Legendary
Legendary quality is the second highest level of item quality available to players, above Epic. It usually takes multiple end-game raid instance runs to acquire or craft these items. Legendary items are considered the most powerful items available to players. The names of legendary-quality items will appear in orange. There is also a higher category of items called Artifact that was introduced in Legion.
For the list of legendary items, see Legendary items.
Legion
"Legion Legendaries" are a large number of items that are below normal legendaries in rarity, but still very powerful. At the beginning of World of Warcraft: Legion, players were only able to equip one Legion Legendary item at a time. As the expansion progressed, the number of legendaries that could be equipped at once was increased to two.[1]
Legendary items can come from world quest caches, dungeon bosses, raid bosses, PvP strongboxes,[2] world bosses and Mythic+ weekly caches.[3]
As of the Battle for Azeroth pre-patch, Legion legendaries can be purchased from Arcanomancer Vridiel at Tanks for Everything in the Dalaran above the Broken Isles.[4] Most sources of Artifact Power will instead give 
[Wakening Essence] to help in the effort to purchase these items.
Shadowlands
Legendaries returned in Shadowlands but instead of being drops, they are craftable through the Runecarver's Oubliette and Domination Armor.
Dragonflight
Legendary weapons returned to Dragonflight as very rare drops from two final raid bosses:
- Scalecommander Sarkareth dropped the
[Cracked Titan Gem] for Evokers, which started a questline to unlock 
[Nasz'uro, the Unbound Legacy]. - Fyrakk the Blazing dropped
[Fyr'alath the Dreamrender], which upon equipping would damage and burn the player before starting the questline to modify the axe to be safely wielded, eventually turning into [Fyr'alath the Dreamrender].
Trivia
- Prior to Legion, nearly all equippable legendary items were weapons. Most others were components used to create these weapons. One, the
[Black Qiraji Resonating Crystal], is a mount. With the exception of those in The Burning Crusade, all of the legendary items required a complicated and arduous questline in order to get them. - When patch 1.4.0 was released, a bug granted players access to an NPC who gave away legendary items. This was hotfixed a day later and the items, with the exception of the
[Bindings of the Windseeker], were removed from players' inventories.[5] - Equippable items of legendary quality always have one or more attribute bonuses or procs.
- Equippable items at legendary quality can't be disenchanted by characters with the Enchanting profession.
- The hexadecimal color code for legendary itemlinks is #ff8000.
Patch changes
Patch 8.3.0 (2020-01-14): Most legendaries are now transmogrifiable.
References
- ^
Kalgan 2016-02-18. Legendaries are concerning. Retrieved on 2016-06-10.
- ^ Legion Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas. MMO-Champion (2016-06-16). Retrieved on 2016-06-19.
- ^ A Guide to Legion Legendaries. Wowhead. Retrieved on 2016-09-15.
- ^ Ythisens 2018-07-13. Legendary Items in BfA Pre-Patch. Archived from the original on 2018-07-13. Retrieved on 2018-07-13.
- ^ Hotfixes/2005 Archive#April 20