by Its_Immanis - 8 years ago     show comments

Blizzard is currently at Gamescom and while they’re at the convention some of the World of Warcraft developers are taking the time to provide additional insight into Legion as the expansion draws nearer.

One piece of information provided during an interview with Fatboss is that the development team is planning on having the first raid of the new expansion, the Emerald Nightmare, will open on September 20th, three weeks after the expansion launches. As with previous raid launches the Normal and Heroic difficulties will open the first week with Mythic available the next week. There hasn’t been an official announcement of these dates yet but we’re anticipating hearing them soon, along with dates for when various wings of the LFR version will be available. Ion did state that raiders will “most likely” have a lot of their set pieces by the time the first wing becomes available so it sounds like there will be several weeks between Normal/Heroic difficulty and LFR.

Another point made during the interview is that Blizzard is placing a lot of emphasis on the timing of content releases during this expansion given the last two have had significant periods of content drought. They feel that raids were released too quickly during Mists of Pandaria and Warlords of Draenor so they’re going to spread them out a bit more in Legion.

One example of this is that there will be more time between the release of the Emerald Nightmare and the Nighthold. The current plan is to release Nighthold in early 2017 with patch 7.1 (including the Karazhan dungeon and mini-raid) landing between the two larger raids.

Another part of the discussion was Master Loot vs Personal Loot in raids. An earlier interview caused some confusion and consternation when it sounded like raids using Master Loot would work the same as raids using Personal Loot where if a person wins a tier piece it automatically places the class-appropriate item in their bag. In the interview it was clarified that raids using Master Loot would continue to receive the same tier tokens they were previously to distribute among the raid as they saw fit and raids using Personal Loot would continue to receive the item instead of the token.

We’ll have additional information from this interview later on so keep an eye out for it but this seemed to be a point of focus for many players. If you’re planning on taking time off for the raid you can start your scheduling!