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Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Artifacts
Raiding
Healing
Tanking
Misc
Classes and Fantasy
Talents
Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
- All of the caster Artifact weapons that look they are 1H do have off-hands.
- The further you are behind on the Artifact as you go through the expansion, the easier it is to place new traits into your Artifact. It is pretty quick to get mostly caught up when switching specs. If you are trying to maintain off-specs you can do that to a certain degree. It only becomes a burden if you are trying to keep many specs all topped off at once.
- Alts will also have catch up mechanism for Artifacts.
Raiding
- It used to be a bigger problem to have a melee heavy raid in the past. The problem isn't solved right now, but it is better than it used to be. Having lots of melee does make it a little harder to learn a new boss. The data shows that people switch specs more from melee to ranged than ranged to melee because of that perception. Melee does need to do more damage than ranged on Patchwerk style fights to deal with the problem.
- Timewalker raids are cool idea, but their time has not yet come. Maybe in the future. The team is talking about revisiting some of the old raids in a new way.
- The team is fixing the boss movement issues in Patch 6.2.3. Thank the engineers!
Healing
- Healers should always have something to do. In Legion when you are doing group PvE content you will notice that you can do a lot more damage than you could before when you choose to spend globals and resources on it. When you are overgearing the content, the damage you do in your spare time will go from close to meaningless (now) to being a useful contribution to the raid (in Legion).
- You should be able to level as a healer, so when you are playing solo you should be able to do substantial damage. Druids having Thorns again will help, things attacking you will take substantial damage.
- Absorbs are a little bit less powerful, have longer cooldowns, and there are less of them in Legion. Paladins won't be causing absorb shields anymore, as their mastery has changed. Discipline mastery has also changed.
Tanking
- Active mitigation is still a big part of what you do, but it went in too strong. If you messed up the active mitigation you died, so it mattered too much.
- Active mitigation should be designed to where the expert player can get more out of it but the newer player isn't awful. It is less about managing your resources and more about using the right button at the right time and the magnitude of the effects are going down a little bit. It is still a very large part of what tanks do.
- All of your long cooldowns like Shield Wall will count as if active mitigation is running while they are running.
- Tanks have buttons that give tank or offense functionality, but the team is tried to do more things that have both. If you are trying to DPS really hard as a tank, that should translate to being a good tank at the same time.
- Resolve is gone. The abilities that relied on it have been redesigned to not rely on it anymore. For Brewmaster, the active mitigation buttons either give you a gigantic Stagger buff or cleanse your Stagger. You want to use them in tandem.
Misc
- People say that there is nothing to do in Warlords, but that isn't really true. There is nothing to do that gives a rewards that you care about. In Legion, the goal is to make the outdoor world, quests, dungeons, and raids all have things that you care about so that there are reasons to do them at max level.
- The transmog system will include old quests that have been removed. There is a chance a few quests were modified that shouldn't have been, but they will handle those on a per quest basis.
Classes and Fantasy
- The team is putting a lot of focus into improving the fantasy of each class, so you really feel different, unique, and caught up in your class's fantasy.
- Visuals, animations, and sounds for many classes have also been improved.
- Survival, Shadow, Demonology, Subtlety, Combat, Discipline are all getting big changes.
- The team originally was going to keep the changes under control, but this ended up being one of the expansions with the most changes to classes after development got going.
- When we see the beta, players shouldn't look at balance yet. There hasn't been numbers tuning. Give feedback on the play style and fantasy instead.
- If a few classes are too strong, the team doesn't want to buff everyone else to that level because all of the encounters would have to be adjusted. Over the years they have tended to do this anyway, which makes older content easier and easier. The power inflation isn't great.
- Nerfs get a lot of attention and the buffs (which there are more of) don't get nearly as much attention.
- When every spec has something unique, distinct, and different that only they can do, it accentuates the idea that you are special to the world.
- There are enough numbers being rolled in combat that any RNG evens out, it is more about there being a little bit of unpredictability to respond to in combat.
- Lots of the major glyphs that are being removed are being added in to the core ability.
Talents
- Currently there are a lot of rows that offer you three similar options to choose from, making it feel like it doesn't matter what you pick. This is going away by moving them into different rows, so you could take multiple mobility talents or multiple AoE healing talents. Really hardcore players may change their talents from encounter to encounter to get different capabilities.
- There will be more impactful talents. Rogues have five rows with straight throughput improvements. Every spec has four or five rows of straight throughput improvements.
- The additional spec specific talents help class fantasy and help to make them feel more impactful. In Legion around 2/3rd of the talents are spec specific.
- Some talent rows now have multiple types of talents rather than all of them being the same. For example, a row could have a new ability, proc, or passive rather than three new abilities. This lets you control how complex or simple your gameplay is. Fury is a good example, as the core rotation with no talents is very simple, but there are a ton of options for added engagement through talents. You can take five additional active abilities you would use in your rotation (not long cooldowns).
- The team will try to address the need to switch specs per encounter with talent choices.
Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)- Death Knights had a lot of balance changes over time. They had unique mechanics, like DoT snapshotting with Unholy. Those things have gone away now, so part of what made Unholy special is gone.
- Something they are trying now is Festering Wounds. When the Death Knight hits a target, they will apply debuff and when they use a different ability that wound will pop. You might hit them and apply three or five, or pop three of them all at once.
- The fantasy of a Death Knight pulling corpses from the ground to do their bidding is great, but in the game it doesn't feel like that when you are playing, so the team wanted to give them a unique mechanic.
- Talents may give them multiple pets, different pets, stronger pets.
- Frost is still very similar to live and Blood is somewhere in the middle.
- Blood Death Knights having the different rune types is part of what made it easy to play. You would just push whatever buttons were lit up, as the runes controlled what you could use. Now you will have more options and control over how to use your runes.
Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)- Resto and Feral druids got minor changes.
- Moonkin is inspired by the current state of the spec, but is now a brand new spec.
- The current spec is based on a cycle of moving a bar back and forth on your UI. You are spending your time playing with the UI rather than the game.
- The moving back and forth on the bar is going away, replaced with abilities that build and spend a resource with different strengths and weaknesses.
- It should still hit the main Moonkin fantasy, as it is still heavy on DoTs, still has Moonfire, Sunfire, Starfall, and all of the unique Moonkin things.
- Innervate is returning, but not to Resto Druids. If they had it, they would want to use it on themselves, which isn't very interesting.
- Innervate is coming back to Balance Druids as their specific utility, so they won't have Stampeding Roar anymore.
- tampeding Roar will be for Feral and Guardian only.
- A powerful single target version of Mark of the Wild is coming back for the Resto Druid cooldown.
- Rejuvenation in Cat Form is going away.
- Predatory Swiftness is staying.
- Feral isn't seeing a ton of changes, but they are getting lots of new talents.
- The base Druid has less skills from the other three roles, but there is a new talent row that allows you to pick Balance, Feral, Guardian, or Restoration, and get a whole suite of abilities for that role and it makes you actually good at it. You get much more than the watered down version you had before and you get to pick which one you are good at instead of okay at all of them.
- You could be a Guardian druid that switches to Cat form to do more damage when you aren't the active tank. You can also be a Moonkin, as if you take the Balance Affinity talent as Guardian, you get Moonkin form.
Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)- Most Marksmanship hunters are taking the Lone Wolf talent on live, so the team decided to go ahead and remove the pet in Legion. You can still be ranged with a pet as Beast Mastery.
- Survival Hunters have lots of cool mechanics right now and many of them have become Marksmanship talents in Legion.
Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)- Frost and Arcane mages got minor changes.
- There is a Mage group that is very critical to influencing the course of Azeorth and directly fighting the Legion that is being reformed. They are getting a secret sanctum in Dalaran.
Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)- Storm, Earth, and Fire is supposed to make Windwalkers really good at three target damage, even when the targets aren't grouped up.
- Windwalker single target damage was a little bit too low for a while during Warlords, they brought it up some, but it is still not one of the best performers.
- The new Storm, Earth, and Fire is something they are doing to solve how hard it is to use the current version.
- Someone looks at the skill and doesn't understand how it works and decides they will figure it out later. This is bad because it is important to doing good damage as a Windwalker.
- The new Storm, Earth, and Fire is being simplified and made more intuitive. It will be a simple toggle, somewhat similar to Blade Flurry.
- You turn it on and split into three, turn it off and you recombine into one. They won't attack the same target as you, but they will find something nearby to attack. You do lose the customizability of assigning targets, but it will do something useful at all times.
Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)- The new Atonement mechanic is very different than the older ones. It is a mix of using damage and healing abilities to mark allies with a buff as you heal them and then heal those people as you damage enemies with Atonement spells, so you have to weave both together at all times.
- Discipline may be one of the more complex healers.
- Disc priest's endless PW:S spam had to go! It was bad for them and bad for everyone.
- Shadow Priests don't have Flash Heal or Heal anymore, but they do have Shadowmend, which is a new spell that is twice as good as Flash Heal in terms of how much it heals for, but over the next 10 seconds half of that heal fades away. If the target takes damage it comes off of the Shadowmend damage first, so if the target is constantly taking damage it is a really strong heal.
- Both Shadow and Discipline will have Shadowmend.
- Shadow will also keep PW:S.
- Holy priests used to have the biggest single heal in the game and the team wanted to move them back in that direction.
- Chakra is gone
- They redesigned the way the Holy Word: Serenity system works.
- Holy Word: Serenity is now the biggest single target heal in the game, it has a substantial cooldown but will heal roughly half of the health bar of the target. A crit would be a full heal.
- Holy also will have Prayer of Healing and Discipline will not.
Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)- Combat rogues felt very generic, so the name of the spec is changed to Outlaw.
- This gives a new direction for the class fantasy, drawing inspiration from movies with different types of outlaws.
- There is a column of pirate themed talents, such as cannonball barrages and grappling hooks.
- The team considered getting rid of Killing Spree, but sometimes rough edges are cool. It is now a talent, so you can take it or other AoE talents. It always ports you back to where you started now.
Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)- Shamans have mana, but it doesn't do anything for them. Mana is gone unless you are a Restoration Shaman! It has been replaced with a new resource called Maelstrom. It is built up through using abilities and then used on certain abilities. It is somewhat similar to the Demon Hunter resource but themed for Shamans and what they do.
Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)- Demonology has gone really far off track from where the core fantasy is.
- The team looked at Demonology and took some inspiration from what exists today, but mostly started from scratch.
- Demonology is going to be completely different, which is going to require a lot of iteration and feedback from players.
- There is no way to enslave dreadlords permanently, but they have talked about a talent that lets your enslaved demon last longer or making it permanent, but there are significant balance concerns.
- It is much more focused on summoning demons and empowering them.
- You still use Shadow Bolt as a generator.
- Hand of Gul'dan is a spender which drops the meteor, but also summons one imp for every Soul Shard you spend on it, up to five.
- There is a rotational ability that summons a pair of new demons, Dreadstalkers.
- There is a new rotational Demonic Empowerment, that will buff the demons you have out, giving them a Bloodlust like buff.
- Lots of talents that summon demons as well, one makes Curse of Doom summon an imp when it pops.
- Another talent makes the Dreadstalkers you summon come with imps riding on them.
- No female Felguard in this expansion. Creating and animating new models is very expensive.
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