Details from the Gamescom Q&A

Blizzard did a little Q&A at Gamescom, answering some lingering questions left over from the main presentation of Legion. This was not a really comprehensive discussion of every little detail, but we did get a few nice details and clarifications.

On the Lore:

So yes, in case you didn't figure this out, Gul'dan's finding Illidan was the pact that he made with Archimonde - after the Archimonde fight, Gul'dan was sent to Azeroth to kick off this massive invasion.

Illidan's status as a hero or villain is left ambiguous, though it sounds mostly like he'll help us, but he'll be very pissed off at us for the whole "killing him" thing.

Twelve thousand years ago (so two thousand before the War of the Ancients,) the Night Elves sealed up a rift of Fel magic on what would come to be the Broken Isles using the Titan Pillars of Creation and built their main Temple of Elune over it. It sounds like this temple became the Tomb of Sargeras (that last part is inference on my part,) because that rift has opened up again.

Artifacts:

For those with off-specs, you'll be able to (it sounds like immediately) follow up getting your first Artifact with getting your second and then third, if you want all of them. It sounds like you'll just have to do the individual quest chains for the individual artifacts, but it sounds like these will be rather short.

There are two aspects of upgrading your artifacts. Artifact Points (or whatever it winds up being called) will let you fill out the talent tree, and this will have a catch-up mechanism so that one spec doesn't fall far behind the other.

The other aspect will be Relics, which for all intents and purposes are your new weapon drops, only rather than equipping something totally different, you'll socket these into your existing artifact weapons. Hopefully this means that dual-wielders or those with shields and off-hands will only need one relic to upgrade both.

Relics will be found in the typical places - quest rewards, boss drops, etc. You'll get better relics from Mythic raids than you would from level 104 quests.

You'll be able to transmog Artifacts to look like other pieces of gear, but not the other way around.

Demon Hunters:

Sadly not a ton of new info on Demon Hunters.

They'll be more similar to Monks than Death Knights, but they'll be focused much more on aggressive play and won't have the hybrid healing that Monks have.

Demon Hunters were apparently a feature they wanted for Burning Crusade, as it would have been an appropriate expansion to add them, but they weren't confident about adding a new class to the game yet. This is the first expansion since then where doing so has felt appropriate.

And that's about it:

We really didn't hear much about Order Halls or changes to individual classes. This was much less like a Blizzcon panel and more of a kind of choreographed marketing thing, but we did manage to get a few juicy morsels.

I suspect that we'll get a few blue posts and tweets over the next couple months, but they're probably saving the real nitty-gritty details for Blizzcon.

They do seem to be talking about the Beta starting rather soon, but whether that's "soon" or "soon (tm)" is the big question.

What we've seen at the announcement is encouraging, but then again, people were fighting in Shadowmoon Valley at the Blizzcon they announced Warlords, so I'll retain a healthy skepticism.

I obviously still have to finish my legendary ring and take down Archimonde (when he comes up on LFR,) and I'll have to get my Druid and Priest to 100 before 7.0 drops (I like to get all the classes to the cap, even if they just sit there afterwards) but I'm very eager to see Legion, and I hope that, like last time, I can get into the Beta, and early (last time I got in on the first day.)