Why does Blizzard hate the idea of running legacy content?

Community General Discussion
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They hate us gearing up for current game content, and they hate us trying to optimize running older stuff.

A big issue with legacy content is how much Blizzard goes out of their way to make it worse to run every 1-2 expansions. People were soloing Legion stuff in BFA, and while there IS legacy scaling in place for that content, I somewhat agree that it should’ve been stronger, or more changes to fights that were otherwise impossible to solo. It’s not that some of the content was challenging–it was straight up impossible. This is a common complaint, and though it’s all easily doable with a single other person, I do sympathize.

Even more recently is nerfs to mobility in older content. This is a more black and white example, since this was Blizzard going out of their way to nerf it. You guys saw the Runeblade of Baron Rivendare nerf, but unfortunately they silently nerfed my Sprinter’s Sword. I had worked up to about 163% movement speed for my legacy transmog farming, but evidently we can’t have nice things for that. Y’know, despite the fact that there’s chars out there running around with 200-220% movement speed unbuffed. The idea that you’re not allowed to do irrelevant content quickly–especially given the RNG drop of transmog and mounts–is very telling. Players have, for years, setup a way to skip to the final bosses for mount and transmog attempts on alts, such as Garrosh, Yogg-Saron, Illidan, and The Lich King, but screw you if you were going to run the whole instance.

A much older example of Blizzard hating legacy content is merging Ulduar’s drop tables. Were you just missing one piece of a tier set, and needed to run Ulduar 10 man maybe a couple more times to get it? Not anymore, comrade. Now the tables are merged and your chances of getting that specific item were lowered.

And there’s also the change to unify lockouts entirely for the raids. Gone are the days when all four instances of Icecrown Citadel were separated as 10 man normal/heroic, and 25 normal/heroic. It took me eons to get all the shield transmogs out of there because of this change, since Sindragosa 10 man only drops 2 items at a time, and you can easily get doubles. Each time I went in there meant I was waiting another week, and sacrificing a run at Invincible. What was the reason for this? Legacy vendor gold farming? That makes zero sense, since that was never a good way to make gold, except that one short while when Cataclysm raids (mainly Firelands) were dropping too much.

So, why does Blizzard hate us running legacy content? What is the reason for it? I’m not even talking about the Timewalking EXP nerf that just happened, since that was clearly a bug (and also since TW dungeons are still the fastest 50-60 leveling method). However, Timewalking counts here, since Blizzard has never bug fixed it, and scaling is all over the place. Anyone that’s run the raids knows how bad it really is. (BT is appropriate, but Ulduar and Firelands have broken tuning and are stuffed full of bugs–some of which are game breaking. Illidari Council door doesn’t always open, friendly fire on Flame Leviathan can delete allied vehicles in seconds, and Beth’tilac famously doesn’t even function at all.)

Addendum: I forgot to mention how some old reputation-gated things are horrible. Why are BFA reps so unbelievably bad to grind compared to Legion? And even running around Legion to still do their crap for paragon cache goodies is crap. I’ve been farming The Warden’s reputation for Sira’s Extra Cloak off and on for years now, and I keep my wowhead post updated every month or two to track how unlucky I’ve been. I do the emissaries for The Wardens and Kirin Tor, and occasionally a few extra quests, having long ago burned out from clearing out all WQs for The Wardens rep ages ago. But I also want something from one of the BFA reps, but I can’t be bothered to grind out the drip feed of reputation you get from everything in that God-forsaken expansion.

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This is a genuinely good question. They nerf it at every turn.

Maybe they’re trying to save the game from going into maintenance mode? Activision saying “well players don’t need new content if they love old content so much”?

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Maybe the nerfs were intended to increase the rarity and prestige of the mounts/tmogs while also increasing the time played metrics.

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Some people take hundreds of attempts on certain mounts. My most fortunate get was the Ashes of Al’ar in three or four kills, and slogging through the Kael’thas RP is a pain all on its own.

However, running longer raids, like ICC25(H) or SOO(M) is even worse. Farming Black Temple for Warglaives was awful, and I did most of the farming on my rogue when Burst of Speed was a thing. Later on, I just made demon hunters over and over to skip to Mother Shahraz, since that’s still not a regular thing.

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I’d imagine its done out of spite, and to a lesser extent, time played metrics.

Why are toys nerfed into having insane cooldowns? Why can’t we still use our legendaries in TW to have a little more fun? Why were old tier sets disabled when we just used them to have a little more fun in TW’ing content(arguably, I know they were disabled due to the multiple class changes and removal of abilities, but still). Speed sets for running old raids for mog/mounts is no different. Players enjoyed it, because it lessened the tediousness while being fun to zoom around.

Why were the holiday garrison decorations nerfed into basically being nonexistent?

Why was what once was the most popular hunter spec, and one of the most popular specs in the entire game deleted and “remade” into basically an unoriginal melee version of Beast Mastery. Doubly so when a talent could have easily been added to BM’s talent tree shifting abilities to melee(IE, Multi Shot into Carve, Arcane Shot into Raptor Strike, etc…) Which would’ve left the old Survival intact, while also giving the Rexxar thematic people have been asking for. Why this, why that, the list goes on.

It genuinely feels like the vast majority of Blizzards decisions are done for no reason other than to spite players. With other decisions being done simply to inflate the time played metrics. I don’t think Blizzard really plays their game anymore, so they aren’t aware. They don’t realize why and how A, B and C changes impact players. They don’t know why we complain and get frustrated. So they see it as us complaining just to complain and thus the cycle continues of them spiting us in retribution.

/shudders thinking about Invincible. That one took me 10 years on multiple alts. And I didn’t use the lockout method, so full clears every time. Still missing a few mog things, but I can’t go back.

Some classes can do okay with longer raids, but I die a little inside each time I run Siege of Orgrimmar on my Deathknight trying for the mount/shoulders.

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If they hated it why do we have timewalking in the first place?

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These developers or whatever tyrannical force rules them has selfish pride.

They believe that their way is ingenious and it is their time to shine, not who built the game before them.

Do not underestimate how petty and stupid we can all be at the end of the day.

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It’s a fundamental flaw with the games design.

It’s almost like they never planned for the game to last this long. The great cata bloat cleaning, scaling the world, and level squishes.

They never figured out how to do character growth over the long haul. Why we have so much barrowed power mechanics and not something that would stick with us expansion to expansion.

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My guess no profit in old stuff.

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Well that’s all that matters that $$$$$.

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Yup,look at the dungeons and raids ,we use to be able to run them on our high end toons with no problem at all now they’re scale up .Some you need people to run through them ,how else would some get through them when people don’t want to do old content…just pay them. And where does the $$$ come from?

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Totally agree, Ennius. I rarely do some mount farms anymore, and I know 50-60 runs for some is low, but when there is also a heafty time investment due to RP/travel time I just stop doing it more and more.

Garrosh for example, I want mount but after enough times (and enough mounts) I say “am I even going to use this thing?” and it becomes increasingly harder to do. Guldan I can solo with extreme ease now and it’s easy/fast to get too, skips like that are nice.

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Why? I know plenty of people who enjoy running old content solo or in small groups. They like running it on different characters. Not running the same content over and over per week. They would like to take three or four different characters through low level content.

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I do too there something empowering about it,well,considering some were a pain and revenge is sweet at time.

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Old dungeons and raids don’t scale with current level cap (“high end”) toons. This is blatantly false information.

I think your tin foil hat might be made out of pop-tart wrappers. This argument couldn’t be any more flimsy. Just another bad attempt at, “tOkeN iS paY tO wIN.”

But pay to win for old content? That’s really freakin’ hilarious.

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You again do I trust you? You have no idea what you are talking about anyway. Actually if i were to make a foil hat it would be made out of 12guage aluminum.

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Thats still there.

They don’t improve drop rates in legacy. The only way these are"easier’ to get is you can spam these on not great geared chars. Wod/prior anyway. RNG is still there.

Like the bow from Blood elf tbc raid. IIRC wowhead said 20% drop for it. It took close to 2 months of 4 hunters a week to get. some of those were fresh and basic 120’s. Thye existed to spam tbc and such for mogs. Didn’t need uber gear.

Yogg has a pair of pants I want at this point I may have a better chance of brute forcing the president’s nuclear codes than these pants.

A universal rule to mog hunt…the one you most want is usually on end boss. SO you have to run the whole damn thing lol.

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It is all about time played now days. The more time they can get people to invest into the game the happier they are.

They don’t seem to understand for the player the reward needs to match the effort put into it also. Or the player just become discouraged and quits altogether.

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I always believed this is just the overall flaw of Theme Park MMOs. The MMO is designed to go on for as long as it takes, but as you add more and more content to a game with linear power progression in terms of levels and stats then eventually older content will become obsolete. All Blizzard decided to do is just cut off the leprous limb altogether instead of let it fester and potentially cause problems down the line, and focus on funneling everyone towards the most recent expansion.

Back in EQ, players considered the original Trilogy of expansions (Base Game, Kunark, and Velious) to be the golden age of the game. Each expansion seems to only add to the game’s content and didn’t necessarily obsolete older content. If you take it apart, you realize that each expansion isn’t necessarily attempting to ‘move on’ from the previous gameplay but is piling on more to do - you know, something expansions like Lord of Destruction for Diablo 2 or Frozen Throne for Warcraft 3 would have done. For instance, The base game has a level cap of 50 and several zones for questing and leveling and a few raid zones. Kunark came and raised the level cap to 60, added “Epic Weapons” which were designed to be your class’s best weapon with unique abilities, added the Iksar race, and added Kunark which has its own 1-60 leveling zones along with new raids. However, doing older raids was still relevant even now, and the extra levels and gear power only meant bringing less people. People still leveled in old Norrath, but now Kunark was another option, some players hopped between them via their preference. Finally, Velious came out and didn’t raise the level cap, instead it offered more gear options, more 40-60 level content, more raids and end level quests. At this point the entire game was basically a “complete product” which each expansion adding more without taking away. Then they added Shadows of Luclin expansion and screwed it all up.

I’m of the mind that now thinks linear power progession MMOs can’t go on forever, they have to have a cutoff point. I think maybe something like Guild Wars 1’s standalone expansions would make more sense. Maybe the cutoff point for Everquest was after each trilogy of expansions, keep the original trilogy as is and make the start of the next with Luclin a standalone game with it’s own content and expansions, etc. Players can choose to play on whichever ‘era’ they desire. The only downside is there’s no way to take a character through the entire thing, unless you make a new character in the next era and just name him/her the same thing and whatnot.

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The level squish was a mistake. All, because people fear big numbers lol. 120 levels is to intimidating to new players they said :laughing: And where are these gazillions of new players that this level squish was supposed to bring to this game lol.

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