New details about the artifact weapons from World of Warcraft: Legion have been extracted from the game data – what do the talents look like?
Dataminers at Work
As the dataminers slowly but surely sift through the game files of World of Warcraft: Legion, more and more subtleties and details are coming to light. A major breakthrough has now been achieved, as the various talents and properties of the artifact weapons have been extracted. Please note that many of the details are still preliminary and should therefore be taken with caution.
Half-phenomenal, Almost Cosmic Powers …
Each artifact weapon has a small web of abilities (strongly reminiscent of the sphero board from Final Fantasy X), all interconnected. Characters always start with a core ability of their weapon, so Retribution Paladins with the Ashbringer gain the ability “Ashes to Ashes,” which gives Judgments a chance to create magical copies of the weapon that additionally damage the enemy.
From these starting abilities, one unlocks new abilities piece by piece across the board until progressing to the truly big abilities (those with golden dragon frames). These are essentially the elite properties, the real specialties of a weapon. Fire mages can obtain a passive ability with “Pyretic Incantation” that increases the damage of consecutive critical hits by 15%. Anyone who scores two to three critical hits in a row will likely see their damage skyrocket.
… and Clichéd Percent Increases
The much larger portion of the various slots are percentage increases in the damage of certain abilities. “Increases the damage of Shadow Word: Pain by 6/12/18%” is indeed a noticeable increase in practice, but hardly provides the feeling of uniqueness that one wanted to achieve with the artifacts.
There are certainly some absurdly funny combinations. Mages, for example, can, with relics (essentially “sockets” for artifacts) and the talent “Everywhere at Once,” reduce the cooldown of Blink by up to 12 seconds – meaning in practice they can teleport around every 3 seconds if they want to.
Relevant to the topic: WoW: Legion – Overview of Artifact Weapons
And a Legendary Fishing Rod!
By analyzing the data, another pattern was unearthed that includes talents for a special fishing rod. This rod then increases, in line with the profession, the chance to catch certain fish, boosts your damage against water creatures, or even allows you to walk on water when you’ve unlocked the corresponding talents. I would bet my angler’s hat that Nat Pagle has his fingers in this …
Mein-MMO says: If the various talents of the artifacts actually go live as described, then it feels a bit underwhelming. Many abilities are simply boring “Increase the damage of ability X by amount Y” and remind one of the classic talent system that had been intended to be left behind.
The truly special elite abilities seem exciting in this regard but could also easily fit into the existing talent system. It remains to be seen whether the gameplay of the artifact weapons will truly be a worthwhile and exciting expansion, or just an outsourced talent system. We are currently skeptical about the extracted data – let’s see what further beta brings.
