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The War Within Alpha - Warbands Feature Overview
In all of the excitment today, you may have missed the first preview of Legion armor sets. The Rogue and Warlock Mythic and PvP gear sets are shown below!
Legion - Transmog System
GamesBeat had a short interview with J. Allen Brack that covered the new Transmog system.
- The new Diablo 3 inspired system will include tabards.
- The designer that worked on the Diablo 3 system is working on the WoW system now.
- In Diablo 3, once you obtain an item, you have unlocked the appearance and don't need to keep the item anymore.
- The system will make transmog more of an item collection system and help to clean out your bags and bank.
- The team knows that the limited backpack size isn't ideal, but they have to find everwhere in the code that assumes it is a fixed size. They tried increasing the number of slots but items would disappear into the void and be mailed back to you.
Legion Community Amphitheater Discussion
The Instance hosted a discussion at the Community Amphitheater with several of the developers. This did not appear on the Virtual Ticket.
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Story, Lore, and Questing
Questing
Class Halls
Artifact Weapons
Classes
Sound
- Wowpedia is a great resource for the team to see what they have done with characters in the past.
- Sometimes if there is something very cool they will contradict the lore a little bit to do it.
- It is very important to the team that every single designer gets to contribute to the story.
- Most of the priests you would recognize are Alliance, so some new Horde priests are going to be added.
- Alleria is tied to the Marksman artifact weapon, so you will see a little bit about where she has been through that experience.
- In Draenor several characters promised to help fight the Burning Legion or visit Azeroth. The team wanted to limit how much of Draenor leaked out, as it was an alternative timeline, but they may appear in the future at some point.
- Jaina will play a role in Legion, maybe not a huge role.
- The events at the Broken Shore are devastating and are really going to shake things up. The Alliance and Horde will be reeling from that throughout the entire expansion.
- Many of the major characters use multiple specs, so Thrall may be Elemental and Enhancement.
Questing
- Individual quest designers tend to put up their own ideas when it comes to specific content and parts of a zone. They are really excited about working with previous characters, working with the creative development team to fact check the lore and make sure it is consistent.
- Individual quest designers usually have favorite characters that they enjoy working with.
- Lorewalker Cho shows you his ancestors for one quest and all of the models used are rejected Lorewalker Cho models from earlier in development. One of them is wearing a Timewalker tabard.
- The Artifact and outdoor world quest lines use the NPC models and voice acting to enhance the quest experience more than ever before.
- When you hit max level, the team doesn't want you to feel like the questing experience is over if that is content that you enjoy. The team has been working on the max level questing experience, taking the lessons of Pandaria, Timeless Isle, and Tanaan Jungle to create an experience that allows you to log in and have things all over the world that you can go and take part in.
- Legion tries to enable more types of gameplay at max level. If you enjoy questing, there will be a nice questing experience. If you enjoy dungeons, the new scaling will keep them relevant for you throughout the entire expansion. Raiding is still there and fantastic.
- One of the quest designers switched to working on professions for Legion, bringing his experience from quest design to create profession related content that will last for quite a while during the expansion.
Class Halls
- Rogues can sneak around their hall and pickpocket each other!
- Garrisons were really fun for the first couple of months, but not so much after that. The team is aware of this and careful about not bringing the bad parts of garrisons forward with Class Halls.
- Velen plays a role in the Priest hall.
- All of the Class Hall locations are finalized. One will be previewed during the panel on Saturday. Others may be shown before beta, but there are no solid plans yet.
- The team wants to strike a balance between players spending time in the Class Halls and the major cities. You will be going to the Class Halls multiple times per day and there are some special features you may want to hang out for.
- The Warrior Class Hall has an arena thing that you can participate in. Every Class Hall may not have something special like that, as it reduces the variation.
- Warlocks overstep at the start of the expansion when the Order Hall is introduced, getting greedy and think they have more power over the Legion than they really do.
Artifact Weapons
- Some of the Artifacts will have a history that is well known to players, but there weren't 36 of them to use. The team had to make very compelling story lines at the start of the expansion to make players feel like their weapon is important and has a history.
- There will be multiple people carrying the same artifact weapons, but this was already the case with weapons from current raids. There is actually more variety because each of the 36 weapons have different models and colors for each individual weapon.
- Artifacts are trying to create an interesting long term progression system that gives you something to do even after you hit max level.
- Artifacts will take some effort for other specs, but you should be able to switch specs. The further behind you are, the faster it goes. Keeping two Artifacts completely maxed out may take some more effort, but switching and catching up or keeping one Artifact a little bit behind shouldn't be too bad.
Classes
- Class specific blogs with lots of details are coming starting on Sunday!
- The class team makes changes for mechanical reasons fairly often, but Legion is giving the team a chance to focus on the class fantasy as much as they do for quests and the general story.
- There will be a lot of class mechanic and aesthetic changes in Legion to try and bring classes back to their roots, as well as making the different specs more distinct.
- The team is trying to develop different ways to handle class balance and tuning without harming the fantasy and fun of the classes and specs. The new PvP leveling system is one example, allowing them to tune classes specifically for PvP.
- The team is really focusing on class fantasy in Legion. What do the different classes do when they are hanging out in their Class Hall?
- The team plans out the major story lines very early in the process and build the progression of the zones along with them. Those stories have been becoming more important and numerous in each expansion.
- Stagger is not going away.
- Brewmaster gameplay does not deliver on the fantasy very well right now, as the biggest thing that matters to them is Guard. You generally think of a Brewmaster dancing around and avoiding things and when you do hit them, they don't seem to take a lot of damage.
- The team tries to avoid drastic class changes in smaller patches, but with major patches and especially new expansions they can make larger changes.
- Set bonuses got really strong in Warlords, providing some variation to gameplay, but there will be other systems that fill this role in Legion, especially the Artifacts. They will be fun and exciting, but maybe not quite as strong.
- Talents are one of the best ways to distinguish the different classes and specs. Legion will have a lot more spec specific talents, adding variety to the different specs.
- The team is adding some loose themes to talents. For example, all of the left column talents may have something to do with rage, all of the far right ones are a weapon enhancement, and all of the middle talents are something else.
- The team isn't trying to use Artifacts or Class Halls to fix classes or change how classes work, but instead build upon what the class already is.
Sound
- When the team was working on Pandaria, they wrote a song for Lorewalker Cho to sing. The voice actor was given a tune and gibberish song and it came out great.
- In Starcraft, the sound team was doing an operatic passage that used Latin and French. The lyrics were mostly meaningful, but part of it was the team's names and other bizarre things.
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