bosses easier. They require you to kill a certain boss 4 times in a difficulty after obtaining the quest.

These quests are a godsend for farmers, however for Legacy Raids, they can be a source of frustration. These skips are not account-wide, so you must do them on every character. Although making them account-wide would be ideal, I understand why Blizzard may not want that.

Suggestion: Allow the skip quests to be completed with one kill of the required boss, if the raid has Legacy Loot Rules enabled. This is already in the game in Emerald Nightmare (though I assume it’s a bug) - in that killing Cenarius will drop all 4 of the items you need to complete the quest. This makes farming Xavius’s Shoulders much less painful.

A lot of Legacy Raids with relevant mounts, legendaries, or rare mogs off the last boss also still lack a skip. Adding a skip to these raids would go a long way towards easing the frustration players have. These raids, that I can recall, would be: Molten Core (Sulfuras) Black Temple (Warglaives), Sunwell (Thoridal), Ulduar (Mimiron’s Head), Icecrown (Invincible), Dragon Soul (Dragon Mounts), Firelands (Fire Hawk Mount), and Siege of Orgrimmar (Garrosh’s Shoulders and Juggernaut Mount). If adding quests is too much trouble, why not add an NPC at the start of these raids that lets you skip to the last boss if you have the achievement for clearing the raid on that character?

Movement Speed in Old Raids

This is a point of contention for a lot of people when it comes to legacy farming. A lot of Legacy Raids - namely Molten Core, Black Temple, etc. do not allow you to mount up in the raid, so it becomes a very, very long run for classes who aren’t very mobile.

Blizzard added a food item to help this, Bear Tartare, but nerfed it to make way for Fried Bonefish. However, Fried Bonefish gives ~20% movement speed, whereas Bear Tartare used to give a 70% Sprint. This is still a significantly noticeable nerf.

Suggestion: If Legacy Loot Rules are Enabled, increase a character’s run speed while out of combat. Just a flat buff. Simple and easy. Something noticeable though, like 50-100%. All this would do is save time between bosses.

Armor Types When Collecting Mogs

Another big thing with farming old raids is that like current content, when collecting gear in legacy content, you can still only collect appearances for what you can equip, even though with legacy loot, all gear can drop. This creates a rather… infuriating scenario when you get super rare mogs like Garrosh’s Shoulders on a cloth wearer or Xavius’s Shoulders on a plate wearer, for instance.

Suggestion: When Legacy Loot is enabled, allow you to collect appearances for all armor/weapon types, regardless if you can equip them. At the very least, please go back and label things like Garrosh’s Shoulders, Xavius’s Shoulders, Archimonde’s Cloth Items, etc. as Cosmetic and BoA so you can send them to a toon that can learn them.

Relics in Legion Dungeons/Raids

One of the big issues with running Legion Dungeons and Raids for transmogs are the relics on the loot table - don’t get me wrong, I understand relics are still used for twinks in their artifact weapons. However, when transmog hunting, they become a nuisance.

I only got a screenshot of 3 of them, but in this kill of Nythendra last year, I had FIVE of the same relic drop in a kill. It was the only loot she dropped. Do you know how bad that felt?

Suggestion: Make it so relics only drop if you have an artifact weapon in your bags. This allows twinks or anyone else to still farm relics for their artifact, but allows other places to opt out of them in favor of mog hunting.

RP Speeches

So, I think the simplest suggestion on this list is the one that annoys the most people. RP Speeches. These are great the first time you do something, but the 100th? It becomes grating. There are long speeches before boss fights like Elisande in the Nighthold. You have to sit through a minute long speech every single time. It’s tiresome.

I don’t know how you might fix this, but I just want to make sure it’s mentioned.

Legion Raid Solo Pass

One thing that a lot of people would like is a pass on helping people solo Legion Raids, now that we’re at the end of Shadowlands. We were given the Legacy Damage buff, but it’s significantly weaker than the legacy buff of any other expansion we’ve had, even in past expansions in comparison to that expansion’s previous raids.

A few passes have happened - like making Eonar more manageable for less mobile classes, but a lot could still be done - like not making the DPS such a tight check on Argus, or doing something about Mythic Kil’Jaeden’s knockback. (Please, just check the kill rate of Mythic Kil’Jaeden compared to the others lol. 90-99% of Mythic ToS runs skip him because the mechanic is very complicated to figure out and it’s a one shot mechanic.)

It also would help to crank up the Legion Legacy Buff. The fact I have died from being hit in Antorus as a ilvl250 bear druid is kinda disturbing, to be frank.

Glory Achievements

This is more of a nitpick than anything. Blizzard has a habit of going back to make raids soloable 1-1.5 expansions after they are released. However, they stopped doing the same for the achievements in the Glory Meta for the raid for some reason. (They even outright removed some group achievements from older glory achievements before they stopped) These groups are becoming increasingly uncommon, especially on the Alliance. 9.2.5 may make this a little better with cross-faction, but as of now it really doesn’t. (Plus there are raids X-Faction wont be implemented in)

When it comes to specifically group intended achievements like Only the Penitent in Firelands - those are fine, as the mechanics of the fight mean you need a least 2 people for them. I genuinely don’t have a problem with those. (However, once they start needing 3+ people, it becomes a problem, which is why I assume Blizzard nerfed Only the Penitent to require 2 people a while back) This also applies to achievements like Get in my Belly in Hellfire. Those mechanics don’t happen with only 1 person, so it makes sense it requires 2.

I’m mostly referring to other situations, such as:

Which require a group, even though mechanically it shouldn’t be necessary. (There are others like this, these are just the 2 I thought of first). For instance, why does a party of 1 not count for Poor Unfortunate Souls, when if they are a Poor Unfortunate Soul, then the entire party is one? Instead, it requires 5 people for some reason. Soft Hands requires catching the egg, even though now it’s possible to kill Ji-Kun before the egg even falls, but it does not count.

Then there’s achievements that require specific classes to solo, like:

I attack the Darkness can only be completed by a Demon Hunter or Warlock, (or using an obscure item you only have 1 chance to succeed with before you lose your chance). Anything You Can Do can’t be soloed, but it requires a tank specialization, so even if it was made soloable somehow, it would still only be doable on a tank class.

Then there’s achievements that are soloable, but requires an insane amount of luck on your part, such as:

It’s technically soloable, but it will likely take you hours to have the boss spawn enough bombs for you to light up every beacon. This was nerfed sometime during Shadowlands, but it was not done enough - it was changed from 12 beacons to 8, but without RNG on your side, you’ll likely only get 6 before you wipe.

Then finally there are achievements that could be easily made soloable by just reducing the amount of things required, such as:

These require picking up/squishing a specific amount of things during the fight. However, solo, you are not going to be able to do that many. Thus, it will require a group. Stardust in particular requires 7+ people.

There’s more achievements for each of the criteria I mentioned, I just didn’t wanna sit here listing every group required achievement, lol.

Again, I think group achievements are fine in the meta, but only when it’s a fight mechanic that causes it, or when it’s current content. Once it’s legacy content and the Legacy Buff is active, this is when the group tuning should happen. The amount of group achievements for the Glory metas, both dungeon and raid, is drastically growing. I currently have every glory achievement only needing the group achievements, and for instance, Pandaria needs 1 more, but BFA dungeons needs like 10. It’s crazy the disparity.

That said, there are some achievements I feel should be removed from its corresponding Glory achievement:

The first one 10 people minimum to do, due to how the mechanic works. When other achievements that required 10 people minimum existed, they were removed from the meta. (The let the boss steal your entire raid group’s clothes one in Mogushun is one that comes to mind) The second one requires a minimum of 5 people, and is very easily failed if someone accidentally triggers damage and kills one of the bosses. Dinosaur vs Snail requires 5-10 people, depending on the raid difficulty. In Mythic, it’s 10. In 10 man Normal, it’s 5. This also requires every person being capable of lowering their own health - which limits your class selection significantly.

EDIT: I just learned literally right now that you removed https://www.wowhead.com/achievement=10754/fruit-of-all-evil from the Legion Glory achievement 3 months ago, which required 10 people. So it’s good to know you still stealth update some of these, but others slip through the cracks.

There may be more that could do with being removed, but these are the ones that stick out in my head as the ones that wouldn’t easily be made soloable. I haven’t done too much research into the others yet. *To note, I did Glory of the Tomb Raider during BFA in a group, so I genuinely don’t know if any of those would fit the “should be removed from meta” criteria.

Honorable Mention

An Honorable Mention goes to the Shadowmourne quest Blood Infusion.

Every other legendary quest can be soloed with enough time and effort. But this one just… can’t be. It requires friends. I’ve had it on my Death Knight for years, and I went and grabbed it on my Paladin earlier in Shadowlands as I no longer play the DK that I have it on. However, I still do not have help for it.

This quest is 13 years old now. I don’t think it will hurt anyone if you make it so this quest is soloable. Now that we can mog legendaries, it sucks being bottlenecked by a quest, even though there’s the weeks and weeks of clears that I have to look forward to after I finally finish it.

If you have thoughts, feel free to share them, even if you disagree. I’d like to learn why you might disagree, etc. :slight_smile:

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Since this is one of my main topics regarding my ingame activity I’ll share my agreements and also disagreements:

Drop Chances + Lack of skips + Movement Speed:
In my opinion the first causes the need for the second and third and at some point you have to ask yourself (adding in legacy buffs) if you just want to insta-port to whatever boss (mostly the last one) and one-shot it so you can roll on another 1% drop. It is this combination of the 3 which creates the current legacy farming situation. At what point is it just about getting everything asap? And then moving forward: Why not one-shot everything in BFA once SL came out? Or the xpac’s first raid once it’s outdated?

Over time soloing old content turned from something organic (outleveling/gearing, except some non-soloable mechanics) into running for more and more 1% mount drops and starting with 4.3 getting all the transmog. 6.0 heavily trivialised it and set a new standard for the 2nd to last xpac farm. Given the current Legion situation you could argue that doubling the legacy buff for that is closer to the originial factors (16 resp. 25 with 6.0).

The most prominent aspect has to be the “1% roll farming” at this point. Leaving MC and BWL aside most of the class/armor type gear drops within the first 5-10 runs and after that it is just waiting for those 2-6 (resp. 9 in Legion) mount/cosmetic drops per xpac. You might aswell add the 5man mount drops since cataclysm to that list. Given a basic 1% drop chance (some are a bit higher) expecting an average of 100 runs to get all of this was fine years ago when the list of things was short and especially your time of the week was less dedicated to managing your borrowed power acquisition (maybe also across multiple alts). By now the relative amount of items that is this rare is still similar but the absolute amount has gotten quite big for those new to the cosmetics grind or those who just didn’t get lucky enough during the time the specific instances where current content.

So the question solely regarding drop chance is:

Should it still be this 1% grind after all those years?

Close to 90% of all runs spend in an old raid/instance are solely done because of 1 item. And since I am already on this spicy topic:
Why are MoP world boss mounts still at 0,1% drop chance with a respawn timer of 15 minutes when in BFA we get a belated world boss mount drop with a decent chance but also a 2 minute respawn timer?
I’ve heard from fellow mount farming colleagues that they are at 8000+ kills on at least one of those bosses which amounts to several months of ingame time just waiting for respawns.

There have been suggestions for bad luck protection or straight up increased drop chances for years. From my personal experience I’ve seen the Yogg+0 Mount drop on the same char twice within 2 weeks but also not drop for almost exactly 4 years (june 2017 - june 2021). There has to be a more reasonable consensus when it comes to this especially since the amount of 100s of runs you can accumulate has gotten quite big by now.

Another way to lessen these efforts is of course: More Skips!
Pain points per xpac/raid from my personal experience:

Vanilla
MC: given speed utility/gear this is a fine 10 minute run for all of it. Clearing the raid once should allow for a permanent option to directly spawn Ragnaros.
BWL: Afaik there is a skip gate after the 2nd boss that was always planned to open once you have progressed past it. That short-cut leaves out the entire supression room. Without that one - or gambling on still being hit with the super knockback from the former trash groups up to the next level - you can clean the entire raid in next to no time.
AQ Temple: You can port forward once certain bosses have been defeated in the current run, this could also be permanent given you have cleared it before.

TBC
T4 and T5 are “fine”. I Haven’t done Karazhan in a while regarding the 2nd entrance post theatre. Is that still functioning?
Mount Hyjal: The first 2 bosses are dead within 2 minutes of entering the instance! Why do Boss 3 & 4 take 10+ minutes to get through their waves? Maybe allow for a perma taunt for the entire trash to be activated by the player. That way all that trash that is fighting aross the map will at least get to the player and not the other way around. Another option would of course be permanent access to the individual sections in the portal room.
Black Temple: You can port past Akama and the Council once you’ve killed them making most of the instance rather quick to access. Once again: Clear it once → perma-use the skip from the get-go.
Sunwell: is “fine” since you can mount up and just rush through most of it. If it were about targeting the Bow a port past the Twins or Mu’ru would help a lot.

Wrath
Naxxramas: Is quite accessable by now, but: Options to shorten/insta spawn all waves on Gothic (4mins) & Kel’Thuzad (2.5 mins) would remove any other waiting point in the entire run.
Ulduar: There once was a (intended?) change that made it possible to use the teleporter right from the start and get far into the raid before having to kill (afaik) the 4 watchers to access the last 2 bosses. Once Ulduar became a Timewalking raid that got “fixed”. Maybe allow it once again to be used permanently (up to Yogg/General) after having done an entire run in legacy mode.
ToC: Skip the heroic speeches. We’ve heard them all before. There is an NPC to further the instance in general, maybe add the options in that dialogue window.
ICC: There is already a teleporter. Finishing the raid once should allow to use it freely. Currently it’s a close to 20 minute run to get to the one thing everybody wants from the Lich King.

Cataclysm
Tier 11: It’s “fine”. This could still turn into a rant about disabling gliders in all PvE instances instead of limiting that to just those done in Mythic+ mode. Gliding down from the elevator ramp to right before Chimaeron feels great!
Firelands: You can use a skip up to Majordomo once you’ve killed him. Having that accessable from the start would help a lot. Triggering Shannox (~160 trash mob kills) feels like half of the raid length.
Dragon Soul: The first 4 bosses just fly by (<5 mins). Then everything grinds to a halt:

  • Either allow a skip past the pre-Ultraxion event or skip it in general (3-4 mins).
  • The Warmaster fight is still solid 3 minutes of 90% thumb twisting.
  • Finishing spine in under 4 minutes is still world record worthy.

These 3 factors make up 50-60% of the raid duration. Players want to get to Ultraxion resp. Madness of Deathwing quicker. The portals exist once you progress. Making those a permanent access via skips would preserve the spectacle of it all.

MoP
Tier 14: It’s “fine” for the most part. After clearing you can skip within MSV towards the 4 kings room. A skip option at Lorewalker Cho would be the most beneficial solution.
ToT: Access to Horridon is rather quick. The bridge cinematic is still not skippable but avoidable by jumping down next to the bridge. You can re-enter the raid prior to the run towards Ji-kun after defeating Megaera. Here would be a good spot for skipping via NPC dialogue. Another fitting option would be right before Iron Qon.
Siege: The Shaman set from the Kor’kron encounter and the mount+shoulders from Garrosh are rare and desired. Skipping right in front of the gates (past Galakras) and at least past Malkorok (there is a teleporter to get out already) would help a lot. But since the last part of the raid is all about running, the spot prior to accessing the Klaxxi or even past those would be a good solution. And regarding the Klaxxi: The spawn of at least 2 of the 9 is still bugged after almost 9 years.
In general this raid takes the cake in terms of runtime without any skips. Even with almost 70% extra baseline runspeed and regular extra boosts around 30-70% my warrior still needs almost 40 minutes to end up at Garrosh.

WoD
It’s “fine”. Highmaul always had good access (2 minutes of RP at the start aside), BRF is a good loop design. HFC is a good example of skip placements in general.
If I had to mention something it would be Blast Furnace getting a nerf for the required bombs for a few weeks some time ago that then again got reverted? Why?

Legion
No major issues here since skips were a given at the time.

BFA
Quite inconsistent and this topic will become more prominent next expansion.

In general
All these suggestions are about using what’s already in the game or at least having efficient access to most bosses without turning it into a port-fiesta across the entire instance. It is one way of getting around faster.

The other topic would be: Runspeed

There have been suggestions around not nerfing speed food or certain items. But all of those options always required trash to be killed for uptime - there are many empty sections in raids though - or the ability to use certain pieces of gear that are locked behind grind (essence for the heart) or restricted to certain classes (Baron sword, Legion plate legendary boots).
It would be nice to turn these (in part removed) requirements into basics activated by the legacy buff. Examples:

  • Instead of having to carry that bufffood why not add 10-20% permanent runspeed to the legacy buff once the player has learned to make that food?
  • The access to the Ripple in Space essence is currently more like an arranged beatdown for progress since BFA WM pvp has ended the moment SL started. 5% are quite beneficial, maybe adjust the requirements to a long term regular participation in PvP.
  • Aggramar’s Stride or also the Longstrider trait from Azerite gear were/are quite effective. Refarming/carrying this gear around is a bit tedious. Since Aggramar exists as a raid boss: Why not grant players defeating him (solo? any difficulty) the access to a permanent runspeed buff in legacy content? This encounter had a major focus on movement, why not reward that?
  • Same could be done with Baron Rivendare. Instead of carrying the sword you get a benefit from defeating him.

With options like these you would create a content & reward system around engaging with legacy content for benefits within the system itself. There have been suggestions for a Vision/Torghast-like talent tree but tying this directly to specific Bosses/RPG elements would make it more cohesive. Making this accountwide should be a given.

How much speed boost is enough? At some point any extra percent doesn’t remove that much more seconds from a run anyway.

So in conclusion:
There has to be a compromise for legacy content in general when it comes to 3 points.

  • Are 1% drops still reasonable given the amount of chances and effort?
  • Where are skips effective and fitting (use & implementation) within each raid?
  • How fast - kill speed as well as movement - should players progress in general?

personal footnote:
If you have problems in Legion legacy raids in terms of HPS: Get the leech trinket from the Maldraxxus mixture rares (east of Seat of the Primus). If it drops it always has the leech bonus. In Legion you do 8x the damage therefore any kind of leech is also much much stronger. Another example of targetable gear suited for legacy content done right.

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I do A LOT of legacy raid farming so this thread is right up my alley!

Thanks to the posters above for their well thought out and thorough discussions! I couldn’t have laid it all out as well as they have and am glad that they took the time to do so.

I might be a bit masochistic here but I actually like that it takes a bit of time to clear the content. With that said a run speed boost built into the legacy content flag seems like a good solution, the walking certainly is scenic but slower than feels good.

I’m not a fan of the idea of a port to the last boss to one shot it for a quick dice roll on a mount. This is a game and playing the content is still important even if the content is trivialized. There comes a point where you’re not too far off from walking up to a buch of vendors in the middle of Org and Stormwind and just buying items off a vendor for 1g each. It’s at some point no longer playing a game and just having items show up in your bags for nothing.

This is what I would like to see:

  • Make all legacy raid and dungeon achievements and meta achievements soloable.
  • Make sure all encounters are soloable. Most of them are already with some creativity.
  • Fix the still buggy things such as the bridge cut scent from Throne of Thunder that you can’t cancel, others are listed above.
  • Change the raid locks to daily or every three days from weekly.
  • Change the drop rates such that nothing is sub 1% or so. After 100 runs you should get what you’re after. (Grasp of the Old God for the Mage set off of C’Thun is my most frustrating example, 5 years of farming and no belt…)

I like running old content and hate when I can only chase a particular item once a week, I’d like to focus on something and be able to do the content more than once a week on content that currently has a week long lockout.

Id rather run it more than once than have the drop rate made super common. I use these activities to kill time, almost literally I have the opposite point of view on legacy content as I do on current content. On current content I’m very frustrated when things aren’t account wide, or I have to do the same quest lines 16 times to do the content I’m trying to do. Old content is what I do when I literally just don’t feel like thinking or trying at anything and want to watch vids while running through old raids to see what I can get. Spending time at this is OK, just year+ long grinds get really painful. 20-60 runs for anything should be a good target.

With that said, having to play almost the entire BoA expansion to get the Arcanist’s Manasaber mount is obnoxious. Legacy objectives shouldn’t still be gated behind an entire expansion worth of achievements; but yes I do want it to take SOME time and not just be a one shotted loot bag tied to a dice roll.

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I’d rather see more efficiency in each run (time spend and drop chances) than turning raid farming towards this burnout end. If you could farm a raid each day, each day lost feels like fomo. A similar scenario already plays out when camping the MoP world bosses with 10s of chars.
I did it with a few mounts from heroic 5mans (ZG, Utgarde Pinnacle) for some time and doing that on a daily basis was already a lot.

It could even be a more ideal scenario when you could encounter these 1% drop bosses in a challenging version either in timewalking or solo play and have a high or even guaranteed 100% chance on those drops. Spending a few hours on a 100% reward is probably more welcome for most players than running up to one-shot a boss 100 times.

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To be fair I also said that everything should be obtainable in 20-60 kills not to exceed 100 (based on a 1% maximum rarity). That doesn’t seem too overwhelming; and with faster resets people wouldn’t be time-gated as much going after what they want.

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I don’t particularly agree with this, as I do enjoy the farming aspect as do a lot of people.

But making it so it doesn’t get… Excessive would be nice. Like I know someone in one wow discord that has an INSANE amount of kills on Sha of Anger across a couple accounts. I think it was at like 28,000 last time I saw them post? (which is almost 11 years of weekly attempts with 50 characters, btw, but I don’t know how many he does it on)

Like I don’t mind say 60-80 attempts but once you start getting higher it becomes a nuisance.

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Great topic

I am totally on your side, old stuff should be soloable, especially achievements. I am still missing many of them because I often play, when there are not many players online and no groups for such achievements. I can solo the BFA 5 man mythic dungeons but i can’t do some achievements like the last one in Atal dazar because you need atleast 4 people :confused:

And addons getting longer and longer these days so you have to wait even longer before you can clear older raids solo. I am also very annoyed by all the RP Stuff in instances like Siege of Ogrimmar because it costs a lot of time.

I like the idea of changing raid locks for old instances too, so you don’t need an alt army to farm as much as u can because of id locked chars.

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I would love for these to be account-wide. Or if that’s not possible, a skip to the end after you’ve killed the boss in legacy loot mode would also be nice. The current system just means that I have alts whose quest logs are clogged with multiple different skip quests in various states of completion.

This would make me super happy as it would also mean that I don’t have to use my limited bank slots for maintaining a speed set.

Having the Garrosh shoulders drop twice in one week on two separate clothies literally made me not want to touch the game for a week. Having everything learnable account-wide would be perfect, but I agree that making the super rare items cosmetics would already be a great change.

This is something I also mentioned in the Dungeon and Raid Solo Accessibility for Old & Current Content thread: the massive health pools and mechanics just create a level of tedium that seems unusual for content from (almost) two expansions ago.

Whereas I’m not a very big achievement hunter myself, I do think they’d benefit from retuning once they’re legacy content. I might actually give some of them a go myself if they were doable solo - one of the big things that’s holding me off is that I know I can’t do them all, so I’d rather just not actively try - seeing 8/10 of a meta-achievement completed with no way to simply go and do them will just make my brain itchy.

My pally’s been sitting on this quest for years, this would be such a welcome change.

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I also do a lot of legacy raid / dungeon farming for t-mogs and I echo the thoughts and ideas expressed.

The main thing that annoys me the most about farming old content is rings / relics / trinkets / necks. I know some people need these for mage tower and other content so keeping them in is fine, but I wish there was a loot toggle to say “Transmog Items Only”… I don’t even mind if it means less loot being award or something. It’s just so annoying and disheartening to see nothing but necks / rings drop when you are desperately after that final piece to complete a set

Some bosses having mechanics that means they cant be done solo, or cant be killed by certain classes is something that should be addressed.

I think bonus rolls for older raids need to be easier to buy / locate or just unify the bonus rolls under a new currency that you buy for gold?

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Oh definitely this! Would be great if we could also get the cap from older bonus roll items removed once the raid(s) that they’re tied to become legacy content.

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I do a lot of legacy farming and I agree with some of the concerns, but I don’t think the way to go about it is to change the content itself by adding random RP skips, damage buffs, speed buffs, loot table changes, etc. I think the legacy damage buff you already get feels a bit strange already. They are bandaid fixes and largely invisible to a new player, and I am not a fan of that.

As you mentioned, a large part of the player base enjoys legacy farming as their main content. I think Timewalking should be expanded into a greater system that will house all of these perks and provide some backbone for legacy farming. There are ways to solve many of these problems by adding a comfy progression system on top of the legacy raids instead of arbitrarily changing them one by one.

Things like bear tartare effects, damage increases vs low levels mobs and bosses, legacy bonus rolls, raid skip unlocks and tracking (instead of a questline you did 10 years ago), legacy raid portals, perhaps an ability to reset a legacy raid lockout mid-week, etc., can all be unlockable (not necessarily grindy) perks of the system instead of randomly tossed in the game when you enter a legacy instance. These are just off the top of my head, I’m sure a lot of fun “talents” can be added to such a system when given the thought.

To be clear I am not 100% against ALL bandaid fixes. Sometimes they are warranted, the relic drops being a good example of this. But things that are just “there” like old raid skip questlines and the legacy damage buff can be concrete objectives that can be worked towards to not only give a sense of progression but also provide a place where they can be canonically and visibly explained.

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Another thing I don’t know if that is intended, but not very cool. Trash loot from Hellfire Citadell onwards is still personal loot, while Bosses are legacy loot.

This makes it very hard to obtain certain trash drops because you can’t loot every single trash mob and even if you get an boe its only for your armor class.

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…that explains so much. I was wondering why I’ve only received a single BoE for all of my running of Legion raids.

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This is more of a problem from T17 (WoD) onwards. On the other hand you also don’t get that many BoEs in other raids prior from my experience. Then again: Getting the belt for the hc/mythic TOS plate set is either 6 digits on the AH or Mission Impossible.

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Bit late to the party here, but that just means less to write for me :>

I’d definitely like some skips in certain raids, like SoO. The really long raids are really painful to do when you just need something from the last few bosses.

Yes please :> It would be neat if a “legacy loot mode” toggle was available in loot settings, which would help alleviate all loot woes of the past; making legacy items ignore personal loot, making all items cosmetic, preventing duplicates from dropping, some bad luck protection… just as a few suggestions! I’ve advocated for bad luck protection before for those of you who missed out on that disaster ;>

I think these can be annoying, yes, but I also don’t think they’re the worst thing in the world. They’re part of the game and I think they make the world feel more immersive. That being said, adding an NPC that you can talk to in order to skip speeches could be a cool solution.

I’d be very happy to see most, if not all glory achievements soloable, or at least doable with a very small group, or straight up removing the ones that specifically require group play from the meta-achievements. It’s really hard to find groups to do these achievements if you’re not already in a big guild with likeminded folks.

This!! Shorter lockouts really play on the psychological need to be effective and can cause a lot of harmful behaviour when attempting to be efficient, and simply adding more chances to get a rare item doesn’t really help with the problem. The main issue with low-droprate items is the labour you put into getting them, not necessarily the time spent (although time is of course a factor in labour). We need better labour, not more of it. That’s where things like the improvements discussed in this thread come in :>

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I will have to agree with most of what Loganp has said. I don’t exactly think that, suddenly, legacy content should be trivial in every scenarios. But I really enjoy the idea that systems can be put behind it in order to make it fun.

This reminds me a lot of a Reddit post I’ve seen a while back, where someone brought up the idea of having some sort of a talent tree (similar to the ones we had for the Visions of N’Zoth, Chromie’s death scenario, Cypher of the First Ones, etc.) designed to buff players in legacy content, with some of the ideas mentioned on this thread: ability to learn mogs on any toon, increased movement speed, etc.

I’d like to point out that big changes like this won’t necessarily make everyone happy. While I’m sure some players would be glad to see someone having better chances at looting Invincible, regardless of whether or not they already have it for themselves, others may feel bad for having spent so much time grinding for it. And when everyone has that one cool item, it doesn’t feel as much cool to have it anymore. At which point legacy content and items obtainability becomes so trivial that they may just as well add every item to a vendor?

I do think that these ‘‘1% drop chance’’ (or lower) cosmetics aren’t really fun. While I’m still on the fence about changing legacy content, I’d like to look ahead in the future. Is Dragonflight going to be another expansion filled with rares with bad spawn timers, terrible drop rates on cool items, raid achievement that require a full 20-man to complete?

There are however, definite improvements for legacy content I’d like to see. Shorter respawn times on rares and world bosses, removing some unsoloable achievements from metas, or being able to collect armor mogs regardless of class (I was genuinely scared to farm Garrosh’s mount on alts that could not equip his shoulders, in case they dropped).

Raid skips, notably, could very well be implemented. Especially when people found workarounds like sharing lockouts between alts for Mimiron’s Head or Invincible. Raids like DS and SoO also take an unnecessary amount of time due to RP you may have heard 100+ times already.

Items like artifact relics could simply be added to the ‘‘extra’’ loot table we already have in-game, like how conduits drop in Shadowlands. Arguably, same could be done for rings, necks and trinkets as they’re not usually farmed by people but still provide a value for twinks.

As for the rest, things like increased movement speeds, raid teleports, dedicated extra bag spaces for legacy items, etc. could be fun ideas to put behind yet another system that can be both refreshing for veteran collectors, or used as an incentive for people who never really bothered farming old content to try it out.

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Difficulty Preservation

When it comes to WoW and other MMOs most of your difficulties can be broken into two categories:

  • Skill-Based Difficulty
  • Time-Based Difficulty

One of the best examples of this is the typical end-of-the-mythic-raid mounts. Raids that clear the content while it is current are guaranteed 1 or 2 mounts from the boss. Depending on when this raid tier is available, some may come back later in the same expansion to reclear with better gear. So, to a small degree, the availability of these mounts may get easier (skill-wise) depending on the details. However, whether it is at the beginning of the expansion or the end of the expansion, it still requires a significant amount of skill.

Now, once this same raid becomes legacy content, the mount-drop chance changes from 100% to 1%. For the first year or so, you will still need a group of people to clear the content. However, instead of 20 people, you may only need 10 or 15 (again, depending on timing, gearing, group overall skill, etc). So, you still need people to know some degree of the fight, but mistakes can be made, and some fight mechanics can be ignored (though some may still 1-shot a player). At this point, there is a transition of skill-based difficulty and time-based difficulty (in other words, it’s a little of both).

The trade here, is that the content has become easier with respect to skill, but the odds of you seeing that mount-drop has drastically reduced – raising the time-based difficulty. As the content becomes older and older, you will need less and less skill, but you are still paying in time with RNG and on a macro-level. What I mean with ‘macro level’ is that if you would like to have the lowest skill requirements, and simply solo the content, then you may need to wait a year or two. This is still time spent waiting, but not necessarily playing the game. In addition, you are not guaranteed the mount, so it may take quite a bit of gameplay time too.

The reason this is important is because difficulty should be reasonably preserved. I say ‘reasonably’, because it is a rough judgement call and not a perfect science (and due to the various input factors, it never will be). For example, there are 4 mounts that can drop from BfA dungeons, and these mount’s drop rate are roughly the same today as they were 2 years ago. However, during BfA you could run mythic dungeons as often as you want, because of the M+ seasons. Today, you may be able to solo that content, but only once a week.

Here, again, your difficulty is roughly still preserved, because despite a lower need for skill and being able to solo it in 5 or minutes, you are limited on a macro-level.

The Assumption that Older Content is Less Valuable is Flawed.

So, let me say here, that I don’t believe you are saying mounts, transmogs, pets, toys, achievements, titles, and etc are less valuable than current content items. However, there are many posts across social media that are similar to this one, leveraging the misconception that just because an item has been in the game for 2 years or 17 years, it is less valuable. Again, I don’t think you are saying this, but I want to make sure to state this assumption is flawed now, so that we can build on it going forward.

Skips

In short, if skips are available in current content, then they should carry-over to legacy content. This is already in the game, so that statement may not even be necessary. However, I do think there is room for improvement here. These skips start as quests – the same type of quests that are limited to 25 per character for who knows why. Honestly, if I can take a moment here, my request would be to remove quest limitations or break up the limitation by expansion. There is no reason for there not to be a tab system where you have your Burning Crusade quests in one tab and your Legion quests in another tab. (I am sure there is a technical reason, but conceptually I would be very interested to know why this could not be done.)

Anyway, adding new skips to old raids has a devaluing aspect to it. For example, at one time you could share lockouts within Heroic ICC, then they removed that ability. Understandably, right? You completely skip the time requirement to get that item, thus devaluing the item, because it takes much less time to get something that took a bit of skill to have the chance to earn when current. And again, from those who ran the entirety of the raid once it was legacy. So, my push-back here would be if you can’t be bother to spend 15 minutes clearing ICC or 45 minutes clearing SoO, then maybe you don’t really care about that item as much as you think you do.

Naturally, this will lead into the conversation, “Well, I have cleared ICC 1000 times, and I still don’t have the mount. So, I clearly want it.” This is fair, but needs to be addressed with a different topic in mind – bad luck protection. I don’t want to get into that here because it could derail your topic. But adding skips for people who can’t be bother to spend 10 – 15 minutes in an instance, sounds like paving a road for people who are unwilling to drive.

Speed

I want to make sure we are talking on the same terms here. When you say, “…it becomes a very, very long run for classes who aren’t very mobile.” If we are being honest, this difference in speed is going to be 3-5 minutes at the most, and many times less than that. Also, if you really want a faster experience, you can craft gear with speed on it. If you are not utilizing the crafted gear, then I would find it hard to advocate for more movement increases.

At some point, someone will utilize everything and move around dungeons at 400% speed, which would be fun, but also broken. So, I don’t know for sure if more speed is absolutely better.

Armor Types

I absolutely disagree with this. As a player, you have a decision to not only make but also maintain for the time that you are in that instance. If you take a druid into SoO and the Tusks of Mannoroth drop, then that is on you. You made a judgement call that those shoulders would not drop while on your druid, and then you continued making that decision for the next 45 minutes. This is asking Blizzard to protect you from your own decisions. And I would be very wary of pushing Blizzard to introduce elements of behavioral control for everyone just because some people like to live on the edge and kill Garrosh on anything other than plate. This attempt at behavioral control is one of the reasons we have a 10-instance-per-server lockout to begin with.

Also, if I could run though dungeons with a druid and pick up everything, then why would I entertain the thought of running with any other class?

Legion Dungeon and Raids

As much as I disagree with the previous point, I agree with this one and I would like to take it a step further.

I can only base this off my personal experiences, but I feel like there is a technical bug regarding doubling, tripling, quadrupling, and centupling drops. The frequency of seeing 4 copies of 1 item and 2 copies of a 2nd item, seems unnaturally high – especially for bosses that have 40+ items on their loot table. These encounters seems fairly common in Legion raids, but also older raids like Dragonsoul, Naxxramas, anything in MoP, and etc.

Furthermore, while I do like the idea of increasing or decreasing your odds of relics while having your artifact with you, I am still curious why Legion bosses only drop 1 item. Legion is the only expansion where this occurs, so it would be nice to see the quantity in drops a little more consistent across the expansions. If that is not possible, it would be nice to at least know why.

RP Speeches

I can understand the frustration here. It is similar to having to fly back and forth for your MoP extra loot coins simply because there is an arbitrary and antiquated cap of 20 coins. Building off my previous points, you could say this is just part of the time-based difficulty transition, but I think you could make a valid point that no actual gameplay is really happening here. Most of the time for RP like this, people tend to tab out like they do on flightpaths.

I don’t have much of a additional suggestion here, but I can definitely sympathize.

Legion Raid Solo Ability

I agree that the scaling of legacy did not really scale well for legacy content when we were shifted from level 120 to level 50. However, I think we should be specific in what types of changes are being requested. For example, in Hellfire Citadel, it was impossible to solo Gorefiend, because a mechanic would activate that would pull you into another phase causing the encounter to despawn. The mechanic initiated so early in the encounter even for character that could easily solo the last boss. So, those types of chances need to happen.

On the other hand, if someone is taking massive damage due to the boss’s power, their own ilvl, or maybe their own character level, then that is a player problem and should be incentivization to develop your character further or team up with others. If you are getting wrecked on legacy content, bring a friend or two. Maybe post in group finder. Maybe post in the local General channel.

So, in short, would it be nice if you could go through and solo all raids from 2+ expansions ago if you are a moderately (Normal raid level ilvl) geared? Sure. And if that is a goal going forward, I am all on board. However, I have seen people complain that they could not solo Mythic Antorus on their 174 ilvl Rogue. I just think there needs to be a middle ground of expectations from development and players alike, followed up with consistency from one expansion to the next.

Returning to Time-Based Difficulty Content

The reason I dove into the discussion of preserving difficulty content, is that there needs to be a core driver for changes being made. Otherwise, changes and adjustments will be random, sporadic, and inconsistent. Preserving the difficulty also roughly preserves the value of the items being sought after – which is what you want for any game you play.

In other words, many of the suggestions here are only good for the individual player but takes no consideration for the game and other players in the game. Sure, the players that can’t be bothered to clear SoO for the Tusks of Mannorth will benefit, because they would be able to 1) Skip to Garrosh, 2) Sprint there in half the time, and 3) do this on their druid, because their warrior might be a bit slower. How would you justify this to people have put in the time and skill (depending when they received it) for the Tusks of Mannoroth? And all this for those who don’t care enough about items to put in the effort themselves?

Let me see if I can put this another way: Let’s say that I really, really want the Mythic tier variants of Castle Nathria for my Death Knight, but I told you that I don’t like doing content more difficult than the equivalent of M+5. In this hypothetical, let’s say that I find completing content that is more difficult than M+5 requires too much min/maxing, time, and effort. Furthermore, the guild I am in wants me to have 3 separate classes to be able to switch between to run with them. However, I don’t like leveling, so I tell them no. So, I am unwilling to level other characters, I am unwilling to deep-dive into min/maxing gear, and I find content above M+5 unreasonably difficult. At this point, it would be unfathomable for me to then say, “I want Mythic Castle Nathria gear, please reduce the difficulty level to match my effort level.” That is what is happening with legacy raids and other suggestions like account-wide Balance of Power completion.

So, if we didn’t reduce the skilled-based difficulty of content (aside from feasibility adjustments) when it was current, then we don’t need to reduce the time-based difficulty of content when it is legacy. Some people have more skill than others, and they reap the rewards. Other people have more time than others, and they also reap rewards. In every facet of the game will their own respective extremes - Mythic level raid gear, Elite PvP sets, gladiator mounts, Love Rocket, Battle Pet Dungeons, Tusks of Mannorth, Invincible, and the list goes on.

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Yet anyone can access Blackhand & Archimonde Mythic within 1 minute of entering these raids. And this expansion is directly following up the comparatively long SoO clear.

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The difference here is that these skips have been there since it was current. SoO and ICC did not have these skips while they were current. So, there is no difficulty change.

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I would love to see some updates to older content, like quicker world boss respawns, or skips for marathon raids like Siege of Throne of Thunder. Maybe bring back Karazhan’s original skip?

A little TLC might go a long way to making legacy content more appealing to people interested in collecting, that might be otherwise daunted by just how inefficient some older raids and dungeons are in regards to time investment.

There’s even a recent example of this, the skip added to TBC Classic Black Temple.
Why not add that to retail, and branch out from there?

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