Okay, I searched twice and asked other CC members if there was an existing thread this time, and there doesn’t appear to be. 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.
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.