Legion Patch 7.0.3 (2016-07-19): Removed

Or how Legion destroyed the unique flavour of so many speciaizations in the game.
Truly the most vile expansion to ever release.
In the 6 years since this tragedy, we still haven’t recovered even half of what was lost.

In this thread, we’ll take a quick look at how Monk used to be played, and how Blizzard have taken away most of its unique tools and mechanics to make it as bland and generic as humanly possible.

Hopefully, someone who cares even the slightest bit eventually looks at this thread and brings Monk class design back to a pre-Legion state, saving the class for Dragonflight.



BEFORE LEGION: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Brewing:_Tigereye_Brew
AFTER LEGION: Gone.

BEFORE LEGION: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Brewing:_Mana_Tea
AFTER LEGION: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Mana_Tea

BEFORE LEGION: Actively swap between a healing stance and a fistweaving stance at all times: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Stance_of_the_Spirited_Crane + https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Stance_of_the_Wise_Serpent
AFTER LEGION: No more stance, just a generic cooldown: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Way_of_the_Crane

BEFORE LEGION: https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Spear_Hand_Strike
AFTER LEGION: Patch 7.0.3 (2016-07-19): No longer available to Mistweaver monks.



And the biggest victim of them all, not just an ability, not a talent, but an entire ressource system and therefore all the mechanics and abilities that were built around it:
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Chi - Patch 7.0.3 (2016-07-19): No longer available to Mistweaver monks.
This caused the removal of abilities such as Chi brew, the disgusting overhaul of Mana Tea, the removal of Pool of Mists which allowed you to have 3 stacks of Rising Sun Kick - a talent balanced around the fact that RSK had a Chi Cost.

The list goes on, I haven’t even touched on everything.
But as you can already tell, Legion was a total disaster and destroyed the Monk class.

This god-forsaken expansion must never again be praised in my presence.

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Legion was good. In fact, the only good modern WoW expansion.

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Legion was enjoyable, not good. Most of us enjoyed it, not because it was good but despite its major flaws.
The systemic philosophy of Legion led to BFA and Shadowlands but neither of these had the Lore etc. to be half as enjoyable.

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Yeah, but that’s the point. Legion in general was good, but had flaws. BFA and especially SL mostly just kept the flaws, but not the good parts.

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Legion was amazing

Lets talk qbout all the great things we did in legion together.

Legion retained more players for its entire span then any prior expansion managed.

It was more then just enjoyable it was a extremely well designed expansion minus a few flaws.

M+ was one of the largest changes to take place in a mmorpg in the last decade, it breathed a whole new life into the game itself and was massively popular and the best feature to ever be introduced in WoW.

It had solid solo experience progression, among several systems, and suramer was absolutely amazing story wise.

LFR was massively more popular driven by several systems.

Artifact weapons while sure did turn toxic in bfa and sl was actually their best borrowed power design. And the most freeing one.

It had loads of content day to day with one of the fastest patch cycles in a expansion.

Most of its flaws were pvp sided, and yes the pvp side of things was horrific. However from a pve perspective that expansion was booming.

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For anyone trying to make the point that Legion was a good expansion, I’ll redirect you over here:

This discussion has been settled already.
Legion is terrible.

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No all that post you linked did was validate your opinion that legion in YOUR opinion was terrible.
There are probably at least 3 threads out there that would validate someone saying Legion was the best expansion ever.

So no actually, this discussion has NOT been settled.

Hmm subjective.

This is your opinion, in my opinion all M+ was give birth to a new form of dungeon exclusivity and elitism. It destroyed heroic dungeons and made normal dungeons an absolute nightmare to play with people demanding “skip this, skip that, go this lane, go that lane, do this, do that” and woe betide if you didn’t know the routes, have an Rio of at least 10k and wanted to do quests or actually see what the story in the dungeon was telling.

So did all the other expansions in their own way, legion just brought in a new system that was dropped when you hit max level. I also remember a lot of people complaining about the AP grind and Suramar was in my opinion a bit of a let down. As for the Nightborne…

Well.

All that work I did with my Alliance, and to hear Alyssra jabber on and on about “we owe you a debt we can never repay…”

As long as you were Horde but then again that was Blizzard and the half baked cop out known as “Allied Races” which were little more than reskins of existing races and desperate ret conning and just spawned a never ending ridiculous cycle of “I want (insert current race here) as an Allied Race for no other reason than I like how they look”

I would argue the best LFR experience was in MoP. All LFR after MoP has been systematically and methodically destroyed by developers who have nothing but complete contempt for LFR and the people who use it.

Artifact weapons while sure did turn toxic in bfa and sl was actually their best borrowed power design. And the most freeing one.

This I do agree on, but Blizzard being Blizzard made it a painful chore and to make things even worse, decided to rub our collective faces in it by rendering them completely useless by “sacrificing it” to a sword stabbed into Silithus which just left me thinking I was trying to fix an air conditioning problem in the Burj Khalifa by climbing on the outside halfway up and sticking a toothpick into a window pane.

No it didn’t, it had roughly the same content time frames as other expansions. People still burned through patches within days and then sat and complained they had nothing to do. What Blizzard DID do however was bring in World Quests in Legion which gave people the impression they had fresh content every day when in actual fact it was just a system to replace the old daily quest system brought in with TBC.

Another probable reason people think Legion had fast content patches was because of the expac prior to Legion.

Warlords of Draenor.

It was certainly the best expansion after MoP to current I’ll give you that.

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Don’t forget that it was the last time we had some exceptional zones for leveling, and Suramar was an amazing experience, too.
I liked Zandalar in BFA, Kul Tiras was really boring imo though, and then the SL zones… let’s just say we can’t get away from the SL zones quick enough lol

All the zones were pleasant to be in, had interesting characters, well paced questing and narrative that all ultimately tied together to the larger Legion A plot, but also could have stood separately from that.

When people say “we want to go back to Azeroth”, In my opinion the last time I felt like I was questing on Azeroth was Legion, BFA was technically entirely on Azeroth, but most of it felt hollow.

It introduced the gameplay philosophies we all absolute despise now, but it was still a great experience.
Also it was the one time they made us feel like a main character consistently and did a solid job of it (seriously blizz bring class halls back please)

It was also the last time we had consistently paced content patches full of things to do, I was a REALLY casual player back then at 14 years of age, but I remember getting my DK class mount incredibly fondly. (sucked that I couldn’t fly on Argus though)

No, it was horrible. You couldn’t even play off-specs, much less alts. You were locked to one char and one spec.

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Legion was the best expansion we’ve had since Wrath, and that’s not debatable. Lore was great, Zones were great, Raids were (mostly) greats, Artifact weapons were awesome, and I kinda really appreciate the focused class design.

What BFA and SL got wrong is that they took the things people enjoyed from Legion, and ruined them.

Unpopular opinion, but BfA was better than Legion.

I can’t say I agree with you but your difference in opinion is completely valid.
The issue Wow’s had since Legion is that each expansion has felt like a totally different game, rather than a progression, iteration and expansion on the same game.
That’s because of two things: parasitic borrowed power systems that get completely ripped out after the expansion, and the way Wow handles it’s expansion’s narratives.
I remember when I started in WoD, with my level boosted hunter (WoD came with a boost), I was so damn confused, who was khadgar? what was the dark portal? the iron horde? Hell, it took me months to figure out that Draenor was the same place as Outland, the place I’d seen my brother quest through back in TBC when I was a kid.
And that kind of confusion is all too common in the intro to an expansion for new players.
But that abrupt start to an expansion’s narrative means each one feels like a self contained game, Legion’s ending did nothing to forshadow BFA, BFA did nothing to forshadow shadowlands, and shadowlands hasn’t done anything to forshadow Dragonflight.
And the confusion going into these expansions isn’t limited to new players, there’s probably quite a number of incredibly casual players who aren’t in Wow-oriented social circles, and they don’t keep up with any sort of development news, they just see an advert for a new expansion and think “oh, I play(ed) Wow, that looks neat! I’ll check it out.”

Now that borrowed power is gone, they need to make expansions thread into eachother if they want to continue with these big narrative set pieces.

But yeah so we all have vastly different opinions on if one particular expansion was great or not, because they’re so vastly different.

I dont think u can call m+s success subjective, numbers recorded dont lie, Ion came out in SL alpha and stated the reason M+ is taking nerfs is because it slaughtered raiding.

300k recorded unique m+ runs in the first week of SL dropping them . Even tho SL is the lowest expansion for m+ due to the nerfs and AoE caps which upset alot of players

Again onto Legions highest retaining population, this is another numbers, yoy cant call numbers subjective it either did or didnt have more players at the end.

Blizzard released a post celebrating the fact legion ended with the most remaining active players then previous.

You cant say m+ wasnt the largest change rhen say it changed the playerbases mentality. If it wasnt massive, itd of have 0 effect.

Theres a reason it killed heroic raiding and its simple.

  • pugging heroic raids has been by ALOT of peoples admission one of the worst experiences to exist.

  • WoW has continously pushed it for WF making it dumb difficult and mechsnics that simply arent managable several times over without full communication.

M+ was one of the largest chanfws in the genre.

Because mmorpgs have barely grown since WoWs launch. They all do the same thing HOWEVER

The only thing you can say WoW does that no other mmorpg does. Is m+ this system does not exist in other mmorpgs. Its the first to make this step in that direction and its the firsr abnormality to exist in the last decade.

Numbers are not subjective.

It didnt kill heroic raiding. It just proved how many people dont like it. Its outdated and the raids were never designed to be fun, just profit from during the WF races and then nerfed into oblivion.

Blasphemy!

I honestly think Wow’s approach to raids needs to change.
I don’t do either but the idea of M+ is far, far more appealing to me as a casual player, I just don’t like how easy it is to lose progress.

Raiding on the other hand… even on a clean normal run it can still take ages, and there doesn’t feel like there’s any incentive to go through that slog.
10 bosses is just too many for a lot of us I think, in the time to do 1 normal raid we can run several M+’s, it’s faster paced, gear is more frequent, and because it’s over much faster we have a change in environment much faster.

If gameplay is your thing, M+ is more appealing, if challenge is your thing, M+ is more appealing, and if just seeing your Ilvl go up is what you want, M+ Is also more appealing.
M+ also only needs 5 people, which is much much much easier to organise than 15/20+ people if you’re playing with a relatively consistent group.

Now if we had raids of 3-6 bosses, or even single boss raids, I think the appeal of raids could go up again, because a lot of us do like a big boss fight, just not in a several hour raid.

And this is just a personal jab, no idea how any one else feels, but if they want to keep doing big ambitious narratives, they gotta stop using raids in that narrative, just give us a cool, spooky tower with some cool bad guys in for raids, and tell the core narrative through the core gameplay that 100% of the player-base will play through.

I think trying to organise the increased quantity of players is another issue people have with the mode really.

Me swapping between healer specs of priest and shadow priest in Legion
Me also swapping between tank and dps paladin and even attempting for the first time playing healer paladin… in Legion
Me experimenting with warlock specs from time to another with different rotations to find the most enjoyable one to me in Legion
Me all rounding monk in dungeons based on my mood. One moment I’m a tank, the next I’m the healer!.. Also in Legion
Me swapping between DK specs to get all hidden artifacts and to try other specs, which I found to be not that great to me… In Legion

Note: I took many breaks in Legion due to real-life obligations, but I enjoyed it more than I ever did in BFA+SL combined. It allowed for self-exploration of specs and to different approaches without being tied to a weapon with different primary stats to drop, and without being at the mercy of low ilvl weapon because none better is dropping from anywhere.

Legion was the disaster that led to two even greater disasters. The people who liked it are either A. subversively and maliciously trying to sabotage the game, B. neurologically disabled (no offence) or C. addicts rebounding from the 0 content of Warlords of Draenor.

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This is most likely it.

People who enjoy Legion are casuals who do not care about depth in class design, and just want quantity over quality. This is why they enjoyed Legion so much, since it brought a lot of new content and regular patches.

Content and patches I was never able to enjoy because they deleted half of my toolkit.

Legion brought great things to the game and as an expansion was ok. But the things it brought changed the direction of the game in a very fundamental way which to me ruined a lot of what made wow wow.