The development team has been working diligently on Legion alongside Warlords of Draenor. During BlizzCon 2013, Senior Vice President of Story and Franchise Development Chris Metzen had stated that the next 5-6 expansions were already in the chamber.
Again, Vice President and Game Designer Tom “Kalgan” Chilton, Creative Director Alex Afrasiabi, and Lead Game Designer Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas were available to answer a few of the questions during the broadcast.
Questions have been taken directly from the stream.
Lore
Question: One of the big questions that has been made was, where are we in terms of the world? Are we in the current Azeroth or are we once more in an alternative reality?
So did Archimonde sent Gul’dan over there, yes? If so why?
When we first saw that cinematic and saw Gul’dan he was pretty happy see Illidan, why was that?
Speaking of which by the way, I think people really want to know: is Illidan the bad guy here in World of Warcraft: Legion or is he on our side? If he is on our side won’t he have some kind of resentment of the past?
Now you’ve mentioned during the release that we will be battling the Legion in the Broken Isles, how’d the Legion get there?
New Zones
One of the things that you’ve mentioned when you introduced the expansion and all the new zones was Dalaran. Is Dalaran, which is currently in Northrend, is that only just casually flying over to the Broken Isles?
With the new area and the new continent, I think what people really want to know: can I fly to this new continent, the Broken Isles, by myself or do I have to take more conventional routes similar to how I was in Warlords of Draenor for example?
But the one that we have at the Broken Isles is conceptually the same Dalaran. It’s been updated a little bit so there’s some changes to some of the locations within Dalaran itself, there are changes in the Underbelly, there’s some texture updates. We combine all that and still have a lot of the same nostalgia that it did before with a lot of the same functionality.
Artifacts
So these Artifacts, how will they play a big role here in the expansion? And then moving forward, what was the progression as we go through the content?
One thing we are going to do in Legion is, starting in 7.0, the first steps of the achievement to eventually unlock flying will be available so players can start working towards it and get a sense of what it is going to require.
What about duel-specs? How are the Artifacts working with that?
A part that didn’t get mentioned is sort of the DPS throughout item level of your weapon itself. And that’s going to be derived from powerful relics that you will obtain through “traditional sources”. You can socket those to your weapon and those will increase its damage, its spellpower. And they also interplay and modify some of the traits that you have socketed as well.
That is going to take the place of traditional weapon drops that you would normally get from quest rewards and dungeons. There will probably be some [weapon drops] early on for catch up purposes, beyond the very early level-up zones, it’s not something that we expect to see because you should have your Artifact.
And that is going to be the thing that you progress. But through these relics that you get, you’re still going to have the core experience of leveling up and getting a stronger weapon that just hits harder. And that way when you kill a Mythic raid boss, it’s going to drop a way more powerful relic than what you would get from a Raid Finder boss or a quest from the world.
Professions
Is there anything you can share in terms of professions?
And then from there, we have some catch up mechanisms in mind that in general make it much easier and faster to get your second and/or third Artifact up to speed and to the same power level as your main one. The one part that won’t directly carry over are the relics. There you would need to earn separate relics for the additional weapon, but that’s not very different from today.
Demon Hunter
The Demon Hunter class that we considered introducing it during the Burning Crusade but we weren’t comfortable enough adding a new class to the game. The Demon Hunter class has a lot of history both in the earlier Warcraft games through the Illidan character through the Illidari in the Burning Crusade. They’re high mobility, agile class that dashes around the battlefield doing a lot of damage.
And then we’re also looking into some systems changes to kind of freshen the system a little bit—it’s been very much the same for a long time now. We’re looking into some updates that will not only improve the UI, but also kind of add new functionality with being able to get expertise in individual recipes. professions focus, feedback garrison replace prof func. Fressing the system a bit, updates, UI improvement, new func, and expertise.
What’s the process of designing a new class, especially one with so much anticipation?
Now that we have 12 classes here, will we get a 12th character slot so we can have one of each class on a single realm?
The Demon Hunter has been introduced as one of the classes with a melee DPS as well as Tank spec, very much like the Monk and Death Knight. How different is it from those two other classes? And do those two have to fear for raid spot?
Demon Hunter is really all about being more in your face, very aggressive, doing a lot of damage, trying to avoid damage where possible using evasion/mitigation. It really has a different flavor and we’re going to make sure that they all feel very distinctly.
And as far as raid spots go, fortunately we have the advantage of having these scaling raid sizes. We also feel like people that will play the Demon Hunter are also going to be people that would have been playing melee specs anyways. We don’t feel like it will crowd the box around the boss too much.
