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Blizzard Entertainment Inc announced the latest expansion for World of Warcraft last week at Gamescom in Cologne, Germany, and today the developer answered a few fan questions during a livestream that gave a little more detail about the new features coming to the game.
The upcoming expansion, Legion, will be the sixth in the game’s nearly 11-year history, and it will focus almost entirely on the Burning Legion, a demonic army that has threatened the world of Azeroth throughout its existence. The Burning Legion had been a key feature of the first and arguably most popular WoW expansion, The Burning Crusade, and from what we have seen so far, Blizzard appears to be taking a fair bit inspiration from that expansion, especially in aesthetic and story.
The clearest example of this is the newly announced hero class, the Demon Hunter, which will be a melee DPS and Tanking class that Game Director Tom Chilton called “a high mobility, agile class that dashes around the battlefield and does a lot of damage.”
When asked how the Demon Hunter will differentiate itself from other melee classes like Monks and Death Knights, Chilton responded that the class will focus on mobility more than Death Knights do, and it will focus on non-stop damage more than Monks do.
When describing the Demon Hunter class during the stream, Chilton admitted that the class had originally been intended for The Burning Crusade, which released in 2007, but the idea had been scrapped because the developers “weren’t comfortable with adding a new class to the game.” Instead of adding a new class, The Burning Crusade allowed Horde character to play Paladins and Alliance characters to play Shamans for the first time.
The first new class to the game came in Wrath of the Lich King with the addition of the Death Knight, which was also the first and (until now) only hero class added to the game.
Another key feature of the new expansion is artifact weapons, items unique to each class spec that players will earn early on in Legion. The artifacts will gain levels with experience, and players will be able to spend Artifact Points to upgrade them by investing in a weapon-specific skill tree.
While artifacts will gain new abilities with experience, they will gain attributes and item levels through special relics that will be socketed into them similar to the way gems from jewelcrafting currently work in-game. Rather than getting weapon drops from dungeons and raids, players will instead gain these socketable relics which will increase the artifact’s ilvl, DPS throughput, attributes, and more.
When asked how artifacts will affect dual specialization players, Lead Designer Ion Hazzikostas explained that players will unlock the opportunity to gain other artifacts for their other specializations, and there will be “catch-up mechanisms” in place to help players gear up their alternate specs without having to go through the lengthy process of leveling their artifact again.
Chilton added that players will still need to earn separate relics to socket into their alternate spec artifacts, but they can use the loot specialization feature to earn those in dungeons similarly to the way many players earn alternate gear now.
Flying has been a hot-button topic in WoW since it was first introduced in The Burning Crusade, and it especially became controversial once it was rolled out to the rest of the game world in Cataclysm. In the most recent expansion, Warlords of Draenor, Blizzard made the decision to not add flying to the new zones as a way to encourage players to explore the world and interact with it more.
That will soon be changing in an upcoming patch however, and this left players curious as to whether or not flying would be part of Legion.
“Eventually yes, but not right away,” said Hazzikostas. “I think that is consistent with the philosophy we laid out in our dev watercooler blog post a few weeks back where we said that our solution for Warlords was a template that we could see applying going forward. We’re going to be enabling flying in the very near future in Warlords, and we think that strikes a good compromise between allowing the ground-based gameplay to shine as people initially explore the world, but then allowing people who have achieved and completed the content to take to the skies and then experience it from an all new perspective.”
He added, “One thing we are going to do in Legion is, starting in 7.0, the first steps in the achievement to eventually unlock flying will be available so players can start working towards it and get a sense of what it’s going to require.”
Other details teased by the developers include giving professions more relevance (a common complaint from Warlords), updating profession UI and functionality, and adding a twelfth character slot so that players can continue to have one of each class.
You can watch the full recording of the stream from Gamescom below (starts at 29:50).
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