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World of Warcraft: Legion review

On September 6, 2016 by Ash Meehan

For me, Legion marked a return to Blizzard Entertainment’s popular MMORPG, World of Warcraft. I originally started playing World of Warcraft shortly before the first expansion, The Burning Crusade, and I eventually stopped about halfway through the game’s third expansion, Cataclysm. Therefore, for me, Legion was all about seeing if it was worth playing World of Warcraft long-term again, and frankly, Legion left me feeling mixed. My experiences started strong, but after I hit the new level cap of 110, the positives began to erode as I spent my time waiting 30+ minutes to get into a dungeon and running around completing world quests.

So what does Legion offer? Legion offers a brand new class in the form of the Demon Hunter, the ability to wield legendary artefacts, levelling changes, run an order hall, increased the level cap, six new zones, ten new dungeons, three new raids, improved PVP and more.

The main focus of this new expansion is the Burning Legion who have once again set their eyes on Azeroth, the Legion has established a beachhead on Azeroth in an area known as the Broken Shore, and so as one of Azeroth’s greatest heroes you must gather your allies and defeat the Burning Legion. To defeat the Legion you must got to the Broken Isles and collect the pillars of creation ancient artefacts that will help Azeroth defeat the Legion. In terms of setup the story is interesting, a powerful foe is coming to destroy the world and you need to gather important objects scattered around unknown lands, but once you get past the premise Legion feels flat. To me Legion has the potential to be interesting, but the story isn’t told extremely well, for example, we see remnants of the Alliance and Horde hatred that was invigorated after the Horde seemingly left the Alliance to die on the Broken Shore, but nothing really develops. To me in terms of story, Legion is great from a lore perspective, but from a story perspective, it wavers between poor and decent.

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So moving away from the story let’s talk about the five of the six new zones. What makes the new zones in Legion interesting is how Blizzard decided to make levelling up in them. In previous expansions, you would follow a linear progression of zone-to-zone as you level up, but in Legion Blizzard has decided to allow you to go to any of the four levelling zones and have the zone scale to your level, for example, if you are level 104 in Stormheim you will be fighting level 104 enemies. Personally, I liked zone scaling as it makes levelling more challenging.

Apart from the Legion invasion of Azeroth and the new zones, another major addition to the game is the Order Hall. The Order hall is a class specific area where you train and work with champions of your class in an attempt to defeat the Legion. Since you are training champions of your class that means you are their superiors, the reason for this is due to your deeds from the previous expansions and the new class-specific artefact weapon. These weapons are the symbols of your class and include the likes of the Ashbringer for Paladins and the Doomhammer for Shaman. These artefacts are special as they will be your main weapons for the entire expansion as each artefact weapon has their own progression system. The progression system on artefact weapons involves unlocking traits by spending artefact power that you can collect by completing missions, killing mobs and more.

Now while I said you train and work with champions, what does that mean? Well if you played previous WoW expansions, the Order Hall is essentially a scaled down Garrison. In the Order hall, you can recruit soldiers and send them along with champions out on missions to gain experience, items and more. Apart from this, you can research your artefact to increase the amount of artefact power you can gain, and upgrade your hall. While the Order hall does contain similarities to the Garrison in Warlords of Draenor the Order Hall is less intensive as it mostly exists to further the expansion’s story and as such it is only a place you need to only occasionally visit.

So, while you are exploring the world as you level is there any outdoor content apart from questing? The answer to that is yes. As you explore the new zones, you can encounter rare mobs that can drop pets, artefact power and new armour, going past rare mobs there are also chests containing artefact power. Once you hit max level there is even more outdoor content available in the form of world quests. World quests involve you travelling the zones of the Broken Isles completing special quests that appear on your map, these range from killing x number of mobs to killing powerful elite enemies. The max level zone of Suramar also has an exclusive piece of outdoor content that involves gathering “Ancient Mana”, gathering this mana is important to the zone’s story as it stops the Nightfallen from exhibiting symptoms of drug/mana withdrawal.

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So, while I’ve talked about what you do while levelling and exploring the zones, let’s talk about the dungeons, but before that a quick line about the combat. Combat is Legion is very much the same as the previous expansions, so do not expect any major changes the game’s combat system, although some animations have being improved. Now back to dungeons. In total, there are ten dungeons, five of which are for levelling while the remaining five are max level only dungeons, and yes, there are heroic and mythic versions of each dungeon. In regards to dungeon difficulty they ranged from easy to challenging, the difficulty really depended on how competent the party is and how quickly they could react to a bosses ability, but add-ons such as Deadly Boss Mods makes that a lot easier than it should be. For those wondering about raids, they are currently not available yet.

So at the new max level of 110 what is there to do? Well, there are the previously mentioned dungeons, outdoor content, Order hall missions, and raids (once they are unlocked). Apart from what I just mentioned, there is reputation grinding and completing quests in Suramar, and of course sitting around doing nothing. In the end, the max level content of Legion is similar to that of any previous expansion end game content; however, Blizzard does make an effort to make max level content to be more diverse and enjoyable experience.

Now before my conclusion let’s look at the graphics and audio. Legion offers improved draw distance and improved stability on older computers. My computer is rather old and despite some frame rate drops in crowded areas, I managed to run the game at a smooth frame rate. In terms of audio, the overall sound quality is nice and there is a lot of voice acting, although some characters sound incredibly dull.

Conclusion

World of Warcraft: Legion is a decent expansion with an interesting premise and content. However, many grind heavy elements of World of Warcraft still remain.

SCORE: 8/10

Pros Cons
+ Outdoor content – Despite an interesting premise, the story is mostly forgettable
+ Zone scaling – Max level content gets repetitive quickly
+ Artefact weapon
Developer Publisher Genre Rating Platform Release date
Blizzard Entertainment Blizzard Entertainment MMORPG 12+ PC August 30, 2016

*A review code was provided by the game’s publisher.*

For more information on World of Warcraft: Legion, visit http://wowlegion.com/.

Author: Ash Meehan

Hi, I’m the creator of SG Gaming Info. When I’m not working on my writing or creating content for this site’s YouTube channel, I like to relax and enjoy character driven story games.


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