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Update (3 PM ET): Added one more interview recap.
Legion Summit - Dev Interviews
Several fansites and influencers had the opportunity to interview the developers at an event this week!
- There are three raid tiers coming in Legion! Two raids are are coming with release, another raid in Patch 7.2 and one more raid in a later patch.
- There are solid plans for at least three content patches in Legion already.
- Patch 7.1 contains a new dungeon and will go on the PTR around the time that Legion is shipping. It should be released fairly quickly.
- Your loot specialization will control what legendary items can drop for you in Legion.
- Caster animations are on the list to improve. The team wants to use feedback on the melee updates to inform the caster animation changes.
- Improved social features won't be in at release, but hopefully soon afterwards.
- The devs recognize that BRF came out too quickly and release pacing in Warlords wasn't great. There is a plan in place to make it better in Legion.
- Another stat squish is coming in the expansion after Legion.
- There will be a new animated series in Legion called Harbingers, similar to the Lords of War series in Warlords. It tells the story of Illidan and the Illidari.
Tom Chilton and Chris Robinson
We had the opportunity to talk to Tom Chilton and Chris Robinson.
Cosmetic Class Accessories and Armor Sets
- In Legion, there will be less mirroring, symmetrical armor sets, and sets that use the same few 3D shapes we have seen forever.
- There will be asymmetrical armor and custom 3D shapes on things like gloves and chests.
- Only a fraction of the ideas from the Cosmetic Class Accessories blog made it into Legion. The rest is on hold for now.
- After the team posted the blog, they started talking about Legion and Artifacts and how it would impact this idea. They were able to use some of the ideas for Artifacts or part of Artifacts.
- What we have seen so far in Legion is about as far as the cosmetic class accessories will go for the Artifact portion of it.
- There is still a lot of opportunity for the other cosmetic accessories that are less obvious choices than librams and quivers, such as accessories for Rogues.
- In the future, rather than just giving every class a cosmetic accessory, the team will build on the theme of the set. If a Rogue set would work really well with poison vials, the team may add the poison vials to the set belt.
- The original approach felt too formulaic and hacked on. They talked about adding a few different variations of the accessory you could earn, but it didn't feel great.
Artifact Weapons
- The fishing artifact is already implemented and in the game, so you should be able to earn it once Legion releases.
- The artifact skins that aren't in the UI yet don't have final sources yet. They will probably be rewarded from achievements somehow, likely tied to new content as it is released.
- The team is still in the process of figuring out what is working about the current artifact unlock sources and what isn't. Whatever works will inform the decisions on how future skins are unlocked.
- We might see more Artifact skins in later legion patches depending on how the initial set of skins is received.
- The artists have a guideline of time they can spend on a weapon model based on the rarity, with an epic weapon taking something like three days.
- Most of the artifacts with one skin took around four days, with a couple hours for each color variation after that.
- The team initially thought doing artifacts would be great! Rather than creating tons of weapon models they would just have to do a few weapons per class and some color variants.
- As the Artifact Weapon system was actually implemented, they realized a few weapons per class wouldn't work, they would have to weapons for each spec.
- After that they realized they would need multiple models and colors per spec.
- This ended up not saving them any time at all, probably costing some. It did allow them to really focus on each weapon and put lots of love and care into each one.
- Normally the team builds a weapon and moves on, but doing Artifacts allowed them to respond to player feedback, going back and adjusting color or theme to get things right.
- People have a fondness for the Vanilla armor sets. Those sets aren't very visually complex and didn't have high quality textures, but players became accustomed to wearing their set for a long time.
- You will have your Artifact for the entire expansion, so hopefully you will enjoy seeing it and the variations you can unlock. When you look back at Mists of Pandaria, do you remember the many weapons you had over the expansion?
Professions
- There are profession quest lines for every profession in the game, starting at level 100 and going through 110.
- There is more content in Legion for professions than there has been in a long time.
- It isn't time-gated content like we had in Warlords.
- The hope for Warlords was to allow more people to keep up with their professions, as you wouldn't have to work on professions all of the time. It turns out there are people that want to do professions all of the time and those people didn't have stuff to do or stuff to sell, because everyone was able to do it.
- In Legion, professions are geared more towards the players that really love getting invested in professions.
Class Trials
- The team got a lot of feedback from players that would use a Character Boost and then realize that they didn't really like that class the best.
- A boost is an expensive investment, so the team wanted to give players the opportunity to try before they buy.
- You can try a character out and play through the Broken Shore, Artifact acquisition, and your starting up your Order Hall during the trial.
- If you like it, you can use a boost to unlock it and make it a permanent character.
John Hight (Legion Production Lead)
We had the opportunity to talk to John Hight.
Social Features
- The team upgraded WoW to the Battle.Net infrastructure that Diablo and Overwatch use, allowing them to add more advanced social features to the game.
- The team isn't happy with where the improved social features are right now, so it isn't a feature that will be going out with Legion.
- The improved social features will be part of Legion, hopefully not too far after release.
- Legion will add an advanced social queuing system that helps you find things to do with friends.
- The system will take a slightly different form than what was talked about in the past, but it is still under development.
- There are a lot of people that play WoW and so do their friends on Facebook, but they may not even realize they are both playing.
- Many guilds have set up guild Facebook pages for communication.
- The Battle.Net Facebook login is completely optional and helps to facilitate communication and share your WoW experience on Facebook.
Content Pacing and World Quests
- The raids and other content will absolutely be paced better in Legion to help avoid such a long content drought.
- Legion will do better than any previous expansion at catering to both players who have burned through all of the content in a new patch in a couple months and those that took significantly longer with shorter play sessions.
- World quests offer progression in smaller time increments than doing a dungeon or raid.
- World quests will remain relevant for raiders throughout the entire expansion.
- The quests currently list rewards like "item level 810+" with the item level being determined by your current item level.
- One big source of Artifact Power is world quests, so everyone will want to do them.
- World quests also provide the Order Resources you will need for your Order Hall campaign.
- It will take closer to months rather than weeks for players to max out their Artifact Traits.
Dungeons
- Dungeons in Legion are a very important way to play the game.
- Legion is the most dungeon focused expansion the team has done in a long time.
- The way that they are structuring the expansion, dungeons will remain relevant for a long time.
- If more dungeons will be added in patches or not is not something they are talking about right now. They aren't willing to say that no more are coming and they aren't willing to rule it out.
WoW Token and Character Services
- When asked about bulk character transfers: "The team has done a lot of things to make it easier for you to do quests, dungeons, and raids with friends on other realms. Scaling zones during leveling in Legion should also make it easier to play with friends."
- The team has been excited about the reception to the WoW Token. Players that had time on their hands but couldn't afford to play every month now have a way to play and players that don't have time to earn a lot of gold are able to do that.
- Expanding on the WoW token in the future is a possibility, but the team has to be careful to avoid messing up the economy or making something that is pay to win.
James Waugh (Story and Development)
We had the opportunity to talk to James Waugh with FinalBossTV.
- Lore enthusiasts will be surprised most by Anduin's story in Legion. We will see a big leap in his development, with a young prince having to step up and make decisions that he hasn't been forced to make before. He has been looked at as a very pacifist character over the years, looking for peace between the Horde and Alliance, but as he gets older it won't be so easy. Players will come to understand his father's more aggressive approach. He is a character the team really wants to build out.
- We will most likely be waiting to see more of Illidan until a later content patch. There will be a lot of Illidan at a certain point.
- The Legion is tethered to something bigger and darker than the Old Gods.
- Sargeras sees infestation and corruption throughout the universe. He has fallen to the wrong approach, but there are issues in the universe and his approach is to eradicate it all.
- The current cycle of the game is in a place where we are facing really big and dark threats and only the heroes of Azeroth can save us.
- The nature of serialized storytelling is that there has to be a big threat, but the team could take a step back and look at smaller stories.
- Med'an is out adventuring in the universe, doing big important things that will one day com to fruition. He just isn't around right now.
- There will be lots of Khadgar in Legion.
- Waugh had no idea if Broxigar or Freya will appear in Legion.
- Some heroes are dying off in Legion, but there will be a lot of changes with existing characters, with some being put in positions you never would have assumed they would be put in.
Ion Hazzikostas and J. Allen Brack
FinalBossTV and Slootbag did this interview with Ion Hazzikostas and J. Allen Brack.
Artifacts
- Artifact Power investment in the first few weeks puts extra pressure on the team to be careful with class balance changes.
- For example, if Fire ends up 15% stronger than the other Mage specs, the team would reduce it by 10%. This way you still would have made the same choice with your Artifact Power, and overall class balance is fixed.
- Artifact Knowledge should give you the ability to keep the progression of alt spec artifact weapons fairly close to your main spec weapon, but keeping them equally progressed will be challenging.
- You should very easily be able to keep off spec weapons up to 80% of your main spec's weapon unlock progression, with the same number of gold traits unlocked. This makes you a few percent less effective, but still not a huge deal.
- Multi-spec has been a huge part of WoW for many years, so they will support it in a good and meaningful way.
- Once you have maxed out all of your Artifact traits, the final trait gives you a raw increase in health, damage, or healing depending on your spec.
- The cost of this final trait continues to increase, so you may have to decide if you want to put another point into your main spec weapon to get half a percent increase or if you want to get a few ranks in your off-spec weapon that is a little bit behind to get a couple of percent increase.
Player Power and Gear
- How quickly player power increases with gear isn't a huge problem right now.
- Hellfire Citadel has gotten to a point where some silly things are taking place, like how fast can 16 Arcane Mages kill a boss.
- It is important that there is power progression from gear.
- It is hard to have gear help people overcome a skill deficit without content eventually becoming easier than the more skilled players would prefer.
- Top end tanks may find it hard to die right now, but there are plenty of people progressing on Mythic Archimonde who are still dying easily. It is important for those people to experience the content eventually.
Patches and Content Releases
- The team won't say how many raid tiers are planned for Legion, but they weren't happy with how patches worked out for Warlords.
- Legion has a lot more patches and different things planned, along with different sized patches!
- Emerald Nightmare release dates will be shared shortly before Legion launches.
- The team is happy with how Highmaul's release schedule worked out, so it should be fairly similar.
- Base level Mythic dungeons will be available at release, but the keystones won't be attainable until raids open and the PvP season starts.
- Blackrock Foundry probably came out too soon.
- Warlords made dungeon content obsolete far too quickly. This is something the team wants to fix in Legion, which can be done with the various new dungeon systems.
- If the team were to add a dungeon in a later patch, the new systems in Legion mean it could co-exist with older dungeons rather than obsoleting them like new dungeons have in previous expansions.
Professions and Legendary Items
- The team still needs to do a pass on professions to have parity across all of them in terms of player power, so that it isn't just Jewelcrafting with a player power increase. In general, professions shouldn't have a player only power increase.
- Your loot specialization will control what legendary items can drop for you in Legion.
Tom Chilton and Chris Robinson
Towelliee had the opportunity to talk to Tom Chilton and Chris Robinson.
- There are catch up mechanics for alts, other specs, and for everyone as time passes for leveling Artifact weapons.
- There is the Nightmare raid and Suramar raid that make up the first raid tier of the expansion.
- There is a raid tier planned to come out with Patch 7.2 and another raid tier in a future patch after that.
- Dungeons will be released throughout the patch cycle.
- Patch 7.1 will go on the PTR very quickly around the time that Legion is shipping. It will be released pretty quickly after Legion comes out, containing a new dungeon.
- There aren't any plans for a dungeon set from Mythic+ dungeons right now, but it is a possibility during the patch content. it depends on how players react to the dungeons and if that is something they want.
- There are plans to bring small attunements back. Right now there are only attunements for two dungeons at launch, but there are plans to have one for the Patch 7.1 dungeon
- Another stat squish is probably coming in the next expansion. The team wanted to do one for this expansion but didn't have time.
- The team looks at all of the art in every expansion and tries to fix things that look dated and out of place. Spell animations were the target of this for Legion, with lots of new spell animations.
- A few of the race specific movements in attack animations went away with the new spell animations.
- The team has a really good patch plan for Legion, modeled more around the Mists of Pandaria style patches than what we saw in Warlords.
- The team is trying to correctly anticipate how long the next expansion would take. They thought Legion would be ready much sooner than it is going to be, which resulted in the long content drought. Legion content should be paced better.
- The rewards offered by world quests will keep scaling up with your item level, up to heroic dungeons, then mythic dungeons, but beyond that we will have to see.
Ion Hazzikostas and J.Allen Brack
Towelliee and Slootbag had the opportunity to talk to Ion Hazzikostas J.Allen Brack.
Professions
- Professions and crafting are something the team will be updating in both big and smaller patches over the course of the expansion.
- The intent is for professions and crafting to be parallel to the available content.
World Quests
- In the future, the team may use the world quest system in other spaces and have more of the world be a playground, but for Legion the focus is on the Broken Isles.
- In an upcoming build, World Quest rewards will start at item level 805 rather than 810. Rewards were a little too powerful compared to dungeons.
Gear and Dungeons
- You can get gear with an item level that is competitive with the very best Mythic raid loot from dungeons, but there are some specific trinkets, set bonuses, and other things that you will have to go into raids to get.
- The Challenge Mode model of scaling down your item level, disabling set bonuses, and disabling raid trinkets effects was one option that could have been used for Mythic+ dungeons, but it felt like you were nerfed as soon as you walked in.
Melee and Ranged
- The team keeps in mind the ranged vs melee advantages when they are designing fights.
- Most players have a preferred play style, either melee or ranged. You don't see a lot of players that do both.
- The melee loving population will probably be divided between more classes and specs now, rather than mages suddenly deciding to play Demon Hunter.
- Melee rosters will probably shift around a little bit, but the melee and ranged composition of raid groups isn't likely to change.
Artifact Weapons
- When you hit Level 102, there is a quest in your Order Hall that allows you to pick a second Artifact weapon if you want.
- It is intended that the best way to use Artifact Power is to spend it as soon as you get it, rather than holding on to it.
Tanking
- There is still room for improvement as far as having both tanks actively doing something rather than swapping back and forth.
- There is a PvP mechanic that lets tanks safeguard another player and share a portion of their damage. The team has looked at bringing that mechanic into raiding.
- In the long ago past, the team just made fights that needed a specific number of tanks. Tank swapping is one solution so that all of your tanks have a role in an encounter.
- The long term goal is to make tanking engaging for all of the tanks, giving them tank things to do beyond a DPS rotation on the boss.
Talent and Spec Swapping
- The change to talent swapping comes down to which situations the team wants you to be able to respec in. Lots of them to consider.
- Should players be able to respec for a rare encounter out in the world?
- Should players be able to respec for trash packs and bosses in the dungeon?
- In battlegrounds, you are forced to play one spec for the entire game, rather than changing your spec to run the flag and then another for defense. The talent and spec choices need to be meaningful.
- The talent changing consumable is pretty similar to the food and flasks that raids have been using for years.
- The final system gives a nice default experience for a player. You can change your talents in town. There isn't any need to make or buy a reagent from a vendor or carry it around for most players.
- Legion already makes changing specs easier and more flexible.
- You can change to any spec, your action bars are remembered between specs, you can change talents in town for free, the UI has been improved.
Tom Chilton and Chris Robinson
JudgeHype had the opportunity to talk to Tom Chilton and Chris Robinson.
- If additional Artifact weapon models are added in the future, their design won't necessarily have to follow the theme of the new raids. The primary focus is the spec the Artifact belongs to.
- It is very unlikely that someone will get all of the legendary items or the absolute highest item level from Mythic+ dungeons.
- The team isn't sure what will happen to Artifacts after Legion. Some of it depends on how the players feel about them at the end of the expansion.
- The team tries to go back and replace buildings in previous expansion content when they create new ones, such as when they create new Troll buildings.
- The Nightborne buildings don't really fit in the old world anywhere, so you will only see them in the Broken Isles for now.
- The pre-expansion patch will contain things like class changes and the new transmog system. A couple of weeks after it is released, the Demon Hunters, Broken Shore event, and demon invasions will be unlocked. The demon invasions will get more intense as time goes on.
- The team talks about doing an expansion without more levels when developing each expansion, but haven't decided to do it yet. There is something lost for many players without leveling up and something would need to replace leveling.
- The team has talked about doing a replay system for arenas or battlegrounds, but just haven't gotten around to it yet.
- The art team is working on new caster animations right now. The feedback on the new melee animations will help to inform what they are going to do with caster animations.
- There currently aren't any plans to change the legendary ring, but if it is still too powerful at level 110 they will do something about it.
- No major redesigns are planned for any classes as of now, but there is still plenty of tuning and tweaking to be done.
- The two dungeons in Suramar have a mini attunement, requiring you play through Suramar to gain access.
- There are no plans to add surnames to characters.
- The team looked at keeping your horns and tattoos in Metamorphosis form, but were unable to do so.
Tom Chilton and Chris Robinson
Vanion and WowChakra had the opportunity to talk to Tom Chilton and Chris Robinson.
- Legendary relics are likely to be added at some point, changing the Artifact more than the current relics.
- The gap between Highmaul and Blackrock Foundry was too short. The gap between Blackrock Foundry and Hellfire Citadel was too long.
- Legion has a better content pacing plan, even if that means the content is finished and put in the game, just not available.
- The team has a tentative date in mind for the pre-expansion patch, but they aren't ready to share just yet.
- The team doesn't want you to feel like you should change your talents for every group of mobs or boss.
- The Obliterum forge is there to allow you to still make use of crafted items that aren't the best for you. You can upgrade your crafted items by destroying the crafted items that you make that aren't the best for you.
- The dungeons in Suramar reward loot that is the same as all of the other dungeons but require you to complete the mini-attunement first, which feels wrong. This is something they will fix.
- The team has a very solid plan for the first three content patches in Legion.
- There are no plans to create a new engine for WoW, as that would abandon all of the work they have done so far. Making incremental improvements each expansion is working very well. A lot of the newer features in other engines wouldn't make a huge difference in WoW due to the art style.
- Legendary items come from dungeon bosses, raid bosses, and world quest caches. In the future the team may expand where they can come from, such as from world quests that reward an item.
- The main reason the honor system was changed is to add more depth to your PvP progression. The gear based model used before made it hard to give you things that felt fresh and new. Another version of your boots that was exactly the same but with a higher item wasn't exciting.
- As soon as you get your Artifact weapon, you can start increasing knowledge levels. This increases the power you get from Artifact Power sources, for all characters. There is also a multiplier on this based on time since the expansion released.
Misc Information
Towelliee, SpartySmallwood, and Slootbag recapped their interviews on their streams.
- It is likely that world quests will continue to be added in future expansions.
- The team doesn't want Ancient Mana to become useless quickly after release.
- The team doesn't want you to be able to swap around relics, which is why putting in a new relic destroys the old one.
- There won't be any legendary items outside of the random drop items.
- Legendary items will be enabled at all times in raids and Mythic dungeons. The team wants you to be able to use the gear you get.
- You can only equip one legendary item at the start of the expansion. This limit will be increased as time goes on.
- The first tier is balanced around most players not having a legendary item.
- Later tiers will be tuned around most players having a legendary item.
- It should be nearly impossible to get a duplicate legendary item.
- Some level of bad luck streak protection also applies to legendary items.
- Breaking down legendary items to create a new one is something the team has talked about.
- In the future, the team is looking to put everything on personal loot and avoid group loot or master loot. This isn't forced.
- If an item that drops via personal loot is the same or lower item level than what you have equipped, it will be eligible to be traded to other members in the raid.
- There are no cosmetic rewards for players that reach the highest item level rewards in Mythic+.
- Holy will probably remain the main healing spec, with Discipline main healing up to base level Mythic dungeons and playing more of a support role in higher end content.
- Mythic+ dungeon gear will probably cap around Heroic raid item level plus five. The gear from the weekly cache will scale up to mythic raid gear item levels.
- Raid testing will start back up again very soon.
- No Gul'dan testing! This didn't work out well for Ra-den, but they have come a long way since then.
- Launch day should be smoother than the Warlords launch.
Elvine shared some profession information on Twitter.
- Blood of Sargeras will remain Bind on Pickup.
- The Jewelcrafting gems that give 600 in a stat will be Bind on Equip.
- Profession materials are meant to be far more scarce in Legion compared to Warlords.
- Players will not experience Gul'dan on any difficulty during Legion Beta and will have to wait until Legion is live
BlizzardWatch had some new information.
- You will be able to see the outline of important NPCs through crowds, making it easier for you to click on them.
- Warlords of Draenor provided an opportunity to learn more about the Arakkoa and the Shadow Council, but the story had to move towards the end of Warlords of Draenor.
- They don't want to rush the Broken Isles story and miss out on any lore this time.
- Goblin and Worgen model updates aren't high priority yet. Legion has lots of new art and combat animations.
MethodDarrie collected some information from various parts of the summit.
- There is new tracking in place for high population zones, allowing the automatic creation of new instances of that zone. For example, if there are lots of Demon Hunters in the starting zone, a new instance of the zone will automatically be created. There were lots of lessions learned from previous launch day starting zone experiences, such as Blood Elves, Death Knights, and Monks.
- The team talks about doing a MOBA style battleground at least several times a year. There is a learning curve for players that aren't familiar with all of the aspects of MOBA games, such as lanes and turrets. The team still isn't comfortable having so many aspects to a battleground, which is why all of the battlegrounds after Alterac Valley have had simple and focused goals.
- The goal is to not have login queues for even the highest population realms.
- The team wants to see how scaling zones works out in this expansion before looking at scaling zones from previous expansions.
- The pre-launch event is designed for max level characters, but characters of all levels will be able to participate to some extent.
- There won't be a new World PvP zone in Legion.
- There are no plans to scale Wintergrasp and Tol Barad. There are problems just beyond scaling, such as how instanced world PvP works. The team would rather spend time trying something new rather than revisiting the past.
- There aren't any big changes coming to Mythic raiding. Boss fights and artwork have been great recently and the team is happy with how they are working out.
- Mythic dungeons should give even top end progression guilds additional content that they can do and focus on skill and precision.
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