Upcoming PTR Legendary Changes

As we mentioned this during the live Q&A last week, we feel the biggest shortcoming of the current Legendary system is that, for some specs, there are some items that are clearly better than others in nearly all situations. As a result, players who have received a different Legendary item feel unlucky, as they didn’t receive the “best” one.

So, we’re making some fairly substantial changes to Legendary items intended to bring them more in line with each other. Items that give a raw throughput increase (without significant situational restrictions or drawbacks) are having their overall power reduced, and we’re taking another pass at several of the more niche items to make sure that, when they’re usable, they feel powerful.

Essentially, we feel that if a Legendary is only usable in certain situations, it should feel extremely valuable in those situations. Conversely, if a Legendary is nearly always going to increase your overall performance, that increase should be relatively smaller. Up until this point, we’ve made the mistake of allowing several items to be both extremely impactful AND always useful, which has made other Legendaries feel “bad” by comparison. It’s also caused some specs to feel as though they need a particular Legendary in order to compete. Those are the issues we’d like to solve.

We’re actively working on these changes right now and expect to have them ready for the next PTR build. We’ll be doing additional class tuning where necessary as a followup, once these changes are in place.

12/13/2016 04:51 PMPosted by Onamah

Instead we are faced with the daunting possibility that we may simply never get a useful legendary. That is not fun, its repeatedly disappointing.

We agree. The problem is that some Legendaries don't feel useful. That's the issue we're looking to solve here.

12/13/2016 05:58 PMPosted by Dopameanaj

I really hope you guys learn from the system and the next iteration of legendaries is purely defensive/utility and no outright dps legendary affixes. They would be much more fair/balanced if they were that way.

There's definitely a lot we've learned here. Ion even said pretty much exactly this in the last Q&A - if we did it all over again, we'd probably only make "Utility" Legendaries.

12/13/2016 06:00 PMPosted by Cassiean

With some, as the instructors fourth lesson for Unholy DKs, it is MANDATORY. This legendary is -required- for us to perform even remotely on par with other DPS classes.

Right. As I said, that's another problem we're trying to fix. If a spec is only competitive with a specific Legendary, then we need to bring up their numbers. To do that, we need to also nerf that Legendary.

12/13/2016 06:00 PMPosted by Deathköw

Just use a legendary token system.

Problem solved.

Disagree. "Just let me pick the best Legendary" doesn't solve this particular problem; there shouldn't be one or two Legendaries that are far and away the best one in all situations. With the way these items are in 7.1, if we add such a system, everyone will just pick the best 2 for their spec and the rest will still suck. We'd rather that none of them sucked.

And just to be clear: something like what you (and others) are describing here is not off the table. Ion even mentioned at BlizzCon that we may end up doing something along those lines in a later patch. It just doesn't solve this problem.

12/13/2016 06:04 PMPosted by Mistula

Another problem not mentioned here is being spec-locked because of legendaries. I have X on my spec, so can't freely switch without feeling behind. AP already contributes to this problem but at least can be caught up -- legendaries, with soft caps and what not, just make it impossible to switch.

Yeah, we definitely share your concern here. We don't have a solution yet (and aren't likely to for 7.1.5), but it's something we're talking about.