Glaives as a Weapon Type

It's very early in Legion's development - while there's an internal Alpha going on, we're probably months (though hopefully not too many months) away from a Beta, and the expansion won't launch until next year (though hopefully early next year,) so a lot of the perceived issues that exist might be totally moot points by then. Still, it bears talking about - the earlier these issues get out in the open, the more likely they are to address them (and although I'm pretty resigned to the death of two-handed Frost, the only way that change could be averted is if it's brought up at this stage.)

Weapons in Legion are going to be very different than they have been for the eleven or twelve preceding years of WoW. There will be a remarkable consistency for players, and if we can assume that Relics will be more generally usable, we can pretty much expect that waiting for a weapon to drop is not going to be harder for certain classes and specs than others.

It also allows them to do something unprecedented - adding a new weapon type to the game.

Glaives are the iconic Demon Hunter weapon. Illidan got his set of Glaives by killing a Pit Lord named Azzinoth - and those weapons are currently collectable in-game as Legendary drops off of Illidan himself in the Black Temple. Right now they're classified as one-handed swords, which actually means that if Blizzard wanted to make it easy for themselves in future expansions, they could just make all Glaives count as swords and be done with it (of course, in the real world, a glaive is more of a polearm, but whatever.)

As it stands, Demon Hunters will only be able to use Glaives, but given the way that weapons in Legion work, that's not really saying much. Presumably Demon Hunters will start with some green or blue-quality glaives and then fairly quickly acquire their artifact glaives - all of this will be tailored specifically to them as a class, so it's not really something Blizzard has to worry about all that much.

But moving past Legion, assuming that artifacts don't become a permanent feature of the game (and I expect they won't,) Blizzard needs to figure out if Glaives are something that will keep coming.

There are a couple things to deal with here:

If glaives really become another weapon type, it seems that the Warglaives of Azzinoth must be updated - it would be absurd to call them anything else. But this would mean that at the very least, Rogues, Warriors, Death Knights, and Monks would also be able to wield Glaives - as those classes can currently use the old warglaives (hey, maybe if they're not swords anymore, Enhancement Shamans could get in on the action?) It would be supremely crappy for some veteran Rogue who got the warglaives off Illidan way back in the day was suddenly unable to use them in Timewalkers or strut around town with them (I actually have a set on my rogue, though he's Assassination/Subtlety, so he won't actually be using them.)

If Demon Hunters are solely able to use glaives, this means that Blizzard has to commit to creating glaives for all future expansions, and it also puts DHs in a position where they have a much smaller selection of weapons (something that non-Combat Rogues are familiar with.) On the other hand, if glaives were opened up to more classes, they could simply make fewer agility swords or something like that.

Of course, the other issue arrives if they go for the common-sense solution, which is to simply make glaives a type of sword - much as the Warglaives are now. The issue that arises, however, is that Demon Hunters won't really be able to transmog their weapons to look like glaives. The Legendary Warglaives, at least currently, can't be transmogged over more recent weapons, and it looks like the same rule will apply for artifacts. Now, perhaps there will be some lower-quality glaives that DHs start out with (similar to the starter gear in the Death Knight starting experience,) but it's a pretty severe limitation on the DHs' iconic weapons.

Frankly, I think it might be time to allow us to transmog legendary looks. Sure, lots of people will want to use those, but I think plenty of people will look for something different - I'm much more likely to stick with Vagaries of Time than getting Thunderfury, Blessed Blade of the Windseeker for my preferred transmog option.