World of Warcraft: Legion Endgame Review

Introduction

I have spent a lot of time playing World of Warcraft as evidenced by my 259 mounts, 684 pets, and over 22,000 achievement points (before Legion). I am no stranger to this game and thus my review will primarily focus on what is new to Legion endgame rather than be a review of the game in its entirety.

Within the game I play as a Death Knight. I have been a Death Knight since I started playing World of Warcraft at the start of Wrath of the Lich King. I raided some in Wrath, and then all through Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria, and Warlords of Draenor. I will be raiding again in Legion, which will be the subject of another review.

Also, this review is going to be a bit longer than my normal reviews due to a much greater number of features than in most other games. Persistent online games tend to have a much greater range of experiences than single player games which are usually more focused on delivering a specific experience.

Something to keep in mind while reading is that things may have changed since this review was written. Some issues raised may no longer exist. Online games such a World of Warcraft are constantly being patched and updated to fix existing bugs and also to streamline the rough patches.

First 15

Ding! (Yes, I used to play Everquest.)

At last I’m level 110. Through some very rare timings I actually hit max level after my champions returned from a mission which rewarded XP to my character. By this point I’d cleared almost all of the quests available to me, so I was definitely ready to be done leveling and get into the endgame.

Now I’m being told to go see Kadghar. He ends up sending me to Suramar (a max level zone in the Broken Isles) where I’m to meet with the Nightfallen. He also gives me a quest to get friendly with all of the factions (except for the Wardens), one of which is the Nightfallen. I’m already honored with all of the factions except for the Nightfallen from all of the quests I did while leveling. So to Suramar I go.

I meet a dying Night Elf who tells me about the fall of her city during a beautifully done cutscene. Following that she starts giving me quests to help establish a refuge for the Nightfallen.

At this point it all feels like just another quest chain, the same as all of the other ones I did while leveling up. Sometimes I wonder why Blizzard even bothers raising the level cap each expansion (though being able to go back and solo old dungeons/raids is nice). Maybe this will be different somehow.

Story

The story surrounding the Nightfallen is extremely well done. Players must infiltrate Suramar City, eventually through the use of a disguise, in order to help bolster a group of rebels who wish to rise up and expel the demons from their city. The rebels range from true believers to citizens who have simply seen too much death and disregard from the elite to one individual who only helps you because you pay him in Ancient Mana (the special currency of the zone). Each quest helps to paint a darker and darker picture of a once great nation now mostly at the mercy of corrupt leaders and the demons who corrupted them. Sometimes you are sent to take out key leaders, other times to plant false evidence, or even to attack the demons directly at the nearby Felsoul Hold. So far I’ve enjoyed the Nightfallen storyline and look forward to seeing where Blizzard ultimately takes it.

After reaching max level I got to witness the remainder of the Death Knight class storyline, and quite frankly I am very concerned. I won’t spoil it, but there were a lot of things that I felt were simply wrong with the whole thing. In my last review I voiced concerns about the storyline while earning the three artifact weapons, and sadly I feel like those concerns were not only justified but now I have a whole host of new ones. Keep in mind though that this is specific to Death Knights. A lot of my guild mates are enjoying their class storylines, but I feel that the Death Knight storyline is going way off track from what it truly means to be a Death Knight.

Interface

World quests, the new replacement for daily quests, have a very simple UI that works very well. Anywhere at all, including when you’re not on the Broken Isles, players can open their map and check out which world quests are active to see if there are any they care about. My only complaint (and this is a small one) is that the interface doesn’t show exactly how much reputation you will gain with a faction. But other than that, the interface is clean and clear.

In my last review about leveling up I highlighted just how much better the game is now that mobs are shared tag. Having said that, I’m starting to see an increase in incidents where players will simply tag a mob someone else is fighting with some instant cast spell while running by and then, rather than help kill the mob, continue on so that they can tag more mobs that they won’t help kill in order to quickly finish a world quest. Blizzard might want to look into making a few changes to discourage this practice such as possibly requiring players be within casting range of a mob when it dies. That said, it may not be worth the potential frustration to legitimate players when a mob charges out of casting range and then dies just to curtail the actions of a few. The practice of tagging and then running, while certainly frustrating, doesn’t create such a massively negative impact on other players as to require some sort of change. It’s just something I would recommend Blizzard keep an eye on.

Gameplay

World quests are awesome! They are a replacement for the daily quest system from past expansions and are easily one of the best new features for Legion. Essentially what it boils down to is that at any time players can open their map and view a number of “hotspots” where quests are currently active in each zone. Players then navigate to that area where they do a quest which rewards them with gold, Order Hall resources, or even equipment. More importantly though, each quest provides the player with reputation towards a specific faction, usually determined by the zone in which the world quest happened. The nicest thing about them is that players can see the reward for doing each world quest before deciding which quests they wish to pursue. There is also a daily faction cache available for doing any 4 quests from a specific faction. Players earn one new faction quest a day and can hold up to 3 of these. This means players with less time to play can skip a few days if needed without missing out on a cache. Early on I experienced a rather unfortunate bug where some world quests did not show up on the map, but Blizzard seems to have corrected that problem. All in all the world quest system is incredibly smart and just feels so much better than daily quests.

Not content to simply deliver us world quests, Blizzard has gone a step further and added two new items that really help to make world questing even more enjoyable. Since flying is disabled on the Broken Isles, getting from one world quest to another can be a little exhausting. To alleviate this, players are given a whistle with an extremely short cooldown that can almost instantly transport the player to the nearest flight point. The other item is a separate hearthstone that will take players back to Dalaran. Due to its conveniences and plethora of portals for traveling the world, Dalaran is where all players would have set their hearthstone. By giving players an additional hearthstone that already does that, it gives players the freedom to set their hearthstone wherever they feel it will be most relevant to them. These two items do wonders for making world quests more enjoyable and fun even despite the lack of mobility from not being able to fly.

Now, having just expounded upon the glory that is world quests, I want to talk about the one glaring issue with world quests, and that is world quests for professions. World quests for gathering professions (Herbalism/Mining/Skinning) are fine. Once every 3 days max level characters with a particular profession can do a world quest to earn a rare crafting material. This limited supply of materials helps keep them rare and thus makes them much more valuable rather than having their price hit rock bottom almost immediately as it has in the past due to a combination of overzealous gatherers and bots. This affects players leveling crafting professions since now they need to consider the sale cost of the item they make to try to offset the cost of the rare materials. So all in all I like what they’ve done with the gathering professions. It’s the crafting professions that have a problem.

Crafting professions in Legion have 3 ranks for each recipe. The 3 rank system I really like, except for the fact that each level has a different skill range. What I mean by this is that a recipe at rank 1 might go from orange (guaranteed skill up) to yellow (high chance for skill up) at 720. But, the rank 2 version will change from orange to yellow at 730. And the rank 3 version at 740 as an example. For most recipes that create a piece of equipment, the rank 3 version either requires exalted with a faction (which will take weeks if not months to reach) or for a specific world quest to appear. The problem with the world quests is you have no control over when it spawns or which one spawns. And if you should miss a day of playing World of Warcraft, then you could miss it. If all rank 3 did was lower the number of materials required, then I wouldn’t mind. But because it also affects the skill rating of an item, players who enjoy focusing on their professions may find themselves waiting weeks or months for the right world quest to appear so they can continue. Personally, I would like to see all recipes have only a single skill rating regardless of rank. As for those with reputation requirements, that leads me into my next point.

Reputation is fun for your main character. I actually do like slowly but steadily working my way up to exalted, but it absolutely sucks to even just consider my other characters. I know for a fact that I’m simply not going to be able to get some rank 3 recipes on my alts because just the thought of getting that character to exalted is enough to make me want to quit the game altogether. I don’t understand the mindset Blizzard has where they think it would be fun to have to hit exalted again after doing it with one character. Even in Mists of Pandaria when factions offered an item players could buy at Revered that doubled all reputation gains with that faction, it still sucked to grind out reputation on alts. Given that players already have to treat each of the different specializations as an alt (I’ll go into more detail on this below), making players also have to re-earn the exalted rank on another character is simply too much. I would like to see Blizzard implement something like a Writ of Introduction, which is bind on account, that can be bought at Exalted and mailed to an alt. The Writ of Introduction will instantly set that character to exalted with the faction from which the item was purchased.

It turns out the Nightfallen quest line is, as I suspected, handled a bit different and feels similar to Domination Point (Lion’s Landing for the Alliance) back in Mists of Pandaria. Players gain a decent amount of reputation from the quest lines, but then they must also supplement that with reputation earned doing World Quests. At certain reputation checkpoints players are sent off on quests that continue the storyline of the Nightfallen. Eventually, players gain access to two new dungeons that are Mythic difficulty only. I really like this method of handling reputation, except for (as I mentioned above) the idea of having to do all of this again on another character kills any desire I have to try to play more than one character. I’ve already suggested a method to counter such a detrimental feeling, so I will continue with my review.

One part of the Nighfallen questline is the Withered Army Training scenario. Now, the idea behind this scenario is excellent. It’s a clever use of the game’s mechanics to create a unique experience the involves a measure of risk and reward. The problem with it is this scenario practically goes out of its way to highlight exactly how bad World of Warcraft’s pet AI really is. I personally don’t play an Unholy Death Knight because I cannot stand having to deal with pets in this game. (As a counterpoint, I play, and enjoy, a Druid in Guild Wars 2 which does have a pet. So it’s not that I hate pets in general, I just hate them in World of Warcraft.) And the withered are sort of the embodiment of everything that can go wrong. The biggest problem is the withered are constantly aggroing extra mobs, and then when you push the button that increases their attack damage, half of them stop attacking at all. Other times withered will run off just to pull some random mob that you in no way wanted to pull. It just feels like you spend the entire scenario dealing with their idiocy and protecting them from mobs that are easily soloable. Also, the withered only have a normal movement speed, meaning if you use any sort of dash type ability then you run the risk of outranging your withered which causes them to despawn. The main issue here is that the withered need to not attack mobs that aren’t already aggroed to you. Also, the berserker withered have a taunt which I wish I could disable since it practically guarantees that they are dead by the time I reach the end of the scenario. And finally, while you can find upgrades for your withered, sadly an out of combat movement speed boost is not one of them. The Withered Army Training is a very cool idea but some absolutely dreadful AI prevents it from being the enjoyable experience that it could be. Also, since all medium and large treasure chests are one time only, there’s something really unsatisfying about getting to the end and only having the single big chest to open even though you cleared the whole instance. Then again, it’s nice not to have to backtrack at the end to send chests back to be opened (since you should never send back chests until after you’ve cleared everything).

There is a second more minor problem with world quests when it comes specifically to PvP world quests. The rewards for PvP world quests are tied to your honor level. This means that the higher your honor level, the better the rewards. The problem is, there’s nothing special about PvP gear compared to regular gear. So when I go on a normal world quest the rewards are item level 830 to 845. But for a PvP world quest the rewards are all item level 805, which is some rather strong demotivation for wanting to run them. The idea here, I imagine, is to push players who normally only do PvE content towards at least trying out PvP content. But with the rewards always being subpar unless you’ve already done PvP, I feel like it falls well short of its intended goal. The simple fix would be to base the rewards on the player’s current item level and to remove the need for honor level before players are allowed to get gear that might actually matter.

Artifact Power is, in a way, a replacement for leveling once you reach max level. Players gain items that provide Artifact Power for doing just about everything from world quests to dungeons to PvP. The system would work great except for one simple design decision that has a massively detrimental effect on everything. Artifact Power gains can only be applied to one artifact weapon at a time rather than to all of your artifact weapons. I cannot for the life of me understand why this was the decided upon. What this ultimately means is that players are either locked into one particular spec or else they must forfeit any and all Artifact Power they applied to a spec they are switching away from. This is so incredibly punishing to players who might want to try out a different spec that it borders on absurd. In addition, players who wish to run more than one spec, usually a DPS who sometimes will switch to healing if a raid encounter calls for an extra healer, are faced with two equally bad choices. They can either focus primarily on one spec’s artifact weapon so they are excellent at one thing and very subpar at the other. Or they can level both together which makes them decent at both but not as good as they could be if they had focused solely on the artifact weapon they are using for the current encounter. This can make them feel like they are holding back the raid. Again, I cannot stress enough how awful this design is. In essence, Blizzard has created a scenario in which your primary character is also considered your alt. Something that makes it so much harder to then actually have an alt. No matter how I look at it, I just can’t see any upside to this setup. I suspect Blizzard is trying to make sure that players don’t reach a point where they’ve maxed out all of their artifact weapons (and thus make Artifact Power useless), but the resulting situation is so much worse than that eventuality could ever be. Here is what I’d like to see as a solution. First, all Artifact Power is now applied equally to all artifact weapons, even if the player hasn’t collected that weapon yet. Getting all artifact weapons to level 34 (at which point every trait is unlocked except for the hidden one) will take the same amount of Artifact Power as it does currently to get a single artifact weapon to level 34. Then, Blizzard can increase the amount of artifact power needed to gain each level of the hidden trait (which is only visible once all other traits have been unlocked) so that the amount of artifact power required to max out that trait is equal to what it would take to max out all three artifact weapons currently. There is the downside that it will take players far longer to max out their artifact weapon for any one spec then it will currently, but I feel the benefit of being able to swap specs freely will more than make up for this. And if Blizzard feels it is taking players too long to max out their artifact weapons, then they can always reduce the amount of Artifact Power needed to level the hidden trait.

As part of the continued class quest players gain access to the remaining champions for use to send out on missions. For the most part the missions system works well. The missions require some clever combinations of champions and minions and I feel like the rewards make it all worth doing. The addition of the Legion Companion App for iPhone/Android is an excellent addition to the Legion experience. The one major problem I’ve encountered with Order Hall missions is when it comes to upgrading and managing the champions’ item levels. The trick, I now know, is to upgrade all of their item levels together slowly. Unfortunately, I had access to a quest with rewarded a Mythic dungeon quest so I mistakenly upgraded two of my champions quickly in order to do the mission before it disappeared. Not only have I been regretting it ever since, but the reward from doing the quest wasn’t even an upgrade by the time I got it. The reason for my regret is that once you upgrade even just a single champion, the item level requirement of the missions available increases to match. The problem of course is I now only have 2 champions who can do such missions, and the other 3 or 4 are too low item level to do anything. Some missions offer items to upgrade item level, but they tend to always be the item level of your highest champion. On my max level Druid alt, I’ve made sure to not upgrade anyone’s item level and I’m having a much easier time gathering upgrades and completing missions. My Death Knight does have access to an NPC that will build me champion items over time in exchange for Order Hall resources, which should be the perfect solution. The problem with that is I’m constantly getting some rather useless champion equipment rather than the armor sets I need to increase their item level. My suggestion for solving this problem is simply to adjust the algorithm so that quests which reward item level increases are setup so that they can be completed by the champion with the lowest item level (not including inactive champions). This way players won’t trap themselves into a scenario where they don’t have the item level necessary to complete the quests that give them the armor sets they need to increase the item level of their champions.

This is more of a small aside, but I wish you could assign an inactive champion as a combat ally rather than having to use up one of your 5 active slots. I like the extra abilities provided by the combat ally mechanic and it’s a great way to level up your champion at the same time. I just wish it didn’t interfere with doing missions. Again, not a huge complaint, but would be a nice quality of life change.

Conclusion

You will enjoy endgame Legion if you enjoy playing in a world that constantly feels alive where there is always something to do if you’re looking for an adventure. Between world quests, dungeons, and professions there is always some goal to strive for every time you log on.

You will not enjoy endgame Legion if you don’t enjoy grinding at all even if it is given to you in a very neat package. Gear will improve slowly over time, piece by piece, and you are going to need mountains of artifact power to max out your weapon even with the periodic boosts.

All told Legion is a huge step forward in terms of how endgame content should be handled. There are lots of different systems all of which mesh together into a rather impressive whole. That said, things are far from perfect and certainly there are some adjustments that need to be made. But, if Blizzard can tighten up the holes in a few of their designs, then Legion will be a big improvement to World of Warcraft leaving players excited for what comes next.