- Author: Jim Franklin
- Date: November 23, 2016
- Updated: January 4, 2021
- Expansion: World of Warcraft
The Latest World of Warcraft expansion legion has been out for months now, and TheZombieChimp.com is yet to write a review. Sure we’ve done the best bits and the worst bits but not an actual review. Because WoW is an MMO I prefer to not review it straight away, but to wait until I have seen enough of the content to be able to give a full analysis. I have now played through enough of the Legion end game, so we’re all good.
This review comes for someone who has played World of Warcraft since its first release, so I have seen World of Warcraft in all of its many faces.
Storyline
We’ll start with the storyline of Legion, which is a continuation of the Burning Legion storyline of Warlords of Draenor. Once Archimonde was defeated at the Hellfire Citadel in WoD, Gul’dan escapes to Azeroth’s main timeline with a plan to open up another way for the Burning Legion to invade in even greater numbers than before. This is witnessed by Archmage Khadgar who warns of the inevitable invasion.
The rest of the story in brief includes you finding five Titan items which holds the power to the stop the Burning Legion’s invasion.
Novelty
This bit is about the biggest new or novelty things that Legion adds.
Artifact Weapons – Everybody gets a legendary mythical weapon based on their class and specification. As you quest you can level up the weapon making it even more powerful and unlocking new skills and effects. There are also a number of skins available per weapon.
Class Halls – Each class has a central location in a similar way that garrisons worked on WoD. These class halls are specific to your class and are hubs for recruiting troops, upgrading weapons and class quests.
Demon Hunters – The latest hero class to join World of Warcraft. Demon Hunters are twin-glaive wielding half-demon elves (Blood or Night). They have two specifications vengeance (tank) and havoc (damage) but wear only leather armour in both cases.
Questing
The bulk of the early part of the game is your questing, and Legion does a good job of bringing you through the story. One of the better things that Legion has brought to questing is that the zone you’re in will scale to your level. This means there are no easier zones to glide through. Your first zone should be just as much of a challenge as the last one. Suramar, the last zone is unlocked at level 110.
Each zone introduces you to the main faction of that zone as you adventure through it trying to find the Titan item. The main questline for that zone also ends in the dungeon associated with that area, so by questing you’re introduced to all the dungeons as well. There are a load of other side quests and areas to look at as well.
There are also your class quests, that albeit short make you feel that your class is doing something specific to help the work effort.
Crafting & Professions
Work has been put into crafting and the professions to try and bring them back to something that you want to spend time on. Each of the professions have quest chains that unlock recipes and every recipe has a number of stages or stars that mean you can make the item more efficiently.
However, the problem is one that has plagues WoW (and many other MMO’s) for quite a while. The scaling of the items is still not appropriate. By the time you’re at a good enough play level to properly collect the materials, you can only make stuff that is so far below your ilevel that there’s no point. It could help your alts certainly, but a profession should ultimately help out the main user, right?
Legion End Game
Once you’ve got to level 110 the Legion end game begins. What could basically be described as the standard grind for gear to get entry into the various raids and heroic dungeons all begin in earnest. Is Legion any different what have they done to change things?
Dungeons & Raiding
The format of the dungeons is certainly fairly standard, but there was nothing majorly wrong to change. Once you hit 110 you quest or do standard dungeons to get gear to go to the heroic dungeons, which will gear you for the raids and mythic difficulty dungeons.
The dungeons seem a little more fun than they did in Warlords of Draenor and it seems at least at the outset that a little more thought has gone into the mechanics of the boss fights and the feel of each dungeon. However, once you gear up, the mechanics still tend to go out of the window as everything becomes one big Tank ‘n’ Spank.
Raid-wise I get a bigger and more impressive feeling from the raids than before. Fighting through the Nightmare Dream and fighting the God of the Underworld, Helya help to add magnitude to the combat but even in LFR there doesn’t seem to any real sort of learning curve. Though this is more due to the way LFR plays than any fault of the raid mechanics themselves. Guild-only runs remain trickier as the guild is all learning the strategy at the same time.
World Quests
The world quests that are unlocked at level 110 are the answer to the question “What do I do if I don’t or can’t raid?” They’re also the primary way to get resources for your order, and ways to get upgrades for your weapon, and form the bulk of your non-raid Legion end game.
Each zone will always have a number of world quests. Each of these quests is connected to one of the major factions of Legion, and will give a reward, either gold, order resources, weapon power or crafting materials. These quests also range in difficulty between solo and group quests. Though due to the number of people doing these world quests, you usually don’t have any issue finding people to give you a hand.
Once a day you’ll get a quest where you’re asked to complete four world quests either in a given zone or of a given faction. Once you’ve done these quests you get a reward of around 1500xp for that faction and a chest that contains an item comparable to your current iLevel. This keeps the world quests relevant as there’s always a chance you’ll get something you can use all the way through the Legion end game.
About the Author
