Could someone explain to me the artifact power system?

[Antermosiph]

Title, I understand the overall gist of it (gain power from doing stuff, power increases artifact strength) but I do have a few random questions regarding it from folks on beta.

1. If you gain power, is it capped on how much you can get per day/week?
2. How absurd is the grind? As the first goal will obviously be to max it out asap (if possible).
3. How does this system work for offspec, and if there is a cap does that cap count against all specs?
4. What sort of activities give artifact power, and approximately how much?

[Deleted]

Hey,

i will try to answer, be aware that this is beta and it will most likly change. Especially numbers and drop chances etc.

1. no, not known
2. its subjectiv, what is "absurd" for you? but i will say so, at the end all will reach max lvl, the question is the earlier you want to reach it the harder/more you have to grind.
3. Right now, you assign your ArP fix to a weapon. Each weapon is tied to specific spec(not class!). You can spend your ArP how you like it, but most likely you want spend all your ArP into one weapon. If you want to reset your ArP, to either redone your current weapon or put in another weapon, you have to pay curent level worth of ArP. which can be a lot and at later stages of the game, a lot of hours of grind you loose this way.
There is something called "Artefact Research", kind of a work orders which last 5 days and increases your rate at which you gain ArP, this research is repeatable.
4. All kind of activities (quests, world quests, dungeons, mob drops, missions, rars, treasues ... dont know all.

Rakrath

[Nihilan]

Artifact power is a consumable currency that can be gained from pretty much everything you do in legion. The vast majority of it will come from post-leveling activities. And while there does not seem to be a cap that can be earned per day/per week, it will take a very long time to fully level an artifact with all 34 traits.

Eventually the AP cost per trait begins to exponentially scale. You will have to obtain the four tomes of knowledge from class hall quests to offset that scaling. Those same tomes also make leveling your offspec Artifacts easier.

[BiggestNoob]

While you're leveling AP is thrown at you like candy making the system seem like it's not so bad. You're given consumables that range from 5 to 500 AP. When you consume them, they immediately increase an extra experience bar (your artifact power experience bar) for the weapon you currently have equipped. The ends of quest lines tend to give 100-200 and your class quest line tends to give bigger chunks. Smaller ones can be dropped from mobs in the open world and from mobs in dungeons (at a much higher rate).

Once you've exhausted all the quests in the content that give AP as a reward, it's rare to see more than 20 or 50 from mob drops or from dungeon drops. World quests tend to reward from 20 to 50 AP, garrison missions award up to 50 (there may be rarer missions that reward more later on), and the caches you get daily (complete 4 world quests for the award, basically D3 bounties) award up to 100 from what I've seen. There may be other rewards from crafting or other dailies but I've not investigated these fully.

You'll end up with something like 4000 AP from doing all the quests. The artifact nodes start at 325 AP and increase by 25 per unlock until you have 13, at which point they skyrocket to over 3000 and start increasing exponentially.

What this means: the majority of your unlocks will happen from tiny sources of AP, requiring a huge grind. Blizzard specifically claims that this jump after 13 unlocks is to balance around the income you'll have, but your AP income starts off huge while leveling and then takes a giant dive, only being matched by non-stop dungeon running or mass mob farming. This also means the respec cost (which costs the same as your next node unlock) is unnecessarily punishing. This also means at this point if you plan on playing multiple specs that you can much more easily unlock nodes in another weapon than your primary weapon (~7 unlocks to a single unlock on your main weapon).

Once you reach 110 a quest becomes available in your class hall that will allow you to unlock the ability to research AP gain increase. Each of these costs 1250 resources (I think, it might be 1500) and takes 5 days to research, with a max queue of 2. The first unlock gives 1% extra AP, but supposedly this ramps up exponentially. If that's the case, it may take 100-200 days before your AP gain is sufficiently high to easily be able to finish the primary node unlocks in your weapon. Once you unlock every node on your artifact, you gain access to an alternate advancement system that has an absurd cost per unlock that gives a flat % performance increase, and enables a new effect on your artifact.

It seems like they intend for these to be relatively uncovered (17-18 unlocks or so) within the first raid and within the second to be mostly done, then the third for everyone to be finished and working through the AA system. Depending on whether there's a limit to the research on AP increases, it could take all expansion of playing 1 character most of the time to completely finish an artifact. If you want to play multiple characters, you should level them early on to 110 and unlock the AP research and do dailies for gear, resources (to continue researching), and the little bit of AP you gain doing this. It may be optimal on alt characters not to actually consume AP or finish AP granting quests until this research is fairly advanced in order to compensate for the lack of playing time.

[Antermosiph]

While you're leveling AP is thrown at you like candy making the system seem like it's not so bad. You're given consumables that range from 5 to 500 AP. When you consume them, they immediately increase an extra experience bar (your artifact power experience bar) for the weapon you currently have equipped. The ends of quest lines tend to give 100-200 and your class quest line tends to give bigger chunks. Smaller ones can be dropped from mobs in the open world and from mobs in dungeons (at a much higher rate).

Once you've exhausted all the quests in the content that give AP as a reward, it's rare to see more than 20 or 50 from mob drops or from dungeon drops. World quests tend to reward from 20 to 50 AP, garrison missions award up to 50 (there may be rarer missions that reward more later on), and the caches you get daily (complete 4 world quests for the award, basically D3 bounties) award up to 100 from what I've seen. There may be other rewards from crafting or other dailies but I've not investigated these fully.

You'll end up with something like 4000 AP from doing all the quests. The artifact nodes start at 325 AP and increase by 25 per unlock until you have 13, at which point they skyrocket to over 3000 and start increasing exponentially.

What this means: the majority of your unlocks will happen from tiny sources of AP, requiring a huge grind. Blizzard specifically claims that this jump after 13 unlocks is to balance around the income you'll have, but your AP income starts off huge while leveling and then takes a giant dive, only being matched by non-stop dungeon running or mass mob farming. This also means the respec cost (which costs the same as your next node unlock) is unnecessarily punishing. This also means at this point if you plan on playing multiple specs that you can much more easily unlock nodes in another weapon than your primary weapon (~7 unlocks to a single unlock on your main weapon).

Once you reach 110 a quest becomes available in your class hall that will allow you to unlock the ability to research AP gain increase. Each of these costs 1250 resources (I think, it might be 1500) and takes 5 days to research, with a max queue of 2. The first unlock gives 1% extra AP, but supposedly this ramps up exponentially. If that's the case, it may take 100-200 days before your AP gain is sufficiently high to easily be able to finish the primary node unlocks in your weapon. Once you unlock every node on your artifact, you gain access to an alternate advancement system that has an absurd cost per unlock that gives a flat % performance increase, and enables a new effect on your artifact.

It seems like they intend for these to be relatively uncovered (17-18 unlocks or so) within the first raid and within the second to be mostly done, then the third for everyone to be finished and working through the AA system. Depending on whether there's a limit to the research on AP increases, it could take all expansion of playing 1 character most of the time to completely finish an artifact. If you want to play multiple characters, you should level them early on to 110 and unlock the AP research and do dailies for gear, resources (to continue researching), and the little bit of AP you gain doing this. Finishing every quest (including every quest and all the unlocks in Suramar) on a character takes quite a while.

This sounds unnecessarily complicated. Why not just give us X points to spend and then increase those each raid patch after a quest?

Meh, I was super excited for legion and this + the talent system change is largely making me feel like not bothering till 1-2 patches in. Doesn't help I gotta reroll because fuck ice armor.

[Nihilan]

In the end it is in not really all that different than farming valor for item upgrades or apexis crystals for baleful tokens. The pertinent point is that those who do devote the time to hammering out AP for the artifact will have an unequivocal advantage over those who do not or can not. With gear item levels being roughly RNG based, AP gain is the only source of player power advancement that is 100% under their own control.

You either have the AP because you were out running dungeons or world quests, or you do not have the AP because you cant be assed to leave your class hall.

[BiggestNoob]

This sounds unnecessarily complicated. Why not just give us X points to spend and then increase those each raid patch after a quest?

Meh, I was super excited for legion and this + the talent system change is largely making me feel like not bothering till 1-2 patches in. Doesn't help I gotta reroll because fuck ice armor.

I thought Blizzard had learned that it's pretty shitty to have grind-based items per spec. This system is incredibly punishing to off-spec play, which means the LFG/LFR queues are going to be far worse than they were in WoD, or you'll have much worse tanks/healers queuing as the artifact nodes are incredibly strong in most cases. A vengeance DH without 14-15 nodes has shit self healing and pain generation than one with like 3 unlocked, so he's going to require far, far more healing than a main spec tank, so if you get an off spec healer and an off spec tank, you're going to have a bad time.

We saw this exact problem when Blizzard tried this system out with the ring upgrades in WoD, and off-spec play was discouraged except for pure DPS classes that only had 1 ring shared between specs. At the very minimum your AP gain should be completely separate from the artifacts themselves, so that unlocking a node unlocks a node on every artifact you have on that character.

I think Blizzard just hates the idea of people playing more than 1 spec and 1 character. I don't know why, it's like "fuck people who want to experience more than a tiny fraction of this game."

In the end it is in not really all that different than farming valor for item upgrades or apexis crystals for baleful tokens. The pertinent point is that those who do devote the time to hammering out AP for the artifact will have an unequivocal advantage over those who do not or can not. With gear item levels being roughly RNG based, AP gain is the only source of player power advancement that is 100% under their own control.

You either have the AP because you were out running dungeons or world quests, or you do not have the AP because you cant be assed to leave your class hall.

Yes and it's shit for raiding. It's like they heard the "split runs are cancer" complaints and said "well how about a much worse grind?"

6+ months in you're going to see people requiring 25 unlocked nodes to join heroic pugs in addition to having AOTC.

[nazrakin]

I thought Blizzard had learned that it's pretty shitty to have grind-based items per spec. This system is incredibly punishing to off-spec play, which means the LFG/LFR queues are going to be far worse than they were in WoD, or you'll have much worse tanks/healers queuing as the artifact nodes are incredibly strong in most cases. A vengeance DH without 14-15 nodes has shit self healing and pain generation than one with like 3 unlocked, so he's going to require far, far more healing than a main spec tank, so if you get an off spec healer and an off spec tank, you're going to have a bad time.

We saw this exact problem when Blizzard tried this system out with the ring upgrades in WoD, and off-spec play was discouraged except for pure DPS classes that only had 1 ring shared between specs. At the very minimum your AP gain should be completely separate from the artifacts themselves, so that unlocking a node unlocks a node on every artifact you have on that character.

I think Blizzard just hates the idea of people playing more than 1 spec and 1 character. I don't know why, it's like "fuck people who want to experience more than a tiny fraction of this game."



Yes and it's shit for raiding. It's like they heard the "split runs are cancer" complaints and said "well how about a much worse grind?"

6+ months in you're going to see people requiring 25 unlocked nodes to join heroic pugs in addition to having AOTC.

So what? Make your own groups if you dont like it. People should be able to invite whoever they want with whatever ridiculous stipulations they want to their pug groups.

[Antermosiph]

In the end it is in not really all that different than farming valor for item upgrades or apexis crystals for baleful tokens. The pertinent point is that those who do devote the time to hammering out AP for the artifact will have an unequivocal advantage over those who do not or can not. With gear item levels being roughly RNG based, AP gain is the only source of player power advancement that is 100% under their own control.

You either have the AP because you were out running dungeons or world quests, or you do not have the AP because you cant be assed to leave your class hall.

The more I look into it the more it feels path of exileish. Especially since the further you ar into the artifact the harder it is to respec it (If it costs 10k to upgrade I have to re-farm that which may make me not want to upgrade it... at least as it's described.

[Nihilan]

The more I look into it the more it feels path of exileish. Especially since the further you ar into the artifact the harder it is to respec it (If it costs 10k to upgrade I have to re-farm that which may make me not want to upgrade it... at least as it's described.

Yes, a respec costs as much as your next trait would cost, so it does become devastatingly expensive to respec once you get pretty far into it.

- - - Updated - - -

I was on my L110 Holy Pally on the pvp server last night and noticed something interesting. There was a 35th trait that appears on the artifact once all of the previous 34 have been unlocked.

The cost of this trait? 338,000 Artifact points. The effect of this trait? +0.5% healing done. I really realllly hope those are WIP numbers.

[BiggestNoob]

So what? Make your own groups if you dont like it. People should be able to invite whoever they want with whatever ridiculous stipulations they want to their pug groups.

No that's not the point. The point is that this makes the problem even worse. People recruit for pugs based on stupidity like this because Blizzard doesn't actually improve LFG, and now with more player power locked behind a grind that isn't gear, you end up with a situation where the asking criteria doesn't actually describe what you want at all.

Yes, a good player with a maxed artifact will destroy everyone else in DPS and make content a joke. But your average player with the same will not even be comparable to a good player with a fresh artifact. This means instead of recruiting people who can actually raid to pugs, which should be the goal of an LFG system (build successful groups), we have yet another system which doesn't actually correlate with that at all.

And yet another system that fucks over anyone coming in mid-expansion. I don't really like raiding completely locking out new players mid expansion. It's a retarded design and Blizzard should feel bad.

[Nihilan]

In all fairness, blizzard is usually pretty good at implementing catch up mechanics for stuff like this specifically for late comers to an xpac. I dont think it is beyond the realm of possibility for them to add more of the knowledge tomes that further speed AP gains.

But yes, those that fall behind in the first few months of the xpac are pretty much fucked in terms of being behind on AP. At least until those catch up mechanics are added.

[nazrakin]

No that's not the point. The point is that this makes the problem even worse. People recruit for pugs based on stupidity like this because Blizzard doesn't actually improve LFG, and now with more player power locked behind a grind that isn't gear, you end up with a situation where the asking criteria doesn't actually describe what you want at all.

Yes, a good player with a maxed artifact will destroy everyone else in DPS and make content a joke. But your average player with the same will not even be comparable to a good player with a fresh artifact. This means instead of recruiting people who can actually raid to pugs, which should be the goal of an LFG system (build successful groups), we have yet another system which doesn't actually correlate with that at all.

And yet another system that fucks over anyone coming in mid-expansion. I don't really like raiding completely locking out new players mid expansion. It's a retarded design and Blizzard should feel bad.

I understand your point, my point is that its simply not a problem. People recruit for pugs like that because they want to minimize the risk of failure as much as possible. And if you're going to take a risk you may as well take it on someone who overgears the content or can show that they've done it before. If I'm the one willing to take the initiative and spend the time building the group then I should be free to set whatever criteria I want. Likewise, there is nothing stopping you or anyone else from putting together their own groups with all the people I wasn't willing to invite to mine.

People coming in mid expac will likely have a plenty of catch up activities, so that is not something I would worry about.

[Alvito]

This sounds unnecessarily complicated. Why not just give us X points to spend and then increase those each raid patch after a quest?

Meh, I was super excited for legion and this + the talent system change is largely making me feel like not bothering till 1-2 patches in. Doesn't help I gotta reroll because fuck ice armor.

The good news is they are still tweaking how you get power and aren't certain on the catch up mechanic for other specs. The biggest issue is 2nd and 3rd spec weapons. Blizz has it in their mind that some how all specs will magically be equal or closer to it then ever before, I just don't see that happening. So as new tier sets or items make other specs blast past others people will have wasted tons of hours on an obsolete spec. They are going to have to change something since they are going all in on this feature and if it is a bust like garrisons were for so many people will look at this as WoD 2.0 as pissed off fans throw in the towel. These weapons are far too powerful and class/spec changing to not have them for the spec you want to play. Right now they take far too long to catch up in other specs though and for rerolls or alts it is worse then the gap that the ring or back had in the last 2 expansions. 36 specs in the game and it sure feels like they really only want people to play 1.

[shanthi]

The good news is they are still tweaking how you get power and aren't certain on the catch up mechanic for other specs. The biggest issue is 2nd and 3rd spec weapons. Blizz has it in their mind that some how all specs will magically be equal or closer to it then ever before, I just don't see that happening.

Even if for the first time ever, Blizzard makes all specs very close to equal, this system is still terrible for healers or tanks maintaining a DPS off-spec if you want to drop a healer or switch out a tank. And for DPS to maintain tank/heal off-specs, if the team is missing a tank or healer one night.

If it really does take most of the expansion to fill out one artifact weapon, Blizzard is essentially removing off-specs for raiding (or, at least, significantly hobbling raid teams whenever they do need someone to use an off-spec to fill in).

[Deleted]

Yes, a respec costs as much as your next trait would cost, so it does become devastatingly expensive to respec once you get pretty far into it.

- - - Updated - - -

I was on my L110 Holy Pally on the pvp server last night and noticed something interesting. There was a 35th trait that appears on the artifact once all of the previous 34 have been unlocked.

The cost of this trait? 338,000 Artifact points. The effect of this trait? +0.5% healing done. I really realllly hope those are WIP numbers.

Isn't that the one that gives incremental flat increases in like 20 steps? Demonology artefact seems to have one, which increases damage by 0.5% per step, and you can do it 20 times

I would say that it is there to give people who fully empower their artefact with all traits something to do. It's a very cheap way of extending the grind - it is virtually identical to the legendary ring upgrade that dropped off Archimonde, which of course you could only do one per week.

As pointed out the artefact power system is like virtually all Wow (and most MMO) levelling systems, it starts low with fairly fast progressing but the requirements grow exponentially, basically the idea is to get you hooked with the quick and easy early levels to the point where the grind really kicks in you keep going

The cost of the later artefact traits becomes enormous

I'm sure I read that (as with the legendary ring grind) artefact power drops from bosses of all types, and can drop in clusters with the chance increasing with difficulty level.

My personal belief is that artefact power costs are so high that there is no necessity to lock artefacts to specialisation. I can see why they want the artefact to be a significant choice but honestly, it will suck mightily if you happen to choose a spec that Blizzard "do a demonology" on (as in a 25% nerf cos they wanted people to not play it), and it's even worse for multirole classes

I think you shold be able to level your artefact as a single item available to all your class specs, but simply restrict how often you can switch specs.

It's going to be a complete sod for guilds that have a tendency to be a bit short and where you have say those who play paladins in the spec required depending on who has or hasn't turned up

But then, I fully expect content to be tuned so that it is doable without artefacts at high levels, just like it was possible to do everything without the legendary ring boost.

Such items are really a variant on the end of season raid nerfs/boosts we invariably get (usually in the form of a flat % raid buff that increases as weeks go by)

[Alvito]

Even if for the first time ever, Blizzard makes all specs very close to equal, this system is still terrible for healers or tanks maintaining a DPS off-spec if you want to drop a healer or switch out a tank. And for DPS to maintain tank/heal off-specs, if the team is missing a tank or healer one night.

If it really does take most of the expansion to fill out one artifact weapon, Blizzard is essentially removing off-specs for raiding (or, at least, significantly hobbling raid teams whenever they do need someone to use an off-spec to fill in).

There are several huge obvious pitfalls and I am sure several unseen ones coming.

[Deleted]

Looking at the calculator the total cost of a fully empowered artefact is well over 500,000 AP.

I can't imagine that "catch-up" mechanics for secondary specs or latecomers will reduce that by a huge amount. It really does stiff multirole classes severely.

I can seem them implementing something where you can transfer AP from one artefact to another, to alleviate the "oops, I chose the spec that is this month's nerfhammer choice" problem.

Just limit how often you can do it, or levy a cost, say a 10% loss on transfer or something

[FertsBlert]

Looking at the calculator the total cost of a fully empowered artefact is well over 500,000 AP.

I can't imagine that "catch-up" mechanics for secondary specs or latecomers will reduce that by a huge amount. It really does stiff multirole classes severely.

I can seem them implementing something where you can transfer AP from one artefact to another, to alleviate the "oops, I chose the spec that is this month's nerfhammer choice" problem.

Just limit how often you can do it, or levy a cost, say a 10% loss on transfer or something

I can't see them implementing something to alleviate the "oops my spec is this month's nerfhammer choice" because whenever they have hit a spec hard with the nerfhammer previously it was because the spec was "overpowered" even when logs showed it was actually underperforming or they stated outright "we don't want people playing this spec".

[nazrakin]

Looking at the calculator the total cost of a fully empowered artefact is well over 500,000 AP.

I can't imagine that "catch-up" mechanics for secondary specs or latecomers will reduce that by a huge amount. It really does stiff multirole classes severely.

I can seem them implementing something where you can transfer AP from one artefact to another, to alleviate the "oops, I chose the spec that is this month's nerfhammer choice" problem.

Just limit how often you can do it, or levy a cost, say a 10% loss on transfer or something

They wouldn't have to reduce the amount you need. It'll probably be a combination of changes to the existing catch up mechanic + new content simply giving larger amounts of power. Artifact Knowledge at level 7 is going to be around a 300% increase and there'll be 10 levels total. It takes 5 days to unlock a level but thats exactly the type of adjustment they could make to give new/returning players a big boost without impacting progression for long term players.