by JR Cook - 9 years ago     show comments

 Since Mists of Pandaria came out Blizzard has moved away from specific legendary weapons to long quest based rewards that give everyone the chance to obtain a legendary item. One of the problems with this approach is how legendary items have stopped feeling legendary. Everyone had a cloak back in Mists and it simply became a raid requirement, it might as well been another epic. On the other hand having a quest that puts you on a journey, which rewards you a very powerful item, for the whole expansion is very cool.

Now that we got a PTR for 6.2 we can start looking at the legendary rings that we will obtain next patch and their effects on raiding. Take into account that we are still in PTR and the rings we see now might change completely for when the patch goes live.

The  DPS rings represent a huge cool down that increases your raid’s damage. One of the problems I see with these rings is that the encounters in Hellfire Citadel will have to take their power into account. This is one of the downsides of having legendary items for all players, most people will  be expected to have these rings so Blizzard has to tune the bosses to account for the power spike players will get. It will also be a form of soft nerf on all the previous content from the expansion. Out in the world I expect people to have these rings to be incredibly powerful compared to rest of the environment.

The tank and healer rings are pretty much extra defensive cool downs that just like the DPS rings will need to have encounters designed around them. I also think that once tanks and maybe even healers get enough gear to survive encounters these rings will be swapped out for DPS rings because the killing bosses faster makes you care less about some of the mechanics that might actually kill you.

One of the interesting dynamics I am curious about is how will people utilize them in LFR. Because these rings can be obtained by people who only raid on that dificulty I guess there will a be a good portion of players who have them. This might lead to some griefing where players activate the rings in moments when they are not useful. Fortunately LFR had become very easy and bosses will still go down regardless of ring usage. This already happens with raid wide CDs like Heroism/Bloodlust so I don’t expect this to be much different.

Overall the rings are very good but I don’t expect them to change much of our game play except for coordinating when to better utilize them in any given fight. I also expect them to have some form of cool visual, since that is always a bonus with legendary items.

What are your opinions about the legendary rings? Are you caught up with the quest line so far? I would love to hear your opinion sin the comments below.