The Legendary Issue

Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker, Sulfuras, Hand of Ragnaros, Atiesh, Greatstaff of the Guardian, Thori'dal, the Star's Fury, the Twins Blades of Azzinoth, Val'anyr, Hammer of Ancient Kings, and now Shadowmourne, These are the eight legendary weapons available in the World of Warcraft, though there's a mount too. As the name implies they extremely rare weapons and the best for their respective roles, in their respective tiers. With current gear levels reaching upwards of 280 weapons like Sulfuras and Thunderfury, with their tiny ilevels of 80, are nothing even compared to greens. The idea makes sense from a mechanics point of view, as the level of content rises weapons become less difficult to get and thus if everybody's toting around these easy to get super weapons everything else becomes obsolete, but from a lore and continuity standpoint it's a complete conundrum. These are supposed to be the most destructive weapons in existance that have existed for hundreds if not thousands of years, yet after a few swings or tugs from a player they turn into total crap. So how do you solve the problem, simple, make it HARD. The first step is to set up a scaling mechanism for the Legendaries like the one for Heirlooms, simple enough to reuse an already great mechanic, but this is only the first step. Instead of Level this will be tied to completed quest IDs. Since 3.3 add-ons can now grab a character's complete quest history from the server, so we know for sure that Blizzard can, so if character has quest ID #### completed ilevel on Legendary A goes up to 280 or what have you. These quest don't have to be something super complex, just super hard. Create and NPCs in Dalaran call them Grand Artificer Brokkar (dwarf) and Head Librarian Sindiri (elf or human). When a player talks to one of them with a Legendary they give a special dialog, and says something along the lines of "But it power's seems to be waning after all these years, but i think we might be able to restore at least some its power." Then they offer you a quest to talk to the other guy who tell you to collect 50 Primal Saronite, 20 Titansteel, and some other item depending on the weapon (Something like 50 Eternal Something). Once you bring him that he begins reconstructing the weapon but it doesn't work quite right, at this point your legendary is replace by a high level epic item. Which will suck, but there more to it. You talk to the first guy again and he tells you something like "We seem to have accidentally sealed away the weapons magic but i've found something here that may just work to fix that." This is where it's become a bit more particular. Each legendary requires items from a different set of bosses. Thori'dal would require something from Malygos in the Eye of Eternity, Something from Freyja in Ulduar, and Blood Queen Lana'thel in ICC. Then set them to a low drop lower drop rate for the higher instances. Finally make the quest chain unfinished and add another quest at the end of the next expansions. You could even stretch it out allowing one part to be available per tier so players can begin the quest. The key is making the boss drops difficult to get, while keeping the quest's fairly cookie cutter. and a big key is while the player is doing the quest they don't have a legendary, you have an epic weapon that used to be a Legendary Weapon,

That's a very scary idea for some people, but when you're finished you have something like this.

(ups to Wow Item Creator! for the awesome sight)