Legacy raid farming is one of the most popular World of Warcraft pastimes, but a recent change that snuck underneath the radar might make that pastime just a bit more tedious than it needs to be. Though players have been doing old raids in World of Warcraft for legendary items and mounts since the beginning, the introduction of Transmogrification in Cataclysm's final patch made this corner of the game skyrocket in popularity.
Every player wants to look good, and collecting item appearances in World of Warcraft is one of its best implemented features, even when compared to other MMOs like Final Fantasy 14. A player needs to only enter an old raid, defeat a boss, and any loot that they're eligible to equip on that character will be permanently added to their World of Warcraft account's appearance collection. Though Legion raids will be easily soloed in Dragonflight at max level, this process is now expected to be a bit longer than initial projections implied.
It would seem that Blizzard Entertainment increased the hit point value across old World of Warcraft instances such as Antorus by about 33%, effectively lengthening the time needed to clear legacy content by a significant margin. Moreover, with the recent reduction in gold obtained from looting old bosses, it would seem that the business of farming raids from past expansions became a lot less lucrative. The change was spotted by FreedpsSargeras, who shared the discovery on the official World of Warcraft subreddit.
Though it might be easy to assume that Blizzard's intentions for this change are malicious by default, there may yet be an explanation for the change that would make this an honest mistake. During the process of consolidating Shadowlands into Chromie Time, a way to activate level scaling, and the consequent upgrade of allowing Chromie Time to last until Level 60, several items needed an increase in item level as Blizzard noticed non-negligible gaps across the expansions.
In other to stabilize this bump in gear power, the developers also applied a blanket increase to all enemy hit points, accidentally applying it to old instances in the process. Given that the legacy raids never fell under Chromie Time, they would always remain at the same level as its expansion outside Chromie Time, which makes this change stick out. Though farming an old raid for 8 minutes instead of 6 minutes doesn't feel like much of a difference, a farming session suddenly taking up 40 minutes instead of 30 minutes is an unfortunate side effect. While the effects won't truly be felt until Dragonflight launches proper, it is certainly something worth investigating in the coming weeks.
World of Warcraft is available now for PC. Dragonflight launches on November 28.