In World of Warcraft, few things are ever more coveted than a legendary item. While this previous expansion has made legendaries a bit more of an esoteric concept, the rule remains throughout the rest of the game.
Legion took an interesting pass around the concept, making legendaries a much more plentiful and world-wide thing than ever before. Players were all but guaranteed one if they played enough, with each time they failed to drop increasing the future chances that they would.
With Battle for Azeroth, that hasn’t quite been the case. Instead, all players are given the legendary cloak Ashjra’kamas, Shroud of Resolve at the culmination of a questline, with its power growing through gameplay. Otherwise, not counting the Heart of Azeroth, legendaries were non-existent.
That wasn’t quite the popular move, though – players love grabbing their legendary Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker and wielding them into battle. Because of that, Blizzard intends to be returning the system in the upcoming Shadowlands expansion.
Just one problem – what’s the point of a legendary item if it’s weak?
[embed]https://twitter.com/Wowhead/status/1313965183405043714?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw[/embed]That seems to be the situation that the developers were in with their latest Shadowlands beta build, and it’s one that they’ve recognized without fan feedback needing to force it on them. In their latest announcement, they discussed tuning and how best to improve the balance of the items.
“We are currently in the process of tuning Legendary items, so in this latest Shadowlands Beta build, you may see many a number of Legendary effects have had their power reduced,” the developers write.
However, it seems that they accidentally undershot their goal and ended up turning the Legendary effects of weapons a bit too low. With the power so heavily diminished, the satisfaction from obtaining such an item is drastically diminished as well. Thankfully, Blizzard acknowledges this!
“We’ve recently had internal discussions about our tuning targets for Legendaries and concluded that we were aiming too low with respect to their power,” they continue in their statement, acknowledging the lowered power. “We’re working through another tuning pass on all of these items, and you should see further adjustments in an upcoming build.”
It’s great to see not only the transparency from Blizzard but also how quick they were to acknowledge that they were creating a system that was going to throw off balance and player satisfaction and moving to fix it. With any luck, their next tuning pass will be a bit closer to their goals.