The Illusion that "Legion was a good Expansion"

Community General Discussion
142

This,… is a bad thing?

You got me there, the Legion legendaries were oof.

I can’t speak too much, since my main is a Frost DK which saw little change as far as I could tell at the time, but I like that some the of the overall changes to some of the specs. There was niches that were yet to be filled, and Blizzard took then to be a chance to fill them.

While not great, it served it’s purposes far better than it did in WoD, as in WoD it was part of an excuse to not do content, but in Legion they used it to push you to do something instead.

I liked the beginning of the artifact system, where it was somewhat reminiscent to the old talent trees. Then it got to the end where I unlocked all of the artifact “Talents”. It’s fine, but ultimately just an excuse to grind out power.

Ultimately, I agree that the Azerite system that it changed into went south, but at least they see the issues with it and are trying to get around it in 8.2

Again, this is something Blizzard accepts the faults in, at least where there is in part particular issue. And have promised in trying to reintegrate things that have made classes unique once upon a time.

Better they try something new than try to cling to whats “Safe”, I personally enjoyed that they tried.

This is not a problem at all, and the real illusion is the one you put on yourself for thinking that it is. Sure, having to wait for something feels bad, but that’s the nature of MMOs that revolve around patches like WoW does, if you really don’t like it that much play another game.

143

Most anything after WOD would have been a good expansion. The World of Pong would have been a hit after WOD. Joking aside, WOD lacked content.

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144

BFA has the better zones and raids.

Legion had the better gearing system, professions, and demon hunters! Oh - and the best class rotation ever before seen in the form of Unholy DK (unsure if that’s still the case in BFA as I main a Holy Paladin).

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Maybe not but its very close imho probably 8.2.5 will fix it all then.

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Legion’s faults and wins have been documented amply here already, so I’ll simply say that despite those faults, and because of those wins, Legion kept me coming back - to the point I didn’t just level up all of my alts, I created new characters. In its latter half I actually enjoyed simply playing many specs thanks to traits, set bonuses, and legendary effects, so much so that I sought out content just for the joy of playing the character.

I never do anything in BfA simply for the joy of playing the character.

I love BfA’s zone design, and many of the zone-specific themes and stories remain enjoyable. But unlike any previous expansion, the rest of Blizzard’s vision – and, critically, its implementation – has left me completely disconnected from the story, and without any interest in where we’re going.

For the last month I’ve just stopped doing BFA content; world quests and emissaries, M+, raids. I don’t even care enough to farm up herbs and ores for gold.

I’ve spent that month focused on Legion and older content. Running all of the Legion raids across all difficulties for tier sets and other transmog items; finally doing the Falcosaur quest chain; grinding out Balance of Power; and other Legion content that by comparison is both rewarding and actually enjoyable.

147

Legion was a good expansion for its time (and to be fair, it had the most grotesque failure of an expansion ever to have to follow, making its job that much easier), but a great deal of what it did right were fundamentals, while much of what it did so very, very wrong were new ideas that unfortunately didn’t get left by the wayside.

Legion was a good expansion in its day, but the legacy it leaves behind? … In the long run, WoW would have been better off without it.

• Level Scaling
While level-scaling can be done without destroying the concept of progression, growth, and achievement, WoW isn’t such a game. With its mixed levels and multi-player experience, doing an “open world scaling system” is impossible to do without making leveling purely ceremonial and meaningless.

• Artifact Pollution
The artifact system was…novel, I’ll give it that, but what it did to the diversity of play styles is not even remotely worth it. Warriors, Death Knights, and Shaman are all waiting to get back the weapon options they lost in exchange for the system. Also, removing the benefits and capacities of the Artifacts and providing effectively nothing to replace them makes going from Legion to BfA feel like more massive of a pruning and power-down than any level squish could ever dream.

At this point in the game, Artifacts were a net loss to players, not a gain.

•Pathfinder Endures
Whoever thought it was a-okay to hold an entire dimension of movement hostage for the majority of an expansion shouldn’t get to make decisions anymore. Regarding anything. Ever.

3 Likes
148

Legion was better than WoD and worse at the same time.

149

Show me your action bar with the 3 abilities that you use (and only those 3 with no keybinds) only and I will agree.

You have plenty of abilities.

Back in the day we had talent trees. Those are gone. We got over that, you too, will get over this.

150

This OP, you may not have liked it, but a lot of us thought it was the best in a long time. I even like MoP, which many had a negative view of, which didn’t negate my fun.
Layer the copy and paste of BfA, It only makes Legion seem that much better.

152

Retitle this to “the illusion that WoW was ever good”

153

Wasn’t the best. But it certainly was better than WoD or BfA and that’s all we really had in the last like 6 years?

Everything is subject to opinion obviously and neither yours nor mine are better than the other. but here’s mine:

One of the issues that we saw in Wod, was the turning point in levels becoming too high. it is unrealistic to continue adding more abilities as each expansion goes because this will cause bloating.

Legion was a reasonable solution to fix that. Instead of adding more and more abilities and constantly re balancing and bloating the classes… they added expansion abilities that would be their core focus each expansion. At the end they can keep what works, make it base line or toss it… ( a level squish would also fix this).

Disagree. Whatever RP people have done, in the end this is a blizzard game ad they make their story and class fantasy cannon. we just get to play in the world they create. And i personally LOVED the class focus. complete 180 from this class homogenization we have going in BFA… .i mean… we dont even have class armor sets anymore… just these garbage tmogs based on the raid… which is hilarious because the mail from Antorus… looks a lot more like naga mail than the garbage we get in palace of azshara .

This is a valid criticism. I would argue that the artifact weapon appearances were plenty, and they were far better than basic weapon mogs, but yes… each eapon for each spec had like what 6 unique weapons, 24 with color variations per spec… and they also had regular tmog drops too from raids and dungeons… so i think it was fine.

Agreed… gross.

As much as i hate azerite and artifact power the catch up mechanics make it so that it really doesn’t matter. As long as you play the game you’re about par.

Yea this one sucked. Again… it’s a problem of bloating from all of these expansions that can be fixed with a level squish imo. Wow is 15 years old… it is bound to have longevity issues if we keep upping the numbers.

While some legendaries sucked… they balanced them fast enough. you were still viable with most of your leggos but not potentially maxed until you got the right combos.

But one thing i will say. As rocky as this system was… it did something no other expansion could do for me. It kept me playing. The allure of the BLP system and the chance to get an all powerful legendary randomly gave me the drive to do the WQ’s and emmisaries. to do the daily heroics and the lfr’s… and it kept so many people running old raids as the tiers progressed. I remember during tomb of sargeras i would still find 20 groups in the raid finder making old raid runs for BLP (bad luck protection), as well as hunting artifact weapon appearances.

compare that to BFA… once i reach a heroic ilvl… which is stupidly fast… there’s literally no reason to do any content other than raid and maybe m+ for the weekly lockout… the game gives 0 incentive now to do any content for any benefit.

this started in Wod… not the best system but it didn’t start in legion.

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WQ’s were a Legion invention. The classes were fine in WoD, Legion broke many specs and sucked the fun out others.

I’ll agree, Legion overall was not bad, just certain aspects were way worse than WoD.

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156

We had a tiny guild and it didn’t kill us at all . . .it gave us more fun goals to work toward! I mean we had maybe seven active people and lots of alts, but we got a fair amount of those guild perks.

Also those guild perks brought people who never guilded up into our guild because we were friendly but zero pressure and if you said you wanted to play solo we respected that and just said hi to you when you logged on. So a player got a couple guild perks and made some casual friends in the game, which was all good.

I think guild perks should be a thing. They only ever needed to be tweaked so that they couldn’t be exploited. You could easily make most perks accessible to any size guild of two or three and up (any social group is valuable . . .smaller ones actually have more socializing).

Anyway, sorry you saw guilds die. I do think raiding guilds had problems because the perks needed to be tweaked so size wasn’t rewarded so much.

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157

I mean… WQ is an evolution of WoD daily’s… basically the same thing…

Wod was the start of the problems. Classes from 90-100 didn’t get a lot of new abilities… legion had an issue from the start because there was too much bloating (wod was just the end of it)…

the point of it is that they needed a better system for abilities because levels were too high. they couldn’t keep adding talents and abilities… it was making balancing a really big issues.

And legion, if my memory serves me, was the first time classes were relatively balanced for the most part. I remember the top raiders in legion mentioning that it was a huge plus… only issue they had was the fact that mechanics revolved so much around soaking and immunities.

Definitely by far the best xpac of the three (wod, legion, BFA).

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  • Crafted legiondaries were amazing
  • Suramar zone was quite well done
  • Argus was also fun to do multiple times
  • Mission board was over the top productive and fun to do on alts
  • M+ was really great and yes, much better than BfA (less trash, more fun)
  • Artifacts were really well done

I think it comes down to what makes an xpac good or not. For me, the entire Legion system was fun for the whole time I played it and alts were incredibly useful. BfA alts are useless, mission boards are horrible, M+ is a slog much of the time, warfronts and islands are some of the worst content in game ever, and often it feels like there is “nothing to do”

159

I mean, Legion was a good expansion. I have been playing since the game came out and WotLK is my favorite xpac but Legion came in around second. Classes being “pruned” were offset by artifact traits. Honestly, the pruning wasn’t even that bad, it just seems bad now that we don’t have like 30 artifact traits. There were definitely some trash overhauls (warlock lmao) but it wasn’t that bad.

Idk what you are talking about when you say “reliance on gear and gimmicks as a form of progression instead of new class ability.” Gear has always been a form of progression via raid and it is nice they added m+ so you have a reason to log on at times beside raid when you max out. Your abilities changed with AP progression as well.

You talk about “forced” class fantasy but nothing is really forced. There is just a story line for each class that doesn’t really differ from you being the hero of Azeroth. You are a rogue? You do rogue things. You are a warrior? You do warrior things. If this game catered to RPers 24/7 in this regard, it would be awful.

I wish there were more appearances released for weapons throughout the xpac but there is nothing wrong with the way they did it. New weapons just mean new skins with different stats. At least you never had to worry about RNG on your most important item and the appearances of artifact weapons are literally some of the best in the game.

Ok, garrison garbage is awful.

The beginning was a grind but they fixed it.

What is wrong with level scaling lmao. This is probably the best thing they could have possibly introduced for leveling.

I agree that the legendary system was trash. I wish they kept legendaries but you had to utilize tokens to get them.

Idk what you think rep was ever like. Rep had been dependent on daily quests forever and just grinding dungeons before that and grinding mobs before that. Dungeon rep is nice but understandably not the way to go. At least world quests offer variety.

160

Legion only looked great because WoD was terrible.

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161

Legion’s ap grind lost me early in the xpac. I resubbed when ap was more or less made irrelevant and it was fairly enjoyable.

Several specs got wrecked in the name of "class fantasy, " which also hurt Legion, imo.

Overall, it was solid. Doesn’t make my top 3, however.

162

I consider Legion to be a good expansion because I had fun playing it.

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163

I enjoyed Legion immensely. Did I enjoy previous expansions more? Possibly. BfA will always be “bad” to me because it introduced a story that I dislike and have had a very hard time simply getting past. There have always been story elements I did not like. Nothing is perfect, after all. Blizz decided to reignite, literally, the faction conflict where I felt it had no purpose. For that BfA will always be a bad expansion and only time and looking at those big Kul Tirans will lessen my annoyance.