From dungeons to crafting, world quests to raiding, and those ultra rare legendary items - this guide will give you all the knowledge you’ll need to hit the ground running once Legion launches on August 30th.
Artifact weapons
Legion won’t have you hunting for the next big weapon upgrade like in previous expansions - instead you’ve got 36 Artifact weapons to chose from, each unique to a specific class and spec. These powerful weapons will be your tool for exorcising demons and other foes in your effort to save Azeroth. Your very first task when stepping foot on the Broken Isles will be to obtain your first Artifact weapon for your desired class and spec; you’ll be able to pick up the rest from level 102 onwards at your leisure.
Since you’ll be using these weapons for the duration of the Legion expansion, they need to have a way for their power to scale: Artifact Power. This currency of sorts is awarded from a huge variety of tasks and events throughout Legion. You can then use this power to unlock ranks of traits within the weapon itself, unlocking additional stats, effects and sometimes entirely new abilities. The first 14 of these rank upgrades—each trait usually requiring three ranks to complete before progressing—are relatively cheap in cost. After that, the amount required for future upgrades increases exponentially, making them much harder to attain.
That’s where Artifact Knowledge comes in. Once you reach level 110, you’ll receive a quest line from your Class Hall to unlock work orders for Artifact Knowledge. For each work order you complete, you’ll go up a single rank - up to a maximum of 25 (for now). These ranks give you a flat percentage increase to your Artifact Power rewards: level two gives you a 50% bonus, whereas level 25 is a huge 24,900% bonus.
It’s incredibly important that you keep on top of these work orders to ensure you’re receiving the maximum amount of Artifact Power from your activities. If you do fall behind, it’s not the end of the world - each weekly reset will decrease the amount of time it takes to complete the work orders on the lower levels, meaning you’ll have some method of catch up if you’re behind the curve.
Spend some time to familiarise yourself with your Artifact weapon of choice, and its traits. Making a mistake as to where you spend your Artifact Power is costly: resetting your traits costs as much Artifact Power as it would to afford your next trait, whether that is 250 or 250,000. Ouch.
Class Halls
We know what you’re thinking: are these Class Halls just Garrisons 2.0? You’ll be happy to hear that they’re not - in fact they’re a much sleeker, concise experience which prefers to create more stuff for you to do outside of their confines, rather than inside.
Class Hall missions are similar to the Garrison mission in Warlords of Draenor, but there are some subtle twists. Instead of having 20-25 followers to send out on missions, you’ll only have a maximum of five active ‘champions’ at any one time (out of a total of eight), but they can be bolstered by hiring different kinds of expendable troops to accompany them. You’ll want to try and make sure all of your champions are being put to work in order to level them up equally - don’t leave anyone behind.
One of your first tasks is to conquer your Order Hall Campaign to unlock an upgraded Artifact appearance, but more importantly your third Relic slot for your weapon: gem-like attachments which increase the raw item level of your weapon, while also offering a free rank of a trait. Your campaign will have you doing all sorts of quests over the Broken Isles, as well as some Class Hall missions. Some sections will require the completion of multiple 4-16 hour missions, so it’s wise not to be too trigger happy with your champions until after you’ve completed them, or you can find yourself delaying its completion and falling behind your friends.
The last upgrade over Garrisons is that you can now receive bonus rewards for exceeding the 100% success chance, with your chance at nabbing the extra loot being equal to the additional percent, e.g. 150% means a guaranteed mission success and a 50% chance at the bonus loot. It’ll be up to you to get the maximum returns from your missions by deciding which champions and troops to send on each endeavour.
Your Class Hall can also be upgraded by spending Order Hall Resources. There’s two branching upgrades at each level, so you’ll be forced to pick between them. The further you get down the upgrade tree, the more resources and time it’ll take to unlock the next upgrade; it will take tens of thousands of resources, and weeks of research as you get towards the end. Nothing is more important than getting the most out of your missions and champions, as being able to complete missions consistently with the bonus rewards can give you a huge advantage. Here are a few upgrade choices that are shared between every class that you might want to think about:
Quest reward upgrades
Your first choice will always include an option to increase the chance at getting rare/epic item upgrades when doing one-time only quests. This can give you a bigger boost while leveling, and a head start once you hit level 110. At the end of the day though, you’ll quickly replace those pieces of gear with dungeon loot from Heroics, so avoid it unless you don’t mind taking a day out of your research to swap it later on.
Champion armaments
This is a big one. Grabbing this will give you an NPC to queue up work orders for champion upgrades, costing only 50 order hall resources each. This will give you a much needed way to reliably increase the item level of your champions, and unlock those rarer and more lucrative missions. At launch, the maximum item level of your champions is 850, but will likely increase when future patches are applied.
Weekly raid reroll token
Taking this will provide you with one of your three raiding reroll tokens a week. It’ll cost you a total of 7,000 gold to get all three of them otherwise, or a huge amount of order hall resources. With this upgrade, you’ll only need to spend 3,000 gold to get the maximum amount. If you can reliably make the gold, then you might want to give this one a miss for the alternative class hall upgrade.
World Quests
The bread and butter of the Legion expansion, World Quests will ensure that you’ve got plenty to do once you hit that all important endgame. Unlocked by reaching level 110, and being at least ‘friendly’ with all of the Broken Isles factions, you’ll be treated to your map populating with exclamation points begging to be completed. You can get your hands on gold, gear, artifact power, order hall resources, crafting materials and pet battle items.
World Quests come in different flavours, each giving different quality rewards, as well as how long they’re around for before despawning:
- Brown symbols denote your average quest, giving average rewards and expiring usually within 24 hours. Blue symbols means the quest is rare, and will give slightly better rewards.
- A dragon portrait around the quests means that it involves content that is difficult or impossible to take on alone. These can include hard elite enemies, dungeons and world bosses. Blue ones will stick around for up to three days, whereas the epic ones reset each week.
When you reach level 110, it’s important that you exhaust the map of World Quests fairly quickly. The reason behind this is that gear rewards will scale up as you increase your own average item level; however they only reflect this the moment they spawn, and don’t update in real time. With proper planning, you can ensure your future batch of World Quests have much nicer rewards by spamming Heroic/Mythic dungeons to get as many upgrades as possible.
Mythic+ Dungeons and Raids
One of the most exciting new features is the new Mythic+ dungeons. These dungeons have a scalable difficulty, and can award some of the best loot in the game. You’ll first need to get a Mythic Keystone, which can be found from the last boss of any Mythic dungeon; you’ll get at least one per week from a full clear of every Mythic dungeon. This will grant you access to a random Mythic+ dungeon starting at level two. Mythic+ will be unlocked at the same time as raids, as detailed below.
In the beginning, you’ll just need to deal with a timer and a raw percentage increase in enemy damage and health. Reaching level four will introduce a single new affix - random effects which will make the dungeon more challenging. For example, ‘Bolstering’ buffs enemies damage and health when any nearby enemy is slain. If that’s not hard enough, levels seven and 10 add another affix each for a total of three. The affixes will be the same combination each week, swapping to new ones at the weekly reset.
If you manage to beat the timer, each player will get their hands on a single piece of loot from the dungeon loot pool. If you manage to beat the timer quickly enough, it’s possible that you can be rewarded with up to two extra chests, while also increasing your Mythic Keystone with up to two additional levels. But even if you fail the timer, you’ll still get one chest at the end so long as you finish the dungeon. There’s no limit to the amount of Mythic+ dungeons you can do, just so long as someone has a Mythic Keystone to start one; don’t be afraid to advertise your dungeoneering services in Dalaran or in the LFG tool!
There’s two raids coming in Legion, but they won’t be available right away. The Emerald Nightmare will launch a few weeks after August 30; Blizzard will make an announcement to ensure you can get yourself nice and ready. The Nighthold is the second raid for the first tier, and will not be accessible until at least a few months down the road - most likely after BlizzCon 2016.
Emerald Nightmare on Normal difficulty requires that players be at least item level 835 before entering. For Heroic, that target is raised to item level 850. While it is possible to skip Normal and go straight to Heroic with good enough gear, it’s still well worth clearing out the former for the extra artifact power and additional chance at legendary items. Your loot can even become Titanforged; think Warforged but on steroids, enabling items to reach the item levels of even Mythic raiding quality.
Legendary items
Legendary items have always been few and far between in old expansions, but in Legion there’s more than in the entirety of WoW’s lifetime combined, and then some. With nearly 100 legendaries spread between different classes and specs, it’s easier than ever to get your hands on that sweet orange loot.
Make no mistake though - it’s still going to require a combination of both time and luck before you see your first legendary item. Here’s a brief rundown of what activities inside Legion can actually reward them:
Dungeon/Raid bosses
Killing any boss at level 110 has a small chance to drop you a legendary item; as you can see above, I was lucky enough to win one in a Mythic dungeon. The higher difficulty the content, the higher your chance of seeing a legendary - expect to see more drop from weekly content such as raids. If you’d like to try and brute force it, you can spam Heroic dungeons to your heart’s content!
Emissary quests
Every day you’ll be tasked to complete four World Quests for a certain faction. Once completed, you’ll get a loot box of sorts which can contain a variety of things, including legendary items. If legendaries are your goal, it's recommended this be your first stop each day.
Mythic+ challenge chest
You may notice a locked chest inside your Class Hall. This chest can be opened on a weekly basis, but only if you’ve completed a Mythic+ dungeon. After a weekly reset occurs, it’ll take the highest level dungeon you managed to complete and give you an appropriate reward: the higher the level, the better the loot and a higher chance it’ll contain a legendary.
PVP chests
Any box you receive from doing PVP activities can contain a legendary. However do note that legendary item effects are disabled in Battlegrounds and Arena, so they’re only useful for open world PVP.
Your loot specialisation will dictate what pool of legendaries can be dropped, so make sure you’re in the right one or you could end up with a legendary for the wrong spec. Each legendary will have an item level of 895, but as time passes and patches bring in better loot, the item level of legendary items will scale so that they’re always the best. You’ll also only be able to equip one legendary item in the beginning - this will increase to a maximum of two once you’ve unlocked the last research upgrade in your Class Hall, and may be increased further by patches.
Crafting
Crafting has seen a much needed facelift in Legion. Instead of learning your new recipes at a vendor, you’ll unlock the majority through unique profession quest lines. You’ll then be able to attain ranks in those recipes to improve them and reduce their material costs. Blizzard have also removed the crafted item equip limit, giving crafted professions a surge in effectiveness; in fact until the Emerald Nightmare raid is released, crafting will be the most reliable way to achieve best in slot gear (ilvl 850).
Two new items are incredibly important for those who want to craft the best items. Blood of Sargeras is a rare bind on pickup material that is used in almost all of the high-end crafts. Players with gathering professions will find a steady stream of bloods, but there are other methods to both fuel your income, and for those who have double crafting professions. World Quests, dungeons bosses and random lucky drops from any outdoor mob.
Once you’ve crafted your high-end item, you’ll need to upgrade it - but to do that you’ll need to destroy even more crafted items in the Obliterum forge. Once unlocked through a hefty quest chain, you’ll be able to obliterate any crafted item to earn Obliterum Ash; the higher quality the item, the more ash you receive. Once you gather 100 ash, you can combine them into a single Obliterum, which when applied to a crafted item along with two Blood of Sargeras, will boost its item level by five points.
If that sounds like too much work for you, and you have money pouring from your pockets, you’ll be happy to hear that you can buy and sell Obliterum from the auction house.
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