Antorus, The Burning Throne is a Flat End to World of Warcraft’s Best Expansion in Almost a Decade
I stand by my review of World of Warcraft: Legion back in September 2016 suggesting its potential to be the best expansion since Wrath of the Lich King.
I’ve no doubt that Legion has reached that potential, but we’re now at the point that lets down most expansions: there’s too big of a gap between the last raid and the next expansion — and Antorus, The Burning Throne, is a damp squib of a raid.
Blizzard has managed to continually provide content updates to Legion, which has kept it fresh without jamming everything into its first year. Five months in, I looked into how Legion was going so far, and how staleness had crept in, but since then, Nighthold, Tomb of Sargeras, and the entirety of Argus has given Legion the kick up the backside it badly needed.
With the announcement in 2016 that Legion would end on Draenei home planet Argus, players were convinced a big patch would see out the expansion. As a zone, Argus is interesting enough to go through the first time, but the quest chain guiding you through gets monotonous by about the third or fourth time. At this point I’m merely going there to kill enemies capable of dropping mounts, and doing invasion points. Gotta admit that skybox is pretty spectacular, though.
After Argus came Antorus – the final raid of Legion. Antorus’ main issue is how staggeringly easy it is. In what was an overall six weeks of raiding (two three-hour raids a week) my guild and I have managed to clear both normal and heroic difficulty. As a Heroic guild this is worrying. I remember the days of spending a month on just one boss, but in less than two months, we’ve cleared the entirety of Antorus on heroic. We’ll be moving onto Mythic now, I guess.
If you look back at the last raid of each of the earlier expansions, they’ve generally always been bigger and more immense; I remember it taking months and months to take down the titular Lich King. Comparatively, Antorus has been out since early December, and my guild and I are pretty much done already. The raid itself feels much smaller than that of Dragon Soul or Siege of Orgrimmar for example.
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When looking at Antorus’ fights individually, there’s not much going on. There are at least a couple of fights where you practically stand there for five minutes and then the boss is dead. Coven of Shivarra is the shining light in this raid; it’s the most tactically varied because of the random nature of the coven’s abilities, making every attempt different — most other boss fights in Antorus are the same every time. Argus himself isn’t too complex a fight either, which is a real shame; it took us five attempts to kill him on Heroic. Five. Five attempts to kill the last boss of an expansion on Heroic difficulty.
More recent expansions suffered from the absence of a main villain. Earlier expansions laid it out from minute one — The Burning Crusade had Illidan; Wrath of the Lich King had the Lich King (obviously); and Cataclysm had Deathwing. They were all over the marketing right from the opening cinematic. The last few? Not so much. It’s been more like, “the sha? I guess?” or “one of the orcs?”. Legion is much the same, and there’s no doubt that the final raid suffers as a result. Without a focal villain from the forefront, the impact of victory isn’t as substantial.
I had hoped that Argus would’ve taken much longer to kill. I wanted that kill to be bittersweet; sad that it was finally over yet prideful in that we’d finally accomplished clearing Antorus. Instead, I was left feeling like we brushed past an entire tier of an expansion without so much as a struggle. Worse yet, it’s the last tier of an expansion, the best one since Wrath of the Lich King.
