Update: The Legion Q&A with Ion Hazzikostas has now finished and you can see a VOD and summary below.
With the Q&A finished up, here’s our run-down of what was said. No major announcements, as aspected, but lots of clarifications and details.
Here’s everything else we know about Legion’s release date and much more.
- Personal loot will get an upgrade in Legion, making all items that aren’t an upgrade ilevel-wise tradable.
- In regards to content drought, Blizzard realise that anything they say at this point isn’t going to help, as they’ve said it before. They’re no longer targeting one expansion a year as an end goal, because there’s just a certain amount of time that creating an expansion requires – new zones, races, classes and so on. Legion will have more patch content, and now they know this they think it will be fixed. They plan to prove this with action, as that’s the only way people will believe them.
- Flying will be added to the Legion portion of the game mid-expansion. Exactly when is still to be announced, as is the patch plan, but it won’t be in the last patch.
- A pity timer of sorts will be implemented in Legion for the new legendary system, but similar to Hearthstone and Overwatchthey’re keeping exactly how a secret. Legendaries are going to be applicable in Mythic raiding because they don’t believe it will have that much of an impact, and they want as much of your gear to be usable as possible.
- Pristine and legacy servers are still being discussed, but don’t expect real news until a while after Legion launches as it’s their current focus. They realise the former isn’t the right solution for the latter, but also think the discussion is helping them improve today’s game.
- Time-walking isn’t going away, neither are weekly events, as they’ve both proven a big success. They won’t be in the first four weeks of Legion to give everyone time to enjoy the new content.
- Lots of extra stuff coming in following patches, including additions to the endgame area of Suramar. Thal’dranoth, an originally announced area, has been replaced by ‘a better idea.’
- The rate at which players accumulate Artifact Knowledge, the new endgame scaling stat, will increase every week once the expansion launches, to help new players catch up and current players change specs or use alternate characters.
- There will be another ‘stat-squish’ to control number sizes, but it’s not a solution they want to continue using. They will do it once more for the next expansion after Legion, then hopefuly implement a new stat system that means they don’t have to bandaid every few years.
Much more in the full VOD, embedded below, with the actual Q&A starting at about 15 minutes in.
Original story:As part of the build up to launch, which is now just two and a half months away on August 30, the World of Warcraft: Legion team is running a series of Q&A sessions on Twitch. These will be broadcast Thursdays, and the first is happening today in just about 20 minutes at 7pm BST / 11am PT. It will feature Assistant Game Director Ion Hazzikostas, AKA Watcher, and a number of pre-selected community questions.
It’s due to last around an hour, and can be viewed on the Warcraft Twitch channel, embedded below.
Questions are being taken from the appropriate forum threadas well as on Twitter using the #LegionQA tag. Blizzard won’t be answering anything they don’t want to, natch, but they have been more open in similar Q&As than the angrier elements of the community might suggest. Discussion looks like it will be slightly less focused on the legacy server debate too, with more questions focusing on specifics of the expansion.
We’ll have a round-up of the big news once the Q&A has finished, plus a VOD if you were unable to catch it live.