MeinMMO demon Cortyn played World of Warcraft Legion Remix – probably more than most others. Because it has really become good.
Yesterday, on October 8th, the Patch 11.2.5 was released in World of Warcraft. What the patch means for “The War Within” is totally irrelevant, because the biggest feature is “Legion Remix”. A return to the old Legion expansion to experience the class campaigns and the great areas again – and to unlock an unlimited number of great rewards.
The anticipation for “WoW: Legion Remix” was not as high as for Pandaria Remix. This was mainly because Blizzard had made it clear beforehand that they wanted to do some things differently this time. There isn’t such an insane power increase as before, the content is spread over several phases, and you have to collect a lot more bronze to be able to buy all the rewards. Therefore, many were clear beforehand: Legion Remix will be a flop and will definitely fail.
16 hours of Legion Remix played and no regrets
I was really looking forward to it and spent pretty much the whole day in it yesterday. After getting up, I logged in and – apart from just showering
and resetting my hunger timer
– spent the whole day in Remix. A good 12 hours until level 80 and then another 4 to finish the rest of the area Suramar. That gave me a little more than 400,000 bronze. I was in the zone
. It was great.
My first conclusion: Legion Remix does many things very well and even has some features at the end that I don’t want to miss in any version of World of Warcraft anymore.
The classic artifact weapons from Legion are not available. You get some duplicates from the Timeless Dragonflight. For the story, they are the same weapons, but they have different talents. All classes and specializations share the same talents but can choose between 5 different paths. This leads to interesting decisions:
Do I want to temporarily transform into a Lightforged being that is nearly immortal? Or do I summon a private dreadlord who bombards my enemies with fel energy?
Even though there are only 5 paths, they feel interesting to play. Because later talents modify the abilities even further. I can “sacrifice brutally” my dreadlord at the push of a button, causing him to deal extremely high damage and also giving me a buff that allows me to summon many more demons to my side who also attack my enemies in the next 30 seconds.
Nothing is as much fun as activating all cooldowns as a demon hunter and suddenly fighting alongside an inquisitor, a shivarra, and a felguard. That is exactly the “Illidari” experience I wish for.
The talents can be redistributed at any time, and this is encouraged by some quests. No one is locked into a path, and the switch is completed within seconds.
The developers have made a clear effort to eliminate the most annoying aspects of Legion. Especially the missions at the order hall mission table are basically gone. You can still accept the quest, but before you send units out, a dragon from the Timeless Dragonflight appears and says “Skip”, “Boring”, or “We don’t have time for that”. I had to grin a little at that and found it kind of fitting.
I’m a bit unsure how much power can really be accumulated right now. Because increasing your item level is a tedious affair. You can’t make big leaps but keep getting gear that is only about 3 item levels higher than the previous one (at level 80, mind you). This causes your item level to rise very slowly but steadily. Anyone who wants to achieve the maximum here must really play a lot. However, since you also earn a lot of bronze on the side and unwanted gear can also be melted down into bronze and power for the artifact weapon, this hardly weighs negatively.
The heroic world is what World of Warcraft needs
I was particularly excited about the “Heroic World Mode”. This is a feature that only exists in Legion Remix. Anyone who wants can make the entire open world significantly more difficult. All enemies have much more health, deal more damage, and often have some affixes that make them much tougher.
This is rewarded with significantly better rewards. Where each mob normally only leaves 3–4 bronze, in heroic mode it can be 20 to 40 – in addition to various power items that improve your character. Yes, the fights take much longer, but they feel better.
Especially during the leveling phase, I had to go about tactically, time my cooldowns well, and sometimes even flee when a single enemy had just one affix too many.
At level 70, however, I had to deactivate the heroic world mode again. This is because the item level scaling between levels 70 and 80 increases drastically. Anyone who is still wearing items intended for level 70 at level 72 will literally get smashed into the ground by some enemies with a one-hit. Therefore, I was forced to collect in the normal world for the last 10 hours and only then activate the heroic mode again.
Overall, the heroic world feels like something that World of Warcraft needs in the future – in every modern version of the game. It’s much more fun when you really have to invest effort. At least when you want to. It should be optional, but the option must be present.
Small bugs spoil the fun, some are hit harder
Sure, not everything went smoothly. Throughout the day, the servers had one or the other hiccup, which caused some players to experience disconnects or receive the error message when logging in that “a character with that name already exists”. Such errors have always occurred in the past, and if you waited 10 minutes afterward, everything continued without problems.
Looking at the forums or social media, some experienced significantly worse. Some report that they could barely play all day and experienced a disconnect every few minutes. At least on my realm and with my guild, that was not the case, and although a few people had minor difficulties, most could resolve them by simply disabling the addons that had become outdated due to the new patch.
In summary, WoW Legion Remix has really turned out great. Surely, the harsh criticism from the community during the “beta test” was necessary, but the voices were heard. The result is a truly rounded game that offers an interesting difficulty through the heroic world mode while also serving the crazy “remix power fantasy” when you zip through the normal world.
I’m sure I will spend a lot of the next 100 days on the Broken Isles to buy every single reward. So if you were skeptical about whether Legion Remix could come even close to the success of Mists of Pandaria Remix, let me say this: Legion Remix is different but not worse. It shows that not every remix has to be the same, and new ideas are even what can keep the game mode fresh.
If you don’t have enough time for Legion Remix, don’t worry: MeinMMO also knows some MMORPGs that can be enjoyed with less time.
