TL;DR Some old guy crying about how BfA sucks compared to legion.
I played from Vanilla through Wrath, and then left WoW in the rear view mirror. The game was great, but I never expected to play again. We killed Arthas. I saw the ending I’d always wanted.
Imagine my surprise when in 2016 one of my best friends told me about Legion. As a dirty RPer, once upon a time, I’d always wanted to see the end of Sargeras. I dusted off the game for the first time since 2009-ish.
Legion was great. Not perfect, obviously, but as someone returning to a nearly 15 year old game I was pretty impressed. So were my friends. Nighthold remains my favorite raid, though I didn’t get AoTC on anything until Argus.
Which brings me to the title of the post. The Legion problem. Legion brought back Kara, which we all remembered and loved. Legion gave us the end of Illidan’s story. It gave us the end of Gul’Dan. We watched an uppity Naaru get blown to fragments.
Finally, we watched as The Main Bad Guy ™ plunged a sword into the world and then died. It was epic. I loved it. Bravo, Blizzard.
Fast forward to today. The friend who got me into the game has also played since vanilla, but unlike me he never quit. Until late September. BfA broke a lifetime player in less than two months.
He played a resto druid named Durkka, and once upon a time I played a bear tank named Durka. We were based on a Team America joke, a movie now so old that most kids haven’t heard of it. Seeing Durkka leave was a huge, huge red flag.
I stayed for a while. I joined a guild, which collapsed, then I joined another guild. I managed AoTC and really liked Uldir. But as my friends left the game one by one I gradually realized why.
Each of them had different complaints, but every last one amounted to the system in question being a lesser version of Legion.
- Legion emissary chests were a way for casuals to get legendaries. BfA ones aren’t.
- Legion missions awarded much greater quantities of gold, artifact power, etc. More importantly the follower progression system was much more in depth.
- The Legion story was rich with nostalgia and callbacks to previous xpacks. Suramar was crazy good, and was clearly building toward Nighthold. BfA has nothing similar. The war campaign just…stops, and none of the player’s actions make the slightest bit of difference.
- Legion had NPCs I cared about. I got to watch a mana addict become a better person, redeeming himself. I cared about his death. BfA has an undead screaming insults at me and constantly yelling for me to get more azerite, while Garona tells me to get bent.
- Legion had artifacts. Artifacts had different achievement based skins. They had different appearances, and animations. Some of them even talked to you. BfA has your new friend Stat Stick.
- In Legion I made a metric *&^$ ton of gold from professions. In BfA I can’t even make a set of armor for myself, much less make things I can sell to other players. We get enough austerity in real life. We don’t need it in game too.
- In Legion my prot paladin’s oh crap buttons were off the global cooldown. I could save my healer. In BfA I watch them die while smashing the button that would have saved them, and I seriously feel like there’s some server lag. Why? What was the point of this change? No dev has ever offered a satisfying answer.
- In Legion when I dinged 110 I had no trouble doing world quests even in leveling greens. In BfA 3 mobs that I wouldn’t even blink at back at level 115 would slaughter my 120.
- In Legion if I brought my scrub friends (and we are scrubs) into a M + 3 we had no trouble completing it. Even good old keyboard turner could contribute, and most importantly Durkka could save him through amazing heals. We could carry him. In BfA Durkka couldn’t save the bad player, and we failed to complete the +3, and our demoralized friend was one of the first to quit because he knew he was the problem.
- Don’t even get me started on tanking changes.
Every place I look BfA is less than legion. The world quests give less. The raids give less, because we have no tier sets, or legendaries. The gameplay is slower, and more frustrating. The story makes zero sense. We just saved Malfurion’s life. I mean, there was a whole raid tier based to get retrieve his feathery *&^.
Now you want us to kill him, because, why exactly? The whole azerite storyline makes no sense. The idea that the alliance wouldn’t use their giant spaceship against our horde crossbowmen makes no sense. Why hasn’t Org been nuked from orbit? We saw what the Vindicaar could do.
On and on and on the problems go. All my friends quit, one by one. We still get together every Saturday to play D&D, and do talk about WoW occasionally. None of them have considered coming back, which makes me a little sad.
I quit back in October myself, but having purchased the Trojan Boat I can still post my pointless thoughts here for a few more months.
There are millions of players who quit during [insert expansion] and came back for Legion. Legion was considered very successful precisely because it brought us back.
BfA has failed to keep us. The quality is lower in every area, perhaps save graphics and individual zone stories. Is that Blizzard’s fault, or the natural progression of an aging game? I don’t know, and I’m not placing blame or throwing rocks at a company that has entertained me the entirety of my adult life.
I do know that I’m not okay with pressing a giant reset button at the start of an expansion. Many of you are. You’ve seen it before, I guess. But as a player who missed all the expansions where they pressed that reset button it horrified me.
In BC I got stuff. In Wrath I got stuff. In Legion everything was new to me, and through the artifact and legendaries I always felt like I was getting getting stuff. In BfA my blade dance does X more damage when it finishes! Yay!
I don’t like having lost more stuff than I gained. I don’t like that so much of our progression was tied to the artifact, and then not replaced. No other game I’ve played from ESO to EQ to GW2 ever stripped away as much of my character and gameplay as I lost from Legion to BfA.
I know they won’t change. I also know millions of players won’t come back, and I suspect Durkka is one of them. =/