Legion was an expansion with incredible potential, spoiled by infinite grinds, rng and time played metrics. It was good. It just burned you out.
Personally I think Dragonflight is an expansion where they (mostly) hit the nail on the head for respecting player time while still having a decent amount to do. But Legion was far better quality, just with poor design decisions. Done properly, Legion would have been a far superior expansion to DF.
That’s on Blizzard. If the majority of players tend to farm things to death and burn out, there’s no point in going “Player issue! We had good intentions! Not our fault!” and then stubbornly stick to your unpopular systems for 2 more expansions. Players don’t need to learn impulse control or play the “right way”, they can simply find another game and many did in SL, costing Blizzard a lot of profits. It’s up to a developer to understand how players tend to interact with games.
I personally think the intention was a response to WoD shedding a ridiculous amount of subs though. They wanted to push players to stay subbed and keep playing because the shareholders were probably out for blood.
Tbf we’re only at half of Dragonflight. 10.2 could still blow us away. Imagine we have an entire patch in the emerald dream, new gilneas, new night elf capital that we build up with a respective renown, etc. It can become rly awesome. Zaralec caverns was just not that great tbh
You are misinterpreting the things that legion did well.
Legion is not viewed as the best/one of the best expansions for all the systems they had.
Legion was praised for doing 2 things right:
Not being rushed and being full of content at a steady pace (duh, they sacrificed wod for it).
Being innovative. Regardless of if you liked/disliked it, it was the first time in wow that we had so much new stuff introduced. It was the first time that casual players had a progression path (m+), and you could actually spend days playing and still having stuff to do.
The reason why the expansions sucked from then on was not that legion was bad. It was that blizzard learned the wrong lessons from legion.
For all purposes while legion had its problems, it never sacrificed content in order to fix them. The fixes for the systems came regardless of the content that kept on coming every 77 days.
Moving on to BFA, we had a straight downgrade in every aspect of the game, and there was no innovation nor hype. Players got downgrade in all aspects (like blizzard seriously believed that they could replace the hype/depth of artifact weapons with azerite armor), and blizzard spent half the expansion trying to fix the game while coming up with new systems to fill the void.
SL was one of the same. Players losing most of their power once more and blizzard introducing new systems that the players could not care about. After failing they spent again half the expansion in order to fix the problems, all the while cutting content. Even the one place they COULD have innovated (torghast) was streamlined into a system you had to farm every week on each character in order to keep up (while being praised in the beta for a game mode that was new and fun to play with that anything could happen).
The reason that now dragonflight is being praised (not like the best expansion ever, but as being a good expansion) is that they stopped worrying about systems and focused on the content.
Once again we have patches every 2 months with new content drooping in. My only worry is that no matter how much content we get, the second problem remains, that there is NO INNOVATION. At the end of the day, we will see how much players are willing to keep playing the same game with only higher numbers and environment changes in their dungeons/raids.
Actually they can be traced back to WoD, something bliz has admitted in interviews.
I really would recommend watching the preach bliz interview, regardless of you opionion of youtubers and what not, it’s quite interesting. And it gives a picture of why it got the way it was.
There are positives and negatives to both design philosophies. It’s not a clear cut X is better than Y.
And yes, i loved that regardless of when you logged in, you could do something to improve your char. It also had many negatives with it tho.
Yeah the AP grind was bad. However the three minor passives (along with weapon level) was an engaging choice. Not perfectly ideal, but nonetheless enaging.
“Alt, timegated, propehcy story” Agree. Especially with the story point. Pretty much every blizzard story since WoW have been prophecy story and they are anything but engaging.
Will disagree with dumbed down class design (Especially after getting ever tank/dps MT appearance). We only got 5 fingers on our hands, so any class that needs more than 5 buttons in their core rotation is going to feel awkward to play.
Yeah, RNG legendaries sucked big time. Especially when with the pity possibly giving you trash or meta defining stuff.
As for titanforgin, the issue with it wasn’t the bonus levels. It was that gear simply wasn’t upgradable outside of it. Titanforgin was great in that it gave everyone a reason to farm easier raids to get the BIS stuff they wanted cause it might have been upgraded. However, the titanforgin upgrade should have been nothing but free valor upgrades, with all gear from all difficulties being upgradable to the same cap (being heroic, cause quite frankly mythic raids should give heroic raid ilvl since it’s the definite difficulty).
And yeah, the order halls were great. Albeit with varing quaility to the storytelling. They kinda functioned like the FFXIV job quests and helped flesh out the world. And Surama was by far one of their most engaging stories.
All in all, the start of legion was a mess. But the last patch was great-ish, which is what everyone remember and thus they remember Legion fondly. The reverse of this is cataclysm, which started strong but had a really disappointing ending (along with the introductions of a poorly designed LFR) and thus people remembered the expansion badly.
Oh and then it was the introduction of world quests, which were prety much just barable for the quick do do unless you had a mandatory auto party addon, which sped up the slow ones…
And then blizzard both killed that addon and made almost every world quest in BFA a slog.
That’s incorrect though. Nothing was mandatory in WoD.
I ended this expansion without having completed even just one step of the Legendary ring questline, and I didn’t even build a shipyard in my garrison.
Hell, I didn’t step foot into Tanaan Jungle until Legion.
I could ignore 100% of the systems and other “unique features” of WoD without consequences.
This is in stark contrast to what came after in Legion, BFA & SL.
There is no truth; only opinion.
It’s YOUR truth. Not mine.
Nonsense. This is an extremely bad comparison.
But even IF I would accept this comparison as valid, then the point still remains: YOU don’t get to decide what’s ‘bad’ (in the case of a game) for anyone else but yourself.
Very much yes. Best expansion to date, imo.
A pizza is a pizza.
It can be well made and delicious or it can be a disgusting mess - or anything in between those extremes. It’s not the pizza that’s the problem; it’s how well it’s made.
The design philosophy, as far as I am concerned, in Legion was perfectly executed.
For me I don’t think it could have been done much better.
That just wasn’t the case in BfA and Shadowlands.
And just to be clear:
The things I disliked are not at all what a lot of other players disliked. For instance I disliked the removal of titanforging, the nerfing of mission tables. Now, of course there’s overlap here; I didn’t like the HoA because I just found it a very very poor rip-off of the artifact weapon; they took the least interesting parts of that system and kept those instead of keeping the most interesting parts.
As for Shadowlands; I did not mind Covenants. I did not mind how switching Covenants worked. I didn’t care about the powers.
I didn’t like Shadowlands for a big part because I did not like the world we got to play in; the zones. Since I’m predominantly a world content player; when the zones suck, well that’s pretty much most of my enjoyment ruined.
Then there was the unfun covenant activities, the fact that I hated most of the aesthetics of that expansion, etc. I actually enjoyed Korthia the most; because it at least gave me a fun gameplay loop that allowed me to work towards gear over an extended period of time (not a few weeks like in BfA or S1 of Shadowlands). I like being able to keep busy.
That’s why I enjoy AP systems. That’s why I like daily WQs (as long as their worthwhile - AP!).
It had a problem, yes. The problem’s name was Argus.
I did not like those zones. I did not enjoy most of the content within those zones.
The rest of Legion was damn near perfect as far as I’m concerned.
Yeah it’s a matter of taste. I like space-themed stuff in wow with the legion. The cosmic themes are really cool to me. Argus does look epic. Especially on this lightforged draenei spaceship, where you see earth
However, I also like the tribal themes in the game with dragonflight with tuskarr/centaurs, so to me it’s whatever. Most stuff in wow looks rly cool to me. I don’t enjoy zaralec caverns though, because it’s not badass enough
Of course it all boils down to taste. I dislike Draenei. I dislike Draenei technology.
But that wasn’t Argus’ only issues; the zones were overcrowded and irritating to navigate and you couldn’t fly there. It was just not fun being there for me.
Oh I didn’t mean overcrowded as in ‘with players’. I meant mob density. You couldn’t move anywhere without getting aggro.
And Blizzard stated: ‘its meant to be a Legion world; not fun to be in’, but at the end of the day a zone needs to be fun to be in; it’s a game. We’re not playing this game to be tortured (well, some might be - I’m not). The Maw had the same issues; they repeated the same mistake and made it EVEN WORSE.
Well as we can see: dragonflight zones feel very cozy. I levelled in shadowlands and I must agree that the maw especially feels awful. I can understand why people hated this expansion, but the covenant zones were great. Especially the venthyr zone was awesome and denathrius as the antagonist there was extremely badass
I’m not a fan either. Nor am I a fan of Dragonflying.
But that’s because I’ve been spoiled by GW2.
I strongly suggest you watch the whole video, it’s very good (and also impressive when you know how tricky it is to ride a griffon, since it loses all momentum if it lands) and it showcases the huge gap between WoW maps and GW2 maps.
I would also like to point out that this is a 2015 map, meaning it was released 8 years before Zaralek Cavern:
I watched about 15 seconds and that’s all I could stomach. That kind of movement makes my head hurt. I don’t play MMORPGs to swoosh around like a sparrow on crack.
I am also the type of player who has turned off ALL of the dragonriding effects; the swooshes, the swirls etc because it gave me headaches.
Anyway: I’ve played GW2. I did not enjoy it much and I personally think most of its system designs are overrated. I also did not like the design of most of its zones.
But then again; aesthetics and design is highly subjective. GW2 is not my thing; even though I played my engineer for quite a while; I was always hoping I could get an armor look that I liked; but I never did.
That’s a weird one.
GW2 zones are intricate, fantastic looking and fun to navigate thanks to gliding, masteries and how mounts work.
How WoW zones look doesn’t even matter because you skip all of it anyway.
I did make good looking armors, but it all feels meaningless because nearly all GW2 rewards can be bought with gold (> gems) anyway.
People in WoW whine about not having access to Mage Tower skins, but I actually love that about WoW. Plenty of armor sets and weapons have a true history behind them, and your characters’ story is tied with them.
Like I said; subjective. I don’t like the majority of the zones; they look very plain and vanilla to me; they lack personality.
That’s a definite hard disagree from me.
I don’t like how mounts work in GW2.
And I don’t like dragonriding.
Even then I wasn’t able to. Even their store didn’t sell things that I thought looked good.
I just don’t like their aesthetic; I would categorize it as ‘Final Fantasy Light’.
I hate the FF aesthetic as well.
