Very subjective, to me Legion was an exceptional expansion. All expansions up to Legion were by far the best. Post Legion things starting going from exceptional to just Ok to right now the most boring expansion. But that is my opinion and many will agree or disagree.
However, I do agree with your notion that older zones should be kept current as much as possible. Evergreen is the term thrown around.
This is the same in almost all MMORPGs, thereās no reason to go back to old zones.
Itās not even āgo backā ar this point. For new players, itād āgoā period because leveling is fast and no longer requires them to explore the entire world.
These zones are straight up dead.
I canāt say I really understand the interest in forcing people to go back to the previous zones. Worst is when they insist on making us go back to Org/SW for the AH but they seem to have stopped doing that again. So often when I was in Oribos someone would be asking for an AH mount. WoD was nice for that too. We had everything we needed in Warspear/Stormshield.
They also like to remove the convenience aspects too, removing the previous portal hubs, reducing it to one to the main capital of that faction.
Anima was 95% for cosmetic stuff (pretty much everything outside the quest for 1 renown per week) and still people compared it to AP the whole Shadowlands expansion. Dont underestimate the ability our community has to be freakingly negative and relate two things that has next to nothing in common just because itās presented in a similar format.
I donāt understand how you can say that as a monk.
Our class is one of those most ruined by Legionās class design:
The whole class overall was made dumber and easier, with several class mechanics being dumbed down:
All of it - gone in Legion.
What a nightmare of an expansion.
Monk remains my main, but itās still a solid 30% less fun than it used, thanks to Legion.
Wellā¦ Guild Wars 2, FF14, TESO and even SWTOR now. All have level scaling in a shape or another and reasons to go back to old zones and content, cause they understood thatās the way to make a world feel alive, instead of an empty world with a few zones alive.
Iāve not once gone back to any old zones in FFXIV except very briefly to turn in some quest that sent you there and then I left the zone instantly again.
Your alts were held back by a grind for everything. Renown levels, the soulbinds, your soulbinds abilities. The levels of those soulbind abilities etc. Your main had to do all that first ofc.
Later on they add ways to speed some of it up for alts but itās unlike DF where you ding and thatās it, you are powered because you have your full tree. Other expansions Legion - SL werenāt that straight forward and heavily relied on the borrowed power aspect. So in DF you just go and gear in whatever your chosen content is to whatever level you play at.
Thereās still a ton of HL player doing fates here and there, the roulette queue is full of HL players that scale down to help new player filling their dungeon groups in exchange with daily rewards and mounts.
FF14 is clearly not the best example. It still better than wow that only has level scaling through grouping with a low level and no evergreen content to go back to since this is not a well known method, neither intuitive, to play old content at the right level so queues are empty.
Pre-patches are fun because they can go wild with no consequences , as the expac is almost over
this is why pre patches are fun, they can give you 10000x power and not worry it will break the game
And soā¦ Renown was not just about Anima, Soulbinds power were totally unrelated to anima.
As i said, 95% of anima (apart from the 1000 weekly for 1 renown made totally optional after the first patch) was for cosmetic. Still, because it was presented in a similar format as Azerite and Artefact Power, most people look back at anima as another disgusting AP grind, something it was not XD
It is my point, Frame a PVE honor level style of progression for cosmetic only and the Wow community will find a way to look at it as Another disgusting AP Grind fest.
Iām not saying it was itās only use. Yes there was an insane amount of anima required to collect everything.
Whilst I agree in using old zones, I find the actual content of the pre-patch is not quite what youāre saying. Itās basically a zerg and some catch up gear. Thatās not better than an expansion, really, now is it?
You know what I did love though? The Blue Dragonflight quest. We went all over the old world getting the old blue dragons back. Now -that- is what they need to do more of.
Thread titles canāt be too long.
The full sentence would be: āā¦better at making the world feel alive, and making us feel like the threat of the new expansionās vilain is actually real and felt throughout the worldā.
For that purpose, pre-patches are indeed better than expansions.
Not if you want full clickbait potential
The world didnāt really feel that alive, though. It was just one zone of a zerg. The questline itself is pretty much but just seeing a load of people fly to and from one zone and then spam abilities and fly off? Nah.
Iāll throw you back to the discussion Iām currently having with Tah:
Indeed and only really lasted a couple of days. If you do the questline now itās dead. But equally you actually get to see what you are doing.
To be fair, Dragonflight is especially weak at setting up itās vilains as dangerous being. None as done anything meaningful enough to be fearful.
Still, the World alive as never been something Blizzard achieved very well. The best moment we had of that is the first few weeks of Dragonflight (in the dragon isles) but it died two months later cause the reward structure was not being done in a way people would continue to do it over the following months.
With AP not be here anymore, last patch content became last patch content again instead of being another way to gain what i want in addition to the current patch content. Removing it made the game even more āāPatch self-containedāā, the variety is dead and the last patch zone is considered dead content. Add to that the fact Zaralek cavern as been irrelevant after a week or two, even for casuals, and you have this poor current state of a dead open world, even in the current expansion.