WoWDec 14, 2016 5:27 pm CT

WoW’s Legendaries are about to get buffed and nerfed

You may have sensed change was coming to WoW’s Legendary philosophy during last week’s Q&A, where the subject of Legendaries came up more than once. The problem, as anyone with bad Legendary luck knows, is that some Legendary items are just better than others. That leaves players feeling pretty lousy when they hit the RNG lotto and get a Legendary… but it’s not a good Legendary, so it languishes in the bank.

In the Q&A, Ion Hazzikostas said the goal was to bring all Legendaries in line with each other so you never feel like you’ve gotten a “bad” Legendary — and these changes will be coming to the patch 7.1.5 PTR soon. In a new forum post, Lore explains that we’ll be seeing both buffs and nerfs to existing Legendaries:

Originally Posted by Lore (Official Post)

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.

While this will hopefully make every Legendary feel like a solid addition to your arsenal, the game’s most powerful Legendaries are about to get hit by the nerf bat (so enjoy them while you have them). Legendary changes should go in with the next PTR build, but it won’t be the end of Blizzard’s Legendary-related adjustments: next, they’ll be “doing additional class tuning where necessary” to ensure classes still feel powerful, even if their Legendaries have been downgraded.

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