Thursday, August 6, 2015

Artifacts: Taking a Cue From Heroes of the Storm?

In Heroes of the Storm, you can level up each individual character, and as you do, after a few levels in which you unlock new talents (though once you hit a certain account-wide level, these will be open on even level one characters) the subsequent ones are mostly cosmetic. You open up new color variations for mounts and then your Hero. Hitting level 10 on any character gives you the option to spend 10,000 in-game gold (earned by playing) to unlock the Master skin - and of course by the time that's unlocked, you'll be able to do all three color variations on it.

All the heroes have other skins as well - Leoric, for example, can look like a Vrykul, as if he's an alternate version of the character who exists in the Warcraft universe rather than the Diablo one - though these are typically sold for real money.

The Artifacts in Legion (this might be the first expansion name we don't abbreviate. Cataclysm was often shortened to Cata, but Legion's pretty quick and easily typed) will have plenty of visual options as well - we saw several variations on the Ashbringer. It looks like there's the starter version, which is the familiar version of it, and there seems to be a simply "higher-level" version that is kind of equivalent to the Master skin - and each of these seems to have color variations too.

But in addition to that, you have things like the Fiery Ashbringer, the Corrupted Ashbringer (that does not look like the old Naxxramas drop) and the Shattered Ashbringer. Luckily, these look like they'll be unlocked through achievements rather than paying money. I don't know how exclusive these will be, but I'd expect this to be a new motivation for things like challenge modes.

Given that all Retribution Paladins will be wielding some variation on the Ashbringer, it's good to know that there will be plenty of cosmetic alternatives, and I'd also assume that we'll be able to transmog them to something else.

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