World of Warcraft Legion Review

I was a little bit reluctant to take World of Warcraft as a review at first, it probably has something to do with the last time that I was introduced to this demonic game where it absorbed 3 years of my life and left me in a pit of despair, desperately seeking approval from guild mates and with no actual real friends in life, but hey, at least my druid was capped out on raid gear! Still, it’s been a while since I’ve been on WoW, ever since the early beginnings of Mists of Pandaria when I created my monk panda and decided to spend every penny I had on it and realise I hated it…

Anyone with any gaming knowledge will probably have heard of, if not played World of Warcraft at some point in their gaming lives. It’s been out for more years than most gamers have been born and has produced a string of expansions, a ridiculous amount of money and, well in recent times it’s own full feature film. It’s created by Blizzard and the new expansion was released back on 31^st August, the new one of course being Legion. Unfortunately for now, WoW is only out for PC, despite my many petitions, but hey, maybe one day it can drain several more years of my life as a PS4 game.

So as I mentioned previously, I haven’t really played since Mists of Pandaria, so I missed quite a bit when it came to the Warlords of Draenor but fortunately you get a nice little boost whenever you pre-purchase an expansion so I was able to skip pretty much all of that and go right ahead to transforming into my almighty bear form and regaling my girlfriend of tales when my friend Phil tried to tank in WoW. Unfortunately, whilst Mists was good, it didn’t really appeal to me, thus leading me to ultimately leave, however I’ve heard some good things about Legion so I was pretty excited to brush off my dusty druid and get going.

Much to my surprise, Legion is actually a pretty good expansion. Those of you with previous expansion experience will probably have been like myself and expected the servers to completely conk out when it came to game release, but everything actually ran relatively smoothly, so it looks like Blizzard has finally understood the needs of gamers where a minute without a video game is a minute in reality, which let’s face it, just pure sucks.

Like any WoW expansion, most of the changes to other classes were actually introduced slightly before the actual expansion release (in the pre-patch if you want to be technical) and there were quite a few changes to all of the classes. Druids got new mastery and quite a significant change to the boomkin form, most classes tank / healer variations dropped their resource gain (I.e. monk tanks and healers lost their chi) and Shaman’s got a sexy new way to build up some badass damage. Every single class has pretty much changed in some shape or form, with some of them being very significant, whilst other’s only a little bit.

Whilst I’m on the pre-patch subject, WoW also offered quite a significant amount of pre-expansion duties, the most amazing of which being Invasions. I re-joined roughly about 3-4 days before the expansion was released, so unfortunately I did not get to benefit the most from it, but from members of a random guild I joined, most of them had levelled alts (other characters) up to the max cap at the time (100) just by doing Invasions.

Invasions are a pretty good way to pass the time, and how it works is that once every 2 hours, 3 spots within each island start to become invaded. You then have to go to those areas and fight off thousands of demons. The Invasion is broken into 4 different sections, the first to protect a local area, the second to beat 3 bosses and a load of adds (little monsters), the third to scout the area and defeat as many monsters or destroy as many of the demons portals as you can, and the fourth to beat a big bad boss. Every step rewards you with a treasure chest containing a pretty nicely priced item which can also be used for transforming your gear to a more badass version and with a massive chunk of experience (a lot of experience!). Don’t see this as an easy task though, each one of those demons can and will destroy you if you get hit, so it’s not as plain and simple as you might think. Further more, the demons seem to scale with your level, so if you’re level 100, you’ll remove the same % of HP as say a level 10 (or at least I think you do…).

Invasions is a pretty awesome way to kill some time and brought a very nice feel to a game which can otherwise feel a bit unsociable if you’re not with friends. It’s pretty exciting game play when you’re surrounded by 100 other player’s who are flat out destroying a 100 foot tall boss. Unfortunately though, these have since been removed, but I’m hoping they could make a come back in future patches.

I can’t really go into Legions without mentioning the thing that everyone was so excited about and that’s the new class: Demon Hunter. These badasses have the ability to tank and DPS and whilst I didn’t get to play the tank version, the DPS was very enjoyable. What makes them so enjoyable to play is their fast paced and mobile based skills which constantly have you ducking and diving, slamming into enemies and ripping them apart with a pair of fell daggers. Whilst they can be a little bit difficult to get used to in gameplay, they are very fun, especially when you finally figure out what you’re doing and they will make a welcome addition to the world of Azeroth (and beyond!).

When it comes to new expansions, WoW has always been the same old, same old. You move to area number 1 or number 2 which is for levels 80-82. Then you move to area 3 which is for levels 82-84, then area 4 etc. It gets a little bit boring after a while, especially when levelling alts as your forced to keep playing through the same areas. Fortunately though Legion completely removes that. You have several different zones that you can choose from and each one scales to your level so you can start wherever you want to. Further more there’s lots of variation within the worlds and you don’t have the ability to gain flight until you actually complete all of the different areas on foot (coming out in a future patch I’m told). The tedious grind from being in the same areas over and over again has pretty much vanished and it’s nice to see WoW taking note of what the players want and doing something about it. I really hope they stick with this theme going forward as it’s very welcome from me.

WoW Legion also adds to the never-ending story of the WoW universe. When playing as Horde in Legion, you’re pretty much given a massive plot change right from the beginning which affects the rest of the story line. Even the alliance get a huge change in their storyline. I won’t spoil anything by giving it away, but it’s definitely a ‘WOW’ moment (no pun intended!).

When you first begin WoW Legion, you’ll be met by an NPC associated with your class who will give you a sexy new quest, follow it because it leads to some pretty nice things. About half way through the quest you’ll be prompted to choose a sexy new artefact weapon. These are weapons which are specifically designed for your class and your specialisation. For example, the druid weapon for feral druid was a sexy pair of claws, which when wielded would change your cute little kitten into a badass tiger which could rip apart Odin himself. As you level up and gain achievements though, you can also receive new rewards which change the way that your artefact weapon looks and make it look even badass.

Not only this, but as you go around questing you will be given weapons and relics which can be used to power up your artefact weapon. Whilst WoW doesn’t have “new skills” as such, you use the quest rewards to power up your artifact weapon, once it’s high enough then you can purchase new passive skills which improve upon your current skills. For example, one of the feral druid skills increases the damage of your main bleed skill by 7%, so you will become stronger just by questing.

Those of you with previous experience in expansions will know that every expansion brings a new level cap, typically by approximately 10 levels. Legion is no different, as your new level cap is now officially 110, a welcome change from level 100 which just looks a bit odd. On top of this, the stats on equipment now have more “bang for their buck” so now 10 stamina will give you significantly more HP than it did in the previous patch, this just removes the element of having 50,000,000+ INT on items. The only downfall now is that you have many players with 1.5million HP+ which is just downright crazy!

WoW has also included new dungeons and raids which are actually pretty interesting and fun. I never really got into the WoW dungeon mentality and only really entered raids a couple of times, but they were actually pretty exciting! Whilst I don’t really have much to say about it, it’s still a pretty interesting and very good way to spend some time in WoW.

Let’s talk a little bit about “Honour Talents”. This is a new aspect to Legion which I’m very much a fan of. Whilst in previous versions of the game, PvP was just pretty much used for ganking the hell out of anyone and feeling pretty badass when you destroyed some noob with your level 19 rogue, but Honour Talents now allow you to further level up and add personalisation to the way that you play PVP. Each set of honour talents is different for each class, so be prepared to learn a few of them to stop yourself being so surprised when a Monk kicks your face off from 20 yards away!

So I’m really running out of words for this game, but really after 1800 words I think it’s probably best to wrap it up as I’m sure most of you are asleep by now. I’ve been a player for many of the World of Warcraft expansions, experiencing the expansions of Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysms and Mists and now Legions and I can honestly say that Legion is a very good addition to the World of Warcraft universe.

It’s not only fun to play but massively adds to the lore and storyline of World of Warcraft, changes lots of classes for positive and realistic gameplay, adds more to the general ebb and flow of WoW with additions to dungeons and raiding and adds a huge amount of further personalisation to each character, so you can begin playing your character in different ways to suit your own playstyle.  Overall the game is great and if you’re an ex player like myself I would strongly recommend going back to get a taste of the wonders that is Legion.