Legion Going to Legacy Loot Rules on March 31st, Months After I Already Got Spaulders of the First Satyr

For any transmog fans, there's some excellent news: next week, running Legion Raids will use Legacy Loot rules. That means that, like earlier expansions, bosses will now drop several items on each kill, even if you run the raid solo, making it far more likely for you to get those transmog pieces you want.

Even fairly early in the expansion, it wasn't terribly difficult to solo some of Legion's early raids, and while I think Antorus remains a pretty big challenge to solo, if you've been wanting to complete your Nighthold or Tomb of Sargeras sets, or if you have been able to do Antorus, this will be a welcome change.

To tack on a little editorializing, I'm excited for this but also feeling sort of bittersweet about the lack of interesting-looking gear in BFA. The lack of class sets - something they say will continue in Shadowlands (though I hope they change their minds on this - we're going to be done with Azerite Gear, so there's no reason we shouldn't be able to get tier sets once again) - has made much of BFA's gear feel very generic.

To me, much of BFA's raid gear looks more appropriate as blue dungeon gear, with its lack of bright colors or particle effects. Obviously, this is a case of different people having different aesthetic opinions, but I feel like epic gear ought to look epic, and some sets (particularly thinking of the Eternal Palace sets) just feel boring.

On top of that, while I understand that coming up with your 18th Warrior set (I'm not counting tier 7 - which was a retread of 3 other than the then-new Death Knights - tier 9 - which was only marginally different between classes and more similar to the current model - and tier 20 - which was a retread of tier 6, except for classes that didn't exist yet during Black Temple) might strain your ideas, but class-based sets gave the classes a chance to feel unique, not to mention it created more incentive to farm additional looks. Hell, I had the entire Ny'alotha set's LFR appearance before I ever stepped into the raid, given that they just used the same model for quest rewards.

I am excited to see the various Covenant sets, but I do worry a bit because Blizzard claimed that we'd actually be seeing more models of gear in BFA than previously, which was patently false.

Because I'm an obsessive, I'm going to count appearances between Legion and BFA to compare. I'll do this behind a cut because you don't need to see that unless you're as obsessive as I am.


Ok, by my count, here's what we've got in Legion. I might forget some, so forgive me if I do.

For sanity's sake, I'm going to ignore recolors for different, say, questing zones or dungeon difficulties.

Questing greens: 4 sets

Demon Hunter starting set: 1

Demon Hunter "end of starting experience set": 1

Class Hall Sets: 13

Initial Dungeon Blues: 8 sets (2 for each armor type as I recall)

Emerald Nightmare/Nighthold Raid Tiers: 13

Crafted PvP Sets: 4

Trial of Valor Sets: 4

Cathedral of Eternal Night Blues: 4

Tomb of Sargeras Raid Tiers: 13

Argus Quests/Seat of the Triumvirate Blues: 4

Antorus Raid Tier Sets: 13

(And here things get a little fuzzy - do we count the heritage armor for the 7.3.5 allied races as Legion or BFA? That's four to whichever they count for.)

So, barring ambiguities, we get 82 individual armor sets (that's also not counting the Mythic or Elite Gladiator versions of the tier sets) in Legion, assuming I haven't forgotten any.

Now let's look at BFA:

Questing Greens: 6 sets (Kul Tiras and Zandalar)

Dungeon Blues: 8 sets (ditto)

Arathi Warfront/PvP Sets: 8 (granted, you could argue that their progression here might count as three times as many, but if we aren't counting mythic sets as distinct from other raid sets, I'll consider this the same category

Uldir Raid Sets: 4

Battle of Dazar'alor Raid Sets: 4

Allied Race Heritage Armor Sets (Not counting the 4 released during Legion): 6

Older Race Heritage Armor Sets: 6

Darkshore Warfront Sets: 8

Ny'alotha Raid Sets: 4

Which comes to 54 sets, which is admittedly closer to Legion than I had thought. But given that Heritage armor is limited to only one race each, it's not something that gives any given character a lot of options.

If we subtract heritage armor from the mix, that leaves BFA with only 42 sets. So yeah, as cool as Covenant Armor looks, I'll really prefer if we start getting class sets again.