Blizzard buffs drop rate of Fyr’alath the Dream Render

In a forum post sure to excite any WoW player who’s still hunting for Fyr’alath the Dream Render from the Amirdrassil raid, Kaivax announced that the effect of Lesser and Greater Embers of Fyr’alath — the “bad luck protection” item from Amirdrassil — have been buffed retroactively, increasing raiders’ chances of finally getting their hands on the legendary axe.

Anecdotally, players have noted both on the official forums and on sites like Reddit that their raids, which previously may not have seen any axes drop at all yet, are seeing them drop all at once for multiple raiders at a time — so it seems this is a much beefier increase to drop rate than anyone probably would’ve guessed from Kaivax’s post. However, this is mostly just a Band-Aid on what is a fairly terrible system of legendary acquisition, one I personally hope Blizzard steps away from in the future.

How did we get here?

When 10.2 first reached the live servers, Fyr’alath was the second legendary added in Dragonflight after Nasz’uro, the Unbound Legacy — the Evoker legendary introduced in 10.1. Nasz’uro had a number of pain points in its acquisition method; one was that bad luck protection wasn’t even added until 10.1.5, another was that it was unclear whether you should be running multiple difficulties to increase your odds of getting it or not, and a third was that the server itself announced every single time anyone completed their legendary — annoying for everyone, but for Evokers without their legendary yet it felt like having it rubbed in your face that you weren’t lucky enough yet.

Once you did get the item to start your quest, the fist weapon demanded both a hefty investment in time and money — a number of expensive or rare crafting materials were required, alongside items you simply couldn’t buy and a forced grind in Fyrakk’s Suffusion Camps. The story elements around these were minimal, as well — gone are the days of extensive storytelling like that around Fangs of the Father, just fork over your gold and do your mandatory grind time to get your orange pixels.

Fyr’alath seemed like it would remedy at least some of this. The bad luck protection wasn’t just a nebulous prospect you had to trust was working this time; it was an actual dropped item you could see, receive, and use. The entire server wasn’t notified every time an axe was completed, either, so you didn’t constantly feel like the unluckiest raider there was. Granted, the actual method of turning Fyr’alath from a drop item into a usable legendary was basically the same as Nasz’uro’s with the serial numbers filed off; you still had to do expensive crafting and a mandatory grind, but they swapped what professions you needed to have and what your grind would be, but it was otherwise the same.

Unfortunately, Fyr’alath had an additional problem early on: it wasn’t even worth using. For many specs in the game, Fyr’alath was so undertuned that it wasn’t worth using over other, more easily-obtainable raid weapons. Blizzard has hotfixed it (again and again) to at least make it relevant, but until yesterday, you still had to be supremely lucky to even get your hands on it.

However, the real question is how things got this bad to begin with. Is this really the best method Blizzard can come up with for legendary items in World of Warcraft? Have we truly moved forever past the idea of story-heavy, “it takes a village”-style legendaries like Dragonwrath and Fangs of the Father, or multi-patch efforts like the Pandaria legendary cloaks? I worry that with the move towards extreme alt-friendliness with Warbands in The War Within, the idea of putting a lot of work (and group effort!) into an important legendary item might have gone the way of the dodo, with this new, completely luck-based and gold-sink-based method taking its place — but there’s no way what we have now is the best model. One certainly hopes Blizzard is taking the almost entirely negative feedback about the current legendary methods to heart going forward.