Legion Developer Q&A - World Quests and Demon Invasions
Today was the Developer Q&A about World Quests and Demon Invasions with Jeremy Feasel. There is no Q&A scheduled for next week, but a Demon Hunters Q&A with Jonathan LeCraft is coming soon.



Adding World Quests
  • The World Quest system will be easy for the team to add additional content to, so expect to see new content for it in future patches.
  • The system uses groups of world quests that are mutually exclusive with other quests in that space. There are only so many Highmountain quests that can be up at a time.
  • The team can increase the probability of new world quests showing up and remove older world quests as they add new ones.

World Quests in Older Zones
  • The team wants to see how the World Quest system works out before looking at doing them in older zones.
  • The Legion Invasions are essentially World Quests that take place in the older zones.
  • There may be a few world quests in the old world in patches, such as the revamped fishing tournament.

Gearing Up
  • It is up to you as a player to decide how you want to progress your character.
  • You can gear up to some extent with world quests, but the hardest content you can do will reward the best gear.

UI
  • You will be able to filter out primary and secondary profession quests, as well as pet battle quests in the UI.
  • There are already addons that allow to you to see and filter world quests in different ways.
  • If there are really popular features in world quest addons that are useful, Blizzard may add them to the base UI.

World Quest Incentives
  • The Order Hall system helps to make you more effective out in the game world. You are building up your bodyguards and boosting the amount of Artifact Power you gain.
  • You may get to a point where you don't need Order Hall resources from world quests as urgently anymore, as there is other rewarding content that will progress your character.

Mists of Pandaria Daily Quests
  • Mists of Pandaria initially had too many daily quests, but it did have some great content in the endgame.
  • Legion is probably closer to a version 2 of the Mists of Pandaria daily quest system.
  • The quests in Mists of Pandaria didn't feel especially rewarding. You got some rep and gold, but had to wait for a couple months to unlock the rep you needed. Until then the quests didn't really matter.
  • You should feel like you can get cool stuff from quests every day.
  • The quests in Mists of Pandaria had some variety, but in Legion there around 1000 world quests, so you will have lots of choices!
  • In Mists of Pandaria you could quickly fall behind on daily quests, which wasn't ideal.
  • In Legion if you don't log in for several days, you will have more world quests up when you log back in than someone who is clearing their map every day.
  • There were some fun quests in Mists of Pandaria, such as the Roll Club!
  • You may not see the same world boss more than a few times a year due to the huge amount of world quests.

Weekly Event
  • The Apexis Weekend has been replaced by a World Quest Weekend.
  • You get bonus reputation for the factions that you are doing world quests for, as well a chance at additional loot.
  • None of the events will be turned on until Legion has been out for a little while. This gives everyone time to level and do the initial activities that they want to do.

PvP World Quests
  • The team added lots of fun and wacky things to the PvP world quests that you can't add to arenas.
  • There are FFA areas, you can ride on goats during PvP, turn into murlocs, and more!
  • The team also wanted to try some PvE in PvP, with the Warden Towers.
  • These Towers have powerful NPCs of different classes guarding them, so when you are attacking them you are a tempting target for the other faction.
  • There isn't an incentive for the other side to come and defend their tower, but they can if they want to.

Pet Battles
  • Pet Battle world quests contribute to the pet battle system itself, giving you tokens, stones, vanity items, and more.
  • Pet Battle quests also can be done to finish your emissary quests.

Faction Emissary Quests
  • Every day there is an emissary up, sending you to do 4 of the world quests that are up for that faction.
  • Completing those quests rewards a cache and a significant amount of rep when you complete the quests.
  • These stack for up to 3 days, so you have a bit of a buffer if you can't log in every day.

Legendary Items
  • The emissary caches can contain one of the legendary items!
  • World quests themselves can't drop a legendary item. The team doesn't want people to feel like they need to go and do every quest for a chance at a legendary item.

Factions and Story
  • In Suramar you will progress the story of the faction by doing quests.
  • The more reputation you earn and quests that you do, the deeper into the city and story you go.

Quest Types
  • You will see pretty much every type of quest WoW has: rare spawns, level up quests, minigames, world bosses, dungeon events, and more.

Demon Invasions
  • The team is interested in seeing how the invasions work out.
  • The new tech could be used in other places for large scale world content if it works out well.
  • Contribute your ideas for world quests if you are interested in seeing the system and content expanded.

Group and Solo Quests
  • There are many types of world quests, including lots of group quests.
  • Everything in the world allows up to five players of the same faction on the tap list, so you can help out other players with most of the quests.
  • All of the rare spawns, elites, world bosses and such are open tap, so anyone can participate.

Quest Reset Timers
  • Each bucket of world quests has multiple quests with different reset timers. Some are weekly, some every 3 days, some daily, some every six hours, and some every three hours.
  • The team wants the game world to feel dynamic, but they want people to have reasonable times to check in on the quests.
  • There should be roughly 10 to 20 things that refresh every play session.

World Quest Replayability
  • The team made a lot of world quests with great variety so that you wouldn't see the same quest very often. This should help keep them entertaining.
  • Each of the rare spawns have ability specific to their zone, so the fights will change.
  • Let the team know if certain quests come up too often or feel stale, as it is easy to shuffle them around or add new ones.

Relics and World Quests
  • Relics are somewhwat similar to how we used to get weapon drops, rather than a weapon you get the relic that empowers your artifact.
  • The spawn rate of quests that reward Relics was too low and has been increased in beta.

Groups and World Quests
  • Outside of progression in Suramar, most quests are the same for everyone the region.
  • Everyone will see roughly the same loot from the world quests that are up.
  • This way friends can let each other know when there is a cool world quest up.
  • If you already got loot from a specific world quest there is fallback loot.

Rewards
  • Emissary quests will be the main source of reputation. After that is the individual world quests.
  • Artifact Power comes from pretty much everywhere in the game, so you can do pretty much any content to earn it.

Daily Quests
  • The faction daily quests spawn every six hours instead of daily. These should be a good replacement for people that miss daily quests.
  • These quests take place out in the world and make it feel like you are doing things that make sense for that zone.
  • No need to pick up quests, just head out to that location and the talking head will appear.
  • There are followups to the world quests, you may come back to a farm and it has been infested again with a slightly different quest.

Pre-Expansion Events
  • There will be lots of awesome lore and story that lead up to Legion during the pre-expansion events.
  • After Legion launches, this would be a long experience to go through. There will be a shorter version that lets you play through the start and end of the event.
  • If you want to experience the full story later, you can go and talk to an NPC in Dalaran to play through it.
  • The Demon Invasion is exclusive to the pre-launch period. You won't be able to go back and do these or earn the rewards in the future.
  • The pre-expansion patch will be released, the team will make sure everything is working fine, and then later the events will start.
  • This delay before the invasion starts gives the team a chance to make sure everything is working well before things kick off.

Reward Item Levels
  • Almost all of the loot can be randomly upgraded to the max level of gear available at the time in Legion, including World Quest rewards.
  • The higher the difficulty of the content, the higher average item level of gear you will get from it.
  • The higher your item level, the higher item level of the loot that will drop.

World Quests and Order Halls
  • Your Order Hall tech tree will be leveled up to give you bonuses.
  • Your Artifact Knowledge level is increased through your Order Hall to increase your Artifact Power gains.
  • The Order Hall should help to make your gameplay more fun.
  • The cool parts of garrison were brought forward, such as the bodyguard.
  • The Garrison was a major contributor to player progression, but the Order Hall is a contributor to your gameplay experience.

Zone Scaling
  • Legion is the first test of level agnostic zones, giving you a choice of progression path.
  • There are certain things that the team wants to make sure work out well before they look at applying it to older zones.
  • For some players, it doesn't feel good to be unable to outlevel the content. They want to look at a boar from 50 levels ago and feel vastly more powerful than it.
  • The team also wants to make sure that the older content feels fun.
  • The team spent a lot of time making things feel fun and challenging for Legion questing.

Reward Scaling
  • As you increase your item level, you increase the average item level that is rewarded from the world quests.
  • This should keep the rewards relevant as you get up to max level gear.

Warden Towers
  • There are Warden towers around the Broken Isles, but they don't have the resources to defend them anymore.
  • Genn and Sylvanas have a war like mentality, their troops will take over these towers. They want to have a defensible position.

Bonus Objective
  • Bonus Objectives will continue in Legion.

World Quest Completion Criteria
  • There aren't world quests that have class specific completion criteria at launch, but it is something the team is interested in doing.
  • Maybe you and all of your Warlock friends will all need to go to one area and call down internals and fear things.
  • Maybe all of the Paladins will have to go and bubble to avoid dying to an AoE.


New Comic: World of Warcraft: Legion #3—"Highmountain: A Mountain Divided"
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
As the Burning Legion advances across the land, the chieftains of Highmountain gather for a momentous summit. An ancient artifact, the mystic Hammer of Khaz'goroth, may hold the power to protect their territory, but will betrayal threaten the tribes from within?


We invite you to read and download the free comic here or through Dark Horse Comics, Kindle, or ComiXology. You can also experience the action and sound of this tale through the Madefire motion book, available on desktop, mobile, and Apple TV.

About
Written by Robert Brooks and illustrated by David Kegg, "Highmountain: A Mountain Divided" is the third in a series of comics leading up to the Burning Legion's invasion of Azeroth.

Robert Brooks is a senior writer on Blizzard Entertainment's Creative Development team and has worked on various projects for Blizzard's game franchises, including the World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor comic "Blackhand" and the Mists of Pandaria faction short story "The Untamed Valley."

David Kegg is a San Diego–based concept artist and illustrator who has worked for top AAA studios and production houses. Visit his portfolio on ArtStation to view more of his work.
This article was originally published in forum thread: Legion Developer Q&A - World Quests and Demon Invasions, Legion Comic #3 started by chaud View original post
Comments 69 Comments
  1. Darkguyver2020's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by kamuimac View Post
    boring q&a - no new informations at all- just some usles marketing - 99 % of twitch chat just spams about pre patch date because thats they are all there
    Quote Originally Posted by Rixorcist View Post
    Probably 90% bullshit again
    Just accept the fact that nothing Blizzard says or do these days will appease your unrealistically high standards. The game could dispense free blowjobs and I bet you would still be dissatisfied.
  1. Gloriandus's Avatar
    You may not see the same world boss more than a few times a year due to the huge amount of world quests.
    A little confused: does this mean world bosses in Legion are lootable only when part of a world quest, or can you still just show up, participate, and have a chance at loot just whenever they're up? As in, the chances at targeting a specific relic is limited to what boss(es) are available any particular week via the world quest?
  1. Peekabooboo's Avatar
    Sounds like a great system. Rather than a complete waste of time world quests seem well integrated into the game. I'll enjoy going out with my wife and doing stuff rather than just logging in for arena or raids.
  1. Tommy T's Avatar
    So fucking hyped for this.
    Looking like a stellar expansion so far.
  1. mmoca01e16f76d's Avatar
    Everything about world quests sounds very cool, also it's super great to see someone so passionate and excited about work they're doing. Jeremy Feasel seems like great dude, and the person we should be thankful if the Legion delivers. ( and I think it will)
  1. tkc-von's Avatar
    Can we set up a GoFundMe page to get Josh a new shirt? Because... dayum!
  1. Scarzi's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Syenite View Post
    Could they please adress the camera change already? 96 pages and almost 2000 posts on the forum, yet nothing.
    oh god, the default camera is fine. Raided with it for 7 years. People that are whining about it are less then .000001%
  1. Msshammy's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Peekabooboo View Post
    Sounds like a great system. Rather than a complete waste of time world quests seem well integrated into the game. I'll enjoy going out with my wife and doing stuff rather than just logging in for arena or raids.
    Exactly what I was thinking. Something to do with the wife while waiting for raids, etc. I will be doing them myself anyways, but there's only so much we can do in the game "together". She has no interest in raiding or even dungeons for that matter. This is perfect for us to spend time in game together and not make myself feel like I'm wasting time that could be spent on gearing or stuff like that. Will be rewarding for both of us.. Love it.
  1. ejpaints's Avatar
    As Accomp said in a recent interview, World Quests will be a detriment to some people's jobs. I may be one of them. Literally so much choice on beta that I haven't had in.... I don't remember how long.... That I had to quit playing beta during the week because I wasn't getting much sleep. It wasn't anything I HAD to get done either. It was just stuff I wanted to do. And that is a level of fun Warcraft hasn't provided me personally in a long time.
  1. Zanzas's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Gloriandus View Post
    A little confused: does this mean world bosses in Legion are lootable only when part of a world quest, or can you still just show up, participate, and have a chance at loot just whenever they're up? As in, the chances at targeting a specific relic is limited to what boss(es) are available any particular week via the world quest?
    World Bosses are lootable and you can use bonus roll tokens without needing the world quest. The world quest for a world boss is just an additional reward to whatever the world boss gives you. Currently in beta there are 13 possible world bosses but only 3 are ever active per week similar to the world bosses in Gorgrond currently except instead of having just 2 and switching every week, there might be a boss that we would only see a couple of weeks through the year due to the high number of them to switch between.
  1. Cazmosis's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Syenite View Post
    Could they please adress the camera change already? 96 pages and almost 2000 posts on the forum, yet nothing.
    2000 posts divided by the same 8 hysterical children = Deal with it.
  1. ckooken's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by GGA1759 View Post
    There should be a good deal of quests in the "old" world. It's sad that every expansion alienates previous areas. Azeroth has so much incredible scenery and locations that could be utilized for any number of types of quests.
    They stated that they are waiting to see how it plays out its but there are plans to add more into the old world zones. I agree with you though.
  1. Logwyn's Avatar
    Two things I noticed most.

    "You can gear up to some extent with world quests, but the hardest content you can do will reward the best gear."

    This is very subjective. If I can solo a 5 man when no one else in the world can.... I should get the best gear?

    Annd

    They seem to be doing much of go out in the world and do things. I wonder how long till people complain they have too much out in the world to do they are never in a city anymore.. =)
  1. rikku45's Avatar
    For some players, it doesn't feel good to be unable to outlevel the content.
    This is why level scaling sucks. Hope they add a toggle for old zones.
  1. Tornwar's Avatar
    It would be cool if they added city invasions for future world quests. Not talking about Legion invasions, but actual Horde/Alliance invasions! Would only happen once in a while, not every day. Gives the player the ability to explore the other faction's city, without entering PvP
    Would be cool events, showing that the war will always be there!
  1. ComputerNerd's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by rikku45 View Post
    This is why level scaling sucks. Hope they add a toggle for old zones.
    It doesn't apply to old zones currently.
    Though I expect there to be caps if it were.
    As the scaling doesn't produce the desired effect in all content by simply bumping up the numbers.
    Alongside the increase in level comes an increase in complexity with abilities used by mobs.
    So therefore if there is to be any scaling in lower zones, there should be lower and upper limits for each so that levelling players aren't scaling in zones where the abilities are then out of sync in terms of difficulty.
    Scaling a level 1-5 zone up to a player would still have it be trivial.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by diguidi View Post
    "Pet Battle quests contribute to all of the different systems in the game, the emissary quests, your artifact progression, earning pet battle tokens and more." Please someone tell me that pet battles are not an obligation at some point to keep progressing the artifact... I dislike them very much
    By that I assume that the rewards from those quests can be varied, and therefore interesting to more than just pet battling usage.
  1. Darkguyver2020's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Logwyn View Post
    I wonder how long till people complain they have too much out in the world to do they are never in a city anymore.. =)
    If people do complain about having too much content, I will pray to the Heavens that I will someday gain the ability to strangle them through their monitors.
    I'd rather be overloaded with things to do than have another WoD debacle where we were AFKing in our garrisons with our Facebook table.
  1. xerus's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Logwyn View Post
    Two things I noticed most.

    "You can gear up to some extent with world quests, but the hardest content you can do will reward the best gear."

    This is very subjective. If I can solo a 5 man when no one else in the world can.... I should get the best gear?
    What they are saying is harder content will reward better gear. A Mythic + dungeon will reward better loot than a normal dungeon or even a lower level Mythic + dungeon.

    They aren't basing the difficulty on you personally.
  1. Shudder's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by tkc-von View Post
    Can we set up a GoFundMe page to get Josh a new shirt? Because... dayum!
    He looks like his mother dresses him.
  1. ejpaints's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Darkguyver2020 View Post
    If people do complain about having too much content, I will pray to the Heavens that I will someday gain the ability to strangle them through their monitors.
    I'd rather be overloaded with things to do than have another WoD debacle where we were AFKing in our garrisons with our Facebook table.
    Yet it's going to happen. In which case you figure out the strangling through monitors thing, please share.

Site Navigation