Did Legion Spoil Us For Class Content?

Legion is, to my mind, the best expansion World of Warcraft has had - and it took a lot to unseat my previous favorite, Wrath of the Lich King. I guess I really like expansions that add hero classes? (Actually yes - I really love hero classes. My DK and DH are 2nd and 3rd priority characters, and might be 1 and 2 if I didn't have such a strong sentimental attachment to my Paladin. I'm pretty sure my actual alignment in real life is Lawful Good - although the personality quiz I just took on the D&D website gave me True Neutral, so...)

Anyway, Legion had a lot of things going for it. For one, it had essentially the biggest bad guys in the Warcraft cosmos as its villains, and went farther than Burning Crusade did by having us actually land a decisive victory against them, rather than just turning back an invasion.

It also had some interesting zones and stories - even stuff that was unrelated or tangential to the Legion, like the Nightmare (which I'd put more in the realm of the Old Gods, even if Xavius kind of straddled the line there) or Helya, which both had really cool aesthetics and lore to them.

But I think that if there was any really profoundly interesting aspect to the expansion, it was class content.

Obviously, artifact weapons were a big part of that - from well-known pieces like the Ashbringer or the Doomhammer to new stuff like Xal'atath or the Maw of the Damned, we got a whole bunch of weapons that had really interesting stories that tied into class identity. But we also got the Class Halls, with their associated campaigns, that let you do things that felt particularly right for your class. While Shamans were calling upon the various elemental lords, Death Knights were going around raising people from the dead to become apocalyptic horsemen. Sure, not all the campaigns were equal in quality (I'm a little peeved that the Paladin and Priest ones were basically identical, and just like I think the Dark Brotherhood quests in any Elder Scrolls games are always the best guild chain, the Rogue campaign in Legion was *chef's kiss,*) but each gave you an opportunity to feel not like a generic adventuring type, but someone of your class.

Now, obviously, this meant twelve times as much content to produce as usual. Even before Legion was over, we had basically finished with class content once we got our special mounts in 7.2.

But even though I think it's awesome that they made entirely different leveling experiences for Alliance and Horde in BFA (something very laudable in an expansion that, on whole, has left me somewhat underwhelmed,) I miss these moments of class identity.

I've been playing a lot of D&D lately (in case you couldn't tell from this blog,) and one of the great benefits of a TTRPG where your dungeon master is tailoring the adventure to the players is that you'll get stories and activities that are tied directly to the backstory you've come up with. Obviously, you can't do that in an MMO like WoW. But giving us these specific things to do makes the world feel a little broader, a little more flavorful.