3. Legacy System
Ana Resendez: Hi, everyone. I’m so honored to be here with you. I cannot even describe the feeling this is a dream for me come true. Ok, let’s start with it. I am Ana Resendez, lead software engineer for the World of Warcraft: Forever team, and I’m here to talk to you about the new Legacy System and some server updates.
So let’s start with the Legacy System. When Hardcore came out, we loved the fact that there were so many people constantly leveling, going through the journey over and over again. The team got inspired by how lively the world felt and wanted to find new ways to reward you for going again in the journey, maybe without the facing the consequences of the daily, like so deadly of it. So the legacy system was created as a way to make leveling alts more exciting, to emphasize the journey over the destination.
With this new system, you get to have new challenges you can complete to earn points for all of your characters. Each character can use these points to unlock new rewards in different and exciting ways, making each of your characters’ journeys more unique. So let’s first talk about the legacy points.
You can earn points by completing legacy challenges across several categories that you can see on the screen back here. So let’s look at a couple examples. For example, leveling a specific class. You have different milestones from level 25, 45, and 60. Another example is reaching a particular skill set, like artisan engineering. So the goal of earning these points isn’t to force you to do something out of the ordinary, you know, like killing an enemy player while singing happy birthday or something like that.
The idea is that the system complements your existing journey and rewards the way that you already enjoy playing the game while maybe adding new challenges along the way.
Okay, but what do I do with these points? Okay, let me introduce you to the legacy trees. The starting trees are three: Professions, Adventures, and Resourcefulness.
As you earn points, you’ll be able to shape your journey through these trees and choose the path that best fits your playstyle. Let’s look at an example of each of the different trees so you can get some idea. So in the Adventure Tree, as you can see, we have Well Rested. This increases how quickly you can raise that experience and increases the cap of the rested experience bar, excellent for leveling all of your alts.
An example in the Professions tree, you can see the Bountiful Harvest that increases how many scarce materials you get from Mining, Herbalism, or Skinning; and depending on the path you take you can unlock some pretty exciting perks, such as this perk.
In the Resourcefulness Tree, you can find Reagent Economy, where your class abilities no longer reagents to make buffing easier. But stay with me. Some of the more powerful perks like these ones are very deep in the trees, so you’re going to have to make some very tough choices.
What makes this system truly unique is that the points you earn are shared across all of your Alts. Each character you have will be able to spend the same number of points in their own trees. Whether if you want to create lots of Alts to earn as many points as possible, or you really want to dive and maximize that particular character that you love, the choice is yours.
So at launch, the number of points are going to be capped. So you’re going to have 16 points to spend on your legacy trees. We didn’t want people to feel pressure to have to do absolutely all of the challenges or for new players to feel like they have a very long way to catch up. That said, the number of points is capped, but to begin with, you can earn up to 65 points, even beyond that limit.
But what do you do with those 65 points? Well, there’s introducing now the legacy reward track, where here, after you continue to create and get all of these challenges, you will be able to get some rewards, like this one, this very cute little bear. I really want to get it.
These rewards are intended to be cosmetic or prestige-based and should not provide a competitive gameplay advantage at all. I do want to add another note about mounts. In Burning Crusade, the off-ramp costs of getting your mount shifted to the trainer cost, and in World of Warcraft: Forever, we are also making this change. Yea. So in the future, we’re going to continue to add new challenges and new perks you can spend your points on and you can imagine seeing these like maybe new perks in the existing trees or maybe completely new trees in the future.
So we can wait for you to get your hands on this system and discover all of the different ways to play with it. I know I already have some idea of Cooking, and I will definitely have an army of Alts to help me shape my journey.
| BLIZZCON 2026 WORLD OF WARCRAFT: FOREVER DEEP DIVE PANEL TRANSCRIPT | ||||
| 1. Intro | 2. New Systems | 3. Legacy System | 4. Server Systems | 5. Itemization |
