Welfare Legendaries

I'm gonna bitch about Legion legendaries for a bit.  Won't you please join me.

*sets up a podium complete with Personal Spotlight, takes out note cards, taps them on podium, clears throat*

I am, to say the least, not a fan.

There are two good ways to do legendaries.  One, make them extremely rare and expensive to get.  Two, make them accessible to every player, but make them take a lot of time and effort to grind out.  Either of these makes something called a "legendary" feel ... well, legendary. 

Blizzard, you had legendaries nailed down alllll the way back in vanilla.  You went a bit into the weeds during BC, yes, but the Wrath and Cata legendaries were honestly pretty great.  Cata, for the record, had the best legendaries by far, in terms of effort-to-reward ratio.  Both of the quest chains were so cool, and the items themselves were really special.

Of course, the major drawback to Approach One is that only a small fraction of players will end up seeing the content.  Granted, a DPS staff and a healer mace will see pretty wide play, but the Fangs of the Father were for ... rogues, and only rogues.  Weird.

Anyway.  I get why this approach is suboptimal, from a "game design" perspective.  So that's why you do option 2, and make the legendary available to everyone who's willing to put in the time and effort.  I didn't end up getting either the cloak or the ring, because I really hate LFR, but that's okay -- I could have done if I wanted to, and so could anyone else.

To be worthy of the name and the power they bring, legendaries need to be either super rare or super hard to get.  Since I'm in general opposed to the RNG for things that actually affect gameplay, "super hard to get" seems the way to go.  And I think, Blizzard, you really nailed it down in Warlords. 

So why oh why did you fuck it up so hard?

Listen.  I know that you didn't want to do a super-hard legendary grind for Legion.  I know that that's what the artifacts are all about.  The artifacts are, in effect, the "legendary" for this expansion.  And that's cool, that's what it should be, the artifacts are a Big Deal.  But that just means you either leave the legendaries out, or you make them super duper rare, like they were in BC. 

You do not make them into what epics used to be.

The problem with legendaries as they are now is that they're common enough that encounters can be tuned around them, because if you don't, people will raid-stack to trivialize the content.  But since now you need a legendary (and not only a legendary, the right legendary) to bring the deeps, you effectively can't do the content without one. 

It wouldn't be so bad if some of the legendaries weren't so powerful for their class and spec.  If they weren't fifty ilvls, effectively two tiers, above everything else people have.  (My druid's first legendary drop, a week and a half after hitting 110, was a 120-level upgrade.  120 item levels.  That's not a tier, that's an expansion-level upgrade.)  But of course, if they weren't obscenely powerful, with game-breaking procs, you couldn't really call them "legendary." 

And the drop rate, ugh.  I do not, as a rule, have the best luck with RNGsus.  There have been some notable exceptions (*cough*Experiment 12-B in two consecutive runs*cough*), but as a rule I only get rare drops when I'm not looking for them.  So you can imagine my frustration, having run the Withered scenario every single time it's popped since September and still not having the hidden appearance for Truthguard or the fox mount.  My very first legendary this expansion dropped in mid-January, just a few days before 7.1.5 was released.  Four months of world quests and world bosses.  So it's a bit "salt in the wounds" that my druid, a throwaway character that I only leveled because owlkitty, got his first legendary a week and a half into 110 and his second the very next fucking day.  Hell, I had his second legendary before I even had owlkitty!

One of the ways in which I like EVE better than I like WoW is that in EVE, it's never really that hard to get the gear you want.  Most of it can be manufactured or earned through missions, and all of it can be bought and sold.  It's not really a model that would work within WoW's paradigm but at least it takes the randomness out of it.  Kind of like the old badges, or valor points, or what have you -- sooner or later you would get gear.

It's probably fair to say that I'm just salty because I don't have good luck with drops.  It's true, I'm salty because I have rotten luck.  But that doesn't make me wrong -- it just means I'm in a place to see the flaws.

I know that artifacts were supposed to fill the role of "legendary" in this expansion.  I just think that was a mistake.  I think artifacts are kind of a dud.  The flavor aspect I like, but the rest?  It's basically the pre-Mists talent system without any variety, and it makes quest rewards feel really boring.  All of those cool treasures lying around the world in Warlords?  Gone, in favor of, oh good, some more AP.

Artifacts are leveling that you have to do even after you hit max level, and legendaries are OP epics distributed by a cruel and capricious daemon.  It's like Blizzard took the worst of the two possible legendary gameplay systems and implemented them in the same expansion.  Nothin but love for you, Blizz, but this one was pretty fail.  Pret-ty fail.