World of Warcraft’s upcoming Legion Remix event is looking to make some big changes to one of the MMORPG’s most popular expansions. In addition to letting players and their Artifact weapons become more powerful than ever before, Blizzard is taking some key inspirations from Diablo to add some new twists to the beloved expansion.
In the same vein as last year’s Mists of Pandaria Remix event, Legion Remix is set to go live alongside WoW’s 11.2.5 update later this year and will be a speedrun of sorts through 2016’s Legion expansion. Players will create new “timerunner” characters and experience faster leveling times, increased reputation gains, and an accelerated weekly content lockout schedule to make progressing even faster.
There are, however, some big changes from last year’s remix event, as recently outlined by Blizzard. Instead of Mists of Pandaria Remix’s ever-upgrading cloak and gem system, Legion Remix will instead double down on Legion’s expansion-defining Artifact weapons. Players will earn an upgrade currency that can be used to upgrade their Artifacts even further than in the original Legion, with new upgrade trees that will see players embracing one of five different damage types–Nature, Fel, Arcane, Storm, or Holy. They’ll also be able to find jewelry slot items that can add additional ranks to Artifact traits, increasing the weapon’s power even further. Thankfully, players will be able to freely respec their Artifact weapon traits at any time.
Power for power’s sake is nice, but Blizzard is introducing some additional challenges for players to put their upgraded Artifact weapons to the test. A new feature inspired by Diablo’s world tiers will allow players to upgrade the difficulty of the game’s open-world content to Heroic. Enemies will have more health and, in another move from Diablo, affix-like buffs that will make them even more difficult to overcome but yield greater rewards. In yet another page from Diablo’s playbook, powerful shrines, called Timewarped Obelisks, can be found through the open world that grant players powerful temporary buffs. As Legion introduced the Mythic+ dungeon system, it will be back in Legion Remix with the expansion’s original affixes, as well as four new ones for players to overcome.
A major part of the appeal of Mists of Pandaria Remix was as a means to earn exclusive cosmetics or hard to obtain items from the original expansion. Legion Remix is no different, though Blizzard has taken some criticism from the last go around. A frequent complaint during Pandaria Remix was that it was annoying that the event’s central currency, Bronze, was used to both purchase cosmetics but also to upgrade gear, often making players choose between the two.
Bronze is coming back for Legion Remix, but this time it will only be used for buying cosmetics. Gear upgrades will instead come from simply doing more difficult content, which should eliminate some of the tension found in Pandaria Remix between upgrading or buying event-exclusive cosmetics.
On the cosmetics front, players will be able to earn all kinds of new loot, including fel-infused versions of Legion’s class mounts and a corrupted version of Varian Wrynn’s swords. Blizzard is promising “plenty of never-before-released mounts, transmog sets, and more” as part of the event.
Whereas Pandaria Remix released with all of the expansion’s content at once, Legion Remix will instead roll out Legion’s content updates every two weeks. Each update will increase the maximum item level players can achieve. In a change from Pandaria Remix, characters can be transferred from Legion Remix to the current, The War Within version of the game early as opposed to having to wait for weeks until the end of the event. Transferred characters will be stripped of their Remix-specific items and abilities and given a new set of level-appropriate gear, though Blizzard warns that transferring a character early is a one-way trip and can’t be undone.
We don’t know exactly when Legion Remix will arrive, but it will likely be in the next 6-8 weeks, in keeping with Blizzard’s fairly consistent update cadence. WoW’s latest 11.2 update, Ghosts of K’aresh, took players to the shattered homeworld of the Ethereals. The update looks to perfectly tee-up WoW’s next expansion, Midnight, which is set to be fully revealed at Gamescom.
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