Fyr’alath is an okay legendary as a concept, but boy does farming it make the game suck.

Twice now in Dragonflight, Blizzard has taken a design hint from the game’s past, trying to apply those lessons from Classic. The problem here is that they took what was easily the worst piece of design in WoW’s past to apply to the current game, and, well, applied it to the current game.

The current legendary system, both for the Evoker legendary last tier and the 2H strength axe this tier, works like this – once the first kill on Mythic is recorded of the endboss that drops the legendary starter item (and it appears to be a guaranteed drop on that kill), players in that region can then kill the endboss on any difficulty for a chance at a drop of that same item. The droprate is scaled down as you reach lower difficulties, so you have a higher chance on Mythic than Heroic which is higher than Normal which is higher than LFR, but it can drop on any difficulty. However, your chance at it rolls into higher difficulties, such that you can never outpace what just doing the higher difficulty would have offered. As an example with fake numbers, if Heroic has a 5% drop chance, normal has 2.5% and LFR has 1.25%, you get a 5% chance for killing Heroic first, but if you do LFR, then Normal, then Heroic, your chance is still 5% total for the week, as the lower difficulty chance is removed, functionally, from the higher difficulties if the higher mode is done after a lower-difficulty kill. The incentive is that doing lower difficulties into higher isn’t punished, but you’re also not rewarded for doing more Fyrakk kills in a given week either – start as high as you can and reduce extra work!

After a successful kill with no drop, you increment a hidden currency on that character that increases the drop rate of the weapon for all subsequent attempts at it on any difficulty. This was different for Nasz’uro (the Evoker legendary) compared to Fyr’alath, where Nasz’uro only offered this increase for Heroic Sarkareth kills (and even that was a mid-season hotfix change), while Fyr’alath offers it for all difficulty Fyrakk kills (with the same rules about scaling as the base drop applying, allegedly). Theoretically, then, the longer you are stuck farming it, the higher the chance of the drop is, until eventually, at some breakpoint, you are basically guaranteed the weapon. If that breakpoint is reasonable is another question – while we don’t have the 100% assured rates, the datamining suggests that the axe is guaranteed at 40 LFR kills of Fyrakk compared to just 7 on Mythic after the recent hotfix to the droprate, which is perhaps a tad absurd, but it is at least something you can, eventually, reach.

Fyr’alath adds another wrinkle unique to it, which is that once you have killed Heroic Fyrakk once, you qualify to receive Lesser Embers from any boss on Heroic in Amirdrassil, which increases your droprate on the axe by a small amount. What amount is small? Well, that we really don’t know. Fyr’alath’s bad luck protection is, hilariously, also tied up in items, and there is some speculation from the datamining that suggests that the greater embers from Fyrakk don’t actually do…anything. Instead, they exist as a placebo to tell you the increase applied…maybe. If you are starting to get the idea that this is a fundamentally awful system that makes little sense, well, I am doing my job in describing it well!

So what the fuck is the problem with this system? Well, there’s a lot.

I mentioned the Classic throwback because it is clear that the inspiration is how Vanilla legendaries worked. Get a drop, which starts a quest involving some amount of crafting and some amount of other side stuff to do, finish it, legendary get. In Classic, this almost kinda worked because we as players were kind of dumb back in the day. We often didn’t even know that legendaries existed, and seeing one in the wild was rare, especially given the difficulty in obtaining the drops – you needed two distinct rare drops for Thunderfury, one plus a rare recipe for Sulfuras, and a rare drop along with 40 other rare drops for Atiesh – so even seeing one was pretty tricky, and the game was generally not balanced around them – if you got lucky enough to get one, it was a huge W for your raid team. The spirit of that is clear in some ways with Dragonflight legendaries – they’re hard to get, but the bad luck protection and all-difficulty availability reflect the modern sensibility of the game at least slightly.

What is problematic is that a lot of balancing is done around these legendaries and it feels pretty bad for it. Specs that can wield Fyr’alath feel kinda underwhelming when played well if they don’t have the axe, and Evokers last season were okay without the legendary, but insanely good with it. The assumption of the tuning is, frankly, a bit off. It makes that prolonged chase that most players go through feel really, really bad. It’s not so much that content is harder without it or substantially easier with it, but that without it, most of the specs that can get the legendaries feel just meh. A lot of that is down to the item level alone – both Nasz’uro and Fyr’alath exist outside the item level curve of their given season of content, and weapons that do that are innately a lot more powerful than other items in the same boat just because weapon stats matter more – weapon damage factored into skills, the boosted levels of Intellect on caster weapons, and the relative value of these slots in gearing, and that is good, because both weapons have a big problem outside of acquisition – their procs are kind of underwhelming and not that valuable.

Don’t get me wrong, they’re good to have and worth having, but at the same time, in the past the idea of a legendary weapon was huge, right? Val’anyr for healers in Wrath was a weapon that you could take all the way into the depths of ICC 25 Heroic two full tiers later, because the shielding effect it offered was that good. In fact, even looking now at Wrath Classic, the absolute BiS for end of the expansion for every healer except Discipline Priest includes the legendary, because it was so effective it was worth taking a weapon that was 32 item levels below what you could get at the very top of ICC 25 Heroic! Comparatively, both Dragonflight legendaries are exceptionally weak – while Nasz’uro was great in Aberrus and its usefulness applied to a whole raid, the value of the stat proc was so quickly outpaced in Season 3 that you could get rid of it week 1 of the season! While we don’t know what Season 4 holds for Fyr’alath, it seems even worse, as the effect is contentious even after 3 separate rounds of hotfix buffs and tweaks that still, overall, make it not that exciting. It required buffs to make the DoT and and channel both benefit from haste, required a hotfix to make the DoT able to crit, and required a further round of hotfixes to ensure it applied on all class abilities it should, and even then, a couple of Death Knight abilities are still missing! What’s worse still, this tier has a lot of strong cantrip weapons that drop from Fyrakk that have procs of huge damage at a rate of 2 procs per minute, with a max level version of these items adding up to an easy 6-7,000 extra DPS for free, no button required. Fyr’alath is more, by comparison – for a Mythic raider playing and optimizing it well, it now ends up being worth around 5-8% added damage, which can hit highs of around 21,000ish added DPS, but then if you aren’t as geared or fail to optimize the channel and DoT effects well, that number is lower, and at a certain point, the cantrip weapons can outperform the legendary at a low-enough skill bracket. Of course, should Blizzard tune a legendary around someone who is playing poorly? Probably not – but there exists a big slice of the pie of total players where this will be an issue.

Lastly from a balance perspective, the main legendary benefit is a channeled damage ability that locks you into place for 3 seconds (often very bad in WoW) and one that also does not allow passive defense like dodge and parry to happen during it (making the sole tank case in Blood DK potentially squishy while trying to maximize the benefit). All-around, there are issues with this axe’s effect!

One positive is that both legendaries extend the crafting system’s usefulness by targeting 6 total crafting professions with a need to make varying items for the legendary and giving them some incentive to play along. I actually overall like this, but with a caveat – because you have to use an item to teach the character crafting your item the actual recipe, you cannot self-sustain with a stable of alts and make the items yourself with alts. You will need friends, guildies, or to rope in a dope from trade to submit a work order to, and while the work order system is secure in that someone can’t just walk off with your 100,000g of mats per craft, I do wish that you could outsource to alts in some form. I guess technically, if you have a friend also working on the legendary at the same time, the friend could teach your alt the recipe to start the timer on the buff that enables it, and then you could relog, submit the work order, and log back over to make it yourself, but you still have to pull another person in regardless of how equipped you are to make the things.

The replaceability of these things matters, because the whole system requires nearly 250,000 gold of materials and a trio of crafts for both weapons, all for something that you are incredibly likely to replace a season later. Oof.

Now it is likely that we’ll see legendary upgrade tokens in season 4 and we’ll get some ability to mix and match at a raid level – 2H strength axes and Evoker legendaries in harmony giving big increases to overall raid damage, but at the same time, all of the expansion’s cantrip weapons will come back too in all likelihood. Nasz’uro will have to compete for Evokers with Kharnalex from Vault of the Incarnates, whose staff effect, according to the Wowhead scaling tool, will probably hit for over 1,000,000 damage every 3 minutes (and for Devastation, is specifically increased by Mastery), and that is only at item level 500. Assuming a Mythic raid version maxes out at 515 item level (current max of 489+26 additional item levels for tiering), it’ll do 1.3 million damage every 3 minutes, or around 7,200 DPS. The Evoker legendary is hard to gauge because it applies on every Empower spell cast without a cap (that we’ve seen) and seems likely to end up applying the buff for around 40 total seconds per minute, on average. At 515 item level, the primary stat buff is 858 more stats – very good to have and a decent increase to raidwide damage, but also in-line with the Sophic Devotion weapon enchant, so it’s not exactly earth-shaking. It’s a lot harder to math that out because it picks different targets, so that is a challenge. I’d expect that Fyr’alath will scale to remain around 5-8% of damage with ideal usage, which is good, but the Fyrakk cantrips are all likely to hit around a 10k DPS contribution themselves with no extra button press needed, and then other cantrip items like Ashkandur for the very same classes and specs offers 100-200k extra damage per minute for free as well.

The problem, then, seems to me to be multifold. The acquisition system is blind faith in Blizzard, layered in bullshit and “trust me bro” with no explanation, acquiring it sets off a quest chain that requires hours more work and hundreds of thousands of gold worth of materials, and the end result is a sub-par legendary that can feel deflating to acquire after all the effort, investment, and farming pulls it takes to get there. The intent is to replicate that Classic feeling, but we got away from doing legendaries that way because it kinda didn’t work even then, and it really doesn’t work now when even the average player is expected to get hyped for the possibility of such a weapon while the LFR drop tuning means it will take a vast majority of players at least a year of weekly farming to get one, and even on Normal it’s not much better.

So I guess the question then, is this – what makes a legendary fitting of the title?

To me, it is a couple of things: first, the effect needs to be amazing. It should absolutely be the case that a legendary is a substantial DPS contribution to any player who plays their class reasonably well and it should be something that takes tough consideration to replace during a given expansion. It should be a cool-looking weapon with a distinctive model and effects that set it apart, so when you see someone with it, it immediately draws your eye. It should be a medium or even long-term goal that you can measurably work towards, with clear progress indication so that you can predict, with a couple weeks plus or minus accuracy, what point you’ll get the weapon quest locked in and ready to craft. On some of these elements, Dragonflight legendaries have landed – Fyr’alath is a cool and distinctive model that is easy to identify. However, on most other factors mentioned here, neither DF legendary really hits the mark. Yet there are some cool things about them too – I actually really like how the crafting step works within a guild or static raid team to create unity and a sort of rallying around the cause of the weapon, which has some parallels to how it used to be in Cataclysm-era when a raid team would give big thought to who got each round of staff/dagger piece drops, and I like that these legendaries both are imbued with lore and significance to the overall story of DF in a similar way to how Cata legendaries had ties to the stories being told there.

If I had to improve it, I think I might literally only make two changes – the legendary effects can and should offer a more substantial personal DPS increase to the player wielding them and the acquisition should be semi-deterministic. In Cataclysm, you had to gather a given number of lowish drop items from a given raid, but the droprate was high enough that it didn’t feel crippling or uncertain, and there was still a prestige to acquiring one, not to mention that it still had a natural benefit to high-end prog teams – the earlier you were full-clearing, the more items you had a chance at getting and it reflected in how fast a lot of the top guilds got to those legendaries, relative to the normal player population. I think I’d also suggest that in the modern game, there is value to having the legendary items drop from other sources besides raid – you should have some way of getting them in PvP (from Strongboxes or some similar mechanism, perhaps) and in Mythic Plus (through end-of-dungeon chests most likely), and perhaps there is even space for the Great Vault to play in this. Blizzard could put different difficulty items onto different value tracks to match the current way LFR is harder to use to get the weapons and make the quest a percentage fill-bar style instead of a fixed “collect 25 embers/40 fragments” style quest, and you could even cap the weekly gain early in a season so that a player cannot just jam through every possible drop method to get it faster, with the extra benefit of uncapping it late into the season as a catchup mechanism.

I think a part of the problem is the perception of legendaries, though. Blizzard still wants orange-text items to be this really cool hook that feels awesome and rare to see, but they’ve also already done irreparable damage to that perception with the Mists, Warlords, Legion, and especially Shadowlands methods of legendary acquisition. To me, this isn’t even a bad thing – legendaries can and should be plot-involved items with unique powers, but that doesn’t mean they need to be all that rare of even necessarily hard to get. If you put Fyr’alath in the hands of a world-first Mythic raider and an LFR hero, and both even, somehow, have the same gear loadout otherwise, it’s not a mystery who will use the legendary more effectively – but it is cool to both to have it and it has a positive enjoyment multiplier for different reasons for each of those two players.

And ultimately, if we only have two paths – legendaries aren’t that rare or they are exceedingly annoying to farm to the point of frustration for minimal payoff at the end, well, i know which path I am taking, every time.