Legendary Items in the Nathria RWF: Complexity Limit, Pieces and BDGG Discuss

By Starym — Dec 11 2020 15:40 UTC

For each raiding guild, there are many layers of work involved in preparing for the big Mythic opening of the Castle Nathria Race to World First (RWF). One of the largest factors this time around is the legendary crafting system. There is a lot of complex decision making that goes into each top guild deciding which legendaries get prioritized, whether to focus on item level or power diversity, and how to correctly gauge the actual value of the legendaries themselves as they're always subject to tuning.

To understand these topics better, I spoke to members of three of the top guilds, Complexity Limit, Pieces, and BDGG on the matter, featuring several of their players' opinions.

Starym: Starting with the very basics, how important will it be for everyone to have their legendaries ready for Castle Nathria?

Preheat - Complexity Limit: Initial sims are showing legendary items to have a massive impact on your overall damage. Not all legendary items will be used for just damage, though. They will be essential for raiding and crafting them will be part of our overall raid preparation.

Bastu - Pieces: People having their legendaries ready for Castle Nathria isn’t something we see as important to emphasize on, in the sense that they are very easy to obtain on multiple characters. Everyone will have the legendaries prepared for Mythic release across all guilds with minimal effort.

Lozy - BDGG: Legendaries are an integral part of most spec’s builds, and they will be very important. It’s intended for them to offer a pretty sizable increase to throughput or utility, so they end up being a huge source of player power in the early weeks. With the updates to Soul Ash/Torghast, item level isn’t as big of an issue since rank 4 is gated a little further out. For any competitive guild, having optimal legendaries ready to go will be a part of the gearing up process, but this would be true whether they were a 1% increase or a 200% increase, since every advantage matters. These are definitely bigger for most specs rather than smaller.

Starym: With different legendaries presumably being more optimal for different bosses, how difficult will it be to get the needed amount of legendaries on all the raiders?

Preheat - Complexity Limit: I think the right strategy to have in a situation like this is to wait for any tuning that might occur and craft your legendary items at the last possible second. If you have alts though, it might be good to go with legendaries that have a very specific purpose, if that purpose would be the reason to bring them into a raid.

Bastu - Pieces: In the RWF we likely won’t have time to craft more than 2 lower ilvl legendaries, or 1 higher one. If a class has a far and away BiS legendary for 80% of the bosses, but loses slightly on the last 20% of the bosses, they would pick 1 legendary to upgrade to max. The choice of picking 2 legendaries at a lower ilvl only becomes relevant when they make enough of a difference that it makes a class good or bad on a fight. This is obviously more likely if a class has multiple playable specs, for example Rogue with Sublety and Outlaw.

Lozy - BDGG: Speaking from a competitive standpoint, there’s really only a few fights in each tier that affect your decisions. Yes, you plan for all of them, but if we’re talking about committing a limited resource, you look towards the later bosses. No one should really need more than 2 legendaries for progression. There’s maybe a situation where a pure DPS could technically play 2 different builds on 2 different specs and want unique legendaries for all of them, but there’s just not enough time to farm all those out. Really just whatever you’re playing at the end of the instance should matter, similar to other gearing decisions.

Starym: How difficult/complex of a choice is it to decide whether to go for 1 legendary and upgrade its item level or to have more variety and go for 2 or 3 with lower ilvls?

Preheat - Complexity Limit: Item level on legendary items is a small fraction of the actual benefit of the items. If there is no chance you will need to ever have another legendary then it makes sense to upgrade instead of get another, but I doubt that will be the case for many classes, since a lot of the legendary items are generally good but amazing under specific circumstances.

Lozy - BDGG: 1 legendary if you can get away with it, although some might have to do 2. There’s 2 parts to this question I’d want to address:

As stated before, only a few fights really matter. If you think a specific legendary is vital to one of your strats on an earlier boss, you can probably just put that on an alt or two and power through. If you think you need to run a different legendary for Generals and Sire, they better both be massively OP in their given situation (and near useless in the other), otherwise you’d probably just lean towards what you’re running on Sire. I know this doesn’t cover people that aren’t just raiding and want to do M+ or PvP in tandem, but those come after the raid. :)

You’re really at the mercy of Blizz buffs/nerfs. If we hard commit all of our mages to legendary A and upgrade, then that gets nerfed and another legendary becomes better, you’re just SoL. There’s not too much you can do about that other than wait until the last moment to make your decision. Multiple legendaries would cover this but if something at level 1 becomes better than whatever you committed to at level 4, you’ll have access to that soon enough. For us where we only have a week or two to make decisions, it mostly comes down to theory/feelycrafting. We can only really make decisions based on what we know and if it changes for us after the fact, it changes for everyone so it’s not like it puts us at a disadvantage as a whole.

Starym: Are there any specific legendaries you won’t initially have access to or won’t be able to get in the period before the raid starts?

Bastu - Pieces: The legendaries that drop from World Bosses are the real outliers here. The World Boss spawn cycle will put some classes BiS legendaries behind a few weeks of rotation and as such not relevant for use in the race. The Fire Mage legendary Fevered Incantation is a good example of this. If Oranomonos does not spawn in Mythic week, the legendary that is BiS becomes worthless for the RWF.

Lozy - BDGG: At this point, it seems like the answer is supposed to be no. Especially with the hotfix that increased dungeon drop rates, those seem easy to acquire. World boss legendaries may not be accessible depending on which order the bosses become available.

Starym: How intense will the farming/grinding for the legendaries be, compared to Azerite gear or a similar farm process in previous expansions)?

Lozy - BDGG: The main issue is crafting them. It’s just an enormous amount of mats for anything other than a rank 1. Top end guilds will just throw gold at this, but upgrading a legendary by yourself is going to be a chore or expensive. The upside is that because rank 1s are decently cheap, having access to a really good power is easy to get, provided you can get the recipe. Torghast itself is also not a time sink and only gonna get faster with gear, so getting the actual Soul Ash to craft/upgrade isn’t an issue. Shame there is no catch up though, but I’d imagine most people don’t craft any more than 3-4 legos for the whole farm period.

Starym: What do you think of the differences between the Legion and Shadowlands legendary systems in relation to the race?

Bastu - Pieces: Legion and Shadowlands legendaries are to each other what chalk and cheese are, completely different. Legion brought a system shrouded with questions about how items were obtained and with no way to aim for specific ones (until later in the expansion). In Shadowlands you are fully aware of when you can get a legendary and from where. The Shadowlands version is far superior not just for RWF, but for the game as a whole.

Lozy - BDGG: Hard to not talk about RNG since that is the only real difference. I think a by-product of that though is that they can be planned around. In Legion for like a few weeks, it was more optimal to remake your character if you got 4(3?, don’t remember the number) bad legendaries. That’s not the case here since you’re in control. Also, it allows guilds to run certain legendaries for certain reasons. Unlike in Legion where you just had to deal with whatever hand you were dealt, you can plan strats around players running certain legendaries, or you just know that everyone is doing the most damage/healing possible.

Starym: In closing, what level of importance and difficulty would you put on getting the exact legendaries you need on your raiders?

Preheat - Complexity Limit: The importance of getting the correct legendaries will be high. The legendaries are decently balanced, but as with any system, there are outliers and not choosing those will be disadvantageous. However, obtaining these legendaries does not seem to be too difficult which is a good thing, in my opinion.

Atrocity - Complexity Limit: If you are less than optimal then you are giving up an advantage, but sometimes you don’t need an advantage to be one of the 20 people in on a raid boss. It’s all very situational but I suspect that everyone in Limit will have the best legendary items unless something completely unforeseen happens.

Lozy - BDGG: It’s looking like legendaries are going to be a huge source of early player power, so pretty large. But it’s just another step in getting ready for Castle. If you’re looking to take every advantage, legendaries are just another thing in the long list of stuff to do.

About the Author

Starym is an old-school raider with a wide history of World Firsts under his belt. He is a long-time news writer and interviewer for Icy Veins and formerly Manaflask. Having raided in the Race to World First (RWF) until the end of The Burning Crusade, he has been covering the events since Cataclysm and the RWF has become his greatest passion in WoW. A (Tauren, obviously) Warrior main at heart, when pushed, he will admit to loving Diablo more than WoW and, thus, should be punished.

Legendary Items in the Nathria RWF: Complexity Limit, Pieces and BDGG Discuss

Related Articles

Links

About the Author