The Illusion that "Legion was a good Expansion"

Community General Discussion
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This question is something i’ve been pondering for a while. The systems are actually pretty identical between Legion and BFA at the surface and the content actually feels about the same in terms of difficulty now. I actually came back to WoW during Legion and loved it and have been on and off of BFA since. So it’s been hard to put my finger on it.

I think I finally figured it out: Purpose. First and foremost, i would say that in Legion the gear grind served a purpose: they had lots of cool skins for you to unlock and so the power i sought was to accomplish the harder tasks to unlock those. Second, AP grind served a purpose. Every Ap level gave you extra power. A huge cornerstone of this was being immersed in my class fantasy during that with the very strong purpose of defeating the legion. It added depth to the purpose i was given. And purpose was thrown right at you: you could view your artifact weapon and the skins and go “I want that” and work for it.

In contrast, BFA’s story isn’t really that connected to most of the things you can unlock and didn’t give that sense of Purpose. At first, Alliance players thought “o great we get our butts whooped AGAIN” meanwhile Horde thought “O great we’re the villains again.” BoD hasn’t really changed that much. Narrative wise the alliance is “winning” but it feels hollow because there’s still not very much feeling of permanent world change around our victory. Meanwhile horde has gained tangible territory through multiple expansions.

Ap in BFA is just broken. Individual ap levels, while adding stats, don’t feel as satisfying as the power gains of Legion Artifact weapons. Azerite armor gates just felt bad in their implementation. Also, ap in legion sucks: the most significant sources are emissaries and expeditions. The least satisfying content and helpful in terms of gear progression. In legion it felt like you were always gaining AP, no matter what you chose.

And finally, purpose just isn’t thrown in your face like it was in legion. I go to the faction boat and it doesn’t show me really cool stuff i could earn. I know there’s lots but most of it is gated behind rng grind and doesn’t hold a candle to anything i could buy from the cash shop appearance wise. The frostwolf mount didn’t hold a candle to the vulpine familiar and that just felt wrong that something i could earn real fast by spending money was way better than an achievement that literally took hours of /played time.

The cherry on top has been Ion’s hubris through it all. He’s always been a jerk but it didn’t feel good with everything going wrong in BFA and it’s been hard to forgive him. And tbh he’s made huge mistakes both now and in WoD (after playing again I’ve seen vids of him uabashedly destroying specs and telling players to deal.if you were mad about long time players of other specs abandoning them for a different spec, why don’t you feel that way about the spec you’re nerfing? The OP spec had its fanbase too…)

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Yeah, Legion was really bad in my opinion as well - destroyed so many classes if not all.

Could care less who travels from time or which goat has a space ship but if the game plays like a watered down phone hack and slash game that has been dumbed down to the point of almost needing zero thought to play your class, every pve encounter is just giant AoE circles on the ground to avoid or whatever nonsense.

The game is so lazy now that you can feel it when you play it, there’s so little passion in this game now from the dev team because they think everything they do is an improvement when it couldn’t be farther from the truth.

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124

I don’t know why there is so much hate for WoD. Cata and MoP were worse in my opinion, especially Cata and the guild ratings which killed every small guild there was and made a bigger need for LFR’s. WoD had some issues but wasn’t the guild/game killer that Cata was.

As far as why Legion was a good expansion, it used bits and pieces of all the other expansions. It turned the Legion expansion into an actual “World” of Warcraft. It put you into the whole story and it tied a lot together with it. People talk about “the grind” and yet Blizz is putting out Classic that people are craving which is nothing but a grind.

BFA is not good for so many reasons and part of it is rolling back the involvement with the rest of the expansions. It’s removed from the rest of the game and game play is just flat out boring. They positioned this expansion to going back to the basics with pvp and world pvp and the pre-launch was nothing but ganking (which was fun and annoying at the same time which is what it should be) and it’s nothing like that at all. There’s a little bit of wpvp with invasions and the bounty system has it’s moments but not the involvement I thought they’d be.

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Thanks to Legion, I have a flail on my meatshields, my druid can be a sparkle cat or a Roidbear, my rogue can literally use garona’s daggers, dual thunderfuries or sick a$$ rapiers, my hunter can have a quiver at his back when in MM, my warlock has the weirdest scythe when in aff, my monk! My monk swings around a mystical paper lantern!

If the cost of some of the coolest weapon appearances in the game was foregoing weapon drops, man…small price to pay.

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In what world is the pruning of half our spellbooks considered a „feature“ ?

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127

Let me just say this. Legion was prolly my favorite xpac.
And, it also kept me logging in EVERY day. Also, I had something to work towards and look forward to. Every. Single. Time.
Does Bfa do that? nah. I almost fall asleep most of the time. There’s just not alot to do.
But I hope next patch will change that.

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i think its because it came after Warlords of - no content - draenor, that people have this illusion.

the lore was also dog crap, with so many inconsistencies, and things trowed at the game, pretty much like BfA.

I still prefer wod over bfa and legion everyday.

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For me personally, Legion had a plethora of content that i not only wanted to do, but felt rewarded for doing. Thats something that WoD and BFA both lack. The rep grinds kind of sucked, but the rewards for reaching each tier felt worthwhile, and since world quests were actually rewarding it didnt feel like too bad of a grind.

The artifact weapon system got me to play classes and specs i otherwise never would have bothered trying (disc priest for example never interested me before Legion) and it further pushed me to really learn those specs and get some kind of mastery over them to earn different weapon skins, which culminated in the mage tower.

Each time i completed a mage tower it felt like i could really say “this is it. This is me mastering this spec. I could take this spec into any situation and succeed now.”

Between that, the class specific quest lines, class halls, and class mounts, i was really pushed into playing every class and spec in the game. It kept me playing and really engaged in the game in a way i hadnt been since maybe Cataclysm. (Cata wasn’t anything special its just where i started really taking raids and arenas seriously)

It definitely had its faults, but 7.2.5 relieved a lot of them, and i always felt like i had a reason to log in and play.

I wish i could say the same now.

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Agree completely. Enough of “faction war” on a game where no faction can truly win because of gameplay reasons. Let’s unite against the real threat that eventually always shows up.

One thing I truly disliked in Legion was that it devastated Demonology. I’m not even talking about metamorphosis, just let DHs have it. But they changed the spec so completely that it turned out into something else entirely. Also it was broken and unfun (for me, at least).

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131

I need to start drinking if I’m going to enjoy anything with Illidan in it. Worst character ever.

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It was a great attempt at adding a unique new way of experiencing your class. We all also pretty much got class specific quests for every class in the game, which was epic. On top of this, we finally faced down the might of the Burning Legion and stood a fighting chance.

Also:
Artifact Weapons brought back a feeling somewhat of some player choice in how to specialize in a subclass.

Legion Legendaries were fun at least and interesting to get

World Quests and level scaling brought forth a new experience to how the leveling/progression experience played out.

Karazhan was fun!

Mythic + was new and interesting for all players

New hidden quests led to groups working together to find hidden areas in the world to explore to earn a unique reward.

And I’m sure there’s more than this.

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The entire post was two sentences?

I later addressed your second sentence.

That is true, as I said.

I must have misunderstood your post then. But feel free to keep throwing insults.

Maybe explaining yourself instead of insulting people’s intelligence in the future might help. But thank you for finally explaining yourself.

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If we want to condemn older expansions for poor features in later ones that they established precursors for, then WotLK deserves to shoulder all the blame for LFG.

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Artifact weapons at the time was one of the best features ever added. Currently you’re constantly on that gear treadmill for stats.

With Artifact weapon relics they not only added stats but extra bonuses as well.

Skins were achievable not by trying to farm a boss over and over but actually doing various stuff in game.

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What I really liked about Legion

Class Halls
Made me really want to level alts for the first time because I actually got to experience something different and it made a lot of the lore and characters relevant. Just a really engaging system overall and seeing other players in the class hall felt way better than Garrisons.

Cosmetic Unlocks
The artifact weapons cosmetic unlocks felt very nice. I don’t like timegated power unlocks but the smoother paced cosmetic ones felt really enjoyable to acquire and had many outlets to get them for many different playstyles.

Fishing
As someone who normally ignores fishing Legion got me hooked on it. Lots of awesome bonus side content.

Demon Hunters
While I don’t main one I have a few as alts and I love how they play. They are super fun classes mobility-wise and great to wind down or farm with whenever I want to play around.

Mage Tower
I absolutely loved this. It was great to have a personal challenge with very nice cosmetics and a reason to master other classes besides your main. If they had more challenges like this spread throughout expansions they would be amazing (brawlers guild type of stuff is really fun too). If they were worried about gear creep having them with preset gear would be very cool and spread into mini challenges throughout the world would be awesome.

Suramar/Argus
While I didn’t like the timegating aspects, having these zones with lots of focus and progression felt super nice. I got really immersed into the lore and story while having tons of side stuff to do there. Would love if more zones did stuff like this.

Mythic+
I stopped playing it because I don’t really fancy the timer in dungeons but I like that they added this to extend the life of dungeons and think they are headed in the right direction with stuff like this. I would like to see similar things added to more types of content without the timer.

Legendaries
The fact I couldn’t get one forever and it being an actual stat boost I didn’t like but I did really like having items that stayed with you all expansion and could be swapped out for different situations. I would love to see a system like this elaborated on but with a focus on utility/situational instead of raw stat power. It seems like they are experimenting with this more in 8.2 and would be cool to see something like this replace artifact weapons and heart of azeroth in 9.0 where they separate it from gear power so players don’t get burnt out with a grind.

World Quests
A much more improved version of dailies. Overall they make the world feel much more engaging but they could use more work. It will be interesting to see how unmarked areas like Mechagon work because that seems like it could be a step in the right direction making people more immersed to communicate and explore.

Overall
It did have many faults and was a bit heavy on timegating (as this expansion has been) but overall I enjoyed the expansion more than I had since any after WotLK. Many of the faults it had have been present over many expansions so I don’t attribute them to Legion alone (cross-realm/sharding, lack of tokens, class uniqueness, focus on timegating, tiered raids/content, titanforging [multiple versions of the same gear]).

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Illusion or not, I am still collecting Legion artifact appearances today and can’t find one appealing in BfA yet.

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Well your opinions are your opinions, no one ever said Legion was perfect but a lot of players had fun with it despite some issues. As for the specific things you list…

While the Pruning part might be true, Artifacts and Legendaries added a lot to the specs (including an extra class ability) and imo made-up for the pruning, the problem comes AFTER Legion where those were removed.

For class overhauls, there were a few failed ones but there were also some fantastic ones, I guess if you are the type of player who will only play one class/spec no matter what and got stuck with something you don’t like then it’s pretty bad, in my case I used the pre-patch to try every class/spec and choose what I wanted to play so I enjoyed two fantastic specs in Disc Priest and WW monk.

I think the Artifact weapon system far surpasses the standard weapon drops we have now, and some of the appearances were great, plus they added stuff like the Mage Tower which was pretty fun.

Garrison tables in Legion were fine much less of a chore than the WOD ones, I don’t think mission tables are a great feature but I’d say Legion had the best iteration of them so far.

Yeah artifact grind at the start was pretty bad, I agree that’s a flaw. It wasn’t much of an issue latter on in the expac. The Azerite system is BFA not Legion. I like level scaling.

Sure, acquisition was problematic, still they added nice gameplay mechanics and interactions that made the game more fun. The thing is, even if something is not perfect it can still be fun.

World Quests aren’t great I agree but they are better than the old dailies, I think they are fine as long as we don’t need to keep doing them for too long.

As for time-gating, it gets a lot of bad rep but I personally don’t mind it as long as it’s not over-abused, having some time between when a patch drops and all the content is made available gives me time to play through the story instead of having to rush everything as fast as possible and dedicate 24x7 to obtain every relevant power possible to get to Raid ASAP, instead by the time raid opens I will have had time to do everything I needed, no rush.

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Legion only is considered so great because look what it followed and now follows it. Legion was a ok expansion at best but coming out of WoD then leaving Legion to enter BFA makes looking great easy. It literally has the luxury of being in the middle of the 2 worst expansions to exist in WoW so when you are going to be directly compared to thoss 2…well its not hard to look amazing

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Basically this, my only gripe was with legions initial artifact power grind being so extensive, however later was for the most part corrected, even as demo I felt gameplay engaging, and satisfying.

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The illusion that “wrath was a good expansion”

  1. Naxx was ctrl-v ctrl-p pretty lazy if you ask me
  2. TOGC more like trial of the grand filler raid am I right I am
  3. Mally, ony, OS good raids or over glorified world bosses
  4. Ulduar being the only top tier raid tier
  5. ICC being good but not top tier
  6. Some specs that were not viable at all
  7. Time gated legendary weapons
  8. poor leveling experience not that it was good before that
  9. LFD need a say more it gets casuals into irrelevant content ruining the game
  10. Argent tournament worst dailies ever?
  11. oh mandatory shoulder enchants for raiding that are rep/timegated behind a rep that only gave you so many dailies a day

Where people so hyped from tbc they were blind to the fact that wrath wasn’t good?

See I can pick apart a good expansion too. Every expac has its fault but legion kept me logging in every day and no other expac had me doing that. Yeah yeah I know its all subjective and I’m gonna wait to see if my list triggers someone because they didn’t read the whole post lmao.

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