History of Legendary Items in World of Warcraft

legendaries have been one of the most sought after items in wow and for good reason too they are by far the strongest items in the game at least until they were replaced by leveling greens in the next expansion that is and so of course we have had many legendaries over the years of wow and many different methods of obtaining them which we'll be going over today in vanilla there were five major legendaries the first being a random drop for molten core the talisman of binding chart this legendary was and still is the only necklace in the game to have a visual effect on the player model and rightfully so as the necklace was never intended to be obtained by players it was accidentally left in the game and not noticed till a player obtained it blizzard then removed it from the game afterwards but let the person who had it keep it all over many years it was visible on the player's armory since he quit the game and wrath of the lich king and the updated armory the item is gone replaced with a generic pvp necklace it is unsure if the player simply no longer has the item or it's just simply no longer visible the next legendary was sulfurous hand of rag groups this legendary was pretty simple really crafted first as an epic rarity hammer you then needed to kill ragnaros for the chance that the eye of sulfur's legendary item would drop and if it did you can then use it to enchant the weapon turning it into a legendary and before we leave the molten core we have one more legendary thunder fury blessed blade of the wind seeker this legendary was obtained from two bindings that were found in the right combined and then forged into a blade using expensive materials to then be fully enchanted by summoning and then killing therad and the windseeker it's also probably one of the most well-known legendaries in the game and even made it over into diablo 3. next we have the black karaji resonating crystal the only legendary mount in the game amount we have a whole video on because of how long the process is to get the thing probably the longest question in the game's history in fact but the general gist of it was to travel all over the world gathering all sorts of materials and helping out the dragonflights eventually you'd get the legendary mount if you helped open the gates or ring the gong within 24 hours after the first one did and lastly for vanilla we have atiesh great staff of the guardian from naxxramas requiring you to gather fragments within the raid and then go to old raids and dungeons to empower it into its legendary self even having slightly different stats based on which class was crafting it and with a small different colored ribbon to distinct them although its teleporting to karazhan ability was very unique it was not really that useful until the next expansion when karazhan would become a raid next we move on into the burning crusade during the fight with kael'thas sunstrider in the eye of eternity raid you had to progress through many different phases of the fight to finally take him out and after killing his team of bodyguards you then had to kill their enchanted weapons which once killed could be looted for a limited duration legendary item that you needed to finish the rest of the fight a legendary bow which also came with the only legendary arrows ever in the game the only legendary shield ever in the game a mace a sword a dagger a staff and a two-handed axe these weapons needed to be distributed among specific raid members who would need to perform specific roles during the fight using that weapons skills special abilities to prevent spells like mind controls although cool these weapons disappeared upon death or after 15 minutes of real time and a fun fact there was a little bug with the kelphos fight where the bodyguards would keep gathering aggro even while they were dead and away tanks could counter this so that they didn't just kill the healers immediately when they resurrected was to equip the legendary staff and just spam use its ability since it didn't have an internal cooldown this staff would generate a very minor amount of threat and since you could use this staff as many times as you could fit it into a macro you could basically use one bug in order to counter another next we go to the black temple in illidan himself and the war glaives of azeroth these glaives or whelp swords were a set of weapons with their own set bonus and a simple objective of just having them drop no quests no long process just get lucky and hope they drop and with a drop rate of 5 each they were not that uncommon to be fair although many disappointed players would see the war graves drop only to realize it was the same one they already had as you did not need two you needed the main hand and the offhand specifically and the last legendary for the burning crusade was also another one you just simply had to hope for to drop thoridel who dropped from kil'jaeden in sunwell plateau this legendary is only real effect other than being a really strong weapon was that it generated its own arrows meaning hunters no longer need to waste money in backspace on carrying arrows around even commonly used in wrath of the lich king when farming weaker content to simply save the hunter some cash funny enough though the arrows it generated did not give a dps boost like normal ammo would so there has been some call for the burning crusade to allow hunters to use normal ammo with the legendary bow or have its magical ammo deal an equal amount of damage equal to the best ammo the bow did do a ton more base damage than the other epic bows in the same raid tier to compensate making it a big dps boost for hunter's steady shot rotation which didn't use ammo as part of its damage anyway so it was still a big dps boost however speaking of wrath of the lich king we move to the frozen norths of northrend with the second ray tier of the expansion oldwar we raid a titan city and in it we get a titan artifact first found as 30 fragments which dropped from bosses you would then combine them together and chuck the weapon into the mouth of yogg-saron himself and upon killing him you would then obtain the legendary healer mace of alinar then in the raid on icecrown citadel itself we have the sister weapon of the frostmourne named the shadow mourn this two-handed axe was attained by doing a long quest line requiring you to gather arthas's hammer left where he found frostmourne gather a ton of primordial saronite collect the blood from the abominations of the play quarter to then craft shadow's edge an epic x not done yet you then need to go to the final boss of each wing to perform a special infusion only then can you begin collecting shadow frost shards requiring you to gather 50 shadowfrost yards which had a chance to drop from icc 25 man bosses with a higher chance on heroic meaning you need to kill at least 50 bosses and once you've collected all these shards the weapon could finally be completed although you weren't done yet the only legendary to do so you could then use the axe to slay the lich king and if you did you would gather many items arthas kept from his past life and return them to the original owners in exchange get a variety of items you could keep from yourself or sell on the auction house making this legendary still worth obtaining even today as selling these items turns a pretty profit with the broken world of the cataclysm we are granted another two legendaries first the dragon wrath's terra gross's rest this staff was obtained through a long quest line within firelands to kill many bosses and perform special encounters against new enemies within the fire lands growing it from a simple branch of nordisol into the rune staff and then the legendary dragonrath although the players who wanted the staff would be set back about 9000 gold because of the gold requirements for it as well but the staff had some unique things about it first it had an on-use effect that transformed the player into a dragon flying mount the only weapon ever to do so although a shame it was never added to the mountain journal as in order to use it you still need to equip the snap from your bags and then put your staff back every time you want to mount up but also by having a member of the guild obtain the staff a small pet version of taragosa would be added to your guild shop allowing all guild members to buy the little pet and then next we have the fangs of the father these daggers were the first class specific legendary or at least the first legendary specific to one class that being the rogue these legendary daggers had their own set bonus and also an on-use slow fall effect giving the rogue a pair of dragon wings to obtain these daggers you first need to pickpocket the boss from hagar within dragon soul then wait 12 or real life hours then complete mini rogue rogue-based quests where the player need to sneak around enemies and infiltrate places like ravenhold to slay wrathion's sibling black dragons then getting a pair of epic daggers that would be upgraded to even more powerful epic daggers after killing dragon soul bosses to then again be upgraded into legendary daggers after killing even more bosses from the dragon soul raid after so many legendaries of simply killing tons of raid bosses to get the materials to make them legendaries and mr pandaria decided to shake it up a bit miss the pandaria started with the special legendary stat gems these could be placed into unique shaw touch weapons from the current ray tier then becoming only more powerful when they added the eye of the black prince to add another socket to the shot touch weapons players could then earn the legendary meta gems that would fit into their helmets only then beat out by epic capes they could obtain that then in the final patch of the expansion could be upgraded to legendary quality one for each of the celestials physical dps spellcaster dps healers and tanks the quest lines were long but unique in that they offered so many little items along the way and gave every single player access to a legendary especially since the items you needed from raids to get were player specific no more fighting on who gets the first shadow mourn and instead of that every player could focus on getting their legendary at the same time and this is something most of the player base and blizzard really liked and so they kept it in before we move on to the next expansion fun fact originally there was datamined itemed breath of the black prince which points to an early concept that the shaw touched weapons we were empowering or to continue to be empowered by cleansing them with their shock corruption and creating a legendary weapon for every class but sadly it was seemingly scrapped later on development in favor of the legendary capes then in warlords of draenor we kept up with this unique legendary situation we got five legendary rings agility dps strength dps intellect dps healers and tanks we started the questline with a simple clearing of dungeons to receive epic rings these rings would then be upgraded time and time again by doing dungeons to get different cores and of course uphexis crystals alongside khadgar you then need to clear high maul for special materials to upgrade your ring again only then to do it again in blackrock foundry after this you would then get a legendary follower garona halforcan hellfire citadel in the garrison shipyard both things added in 6.2 these things you needed in order to finally upgrade the ring to its legendary status also with this patch they made it so you could buy the materials needed from the last raid for lots of apexis crystals the rings were quite unique first off they could have their item level upgraded by three every week to a maximum of 7.95 these upgrades came from kill and archimonde every week after getting the legendary or buying the upgrades using valor points but these rings had a very special effect when used it activated all other rings of the same type also sharing their cooldowns doing things like increased damage and then causing the player who used it to explode for percentage of the damage that all the players dealt while cool the players hated this thing simply because one player could press it and mess up the entire fight as giving every member raid a rate-wide dps cooldown is not really a great idea not everyone has as good restraints as the people who are normally supposed to pot bloodlust over the past two expansions with everyone has a legendary meaning they're no longer special was a common complaint about the new system although legion was about to bring that to a full stop legion came up with a new system which was usually referred to as the legionaries these legionaries ranged from generic ones used by any class or healer to specific classes and specific specs and there were tons of these and they dropped randomly from doing world bosses killing bosses and more keyed word randomly this was a massive complaint to the playerbase as having to go through so many legendaries for someone to get their bis legendary first while you get yours last was a real problem and a very frustrating one too this was not fixed until the very end of the expansion with the vendor added that allowed you to farm and then buy legendaries specific ones for yourself or tokens that could then be sent to alts to allow them to get some legendaries you could originally only wear one of these but by doing your class hall campaign and researching you could eventually wear two at once before we move on there are two more things to talk about first there are the craft and legendaries these legendaries were made by leatherworkers tailors and blacksmiths these items were mostly focused around leveling or just doing content quickly good for alts or farming old content and with effects that focused on movement speed or getting bus from kills lastly there are the titanic trinkets from the raiden taurus these trinkets were mostly epic and quite easy to get and could even be upgraded by killing argus each week just like the rings from warlords of draenor however there was one trinket a month though's vision this trinket was legendary and very powerful and even though it was a legendary it did not fill the two legendary camp that the others did although its drop rate was abysmal doing the boss every week on multiple difficulties till the expansion ended it was common to only see one or two of these drop ever in the next expansion battle for azeroth blizzard listened and got rid of the massive amount of legendaries instead waiting until the final major patch of the expansion to give us astra kamus this legendary was obtained and then upgraded entirely through doing the 8.3 feature horrific visions giving you increased stats buffing future horrific vision runs and giving you corruption resistance allowing you to wear more corrupted gear a type of gear specific to the final patch of bfa which gave you increased effects at the debuff of gaining corruption which gave ill effects if you wore too much of it unlike past upgraded legendaries this one was legendary from the start however as you upgraded it its visual appearance and the special effects it got changed as you leveled it up although once fully leveled up the cape could then be again increased in power by doing a few things like the weekly horrific visions or n'zoth kills and that's it for battle for azeroth very simple so now let's go over to the shadowlands with the channel lens expansion they added a new legendary system first you would need to do a variant content rep grinding pvp tour gust raids dungeons and by doing these you would get legendary memories you would learn them adding them to a list that then would be brought to a being known as the runecrafter going doomed with these memories and scrolls of stats as well as specific armor pieces crafted specifically for legendaries they could be combined with soul ash obtained from tour gus to create a custom legendary you chose the power you chose which slot it goes in you chose the stats and you choose the item level of course higher item levels need more soul ash and stronger armor pieces theoretically that makes a shadow lens having the most legendaries of any expansion ever although if you only count the memories and not the crafted specific amounts of items you could make i think legion still has it beat so as you can see legendaries have had many versions over the years vanilla with more of a focus on having to obtain rare drops the burning crusade with the legendary itself being a rare drop wrath of the lich king cataclysm and vanilla's atiesh needing you to kill tons of bosses to get the materials with breakups like little events quest and then mr panderia warlords of draenor and bfa following the same idea but with each player working on their own legendary instead of needing to compete then legion would just legendary's all over the place very similar diablo 3 and shadow lands with crafted legendaries basically taking the legion version and more streamlining it there are a lot of different versions of the legendaries throughout the course of the game and each of them had their own pros and cons alright and that's the video subscribe for more weekly videos on legion [Music] legendaries

Channel: hirumaredx

Views: 320,664

Keywords: Battle, For, Azeroth, World Of Warcraft (Video Game), hirumaredx, history, wow, worl, vanilla, bc, burning crusade, wrath, wrath of the lich king, linch king, Video Game (Industry), World Warcraft, facts, Warcraft (Fictional Universe), how did doom work before wrath, before cata, how it use to work, funny, 8.3, 2020

Id: EpFUp0kzAu0

Length: 15min 53sec (953 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 16 2021