Legion Post-Mortem

With a little under 5 days remaining before Battle for Azeroth launches, I thought I’d write up my thoughts and feelings on Legion — the good, the bad, the ugly, the amazing.

Let’s start at the beginning — definitely a highlight of Legion’s existence. Leveling during this expansion was amazing, let’s be honest. Class halls were great, engaging, and really played into the class fantasy in ways that hadn’t been explored before. The leveling experience itself was very fluid, with your choice of zones and which story thread you wanted to follow. It wasn’t a long, maddening slog like previous expansions have been, but more a leisurely stroll through story and zones. The whole experience was well-balanced, scaling worked well, and the zones were balanced so well that you naturally hit 110 right about as you completed your fourth zone, or at least I did. (Naturally I went and got the 110 goodies and finished it off, because who leaves a questline unfinished their first time?) Even alts were fun — they became easier with time, having flying available after 7.2 and invasions to powerlevel if you wanted to skip storylines. All in all, best leveling experience we’ve had in history.

With the good parts of the leveling experience came the bad, though. Frankly, the storylines were hit and miss. Val’sharah stands out as the best — a highly connected, unified zone with a consistent storyline (other than the side trip to Bradensbrook, which was poorly integrated), and honestly it was very emotional. Highmountain is probably the middle-grade: While Mayla and Thunder Totem and the Highmountain Tauren tribes dominate the story (as they should), it felt too spread out and didn’t flow as well as it could’ve. The murloc sidequests felt unnecessary, and the addition of Deathwing’s backstory would’ve made for a better epic scenario than the odd little sidequest dip that it ended up being. There was clearly supposed to be some emotional resonance with the destruction of Riverbend and loss of lives at Skyhorn and Frosthoof Watch, but the characters were never given enough time to love and it fell flat.

Azsuna gives me extremely mixed feelings. There’s a lot to parse, and it’s very disorganized. You start out with the Illidari and getting a little bit of the Wardens storyline, which I honestly think was the strength of the zone, and an area they should’ve leaned into more. But it abruptly drops (you’re obviously meant to do Vault of the Wardens at this point) and you’re quickly dragged away to do either fetch quests for the blue dragons (?!?!?!) or a traipse through Night Elf history with the Court of Farondis. Of the two, Farondis at least had a consistent and emotionally-driven storyline, whereas the blue dragons were just…there. There was no tension in the blue dragon storyline, and no focus at all. Its only saving grace? Runas, the tragic Nightborne that we all grew so attached to and were so sad to lose. In addition to (or perhaps between?) the two storylines, there was an odd shoehorned-in set of sidequests, with an imp being the highlight, an odd Legion-worshipping magical academy(?), and finally pirates for no apparent reason whatsoever. The world quests didn’t add much to this zone, and frankly everything was just a little off-kilter. If Val’sharah is the A+ example and Highmountain a solid B, Azsuna doesn’t even score a high D. Definitely not an example of Blizzard’s best storytelling.

With that out of the way, it leaves me with my least favorite leveling zone: Stormheim. I was visually impressed with this zone, and thought it had a lot of potential, but it absolutely fell apart. It starts out strong enough, if forced — a glimpse of the faction conflict, depending on your side, and engaging with the Sylvanas-Genn storyline. You establish a bit of a foothold, and then…promptly drop everything to answer a raven from some random Vrykul? (Yes, you later learn that he’s Odyn, but that’s unimportant. Sadly.) The concept of the trials to earn Odyn and the Val’kyr’s favor is actually really cool, but you find at every trial that they’re sort of nonsensical. Not to mention, clearly only supposed to be defeated by someone pure of heart and true of conviction — except for God-King Skorvald who is clearly cheating at them but no one gives a damn. You’re then tossed into Helheim halfway through and seemingly randomly after a mishap, where you have to grind through a frankly quite boring should-be-sidequest only to…see Sylvanas and Helya scheming about something you never actually see? Then you go on, finish your trials, more shenanigans, randomly find Sylvanas trying to enslave Eyir only to be interrupted by Genn, and then…the aftermath is never explored and the faction conflict not discussed again. Oh, but you go and earn Odyn’s favor, only to have to do it again in the raid because beating him down once wasn’t enough. Or something. I lost track of this zone’s meandering, nonsensical storyline. Even more amusing are how there are entire sections of the zone just left abandoned and unused. Hafr Fjall exists and has a flight point for no discernible reason. Shield’s Rest was clearly meant to be a group zone but there’s no point to it. The titanic statue overlooking the dragon hatchery has no story or purpose, nor does Watchman’s Rock. The two faction enclaves are never used at all. And if it weren’t for the brief sidequests and later the Mistborne questline, virtually the entire coastline would be desolate and pointless. (Except for Vampirates, because those were at least amusing if totally nonsensical.) To put it in short: Stormheim was an absolute, complete, total clusterf***, and I deeply disliked it.

With leveling zones out of the way, let’s talk about my favorite part of the entire expansion: Suramar. Suramar was absolutely S-Tier storytelling. The questline was difficult, fun, engaging, and fitting. The humor was spot-on (I could talk for DAYS about how much I love Oculeth). You start from one desperate plea, build a base, gather survivors, slow-roll a revolution, add allies, end up building a combined army, and finally overthrow a tyrant and retake a city. Everything about this storyline was amazing. It was well-paced, well-executed, and utterly and thoroughly enjoyable. In fact, other than the Jandivik storyline (Which, really should’ve been part of Stormheim and made no sense here), and the awkwardness of accessing and moving around Falanar, I find Suramar to be flawless. If Stormheim was the low point of Blizzard’s storytelling, Suramar is the peak. It felt like a living, breathing, evolving zone. Every piece made sense, and everything came together in one glorious moment of triumph, all because of your directly-witnessable efforts. I genuinely cannot lay enough praise on this zone. I hope with all of my heart that Suramar becomes the new standard for Blizzard’s storylines.

Broken Shore is a zone that’s been analyzed to hell and back already by others, so I’ll keep my opinions on it brief — I dislike it, and while I understand why Blizzard structured it how they did I strongly feel it was a mistake in almost every aspect. The spread-out and repetitive nature of the storyline was MMO garbage at its finest. There were systems built on systems built on systems, all of which were unpredictable and random and less-than-fun, which ultimately just led to an undesirable experience. There was a grinding-like experience you couldn’t grind because of limitations. There were world quests that felt like you were getting nowhere. There was an invasion mechanic with The Sentinax that ended up being endlessly frustrating fighting against groups of people with too few spawns and too many hands trying for the same pool of mobs. The world bosses were inconsistent and lame. The rarespawn bosses were frankly uninspired. There was no solid story, no sense of organization or progress, and the static always-respawning nature of the zone just felt bad. Honestly, if it hadn’t been a requirement for flying, I genuinely would not have done ANY of this zone and would’ve taken the weeks before the opening of Tomb of Sargeras off. Broken Shore was a miserable failure, one I hope Blizzard learned some good lessons from.

Last on the zone analysis chopping block, Argus. I will say two things that color my opinions — For a planet, three zones and a raid were just not enough; and I fundamentally believe that disallowing flying permanently was a mistake that led to some silly design decisions. That said, overall, I feel like the Argus storyline did okay. To start — there was ACTUALLY A STORYLINE, unlike Broken Shore, which helped a lot. Finding the Broken and the Lightforged, Turalyon and Alleria’s reunion, and generally everything Krokuun felt good. There was clearly a mechanical purpose to everything in the zone, and it had enough story to tie it together and make it feel like a progressive flow. Antoran Wastes did none of that at all, and had no storyline to speak of other than drilling into Antorus, but I actually feel like that was okay. Clearly the Wastes were only designed to be a world quest hub with a sense of “This is the Legion’s home base and we’re fighting on turf we don’t understand”, and it did that well. Mac’Aree managed to simultaneously make me extraordinarily happy with how it was set up, and disappoint me in the most extreme with where it went. Every part of Mac’Aree felt like we were experiencing Draenei history, and like we should’ve been making progress of reconquring areas and laying that history to rest. And then…it ultimately never materialized. The storyline flowed, but nothing stuck around, nothing was permanent. Every foothold just felt fleeting, like the entire zone was a lost cause. And while the story moments were quite good, both for the Draenei and for Alleria’s questline, they felt hollow and rushed, like we were just seeing the zone and quickly grabbing things we needed but didn’t understand, and then abandoning it to just suffer without us. Mac’Aree had much more potential, to peel back the deeper threads of the story, to let us peer into the void and the veil between life and death and let us see exactly how and why things had evolved how they did. It ultimately didn’t capitalize on that, and I feel we’re worse off for it. In total, Argus felt fine — invasion rifts could’ve been storied and had more purpose, but otherwise Argus gets a solid B for effort from me.

With zones covered, let’s dip into a little discussion about systems. Legion’s systems were a mixed bag. Personal loot felt okay usually, especially after droprates were buffed post-Nighthold. The worst place for it I felt was LFR, where the massive emotional effort an LFR takes and low reward potential for the gear your given should mean that some kind of gear reward is guaranteed; I openly suggested that one guaranteed piece per wing either as a boss drop or an end-wing cache should be standard, and I stand by what I said. With that in mind, the catchup systems for gear were actually very good. Broken Shore’s nethershard gear and Argus’s Veiled Argunite gear were both amazing systems, if a touch slower than I would’ve liked. The Bonus Roll system through Seals of Broken Fate remains every bit as annoying as it was in past expansions, though Blizzard seems unlikely to change it. The Order Resources systems and class hall missions felt far better than their previous iteration, though catchup mechanics for them could have been better/clearer from the beginning. Curious Coins were a fun “secretive” reward that I wish they’d done more with, and would’ve fit so well with more toys or battle pets or perhaps even another mount.

I’ve left two systems for their own discussion, because they both merit longer responses. First, the Emissary system. I strongly believe that Emissary Caches and the repeatable reputations were the best system of Legion, and deserve praise and highlights. These are easily the best iteration of daily quests in WoW history, allowing you to build them up to remove the pressure of needing to log on every day and then feeling very satisfying with a chunk of useful things coming out of them. I do have two things to note: One, the gear from the caches should’ve scaled better, ideally to whatever the catch-up cap at the time was (or to M+2 level, both of which were about equivalent); Two, putting random mounts in the Paragon Caches was an absolutely horrid idea because of randomness — for an equal feel, you could put a number of tokens which can be earned and saved up to get the mounts in a guaranteed way after so many caches. The Curious Coin system was ready-built for this interaction with the mounts, and they didn’t use it, a real shame. Otherwise though, Emissary and Paragon caches felt very good and engaging and I’m happy to see their return in BfA.

The second system is, of course, the elephant in the room — Legion legendaries, often shortened to Legiondaries. I can’t even begin to explain how much I hated this system. Painfully random, excruciatingly imbalanced, a massive headache for alts and an active detriment to off-specs… My list of complaints about this system alone could be an entire blog post. Nothing about Legiondaries felt good. Their abilities felt like things that should’ve been baseline for your class at best, or set bonuses at worst. Getting the right ones meant the difference between feeling pathetic and feeling like a god, all over something that you couldn’t reliably control. RNG drop rates on top of RNG pieces were just bad. In my opinion, the only thing they ever did right was in 8.0.1 when they simply changed the system to allow you to outright buy the legendary you wanted. This should have been how the system worked from the start — Build up resources and directly target the legendaries you need, and forget the rest. Once you have what you need, buy random tokens for your alts. Simple, clean, done. Instead we got massive headaches. What was even more painful is that they weren’t slot-guaranteed, meaning that your best pair of legendaries could be eating up two of your tier slots, which were also subject to RNG drops, making the entire thing one interlocking nightmare of a system to deal with. I sat here for ten minutes trying to put my feelings on how bad this system is into words and I simply can’t. I hope more than anything that Blizzard never, ever does a system like this again. I hope they learn from this mistake. I’m happy that, at least at the start of BfA, no such system seems to exist. Legiondaries can make like the Legion itself and die an awful, anticlimactic death.

I’ve left Legion’s biggest moving parts for near the end — Dungeons, PvP, and Raids. Frankly, there’s not much to say on them. Dungeons were in an extremely good place, and M+ breathed some real life into them and kept them relevant to the very end. They were challenging, fun, and frankly a good system that I’m glad Blizzard is carrying forward. Some affixes need balanced, and a little work needs done to make sure every affix works with every dungeon (Who’s still throwing away Cathedral keys? I am!), but they’re in a good spot. PvP likewise was in a pretty good place — PvP rewards needed a bit of tweaking (and I think BfA’s Conquest system is exactly the tweaking it needed), but otherwise PvP was remarkably well-balanced and fun, especially with the introduction of the Mercenary Mode opposite-faction queueing to help balance queue times. As for raids, they were in the best place they’ve ever been. Raiding was well-paced, enjoyable, reasonable on challenges, and fun. Other than a couple of bosses (Pre-nerf H Mistress Sazzine, H Coven, H Kil’jaeden), everything just…worked. The encounters were generally original and good. I could write an entire teardown on every fight of every raid, but there’s no point. Blizzard’s raid design team has been on a high since the end of Mists of Pandaria and isn’t coming back down any time soon. And to that I say — you go, you wonderful bastards you. I look forward to what nightmares they throw at us next.

One thing remains to talk about for Legion — the pacing. I feel like, despite its almost-breakneck release schedule for an MMO, Legion was paced exceptionally well. The disappointment of Broken Shore made the Tomb of Sargeras block feel longer than it should’ve, and in my opinion the gap between Antorus and pre-BfA content could’ve been a couple months shorter, but overall I’m happy with it. If Battle for Azeroth follows the same tick-tock of Raid Patch-Content Patch motion and solves some of the glaring issues I’ve pointed out, it could be an extremely successful and well-paced expansion.

Despite my complaints, I still feel overall Legion was a very fun and enjoyable time. Blizzard’s got a lot of lessons to learn, but also a whole lot to celebrate. Legion ended up being well-paced, smooth, and even overall had a very good story despite flaws. I’m cautiously optimistic for Battle for Azeroth. I feel like, with lessons learned from Legion, WoW could easily be in the best place it’s ever been. Let’s hope I’m right.