World of Warcraft: Legion review by Tyson
Overall
Rent
World of Warcraft's sixth expansion is better then several of the previous expansions but many design choices still hold back what could be a superb expansion. Much like the Warlords expansion I recommend that you play for a month to see the sights then come back as needed when new content becomes available.
Gameplay
I enjoyed how the Legion expansion started off with a bang. Right at the start we end up getting our butts kicked in a failed stand off with the Burning Legion. At this point all the races of Azeroth decided to regroup and fight back at the Burning Legion. This is where things get interesting with class halls that give something unique to each class. This is where much of the personalized story comes out during the expansion. I ended up finding the class halls to be very uneven in their approach. Some class halls have some great ways to get around the Broken Isles continent while others didn't. Some class halls let you use your mounts in them while others didn't. Some class halls have a great selection of champions that you can use as bodyguards in the Broken Isles while others didn't. Some of the Warlord of Draenor garrison mechanics carry over to class halls as well. Prepare to collect resources so you can have champions go on missions or use resources for class hall upgrades. And prepare for some horrible class hall upgrade wait times. Such as weeks for a single upgrade to finish. Sadly stuff like this wasn't very fun for me. Overall I found class halls to be a very mixed experience.
Along with the Class Halls comes Artifact Weapons. These are powerful weapons that are unique to each class and their spec. On one hand this is pretty cool having a weapon you use the whole expansion but it is a bit boring as well . Seeing every Retribution Paladin carrying around the Ashbringer gets visually boring and sort of ruins the story of you being the chosen one to wield such a powerful weapon. The Artifact Weapons use an interesting system of artifact power and relics to power up your weapon but this also gets boring by grinding out artifact power for days or more to get such small boosts like a 3% spell critical strike or a 1% increase in overall stamina.
I found the profession system to be very disappointing in Legion. Leveling up your professions becomes very time consuming now that you have a rank system on your recipes. So in order to keep leveling up your profession you need to level up ranks on your recipes which many can be only gotten from 110 content. Even ranking up recipes feels boring. All the ranks do is remove a bit of crafting materials. Why not have rank 3 pants with better stats then rank 1 pants. Combine that with just about every crafted recipe being taught from a quest reward and it quickly becomes very tedious to learn new recipes. So prepare to have a painful time to skill up professions this expansion.
Questing in WoW has been one of my favorite aspects of the game and thankfully Legion works well in this area. Each new zone has a specific story and faction that you work with which is nice. I did like how you can decide in which order you want to play each zone in but I didn't like how everything leveled up with you. Having everything level up with you can make getting from point A to point B very tedious at times. Once you hit level 110 you can activate world quests which activate once you enter a specific spot in a environment. These are very similar to the quest you did while leveling up and the world quest rewards are crazy good. Getting raid quality gear from 2 minutes of work is crazy. I hope that the developers fix this since this just kills any motivation I have for raiding or doing dungeons when I can get better gear by doing almost nothing.
Outside of questing I found the dungeon and raid design to be okay. I like how you can still do the various raids in the raid finder tool but if you want a better challenge and loot you can still get people together to run the higher difficulties. Also getting in and experiencing dungeons like the Halls of Valor of the Maw of Souls was very enjoyable. I didn't come away as impressed wit the raids but they were enjoyable. Still being able to get better if not the same quality of gear from world quests did kill a lot of the motivation I had to run the raids and dungeons.
The last thing I want to mention is the new class the Demon Hunters. This is a melee class that can do damage and tank roles. I liked how the class had its own starting area and started at level 98. I do want them to open up the class to more races as of right now you can only choose Night Elf or Blood Elf as a Demon Hunter
Control
I had no problems with the control setup of WoW. If you have a good keyboard and multiple button mouse then WoW will control like a breeze. After six expansions you will either like or hate the controls at this point.
Graphics
While I still enjoy the graphical look of WoW I didn't like that this expansion requires better hardware then ever before . If you could run Mists of Pandaria or Warlords of Draenor with a good framerate then prepare to have your PC struggle with this expansion. Framerate problems appears in a lot of places due to the higher quality textures and better environment geometry. Legion is one of those expansions where you will need to severally downgrade your graphic settings or upgrade your PC.
Sound
The audio portion of Legion is well done. I liked all the different voice acting that was used throughout the expansion. While some dialog is cringe worthy at times it at least sounds well. Background music is fantastically done as well.