Hidden Artifact appearances are even more hidden than we expected in Legion Remix and most can’t be acquired

Right before Legion Remix started we were told that many of the Artifact weapon appearances would be available to acquire with your ReLegion toon, but this doesn’t appear to be the case.

As initially specified in a blue post:

However there appears to have been a miscommunication either with the development team or with Eternus as most of the Hidden appearances for Artifacts are not obtainable in ReLegion. It’s easy to confirm with a Hunter — the Marksmanship hidden appearance is obtained via the Syriel Crescentfall’s Notes: Ravenguard from Veridis Fallon once you’ve reached Revered with the Court of Farondis, but the Emissary does not have it available.

What makes it particularly odd is that there are a small handful of Hidden artifact appearances that are available; one notable example is the Protection Warrior hidden Artifact appearance. So what happened?

If I had to guess the main reason for the discrepancy is the truncated drop tables for ReLegion mobs. If a class has a hidden Artifact appearance which requires an item drop there’s a good chance it was wiped away with every other item from the loot tables when the NPCs were transferred to ReLegion. The ones that slipped through the cracks, such as the Burning Plate of the Worldbreaker, are part of an environmental spawn that likely copied over with the map.

Of course there’s probably a good reason for not wanting hidden appearances to drop: several require one to travel outside the Broken Isles to acquire them. For example to obtain the corrupted hidden appearance of Ashbringer you need to acquire several items and travel to a lot of places including instanced content. So most likely a decision was made not to include hidden appearances because of these sorts of logistical issues.

None of this would’ve been a problem though — after all, they are all available in retail WoW — if Blizzard hadn’t deleted the original blue posts. Fortunately Wowhead’s bringing attention to the issue resulted in the posts being restored, but there has yet to be an official update as to what’s going on. I expect that the most likely outcome is that the hidden appearances will remain completely hidden and players will need to chase them after leaving the employ of the Infinite Dragonflight.