World of Warcraft: Preparing For Legion
Seasoned World of Warcraft players know this wonderful time in an expansion’s life cycle: everything you’ve done up to this point is almost worthless. It’s pre-patch! This time it brings easily acquirable gear, invasions, and a heck of a lot of demons. In this case, The Legion are back.
And so I’m back (from outer space). Going back to WoW last week I realised it was the longest break I’d had from the game. You see, WoW players don’t “quit”; they take “breaks”, and this was the longest I’d had from WoW since I started playing way back in February 2008. Warlords of Draenor just didn’t do it for me. I only had one level 100, and the idea of going back through Draenor levelling was one met with disdain. Now, I’ve got six – even though one is a Demon Hunter and the other the free 100 boost you get – so I’ve got three new level 100s thanks to the biggest addition in the pre-patch which I’ll talk about later. The Garrison in Draenor was forced so heavily onto the player that just thinking about going through that malarkey for another character was tiring. Unfortunately, Draenor followed the trend of less end-game content with each expansion. As a player who had a plethora of raids and heroic dungeons in Wrath of the Lich King, it’s so disheartening that Draenor only had three raids and eight dungeons in comparison to Lich King’s nine raids – including all the one boss raids – and 16 dungeons.
But pre-patch has come bringing with it some new content – hooray! – preparing players for the next expansion, Legion. Without a doubt I was a bit lost coming back: I didn’t know any of the changes, and I didn’t know what invasions were. Every class has had major changes once again; mostly, Blizzard have further trimmed down spell wise again much like they did for Draenor. Speaking to guildies and friends, some classes are now boring – some specs now only have about three spells in their main rotation. Other specs have had some much needed life sewn into them, or changed completely, like Rogues’ Combat spec is now Outlaw. What I’ve been doing is playing across all my characters and trying many specs. For DPS I’ve been looking for specs that have a good number of spells in their main rotation as they’re the most fun – currently I’m enjoying Fire mage and Retribution Paladin. Those classes with three or four spells as their main rotation, I ain’t a fan of that.
The main content brought in pre-patch are the invasions. Currently, every two hours the Legion rain down from what look like spaceships in zones across Kalimdor and The Eastern Kingdoms. It has been nice going to zones I haven’t visited in years. These invasions are showing up at Dun Morogh, Tanaris, Hillsbrad Foothills, Westfall, Azshara, and Northern Barrens. Invasions are done in four stages with a lot of players brought together cross-realm to help fight off The Legion. At the end of stage two and four you get a chest – these chests are great ways to get max level characters geared ready for Legion as they will give you gear scaled on your level. They’re also a great way to level any and all characters. Unfortunately, the experience given from invasions is in constant flux having given a buff, then a nerf, then buffed again, but you can still travel to one and go afk and get a good amount of experience. If you take part in the invasions and solo mobs you can get very good experience. When invasions first released, players went around in groups to take out the boss mobs during the stage where the entire zone is swarmed. It was nice seeing the Alliance and Horde actually banding together to protect this zone; now though with the change, everyone goes off on their own for experience. If anyone comes in to help you take out a mob it hinders the amount of experience you get completely nullifying the idea to band together.
Pre-patch always brings a quest line to introduce the expansion, and Legion’s pre-patch quest starts with The Broken Shore. Now, if The Broken Shore is anything to go on, then Legion could be the expansion we’ve been waiting for. Blizzard have said they were gearing up for this expansion with the previous two setting up Legion in terms of story and tech they wanted to bring into WoW. That technology is shown off in The Broken Shore and across the invasions. The quest line essentially puts you into a raid to fight the Legion. Don’t worry, I won’t spoil anything and it’s kind of nice being able to say that about WoW; The Broken Shore doesn’t hold back punches with big changes to story and characters which is something players should experience for themselves. But in this raid as it were, WoW uses its new tech that allows the health and damage of enemies to be flexible. The more players doing that quest at one time, the more health the enemies have. Now that’s not entirely new to World of Warcraft as that tech is in flexible raids, but now character level plays a role as well. This happens during invasions as well and very cleverly at that – a level 1 can do invasions as can level 100’s and the tech works so well that the level 1 could potentially be more effective than the level 100 during the invasion. At times, my damage meter was showing a level 38 doing more DPS and damage than my level 95 because of how the flexible tech is working – I see the mob with a certain number of health, that level 38 sees it with less health, and on their screen I’m doing DPS relative to their level.
Also made available in the pre-patch are the new hero class Demon Hunters – or, the class that will fill 50% of a raid by themselves. You start at 98 as a Demon Hunter and make your way to 100 while going through the story as to how and why Demon Hunters join the Alliance and Horde to defeat The Legion. I’m not a huge fan of them even though their double jump and glide is pretty fun. Demon Hunters don’t really have that many damaging abilities right now which is a shame, but the idea of levelling one to 110 with five talents to choose along the way is pretty exciting. The quests for the Demon Hunters seem to happen at the same time as the Horde and Alliance are fighting elsewhere – you arrive as a Demon Hunter at either Orgrimmar or Stormwind just as the given faction have come back from The Broken Shore. Definitely check out Demon Hunters – I mean why wouldn’t you? Maybe even start by playing a Demon Hunter when coming back for pre-patch. Oh, and they can dual-wield warglaives and they look pretty sweet.
In terms of preparing for Legion by having a decent amount of gold? Invasions are pretty frequent and the gear sells for enough that doing those at every opportunity could be worth it though they would certainly grow stale very quickly. On top of that, invasions give a currency known as Nethershards that allows players to buy certain pieces of gear, but more importantly a Felbat, I choose you! – a pet which can sell for about 1500g on the auction house. Doing invasions efficiently enough means that after two invasions you could afford one of those Felbats. You can still go back and do 25 player heroic raids as well to make some decent money – I tend to do a Firelands 25 player heroic every week for a reliable and weekly gold injection.
With invasions being the main pre-patch experience, they have inevitably become boring very quickly. Hotfixes keep coming in to change the experience gained from them, meaning their value for levelling are always changing. Further into the pre-patch the invasions will become more frequent meaning everything I’ve already outlined on their usefulness will only get better. Luckily, the ramping up of the invasions and more quests to come leading up to Legion make the pre-patch seem worthwhile and almost exciting to be a part of. The Broken Shore quest line shows Blizzard may not be afraid to pull heavy punches throughout Legion, and it’s oddly exciting – I’ve not been genuinely interested in the story of an expansion since Lich King. It’s also nice to have an expansion that doesn’t need an acronym or a shorter version of itself when writing it.
So where should you start? Any of these can be a good place to start – try out the classes and specs; look for specs that perhaps you didn’t like before because you may do now. Icy Veins has always been a great place to check out rotation, specs, and stat priorities for all specs so if you’re struggling with picking talents check out what they have to say about the most optimal. Do the invasions; the patch quest line; get some sweet Transmogs and cheer at how you no longer have to have your bank filled with gear from three expansions ago given the changes. For me, it’s looking more and more likely I could start Legion with a fire mage main, and that’s okaywith me.
What about you? Are you prepared?
