#1 - Jan. 14, 2014, 9:08 p.m.
I played since the game lunched (and one weekend of the Stress Test). I leveled six characters to 60 and raided a LOT, mostly on my Priest. I will tell you that Vanilla was not more challenging in any meaningful way. It was simply tedious. Things took much longer and were more "grindy". Raiding involved a week of consumable farming, followed by about 16 hours of actual raiding (a lot fo which was spent waiting for people, handing out consumables, and buffing).
I dinged 90 on this toon on Friday and now I'm working on the Black Prince quest lines in the hopes of getting my cloak in a few months and it got me thinking about this whole grind for a Legenday.
I don't think getting a Legendary should be easy, but I don't think it should be tedious either. Waiting three weeks to accumulate 3000 VP isn't challenging in any way. I'm gonna cap Valor every week on a new toon anyway so I can get her geared ASAP. Having three weeks of VP capping is just artificial gating. The rep grind is similarly tedious. There's no fun or challenging way to gain Black Prince rep. It's a rep grind in its purest form. I stand in one spot on Isle of Thunder having NPCs help me kill some statues for about 3 hours. How is that challenging? And, of course there's the sigils/secrets/runestones. Again, I'm just running LFRs that I would have run to gear up anyway and relying on RNG to get me all my sigils in something resembling a reasonable amount of time.
I really hope Blizzard learned a lesson with this quest line. I like the idea of a Legendary that is accessible to everyone. I think they were on the right track there. But, for me, the experience of earning a Legendary should feel more epic and challenging. I can understand their concern that if they made it challenging, some people might not be able to get it, so why not have both? Why not have a more tedious, but easy quest line for people who can't meet the challenge, and then have some challenging methods to move you along more quickly? Say there is a rep grind involved. Let people earn 55 rep per kill by grinding mobs like we did for Black Prince, but then let there be faster rep gains by doing something like a solo scenario or proving grounds that test you as a player.