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Yesterday, Blizzard released the 8.0 update for World of Warcraft, effectively signaling the start of the next expansion, Battle for Azeroth. This is an exciting update full of changes, big and small, but the 8.0 also announces the end of the Legion, the best expansion since 2008, the Lich King Anger. Now that it's over, I can not help but feel sad. It's been two years since World of Warcraft was 13 years old. There are not many games of this age that improve with age, but Legion is an expansion that people fondly remember for years to come.
And it's easy to see why. After what looks like a mid-life crisis with Catacylsm and Warlords of Draenor, World of Warcraft sits in a confident maturity, a bold vision that pays homage to the past without being chained. Legion made World of Warcraft more accessible than ever, while keeping pace with updates and dynamic content that assured me that I always had a reason to identify myself. After years of worries if the best years of World of Warcraft are behind
At Broken Isles
Legion, the sixth expansion of Warcraft, launched almost two years ago on August 30, 2016. When I I reviewed at the time, I said that she was carrying terrible weight "having to compensate for the flop that was Warlords of Draenor. While Warlords of Draenor began to be promising, its main features isolated players in the world's solo instances, and significant updates were too rare.After a short time, Blizzard revealed that World of Warcraft had lost more than 3 million since the launch of Warlords.It was just not much reason to play.While World of Warcraft was still easily the most popular MMO with over 6 million people. subscribers, this was not a very new promising for the future of the game. And Legion should be the expansion that has transformed these bad omens.
When Blizzard announced the Legion at Gamescom 2015, fans feared it would be a hasty expansion to consolidate the ongoing discontent with the Draenor warlords. But when Blizzard made a deep revelation a few months later at Blizzcon, it was already clear that Legion was not repeating the mistakes of Warcraft's past. Instead, Blizzard wanted to give players everything they had been asking since the launch of The Burning Crusade in 2006.
Finish the Garrison Solo, for example, who confined the players to their own base. they were not in search. Instead, Legion would introduce class specific classrooms where everyone in that same class would come out to take new story quests, assign tasks to NPC disciples, and activate new ones. artifact weapons. And Demon Hunters has finally become a playable class, one of the best that Blizzard has ever designed. Not only are they terrific in combat (I particularly appreciate the indomitable character of the Tanky Vengeance specialization), but their ability to fly and their overall mobility have made World of Warcraft feel kinetic like never before. I've supported a Demon Hunter all over the Legion and loved it.
I supported a Demon Hunter throughout the Legion and loved it.
When I played Legion, I found one of the most exquisite details of World of Warcraft. and designed areas to date. The Broken Isles were one of World of Warcraft's greatest hits, with each area drawing inspiration from a beloved corner of Azeroth. Val-Sharah was a rich woodland region slowly succumbing to purulent rot, while Azsuna was a melancholy elven ruin. Each of the five areas was so distinct that she felt a little silly going from one to the other but they also illustrated how good Blizzard is building the world. A subtle but major improvement has been made in the scaling of levels, which has now been applied to all the old areas as well . In Legion, each of the four leveling zones could be attacked in the order you wanted and the monsters would always evolve to your level to keep things tough.
Legion also improved and iterated on Warlords of Draenor's quest design. Treasures, elite monsters and easter eggs were scattered everywhere, encouraging me to take innumerable detours towards my next goal. And the quests themselves have varied a lot and have told interesting stories that have helped deepen my understanding of the world and its people. I especially liked Suramar, the end-of-game area reserved for characters at level 110. This elven city was a big step forward in the way Blizzard designed urban areas. Every neighborhood buzzed with activity and interesting things to see and do. The overall story of the exuberant Nightborne beginning a revolution in Suramar that was told during two updates was fun despite, sometimes, feeling like a grind.
While I would still like to see Battle for Azeroth improve this, Legion felt more social thanks to the public halls and new world quests. Once players have reached the maximum level of 110, world quests will dynamically appear on all broken islands that offered all kinds of loot. He encouraged players to come out and exist in the world instead of hiding in Dalaran while waiting to enter dungeons and pre-matched raids. It meant that the world itself was constantly full of players to team up with (and if the mood struck me) gank
Rhythm
Mythic + makes dungeons an end-of-game activity "
If there are two major features that make Legion be fondly remembered, these are undoubtedly the dungeons of Mythic + and the rhythm updates. The first was an indispensable reimagination of how the dungeons fit into the growing list of a player's activities once he has reached the maximum level. In previous expansions, dungeons were often treated as a stepping stone towards the end of the ultimate game: raids. But the problem was that once you used them often enough to get the equipment you needed, there was little reason to go back.
Legion solved this problem significantly. With a nod to the Diablo 3 Rifts, Mythic + was a new flexible difficulty mode that rewarded equipment as good as anything you could find in the raids. Each week, players received a mythical keystone that unlocked a specific version of Mythic + from a dungeon with enemies with healthier and higher damage than their usual versions of Mythic. If you beat the dungeon, you get more powerful loot and your keystone reaches a more challenging level of Mythic + and you head to another dungeon.
But the real challenge comes from the affixes that will slowly be superimposed as your Mythic Keystone has reached higher levels. Enemies can ignore tanks and hunt for healers, empower their allies when they die, or generate explosive orbs that must be destroyed. More sinister affixes would punish healers for going overboard or sending shockwaves to players who damaged and interrupted their allies.
Mythic + made dungeons an end-of-game activity rather than a stepping stone. He pushed the teams to their limits and rewarded with incredible equipment, but dispensed with sometimes useless and inaccessible demands of unconditional raids. More importantly, it made the dungeons fun to run each week rather than another. It is not surprising that Mythic + will remain a central pillar in the battle for the Azeroth dungeons.
But the best thing about Legion that everyone can appreciate is the aggressive way that Blizzard has released major updates. To put things in perspective, Warlords of Draenor had only two major updates while Legion had five.
Update 7.1 arrived just two months after the launch of the Legion and featured Return to Karazhan, a fan-favorite raid turned into a mega-dungeon. it could take hours to completely complete the first few times. Two and a half months later, Patch 7.1.5 launched a new raid, The Nighthold, while offering a new Dungeon Timewalking event (where players can jump into older expansions dungeons for rewards) and the fast-paced fashion Brawler's Guild. Another two months saw the release of version 7.2, which added a mini-zone, a new dungeon and a raid, as well as dynamic demon invasions across the Broken Isles. And five months after that, Legion got its biggest update when Blizzard added three mini-zones on the planet ever seen from Argus, a new raid and dungeon, two new factions and smaller features like Invasion Points.
There was always something going on in Legion and Blizzard surpassed 7.3 when the players became intergalactic travelers and explored Argus, the headquarters of the Burning Legion. It was a dramatic climax to an expansion full of dramatic climaxes. It was only earlier this year that things started to slow down a bit as Blizzard focused on developing Battle for Azeroth. The only part of Legion that was massively annoying was the way much of its story was distributed to players for 11 weeks until the opening of the new raid. But in hindsight, it's hard to stay bitter with Legion's great post-launch updates. Finally, after the drought of Draenor warlords, Blizzard reached a rhythm that made everyone happy.
Regarding Artefact
Not everything about the Legion was the sunbeam and demon killing. While Blizzard nailed how the players got new loot, Legion dropped the ball what this new loot was. At the beginning of the expansion, each class specialization received a unique Artifact, a powerful instrument of war like Thrall's legendary Doomhammer. The message was clear: the players were going to use the most powerful weapons of the known world against the Burning Legion.
At first the Weapons Artifacts were great. Unlike normal machines, they had inherent characteristics that were unlocked and reinforced by the power of artifacts. At first, the choice of features to be leveled had a significant effect, but later, Artifact Weapons appeared to be a linear grind for marginal improvement. They were just more exciting. Even worse, Weapons Artifacts made alternative upgrade characters a real pain at the beginning of the Legion. Players had to wait in real time on boring "search levels" to put their new Artifact Weapons on par with their other characters, a process that has become so horrible that Blizzard has completely removed it in an update higher. In retrospect, the Weapons Artifacts were fun to handle, but were just not very interesting to level up.
But even Artefact Weapons pales in comparison to the most egregious problem of Legion: the legendary equipment. In previous extensions, legendary items have been rewarded for Herculean feats such as completing epic quests or the hardest beats repeatedly. That was a sign of your high profile status, and Legion threw it all for a system that favored RNG above all else.
Throughout the duration of the expansion, Blizzard tried to update the legendary and make them less terrible but the damage was done.
Like Diablo 3, the legends of the Legion could be obtained from anywhere and anything. You could sneeze on a sick antelope and a legendary object might come out. It was not rewarding at all. What's worse, these legendaries have had a dramatic effect on your combat performance. But because everything was RNG, it was completely random that had the best folks and who had none at all – and that made the players furious. For the duration of the expansion, Blizzard tried to update the legendary and make them less terrible, but the damage was done.
Titan-Forging was a boring system that sometimes took equipment and made it stronger. all. Like the Legendaries, it was a complete RNG that gave players powerful and exorbitant equipment without requiring anything more. It was supposed to be a nice little bonus but those who did not have Titan-Forged equipment felt excluded. It was these random elements of the Legion that really made loot a crapshoot sensation. Players have understood that monsters might not always drop the material they want, but it was supremely frustrating to have someone else get a piece of equipment. markedly stronger for no other reason than luck. But compared to where Legion has succeeded, these frustrations are a small (but very visible) stain.
When I reviewed Legion for the first time and gave it a 90 out of 100, I was terrified at the idea that, like Warlords of Draenor, this would make a good first impression but drop the ball of the months on the road. Instead, Legion has dramatically improved with each new update adding a staggering amount of quests to do and areas to explore. At the same time, smart innovations like Mythic + pushed this 14-year-old MMO ahead of its competitors by updating an outdated formula and making an interesting and interesting investment.
Although he sometimes stumbled, Legion was all I wanted. World of Warcraft: a huge world to explore, challenging group content and a constant flow of new things to do each week. Now that it's over, I can say that Legion is the best of the two years I've played at World of Warcraft since it was launched in 2004. The battle for Azeroth is only a month away from launch, but Blizzard has some work to do. they hope to reach the legion.
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