Artifacts | BlizzCon 2015 World of Warcraft: Legion Game Systems Panel Transcript

Relics

Craig: So you are also going to be seeing a new type of item dropping in the Broken Isles. In all of Legion: Relics.

Craig: These are special items that you can socket into your artifact to increase its power. They can increase in a couple of ways. They increase the item level of the weapon, increasing its stats, and they increase higher item levels for higher quality relics further into the expansion; but they also give you bonus ranks for those traits that I was talking about.

Where normally you would get 3 ranks for increasing your Shadow Bolt damage, you can get a relic that can increase that to four or five ranks; and further specialize on doing more damage in Shadow Bolt-specificly.

So this kinda gives you sort of specialization customization for the types of gameplay that you are more interested in.

Do you want to be more about burst AOE damage or more about your primary single-target rotation on raid bosses? Or you do a lot of PvP and you want to focus on your survivability abilities a little bit more?

Craig: Those relics, over time, would eventually actually be able to tap into those major traits as well, taking something that was normally one rank, and allowing it to increase its power too.

These relics come in many different types. If you look at the top of the Deadwind Harvester you will see two symbols. Those indicate the types the Deadwind Harvester can accept.

Craig: One of those is a shadow slot, one of those is a fel slot. There are many other different types of relics: Fire relics, Water relics, Earth relics — the Ashbringer has a slot for a Holy and Fire. So different people are going to be seeking out different relics in Legion.