Shath'mag vwyq shu et'agthu, Shath'mag sshk ye! Krz'ek fhn'z agash zz maqdahl or'kaaxth'ma amqa!
The Black Empire once ruled this pitiful world, and it will do so again! Your pitiful kind will know only despair and sorrow for a hundred thousand millennia to come!
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Pretty sure they havent made their minds about it yet. Personally? I would like it to stay , if it works out well enough.
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They already said , that it will take 1-3 months to max the artifact out . Someone mentioned b4 , that apparently there will be a cap on artifact power. No idea what kind of cap will it be , but I would imagine , it shouldnt be more than a weekly cap.
I might be willing to concede the point on power creep but the expansion as a whole assumes you have an artifact. The (possible) power creep, the quest text (which now includes the pop up VO with faces), the item drops, the class halls. It's an expansion built around this one concept. I have no idea how their internal systems work so I don't know what the better answer is for them. For customers it's creating the new artifact and story, for them internally? Not sure.
I think the other way around is more likely(though not necessarily very likely). They already have a system in place that allows them to effectively continue to increase the item power of the artifacts indefinitely. But they won't keep the artifact power system due to the issue of keeping people up to date in post-legion expansions.
Yeah, it really feels like the artifact system is a spiritual successor to "the path of titans".
Sure, my point is just that they could do anything with it. The fact that the artifact progression is tied to the weapon is irrelevant. Even that last point of yours is something that'd be easy to deal with by adjusting AP gain so that you'll have enough to buy "legacy" traits by the time you are 110. They're going to need to give people some new skills and abilities between 100-110 anyway.
All major lore artifacts will likely go back to their owners and the rest put away, next expansion I have a feeling we will have something similar to artifact weapons but possibly innately for any weapon you can find over a certain item level and over time you will upgrade it into an artifact like weapon, maybe with not as many choices but it would be cool if we could forge our own unique one from a rare we like, that way it would feel truly unique.
The easy solution would be to make any new class a part of an already existing faction, and have them share an existing artifact for the 10 levels where it would be relevant. Let's say they added a Battle-Mage class, they could just give them Felo'melorn for all specs and send them to the Mage Order Hall. It doesn't need to be very complex, and they could easily replace every Mage reference with Battle-Mage.
They're at a point where any new class could easily be associated with an already existing one for just a few levels.
Artifact Weapons is great Artifact Power is a cluster fuck, they need to fix it and do it before beta