Key Highlights:
- World of Warcraft: Forever’s Legacy System adds account-wide progression through 65 challenges covering classes, professions, PvP, exploration, dungeons and raids.
- Legacy Points unlock character-specific perks, but Blizzard says players can reach the launch spending cap without levelling alts.
- Account-wide rewards include a Spectral Bear mount, pet and tabard, with Blizzard planning to expand Legacy through future content updates.
World of Warcraft: Forever is taking us back to original Azeroth, but Blizzard isn’t bringing every part of its old progression system back with it.
The developer has now given us a much closer look at the Legacy System, an account-wide progression feature that rewards pretty much everything from levelling different classes and learning professions to exploring Azeroth, clearing dungeons and throwing yourself into PvP.
For someone who can never quite decide whether to stick with one character or make another one because this class looks fun too, I may finally have an excuse.
Legacy becomes available once your first character reaches level 25, although there are two other ways to unlock it: reaching 150 skill in a non-gathering primary tradeskill or exploring the entire world map.
Once it’s open, there are 65 Legacy Challenges waiting at launch across six categories: Classes, Tradeskills, PvP, Adventure, Dungeons and Raids.
Some of them should happen fairly naturally while playing. Levelling each class to 25, 45 and 60 awards Legacy Points, while professions have their own milestones at 150, 225 and 300 skill.
Others are going to require considerably more commitment.
Players can earn points for defeating Onyxia, completing groups of dungeons across different level ranges, exploring the entire world map and clearing Forever’s new Hyjal Summit and Barrow Deeps raids.
World of Warcraft players aren’t being left out of PvP either, with challenges tied to ranks, Battleground reputations and the Field of Honor PvP Season’s Journey.
Completing each challenge earns one Legacy Point, and this is where the system gets much more interesting than another checklist of things to tick off.
Those points are shared across your Battle.net account, but each character gets to decide independently how to spend them.
Legacy launches with three perk trees — Professions, Adventure and Resourcefulness — meaning one character could focus heavily on crafting and gathering while another uses the same pool of earned points to make travelling or levelling around Azeroth a little easier.
Some of the perks are also dangerously convenient.
Frequent Flier reduces the cost of flight paths while making them faster, Well Rested increases how much rested experience you can accumulate, and The Quick and the Dead increases your movement speed as a ghost.
As somebody who has spent an unreasonable amount of time running back towards my own corpse in World of Warcraft, I’m struggling to see a downside to that one.
Other perks can increase reputation gains, reduce durability damage after death, improve gathering yields, provide additional fish or help with tradeskill progression.
There are even options that remove the need to purchase certain reagents for class abilities.
There is a limit to how much of that convenience we can grab immediately, though.
Each character will initially be able to spend a maximum of 16 Legacy Points. Blizzard says the cap is intended in part to stop established players from gaining too much of an advantage over people arriving later.
What I particularly like is that this doesn’t mean everyone suddenly needs twelve characters.
Forever clearly gives alt-loving players plenty of reasons to experiment with different classes and tradeskills, but Blizzard says a single character can earn up to 29 Legacy Points.
That’s already considerably more than the 16 points a character can spend at launch.
So if you’re someone who finds one character and refuses to let them go, you’re not being punished for it.
If you are an alt collector, however, Legacy is probably going to become another very large to-do list.
Those points also contribute towards account-wide rewards, completely separate from whatever you’ve chosen in the perk trees.
Four rewards will be available when Forever launches: the Replica Ironforge Air Rifle toy, Spectral Bear Cub pet, Spectral Bear Tabard and Reins of the Spectral Bear mount.
Yes, there is a spectral bear.
Apparently Blizzard understands that sometimes the easiest way to convince me to complete a giant list of challenges is to put an animal at the end of it.
Legacy isn’t intended to stop there either.
Blizzard plans to add more rewards as Forever receives new content, alongside additional Challenges and Perks.
Existing perk trees can be expanded and entirely new trees may also be introduced over time.
Hardcore players will eventually get their own version of the system when that ruleset arrives after launch.
Progress earned on non-Hardcore rulesets won’t carry into Hardcore, although Legacy Challenges completed while playing Hardcore will unlock across the other rulesets.
Blizzard is also planning 12 Hardcore-specific Legacy Challenges.
All of this gives Forever something particularly important for a version of World of Warcraft built around returning to the beginning: a reason for progress to continue beyond simply getting one character to level 60.
We already knew World of Warcraft: Forever was expanding original Azeroth with more than 1,000 new quests, additional areas, dungeons and raids when it launches on November 4.
More recently, the ongoing beta managed to overwhelm Blizzard with considerably more players than expected.
Now Legacy gives those players another reason to keep wandering around Azeroth once they’re there.
You can chase raids, level professions, disappear into PvP, explore every corner of the map or inevitably create another character because you promised yourself this time would be different.
Either way, Forever wants that time to count towards something.
Which is great news for my Battle.net account.
Potentially terrible news for my free time.
