Legion Developer Q&A - Ion Hazzikostas
The Q&A is over and we are in the process of cleaning up the notes below. The Q&A next week covers professions.
Pre-Expansion Patch
The pre-patch date isn't finalized yet, but the timing will be similar to other expansions, some number of weeks before Legion release.
The demon invasion event is live on both beta and PTR.
Personal Loot
Players liked the social feeling from group loot and being able to pass along items they don't need to other players.
In Legion, if you get an item from a dungeon or raid with personal loot that isn't an upgrade for you (lower or equal item level for that slot), you can trade it to another eligible player.
Healer Leveling and Talents
The team put effort into improving healer damage and healer soloing in Legion, so players are now able to level more as a healer more efficiently than they were able to in previous expansions.
A Holy Priest and Shadow Priest won't kill things at the same speed, but the overall difference in time to complete a zone is not meaningfully different now.
DPS still has a small advantage in leveling speed, but healers no longer take 2-3x as long to kill enemies.
There are talents and Artifact traits that will help you level faster as a healer.
You can change your talents around freely when you queue and arrive in a new dungeon, so there is no need to go back to town.
Content Droughts and Expansion Development Timelines
Not having content droughts is a priority for the team. They know that they still haven't managed to eliminate them and that actions speak louder than words here.
When the team set out to make Legion, the goal was to solve the content drought problem by making expansions faster than they have before.
The team made sacrifices along the way to try and make Legion faster.
They discovered along the way that there is a certain amount of time that goes into making an expansion that is up to par with what players expect and deserve.
If an expansion was just some new zones and dungeons, like a bigger patch, they probably could make them faster.
When the team starts adding new systems or classes, it takes time to iterate on the new things and get them right.
The team was too ambitious with their targets when planning for Legion.
The team has learned their lesson and accepted that they can't produce an expansion faster, so the plan moving forward as they start working on the next expansion is to make sure Legion has a lot more patch content.
They want to build on the stories that they are in the middle of telling in an expansion, giving players something to do while they work on the next expansion.
Yearly expansions wouldn't be the best thing for players. Longer expansions give us time to explore the world that was created and time for the team to get the next expansion done right.
Thal'dranath
Thal'dranath will not be part of Legion.
It won't be a reduction in content delivered to players, just that the team had a better and way cooler idea.
Thal'dranath was yet another ancient elven ruined island that has a heavy Legion presence. There is already a lot of that in Broken Isles.
There are cool new places to explore in the patch content and once players see it they will agree that it is cooler than what Thal'dranath would have been.
Suramar and Storytelling
New content will be added to Suramar during Legion.
There is a good portion of the story of the Nightfallen and Nightborne in the initial release, but there is more of that story to tell.
There were lost opportunities in Warlords, such as the story of Shattrath, the Shadow Council's assault on Shattrath, and the Arakkoa.
Professions
In the next beta build there will more more Blood of Sargeras sources.
There are players that are double crafting professions wishing they had a gathering profession now and to some extent that is how it should be.
With Garrisons everyone was self sufficient and there wasn't much of a reason to trade or interact with other players.
The value of BoP crafting materials is that it gives some market power to the crafter.
When you can trade all of the materials used to craft something, all you do is push a button and hope for a tip.
RNG, PvP Gear, and Legendary Items
One option is completely deterministic loot acquisition. Loot is on vendors, so you grind out a currency and then go and purchase the item you wanted. This often feels like a grind.
With randomness, there is a chance for surprise, excitement, unexpected outcomes, and variety.
Randomness with PvP gear in past expansions didn't work well, as you needed a full set to be competitive.
In Legion, you have normalized stats in PvP, so gear is far less important.
Being unlucky when gear doesn't matter as much might make a one item level difference, meaning a fraction of a percent power difference.
The gear you get from PvP is now the same gear you can get from elsewhere in the world, so it is useful for a variety of content.
The team wants to encourage more people to try out PvP, especially if they have written it off in the past because of the time investment or bad experience from being undergeared.
Legendary items are attempting to recapture the spirit of world drops from early World of Warcraft. You could randomly get a really awesome item.
There is some bad luck protection for legendary items, so that you have better odds to get one the longer you go without getting one.
The team doesn't want people to be able to target specific legendary items at launch, but later in the expansion it might make sense to add targeting a specific legendary item.
Allowing legendary items during early Mythic progression was done so that you could use the gear you have. The limit of one legendary equipped should help to reduce the impact they have. A single item isn't out of line with other power disparities in other raid progression races. Heroic Warforged trinkets and other things during the first few weeks were a larger power gap than one legendary item will be. The race won't be won or lost because of a legendary item.
Rough Notes
The pristine server idea was not aimed at the audience that wants Vanilla servers. The other aspects such as community and leveling speed are something that the team is targeting in the live game. Pristine servers aren't coming soon, but the discussion around them is helpful.
Legion is going to be the most alt-friendly expansion in terms of the diversity and replayability of the content. Different Artifacts, Order Halls, zone order, and other parts of the game will be different on each character.
Artifact Knowledge is not account wide. It applies to all Artifact weapons on a single character.
Each week after the expansion launches, it will become faster to earn Artifact Knowledge. It applies to all characters, so alts and people that come back will be able to catch up.
There are a couple dozen levels of Artifact Knowledge to progress through. If you focus on your primary weapon and are 20 traits in, you might have to choose if you want one trait in your main weapon or five in your off-spec weapon. It should be pretty easy to keep off-spec weapons up to around 80% of your main spec weapon.
There are no plans to allow further loosening of the transmog restrictions across weapon types.
Some animations only exist for certain weapon types, so if you transmogged a dagger into a mace, your character would be trying to stab people with a mace.
Some of the artifact unlocks are different weapon types to help players that don't like their Artifact weapon type.
Valor and Valor Upgrades are something that could come back towards the end of Legion, but no plans for it right now.
Time-walking is awesome and the team will continue to expand it going forward.
There will be a World Quest bonus week, with 50% more reputation from world quests.
Weekly events will be taking a month or so break when Legion launches to allow players to focus on leveling and getting ready for dungeons and raids.
DPS numbers are getting up to where they were in Mists of Pandaria, so next expansion will probably have a squish again. This will also be a chance to look at the combat system and see if they can come up with a better solution.
Legendary items can come from world quests, dungeon bosses, raid bosses, PvP strongboxes.
In Warlords, if you were going to daily quests you knew at the start of that session that nothing exciting could happen. The same thing applies if a friend wanted help with a dungeon. Warforged, Titanforged, and legendary items should help to add some excitement.
World quests should occasionally reward Relics, there was a bug in previous builds that prevented this.
The team added new animations and visual effects to melee. New animations and visuals for casters are coming up next, changes will come in patches and expansions rather than all at once.
Specs should be mostly competitive with each other, but some specs will have a niche where they are a little bit better.
Titanforged gear can come from world quests, dungeons, PvP rewards.
In previous expansions, there wasn't much of a reason to do content once you have passed the item level rewarded by the content. In Legion you can get a range of item levels from content, so older content still has a chance to give you something relevant. You could kill a normal dungeon boss and get a Mythic raid item level item! (That has a very very tiny chance of happening)
Flying will be allowed roughly in the middle of Legion. Not in the last content patch, as there will be patches after flying is unlocked.
The team is mostly focusing on tuning now, not lots of bigger changes to mechanics.
A new single target nuke that replaces what Frostfire bolt used to be is coming.
A lot of the interface options have been removed and are staying removed. They were removed for clarity, allowing users to find options they are looking for that are important. There are a lot of options that most players never touched. Most of these things can still be set through console commands. Addons still have access, so someone can make an addon to control the options.
In Legion, Holy Priest is the traditional healer spec while Discipline is more of a healer and damage hybrid. There will be a much bigger difference between the specs than ever before.
Tanks are great at leveling and soloing, even if they kill things slower when killing one at a time they can pull more and survive.
The team occasionally talks about adding a Ulduar style harder mode to a boss. They did it in Terrace of Endless Spring with a harder different kill order for a boss, but not many guilds did it.
There are no plans to add another spec to Demon Hunter at this time. A healing spec didn't make sense and splitting the cool and iconic things from Demon Hunter into two specs doesn't feel great.
There aren't any dungeon sets in Legion, but it is something they are keeping in mind for the future. The Order Hall set is obtained by doing different types of content.
The power of the legendary ring proc and passive will decline as you level. You may use it for a little while at Level 110, but it isn't designed to be powerful in raids. The pre-expansion patch will stop players from starting the legendary ring quest and the expansion release will remove the questline.
