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WoWApr 4, 2016 7:00 pm CT

Class halls help gain secondary artifacts and more

While everyone else on Legion alpha was retaining their most progressed leveling characters for more raid testing, I rerolled my Warlocks to level again. Blizzard requested that Warlocks, Monks, and Shaman reroll since the class hall updates included in the latest build don’t work very well on already post-100 characters.

The Warlock class hall already had two followers in a blank garrison-like UI on the mission map that lets you start the quests in a zone. In this latest build, the garrison-like UI has been updated to include missions, combat allies, troop work orders, class hall upgrades, and secondary artifact acquisition. There may be more as I explore the class hall further, but the mission times are much like the current garrison missions on the order of anywhere from 30 minutes to 4 hours, so I’m progressing slowly in between other testing needs. Read on to find out more about the newest class hall updates!

combat-ally-interface

Questing buddies

Champions are the class hall version of garrison followers, and they’re very familiar in that they each have a couple of mission counter abilities and fit into mission slots. Some champions also have a Combat Ally ability, which helps you out when questing in the world. For example, in the Warlock hall, the two introduction followers both increase damage taken by a target for a short duration. Combat Allies also play their flavor part, in that the Destruction Warlock that I can currently take will cast Destruction Warlock spells like Chaos Bolt. Much like garrison bodyguards, a Combat Ally can’t be on a mission at the same time as questing with you. It looks like the current cap on active followers is six, though that may change.

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Troops and missions

The introduction to the class hall mission interface walks you through how to do work orders on troops. Troops are trained via work orders, which are very similar to garrison work orders costing class hall resources and taking some time to complete. Packs of Imps can be paired with the other champions to help create better success chances with only one or two champions. Other Warlock troops include Dark Acolytes, but I haven’t gotten to train those up yet. Currently, I’ve made four packs of imps, and one pack gives a flat 20% mission success chance, including pushing the success chance over 100%! What goes over 100% success chance is given to a chance for bonus loot, so my 115% success chance mission will succeed with a 15% chance on bonus loot.

Troops also appear to have a health bar in the form of hearts. A pack of imps have two hearts, and after using a pack on a mission, they came back with one heart missing. This might be how you’ll have to constantly train troops after you initially train the max number because they die after a certain number of uses.

Missions have bosses, minions, or spells to counter in order to complete, but they also have some buffs to counter you while on the mission. Some boss buffs obviously affect the mission time or success chance, but some will even kill your troops. I’ve collected some of the boss buffs from my currently available missions:

  • Lethal: Troops on this mission will be killed.
  • Powerful: Reduced success chance.
  • Disorienting: Increased mission cost.
  • Cursed: No bonus loot.

warlock-class-hall-upgrades

Class hall upgrades

One new feature reminds me of the science research in StarCraft 2 where you can pick one of two options for upgrading your units. An NPC will open up a pane for class hall upgrades, which are currently five two-choice tiers of various bonuses to aspects of your class hall, mainly to the mission success chances or follower and troop bonuses, but also a couple questing bonuses. Warlocks, for example, can summon an infernal to help complete world quests or they can “sacrifice imps for random rewards.” The sixth and final tier in the class hall upgrade is very important as it’s the unlock for the third relic slot on your artifact forge.

Class hall upgrades cost class hall resources and also take increasingly longer amounts of time to fully research. The first tier takes two hours to complete, but it gets to one day by the third tier, one week by the fifth tier, and two weeks for that sixth tier relic slot upgrade. This is the first go-around with class hall upgrades on alpha, so these are very likely all placeholder values until the developers finalize how costly they want it to be. Once you fully research the ability, you are allowed to switch to the other tier choice if you want. Swapping the upgrade currently costs the same in both resources and time as your original choice did.

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Secondary artifact acquisition

On alpha, you can swap specs on the leveling realms but you can’t really play the other spec because of your lack of the other spec artifact(s). With this new build, that is changing for some of us as we get access to a quest to start our other spec artifact quest lines. In the Warlock class hall, a mission came up for my Affliction Warlock that rewarded a quest-starting book to go start the Demonology artifact quest chain. I completed and acquired the Skull of the Man’ari as Affliction, allowing me to now swap and play specs on the same character. It’s the exact same scenario as my Demonology Warlock originally played, except without the class hall introduction that I obviously don’t need to do again.

 

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