In the upcoming 5.4 patch on the new Timeless Isle, there will be a new world boss that only people who have succeeded in obtaining the Legendary Cloak (meaning have completed the Legendary Quests for this expansion thus far) can access. As usual, there’s a huge amount of arguments that have broken out over on the Blizzard Forums that beg the question, “Is it really necessary to have the cloak completed to access another world boss?”
That introduces an even bigger question: is the Legendary Cloak even worth going after?
Ultimately, this implies whether or not doing the legendary quests even is worth the effort? You have to put everything into perspective when you consider the answer to this question, especially the history behind gear, legendaries and expansions. The answer really is up to the individual as the quests are more a matter of preference and self-fulfillment rather than something you can utilize to gear up for a patch or two.
Take for instance the legendary gems at the beginning. Right when patch 5.2 hit, pretty much the Sha Touched Weapons and gems that you farmed for months became invalidated. If you happened to stumble upon a Sha Touched Weapon early on and had the gem lying around in your bag, then it would just be a matter of time before you incidentally would get an upgrade in Throne of Thunder (or even through say a Heroic Scenario if you mostly play casual). And once you got your upgrade, your precious Sha Touched weapon would go into Void Storage as a possible future transmog item once your other items started to look dull on you.
The real killer though is the lead up. There’s a lot of grinding involved in the legendary quest line. A LOT. For people who dislike to PVP, you’re forced to PVP. At some point, you will also be forced to group up with four other people. If you’re lucky, you’ll be at the right place and the right time in obtaining help from people in a similar boat. But then you get to the new grind in farming specific items from ToT, which had a notoriously bad drop rate. It was so bad that Blizzard ended up relenting in making the Lei Shen encounter guarantee a drop.
Even when you do all that, you still have the challenge. A friend of mine described the challenge as “keyboard/mouse busting frustrating.” Right now, my mouse and keyboard already malfunction and I paid $200 for those. So I really don’t want to spend more money on hardware just for a stupid game. What’s great about this challenge according to my friend is that it tends to bug out. Well, that’s just encouraging.
Of course, the cloak does provide some neat bonuses that I’ve seen on my friend’s toon. I think they’ll be adding some effects (not sure if it’s just visual). Yet the minute the expansion gets released, you’ll probably be able to use your cloak for about 3 levels before a green becomes available that has better stats.
So again, the question is whether or not the legendary cloak really is worth the effort? I think like anything it really is a matter of personal preference. The way I’ve treated the entire quest line is to work on it when it’s convenient for me. Honestly though, it doesn’t seem worth the headaches so I’ll probably end up skipping the rest unless something changes.
I have to admit that the way they’re handling the new world boss is somewhat puzzling. I did hear that they will be making the boss account wide with regards to being able to fight it if you have completed the legendary quest on a single toon. Still, someone brought up the point in how getting groups for this fight might end up becoming difficult to impossible if the number of people capable of completing the legendary quest/cloak is too small. I know Blizzard has virtual servers in the back of their minds, but that does not necessarily guarantee that people will be able to fight the boss.