I haven’t had much to say yet about Legion Remix in the nearly 3 weeks it has been live because I wanted to kind of play it and see how I felt. And, uh…I think I played it enough to have a take!

The Remix formula established with Mists of Pandaria Remix last year is a basic premise – you immerse fully into a single expansion’s content, only having the option to play it and nothing else, with accelerated leveling, vastly higher ceilings of power, a boatload of cosmetic things to buy during the event (including some rare drop things you can still technically obtain in the live game), and a vague hint of a story involving the Dragonflight lore establishment of an alliance between some Infinite dragons and the Bronze where the leader of the allied Infinites can conduct experiments in existing timelines to see what might result from changes.

MoP Remix was hampered by a couple of things, namely that Bronze, the currency used to buy all the cool cosmetics, was also the main avenue for increasing your gear power, which created a tension between upgrading your power or getting the stuff you wanted that would go away with the event. Of course, a trick here was that spending Bronze on gear also gave you more ability to farm Bronze which made getting the stuff you wanted faster so the real path was to go all-in on gear and then push cosmetics when you could easily farm all the content daily in a breezy afternoon, but I had plenty of friends who fell into the trap of not upgrading their gear and getting stuck having to compromise on what they could buy with Bronze as a result. MoP Remix was also a choice paralysis nightmare sometimes, because from day 1, you had basically the full expansion right in front of you, which could make choosing what was worthwhile difficult, especially when you could do every dungeon and every raid on every difficulty every single day, but also had the pull of world content with unique rewards, Scenarios, and alt leveling. Lastly, while MoP Remix was fast leveling, its transference of power to alts was extremely poorly explained and thus felt bad when you’d roll an alt and see cloaks with a fraction of the bonuses of your main cape.

Legion Remix has attempts at fixing all of these issues. Gear is now on a watermark system, meaning that once you get 584 from drops (the maximum baseline item level for most activities) you get a drip-feed of slightly higher gear from certain activities and caches until every slot is at the 740 maximum. Jewelry is no longer tied to achievements but instead drops like anything else and has a daily quest that just gives you a piece at random that is tied in to the watermark system so it will nearly always be an upgrade on an item level basis. Bronze is exclusively yours to spend on cosmetics as desired, although there is a far larger assortment of items and a significantly higher total Bronze cost to get everything (however, this cost is still comparable or lower than getting a full-upgrade gearset in MoP Remix plus buying all the items for Bronze was). Legion Remix also has phases of content like a Classic server ruleset, so the Legion expansion is being rolled out in two-week intervals with a rough match to when content initially rolled out back in 2016 for the beloved expansion (Trial of Valor was bumped into the baseline content instead of a patch as was the addition Vrykul world content and quests, but everything else is roughly aligned to the patch cycle it originally belonged to), so instead of huge choice early on, you have a narrower roster of content you can do which makes it easier to decide. This also sort of constrains the Bronze acquisition, which is matched by having rewards you can buy mated to their content cycle, so while Bronze earning early on is slower, you have less stuff to spend it on which makes it relatively easy to get most of the things quickly. Alts and their experience bonus is now tied in to an account-wide experience buff that maxes out at 400% bonus, with lots of repeatable quests and some one-time objectives that feed into it. Getting to 400%, especially with alts, is relatively breezy, since you get 10% per character at 80, 1% per Infinite Research quest completed (and while each character has a cap they can do with a cycle timer to refresh, alts have their own timers so you can stockpile a ton of bonuses this way), and another 10% per zone with fully-completed quests, meaning a first character who levels to 80 and completes all 5 zones will give you a 60% baseline bonus assuming 0 other content.

Because Legion means Artifact Weapons, they are now the means by which all your bonuses are conferred. Instead of the Tinker sockets of MoP Remix, you have a generic Artifact tree (not the original expansion versions, alas) and you can fill the hilt section fully and then pick one branch to max out before getting to a paragon-trait that buffs your Versatility by 1% per level. Each tree has an active ability and that ability is empowered as you go down the tree, and a lot of the raw power of Remix comes from using these abilities smartly. You also get Remix Time, which lets you vastly accelerate cooldown regen for a couple of seconds, so you can cycle between your chosen spec’s burst cycle and active Artifact choice, then push the cooldowns down and get a second stab at bursting substantially earlier. It creates a slightly more active play structure compared to how Tinkers tended to feel, which is kind of nice.

The Paradox of Being Overpowered

Remix as a mode has a problem that I think is fascinating to look at from a game design perspective. On the surface, I think most players would say that they like to be overpowered over anything else – that being individually capable of great feats is something that makes a game feel fun. However, I think the paradox here is that the opposite is actually true – in a way, being overpowered makes nothing risky or story-worthy, and thus nothing is that interesting if it folds under your feet because eventually it starts to run together. Good game design is about meaningful constraints – asking players to accomplish something with firm limits that define the scope of possibilities, because the stories of epic gameplay sessions emerge from struggling to fit to constraints and still overcome an obstacle.

This leads to a couple of dilemmas. If you are broken enough to not be playing for fun, but because you feel a compulsion to collect all the things, then being carried feels fine – who cares, I just want the stuff, I’m not here for fun anyways – so you get into the Remix machine and let the players who are having fun go brrrr and pickup the droppings as you go. If you are playing for fun, then you go through a few loops of iffyness with it – because gearing up feels like being carried where you might not even get to do anything before a boss dies, which feels bad, and then when you get to that OP status, nothing is challenging enough to matter and thus it quickly becomes boring, because there’s little unique gameplay experience once you reach a high-enough level of power. What I enjoy in Remix is the sweet spot between those extremes – when I am powerful enough to solo many things but that act requires thought, planning, and skillful gameplay. What this functionally results in is being able to enjoy leveling, because there’s still some danger to it, and enjoying that mid-tier of power at endgame, where I can be skillful and demonstrate effective gameplay before my Artifact or item level is too powerful to be carrying the brunt of the work. Being weak feels bad and being godlike also feels bad, at least in my opinion.

Remix hasn’t quite perfected this issue yet, although going to a newer expansion does provide a way out…

Legion Has What MoP Don’t

MoP had challenge modes for dungeons, which weren’t available at all in Remix. Legion was the start of Mythic Plus, which Remix does have. In fact, Legion Remix has a bespoke Mythic Plus implementation that is loosely based on the current retail model, with custom Infinite Dragonflight base affixes and added affixes through the return of Legion-original affix options, capturing a smidge of the original flavor in a distinct and new package. Because Mythic Plus can just scale on into the stratosphere, it makes a perfect compliment to the scaling of power in Remix, where players can reasonably expect to solo +20 and up keys without a sweat but still need coordinated groups and skillful play to break into the highest level of play, like…doing a +113 key! In fact, as I write this, the solo leaderboards on Raider.IO show an Unholy DK doing a +84 3-chest run and the highest group run being a +161 key. Mythic Plus is an ideal in this scenario because it offers a bit of something for every part of the power scaling audience – if you want to be carried, a good group can easily run an +85 key with you as dead weight, if you want to solo and play skillfully, you can push harder and harder as much as you can handle, and if you like pushing in a group, you can get a push team to easily get into triple-digit key levels with some challenging and engaging gameplay.

Outside of M+, using Legion as a base has a few other benefits. In MoP Remix, the thing that hit my guild hardest was that all raids outside of Siege of Orgrimmar were on their original raid-sizes, so there was no flex, you had to either run a 10 or 25-player raid (with a potential solution to uneven rosters being to understack for the given size). Legion is standard WoW flex raiding with 25-player LFR and 20-player Mythic, so plenty of ways to engage regardless of group size there. Legion was also the introduction of World Quests, so Remix is of course populated with a map full of them on a daily basis that lets you play in the world without needing an active story quest to do. These changes, perhaps small-seeming, make a big difference to how enjoyable Legion Remix can be to play. It offers more choices and better flexibility, which makes it more approachable and overall friendlier. Legion was also an expansion that was designed around the Pathfinder system, which means its world map has more nooks and crannies with fun stuff to explore and depth, which is also less annoying than it originally was in launch Legion because we can not just fly, but Skyride all over in no time. Legion Remix also found a way to integrate a facsimile of tradeskills, at least with gathering of herbs and ore being a thing – sure, they just turn into Remix power widgets that disappear in a flash of text as powerups, but it means that this mode of play is closer to being a proper showcase of a more full WoW experience.

Lastly, Legion Remix pokes fun at the original design of Legion a bit. Any time you get to a timesink quest designed to waste your time with the Order Hall mission table, Moratari of the Infinites pops up to talk about how our time is limited, eventually getting shorter and more funny as she casually dismisses doing any of that bullshit so you can just receive the quest items needed and immediately turn them in. I’m slightly disappointed that we didn’t get any good quips about Legiondaries but I suppose that would require a level of self-awareness that Blizzard is only occasionally capable of, so hey.

The Fun Detected Meme

It is a common detraction point against Blizzard that they so often end up absorbed into their own idea of what the game should be that they miss what players like about it, and I think there is an aspect of that which is true in Legion Remix.

Firstly, let’s talk about why it wasn’t too hyped prior to launch. The PTR was a mess for Legion Remix with leveling, power grinding, and overall gameplay feeling slow and overly gated. It is fairly clear that Blizzard wanted this Remix to have more longevity outside of just leveling more alts when compared to MoP, thus leading to the timegated content rollout structure and initial PTR pacing of content. It took a deluge of feedback to Blizzard about how dull and unexciting this version of Remix was for them to relent and readjust the curves on power and experience gain accordingly, which did make the mode a lot better.

However, there is one thing I really don’t like about Legion Remix that I think is absolutely a rookie game design move, and it is that the first hour on your first character is a miserably slow and dull experience. MoP Remix made you spend maybe 20 minutes getting the cape and set dressing out of the way, which was fine enough, but Legion Remix has an opening segment that takes 3 times as long for no real benefit. There’s quests to kill demons in Dalaran, and then you have to free civilians, and then you do it again but with slightly different targets, and then you run around touching balls until the Infinite Dragons stop fucking around long enough to give you your first Artifact and send you off. I get that the intention here is to explain to a less-skilled WoW player what is happening and how the systems of Remix work in this version, but they do it in the worst way – long dialogues that are in-universe and so don’t acknowledge what keybinds or interface options you need to use to empower the weapon. There’s new voice acting and like hey, that’s neat, but I watched the mother/mother-in-law of two of my raiders on stream putz around in the opening experience and it was just not at all clear how these layers of systems were supposed to work to her. That’s not a slight for her either – the game at this point assumes a level of comfort and familiarity with the game that a lot of players simply don’t have, so while it’s quick and easy for me to blitz those quests, not everyone has the game as a hyperfixation they’ve played for over 20 years. I think as we look ahead to Midnight, an expansion built on simplifying the core of the game to reduce complexity and ease new players in, some real thought must be put towards investing into a better new player experience not just in terms of content structure (which they are already doing), but making meaningful and helpful tutorial content that isn’t trying to be cheesy in-universe narration. Just take a second to tell someone who is unfamiliar what the hell the user interface does, especially since in 12.0 you’re killing most of the good customization addons (intentionally or not)!

In game design, there’s a concept of creating your first level last so you have a sense of where the game is going and how it plays so the opening can be the best parts of the experience and a distillation of what the game needs the player to know, but I think Blizzard just crammed too many samey quests into one place and it makes that opening hour of gameplay exceedingly dull. I literally gave up on Legion Remix on PTR there, I didn’t even need to see the rest to know that I was already tuned out, and while I soldiered through it for my mandatory one time (skipping it the other 11, haha), I did not enjoy it and it felt like a tedious chore to overcome.

I think one other challenge Blizzard has with design in modes like this is how to offer players choice. The gear watermarking system is fine enough, but I’d like a few more ways to gear up quickly through other means. Bronze being required for gear in MoP Remix was bad, but if I had a choice right now to trade a shitton of Bronze for a 740 item, I would do it. My Remix main needs literally just a 740 pair of pants to be max item level, and the watermarking system has meant that through every available means, I’ve pulled 13 non-pants 740 items when all I really need is a decent pair of pants. Sure, I can save those pieces for real min-max gameplay by optimizing stats and such, but god damn it is an annoying system to get excited about farming motes and having purple caches in my bags only for them all to shit the bed because Blizzard wants to over-regulate the pace at which players gear up. In some ways that is the WoW experience in a nutshell, just ask anyone still farming weekly +10s in retail for a chance at a desired Myth-track slot, but it is one of the worst parts of the experience and the one I think players least want replicated in the funhouse steamroll version of the game!

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Overall, I still really enjoy Legion Remix and as my guild has wrapped for the season on retail (and thus the expansion), I’m excited to wind through the remaining two phases of Legion Remix in a more leisurely manner (or roll another couple of alts until I hit account character cap, what’s it to you?). I think a lot of potential still exists for future Remix events, although the gameplay design makes me hope that it ends up being for more recent expansions if it means we can get that higher diversity of content. Wrath of the Lich King Remix would slap until you realize the dungeons were already facerolls, the raids are locked sizes, there’s no progressive difficulty content to explore (not even all the raids have hard modes or Heroic difficulty!), and while I want to believe that Blizzard will work to change that over time for future Remixes (we’re already getting our first WotLK dungeon in M+ next season!), it also kind of defeats the purpose of Remix from a business POV as a reduced-effort filler content piece that is fun and relatively easy to implement (no shade at all, and I bet it is harder than we might imagine to implement, but it probably beats the work of a full Retail season or designing a gap raid).

Either way, if they follow the trend of nudging forward 2 full version numbers, I’ll see you in 2027 for…Shadowlands Remix? Oh boy…(okay actually it would slap though, in this essay I will…)