Legendary Drop Rates

The rate at which players acquire Legendary items is a subject that we’ve kept a very close eye on since the launch of Legion. We’ve generally tried to avoid getting into too much technical detail on the system behind your chance to get a Legendary, but we would like to say a bit more on what we’ve done behind-the-scenes up to this point.

As many players have figured out, changes were made to legendary drop rates with patch 7.1 and patch 7.1.5 – when those patches went live, your chance to receive a Legendary increased in pretty much all cases. What you might not have noticed is that we’ve been steadily increasing your chances since then. One of our long-term goals is to allow you to switch specific Legendary items in and out as the situation warrants, and regularly increasing drop chances is one way of ensuring that that happens.

We’ve also made adjustments that leveled off what used to be steady decrease to your chance to get subsequent Legendaries after your first. When Legion launched, every time you earned a Legendary, your starting chance to earn your next one would be lower (and thus, the average time it took you to loot it would be longer). At this stage, however, most players in the Broken Isles are no longer hunting for their first Legendary, and many already have their second. We didn’t want you to feel as though your good fortune in the past equates to harder times in the future, so we normalized drop chances for subsequent Legendaries after your second. Right now, in Patch 7.1.5, your first Legendary has the highest drop chance, the second still has a significant bonus, and then you’ll have the same chances to earn your third Legendary as you will your fourth, fifth, sixth, and so on.

We think it’s important to get this across clearly: it currently takes the same amount of luck/effort to get your third Legendary as it takes to get your eighth. We’ve seen a few players and tools attempting to use historical data to predict their drop chances, but because of how regularly we’ve been increasing Legendary drop rates, that data is extremely outdated – and their conclusions extremely inaccurate. In short, your chance of receiving that next Legendary is probably a lot better than you think.