Getting certain legendaries wasn’t a choice at all. It was mandatory for a few classes to function and excel well. The arms mortal strike rage reduction came to mind, otherwise you’d essentially be rage starved.
And then there was Enhancement and their need for the ascendance gloves. No other legendary performed as well as that one on Shaman, except maybe the maelstrom boots for Elemental.
Some legendaries were also absolutely useless to get. As I mentioned, Destiny Driver and Prydaz pre-ToV, was literal trash and a waste. And if you got it, well, say goodbye to the RNG protection that you have to grind up again to get the one you desired.
You’re missing the point, getting certain aspects of your class based on solely on RNG was extremely bad design, especially if they were integral to your spec.
It’s why Azerite Gear isn’t so popular right now since they’re pretty much Legiondaries 2.0.
You didn’t have natural progression, you just had complete RNG. The new Essence system though? Much better iteration, I’d rather grind out for something with a clear objective rather than loosely doing irrelevant content just for a shot at a legendary I want.
I didn’t get them until the tail-end of Legion, and my Shaman was my main from 7.0 to 7.3.5. I know your pain.
I liked legion because it felt like I was actually a hero of my respected faction and Azeroth. There was no political posturing, there was no for the horde/alliance. It was just save the world from the legion, a real threat. The overall theme was just great cause it progressed over many expansions.
It was like the horde and alliance, despite their bad history and differences, would finally put the past behind them. They were starting to realize that there could be peace, and possibly even prosperity between them if they worked together.
Then BFA came along and literally flushed 14 years of story down the drain, because reasons. The entire BFA campaign on both sides, for me, has been a sad state of affairs. It’s just “go murder soldiers defending their lands and homes and families” on both sides. No opportunity to choose a different path in the war, like back the champions of Azeroth or cenarion circle, instead of horde or alliance. Nope, just go be a good soldier and kill everyone in your path, commit war crimes…whatever you are ordered to do.
This is the new hot word we’ve been using for a while, and I wish we would just let it die.
“Illusion” is such a tricky concept. You can opt out of doing World Quests, and you can opt to only do some of them. There’s no “illusion” there. You can choose to do them or not.
What most people mean when they say this is that there isn’t anything meaningful behind the choice. Except it’s like saying that choosing to eat duck tonight isn’t any more meaningful than choosing to eat chicken. The point isn’t strictly about what you get out of it after all is said and done, but rather whether you enjoyed what you did get.
If you didn’t enjoy doing it, you didn’t have to do it. That’s just how it works, there’s no “illusion” involved.
We constantly use the term as though an illusion is always bad, as well. “This thing that some people like is bad because it’s just an illusion” or “even if you might like that it’s bad because it’d just be an illusion” or “talent trees merely gave the illusion of choice”.
All of those “illusions” come together to serve a function. They create a game experience for you, regardless of the full breadth of the systems involved you still feel the experience. It hedges this no mans land where we want to say “it’s not real so it’s not good” but we don’t quite want to say it either because the whole game isn’t real.
Illusions are part of what make any game fun, the idea that they’re inherently bad is just folly. Otherwise you’ll have to look at, and accept, the games themselves are just one big illusion.
I hadn’t played since MoP, so I leveled my main through WoD, Legion and finally BfA. I did try to finish out the content as best as I could on my main, so I can’t really talk about end game or instances. And I have no idea how the expansion specific gimmick systems worked. With that being said.
Legion was by far my most hated expansion. I hated it. So much on rails maze like maps, so much frustration circling around mountains looking for that cave or secret path. So much backtracking because I took the wrong path. And you got to turn around and fight almost everything while you’re doing this because, run where? You don’t know where you’re going.
Then you get to the expansion content and it’s endless one mission at time quest chains where you can be traveling for 5 or more minutes just to click on something. Then you travel back to the quest giver and they have you travel back to essentially the same spot to click on something else.
Those story rich super long quest chains that are mostly about the carrot at the end of a very long stick, they age poorly when the carrot and the story don’t matter much. Just pulling my hair out thinking when, when, when does this mindless story and chain of meaningless tasks end. Definitely good examples of why you shouldn’t let external factors like story or needlessly taking up players time define and trump the game play.
I didn’t run an alt through that content until I had flight and heirlooms. With flight it’s not as bad.
Overall, excluding the Tanann Jungle, I think WoD was the best leveling experience for my situation. BfA isn’t that bad but… I think the conclusion I’m coming to is…
The post expansion zones are usually horrible content. Just on a game play basis. You take away the story and the very shinny carrots like flight and progressing what ever gimmick system you have and they are horrible game play experiences. Just absolutely horrible annoying slogs. Everyone of them.
class design and pvp are really all that matters to me. WoD > Legion > BFA
(WoD)Pruning had started but wasn’t overboard yet.
(WoD)The classes were still interesting for the most part.
(WoD)We still had pvp vendors and could target specific items.
Legion pvp was crap and the stat templates were a stain on Wow’s history.
I enjoyed it alot more once flight was enabled. Pre 7.2 Legion wasn’t nothing special. Gotta realize it also followed a very poorly received expansion as well.
I at least felt like I wanted to try and play all the classes in Legion, because they all had an interesting class hall storyline and it was interesting to see what artifact weapons had to offer on each one.
There is absolutely nothing like that in BfA. I have no motivation to play anything but 1 single character, and that’s only furthered by the crappy timegated rep grinds so you HAVE to stick to 1 single character to make any amount of progress on them. I’ve always enjoyed playing multiple characters and enjoying different class fantasies. There is nothing like that in BfA.
The only motivation I even have to continue playing WoW at this point is an empty promise of “well maybe you will get to do the raids” and I just can’t be bothered anymore, I just don’t care. The game and classes themselves are so poorly designed and boring that spending weeks or so to get geared and putting up with it just isn’t worth the promise of being able to eventually raid.
I liked Legion. I enjoyed the story, landscapes, raids, “special” feeling with you being the hero and having this cool weapon. I loved learning about all the weapons and the class halls (watched on youtube).
It was the first time I ever did end-game (mythic) raiding and I really enjoyed it, probably cause I actually liked the raids.
I liked my class hall a lot, and I liked the mission board being simplistic. World quests were fun at first but got boring so that could have used some work.
After nighthold I gave up until Antorus, because it became repetitive. World quests are a great idea, but if it’s all there is to progress/get stuff it just feels like chores.
I liked the legendary items, they were exciting and fun to collect. I pretty much had most of them by the end so I didn’t have any issues with having the exact correct one (which wasn’t even necessary unless you were trying to be top 50 in wow logs).
I appreciated ability pruning; sometimes I question like why healing growth was taken in BFA (or maybe it was Legion?), but otherwise I used to have no room for all my spells and I get sick of having to keybind 50 spells.
Other than that, I loved it. I still go back and do the raids for transmog now.
The Horde was completely absent from the expansion, except for Lady Liadrin telling us to put up “Help is on the way!” posters in Suramar.
Yes, Legion was the 2nd expansion where they did a ton of pruning. But in many cases (like my class), the pruned abilities were moved to the artifact weapon.
Blizzard’s true crime was removing the artifact weapons afterwards. If they had kept them in the game, then Legion’s round of pruning wouldn’t have been permanent. So it’s BFA that took changes from Legion, and turned them into actual mistakes and problems.
I think eliminating weapons as loot drops, permanently, would be a good idea. Weapons have a much larger impact on a character’s performance than any other gear piece, so it would be much better for the game if weapon progression could be gradual - like in Legion - rather than subject to sudden, massive spikes depending on luck with loot.
I see a lot of people say Legion was good after 7.2, but that tells me the xpac was bad for most of its release, so…
How is an xpac that was bad for majority of its run (even some of its supporters admit it) considered one of the greats? Outside of the Mage Tower and Class Halls, Legion bored me to the point that I started trying out other MMOs. I almost didn’t return to WoW, tbh.
And end up with an eternal AP grind? Getting the good weapon in the game is like the only true GOOD feeling still left in the game. Unlike all of the other wf/tf rng crap, any weapon upgrade for melee feels good.