Recently the curtains have been pulled back on the legendary drop rates. I’ll put source at bottom of post.
The definition of what has been a legendary and how they are acquired has changed a lot over the years. I can’t speak for everyone but in my anecdotal experience of my guild and people I play with the random drop chance of legendaries is not considered fun and it feels like a sigh of relief instead of excitement once the evoker or legendary axe drops.
That shouldn’t be happening and I feel the acquisition method is the main cause of it. Over the years a personal favorite for me was the Cataclysm legendaries with Dragonwrath and Fangs of the Father where they were deterministic of when they could be acquired with slight variance depending on how many items one needed dropped. Then more drops for faster acquisition for players who did the highest difficulty of content.
I feel if the legendaries are already a point of making it an eventual drop for everyone that can use it to just remove the feeling of pure chance and make more deterministic. The acquisition can be slower for those who raid heroic and then slower still for normal.
I am hoping for the future legendaries are done in a way that does not feel like a weekly despair for my fellow players but instead be an award for a cumulation of effort with a clear finish line in sight.
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I still think the Dragonwrath/Fangs of the Father style of legendary is the best method.
- A lot of quests taking place both in story quests, solo challenges/scenarios and the raid.
- Items from the raid get assigned to people, with minor variation in how many drop.
- Each “stage” gives a progressively better weapon, culminating with the actual legendary
- Final quest requires killing the end boss in a special manner
I’d personally have it work in such a way that you can only get the weapon equivalent to “your” raid difficulty. So everybody gets the stage 1 epic at normal ilevel, stage 2 requires doing heroic raid and has late heroic ilevel, stage 3 requires doing mythic and has late mythic ilevel, and then the final legendary upgrade requires killing the end boss on mythic.
That’d obviously not be popular because people have gotten used to legendaries being thrown at you in any difficulty, but I think this is the one place where deterministic(ish) loot acquisition makes sense, and requiring the hardest content for the best gear is just how the game should work.
This way there’s no random “oh that guy is just 10% stronger than everybody else” on progress. You don’t get the legendary until progress is done.
The alternative would be that the # of “fragments” varies per difficulty (but no variance within each difficulty) with the final quest working on any difficulty, and the weapon acts as a timed soft nerf to the raid.
The “just get lucky lol” style of legendary has no place in the modern game, and the questlines were very cool because they were able to lean into tools the potential wielders had access to.
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I would very much prefer a more Cataclysm-esque style of Legendary acquisition over this current RNG-fest which eventually has a pity-counter and then combined with significant economic requirements which feels quite cynical in a world where WoW tokens exist, but that’s beside the point. With the current system, upon seeing the general despair that a friend has gone through since the start of the season, and another who ‘suffered’ in the same way during the last patch, I would genuinely be upset if my class was unlucky enough to receive the current legendary treatment.
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Hard agree. It felt like a group effort from guild and having a goal to look forward to with completing this was perfect. Absolutely despise RNG aspects to item acquisition and would much rather prefer something that is goal-oriented with a light at the end of the tunnel. Even the legendary cloak in MoP and legendary ring in WoD was fine because you could actually work towards it every week, vs hoping and praying something drops for you.
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The downfall of those for me were the actual effects. The questlines were mostly fine, but suffered a bit from being shared because the quests couldn’t be designed around things like pickpocketing or (from memory, I could be horribly wrong) the Dragonwrath Nexus scenario being tuned/designed slightly differently to work with each of the small selection of specs that had to be able to do it.
The gameplay effects were also fairly weak. The cloaks were completely passive (looked absolutely incredible though), the caster and healer meta gems at least had some gameplay to them. The rings were actively frustrating, because you got your legendary but then somebody else potentially got to decide when it got used. How much each spec benefited also varied wildly because the ring wasn’t tuned separately per spec, meaning burst specs (especially ones that lined up naturally) benefited a lot more.
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Great post. I recently touched on the legendaries in my post about raiding, but I pretty much agree. These quest lines were truly legendary in nature, and killing an end boss being the final piece is just such a natural conclusion and avoids the feeling of letting your team down on prog cause you didn’t get lucky.
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Getting Fangs really felt like it made sense from pickpocketing the boss to get the initial starter (and freaking out your guild members when you did so) to having to bribe some dude towards to end to finish it. It felt like the entire thing was storywise something a rogue would do.
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