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. cuafpr's Avatar
    plz no more forced leveling scaling uhg..... its bad enough in legion >.<
  1. Biggles Worth's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by cuafpr View Post
    plz no more forced leveling scaling uhg..... its bad enough in legion >.<
    I feel like I'm the only one who doesn't like killing every single npc in one hit.
  1. nekobaka's Avatar
    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.
    Some already are and are saying they will not pick up Legion which would be good for all. Can only hope they will stay away for good.
  1. Spotnick'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.
    There was a lot of stuff to do at the beginning of MOP too.. people burned out from too much content. Yes, they did. I know several people who stopped playing after going nuts with all those dailies. The key is balance. The fact that they are not dailies, but have different timers will help.. anyways we'll see, at some point you won't need much Order Hall resources and can focus on Artifact Power, etc.

    I was not doing all the MOP dailies every day, so I pretty much gave up on all the gear gated by them.

    Personally my only concern with this is there is no way in hell I'm doing those on more than one character.
  1. thilicen's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Biggles Worth View Post
    I feel like I'm the only one who doesn't like killing every single npc in one hit.
    Oh I'm with you, nothing fun about it.

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Spotnick View Post
    There was a lot of stuff to do at the beginning of MOP too.. people burned out from too much content. Yes, they did. I know several people who stopped playing after going nuts with all those dailies. The key is balance. The fact that they are not dailies, but have different timers will help.. anyways we'll see, at some point you won't need much Order Hall resources and can focus on Artifact Power, etc.

    I was not doing all the MOP dailies every day, so I pretty much gave up on all the gear gated by them.

    Personally my only concern with this is there is no way in hell I'm doing those on more than one character.
    One of the finer qualitites of offering relevant gear from many sources is that you can focus your attention on certain types of content on certain characters to keep it interesting. That's probably how I will be using my alts at least.
  1. mmocd2a2ae8157's Avatar
    Legion is probably closer to a version 2 of the Mists of Pandaria daily quest system
    WHAT THE FUCK? Let's get the worse of MoP (daily quest) and the worst of WoD (garrison) and make a new expansion. SeemsGood Sad to see how they are making the same mistakes over and over again, I don't want wow to die but I don't think we will survive another expansion worse than the previous one.
  1. thilicen's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by seijulala View Post
    WHAT THE FUCK? Let's get the worse of MoP (daily quest) and the worst of WoD (garrison) and make a new expansion. SeemsGood Sad to see how they are making the same mistakes over and over again, I don't want wow to die but I don't think we will survive another expansion worse than the previous one.
    You clearly haven't tried any of these features.
  1. mmocd2a2ae8157's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by thilicen View Post
    You clearly haven't tried any of these features.
    The concept of daily quest is just wrong, it transforms a game (that I love) into a job (personally MoP daily quests has been the worst thing I've ever experimented on this game). I'm not saying that I don't want stuff to do, but don't put a temporal constraint for doing so (at least not a small one like "a day").
  1. thilicen's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by seijulala View Post
    The concept of daily quest is just wrong, it transforms a game (that I love) into a job (personally MoP daily quests has been the worst thing I've ever experimented on this game). I'm not saying that I don't want stuff to do, but don't put a temporal constraint for doing so (at least not a small one like "a day").
    If you're worried about world quests then there's a huge difference to consider. You don't HAVE to do them all or every day to have a chance at the better gear, just go with your own flow. Honestly the only way something like this becomes a job is if you make it one. If you feel you -have- to complete every world quest available every day then yes it's going to be way over the top, but the system is in no way designed for you to get to that point. It's more a "do what suits you best".
  1. mmocf89c8b0f36's Avatar
    Actually... it... looks good.
  1. mmoc8b9477f07c's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by seijulala View Post
    The concept of daily quest is just wrong, it transforms a game (that I love) into a job (personally MoP daily quests has been the worst thing I've ever experimented on this game). I'm not saying that I don't want stuff to do, but don't put a temporal constraint for doing so (at least not a small one like "a day").
    How bout you actually read the information that they supplied you?
    It gets reset after 3 days! so you have 3 fucking days to do them.
    So if you don't do any quests for 3 days you will have 3 days worth of quests there for you to do!

    really, fucking read! Come on.
  1. Srg56's Avatar
    I sit here and think about how amused these people making the game must be.
    What are they thinking or saying inside the boardroom meetings to each other? Things that they can't say in public because they need to present themselves as understanding and not offend anything that may have a credit card and is interested in staying subscribed to their game, ya'know, what's behind their smiles and chipper attitude when talking about the "issues" of "too much content" in MoP. I can only guess:

    -what the fuck is wrong with these people?
    -are they insane? have they no self control?
    -do they really need to do every single quest every single day?
    -so what if they miss one day or week of quests? IT'S A GAME!
    -etc etc
  1. Soeroah's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by seijulala View Post
    WHAT THE FUCK? Let's get the worse of MoP (daily quest) and the worst of WoD (garrison) and make a new expansion. SeemsGood Sad to see how they are making the same mistakes over and over again, I don't want wow to die but I don't think we will survive another expansion worse than the previous one.
    The problem with MoP wasn't daily quests, it was that rep was "required" more than ever. You should be complaining about Profession level 3 recipes being on faction vendors, not the world quests.

    Legion's nothing like Pandaria. I love the world quest system, it feels much more casual, not as punishing to take a break from... But the faction stories, Suramar aside, aren't as good as they were in MoP. World Quests don't give much lore, especially the Warden ones. No questlines as you gain rep from what I've seen, either. Not like 5.1. No alt catch ups for rep. Other than having lots of alts and spamming one particular emissary quest.
  1. Arvandor's Avatar
    quest overkill in legion? i hope not, but we will see.. the 3 and 6 hour spawn time is to short! daily spawn time is enough!

    the comic story is lame.. number one was fantastic! shame that we dont see a continue..
  1. mmocc1f11a099b's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Biggles Worth View Post
    I feel like I'm the only one who doesn't like killing every single npc in one hit.
    You aren't only one as Blizzard is considering level scaling and they wouldn't if there were no people who wanted it.

    If Blizz wants to make old content fun then more time walking and raids time walking is great idea. Then they can even allow people to scale down to friends level while grouping IF they choose to scale down. If they enforce level scaling in all zones, dungeons and raids with no option of choice it will be the last day I play Wow as nowdays 90% of things I do in Wow is speed runing old content and getting achievments. If I were to do it hard way (which takes time x 50) then I wouldn't deem it worthy doing. I don't think its unfair for those who spent long time to get these items and achievements in past as they got rewarded then and had gotten their rewards way earlier than anyone else.

    It is not like the old content will become new and fresh just because it will suddenly provide alt alike feeling of challenge. It is old zones and raids that most of people ran hundreds times and they got bored and fed up with these. If to come back to these places again then only as time walking - an event that is not obligatory. They could even introduce time walking zones with special extra rewards and quests behaving like dailies there untill end of event.
  1. mmoc78e9842c0f's Avatar
    Yeah Gods, the Tauren in Highmountain surely are a self-righteous bunch. Don't feel Tauren at all. So far, the second Comic was the best. Can't wait for the new Mini-Series.
  1. derpkitteh's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by seijulala View Post
    WHAT THE FUCK? Let's get the worse of MoP (daily quest) and the worst of WoD (garrison) and make a new expansion. SeemsGood Sad to see how they are making the same mistakes over and over again, I don't want wow to die but I don't think we will survive another expansion worse than the previous one.
    daily quests were what i liked about MoP.

    you actually had a lot of things to do then. domination point and isle of thunder were handled so much better than all world content in WoD was.
  1. mmoce25a800b33's Avatar
    can't figure out if
    that dude has like at least 100% more real life haste than me
    or video was playing faster.
  1. middling's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by derpkitteh View Post
    daily quests were what i liked about MoP.

    you actually had a lot of things to do then. domination point and isle of thunder were handled so much better than all world content in WoD was.
    I didn't mind the daily quests at all on ONE character, but to try and do them on multiple chars. What I didn't like was the rep system at the beginning of MOP. Blizz agreed the gating behind ONE faction was too harsh and ended up tweaking it.

    I am confident the same things can happen here if things don't make sense.

    they will likely increase the rep received from each quest since it's too low now, takes FOREVER to reach exalted, like months
  1. mmoc78e9842c0f's Avatar
    I liked the system in MoP - I mostly alternated between different factions each day I played. Did take me some months to reach exalted with all of them, but I eventually did. It is imho the same thing with Tier Sets and Class Trinkets in LFR - just because you have the opportunity to do something, doesn't necessarily mean that you have to do all, everyday/week. Just constrain yourself a little bit, it is not that hard.

    Am stoked as fuck about the new Legion System - now I can concentrate on my two Mains, and still progress them months/years after the initial Legion release. And not just with Raids - Word Quests, Artifact stuff, Mythic dungeons, Suramar, LFR and Professions. Nice to have so many options to progess my Chars outside of hc/mythic Raiding.

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