Artifact weapons are one of the key features of Legion. So much of character power has been focused on improving artifact weapons. The artifact trait trees are similar to the old talent trees in that there are a lot of flat bonuses to various abilities, and that allows relics to be more interesting than a simple item level upgrade.
Leaving artifacts behind at the end of Legion is going to be very strange.
I don't know the exact calculation, and I'm sure it varies based on the strength of various bonuses, but I would bet that if we were suddenly to use ordinary weapons at the same item level of our current artifacts, the result would be a very significant drop in damage output, healing, or survivability. There are the obvious 20ish% bonuses to every major ability, but also rotation-smoothing abilities and passives (I remember my friend who plays a Balance Druid was considering changing specs after eight years until he got the Scythe of Elune and thus access to the New Moon/Half Moon/Full Moon spells.)
In a game where everything needs to be balanced and scale, Blizzard is forced to sort of break things in order for the cool solutions they've come up with to have problems to solve. But this also means that following Legion, they'll either need to fully integrate the artifact traits (with a bit of culling and adjusting of course) or they'll need to seriously rebuild a lot of abilities to compensate for the lack of these traits.
A number of active traits could easily be reimagined as talents. For instance, Frost Death Knights' Sindragosa's Fury is a seriously iconic ability (borrowed from Arthas in Heroes of the Storm) that I could very easily see becoming a high-level talent, and that could probably go for a lot of these artifact abilities (and a number of them are either lore-specific enough or less centrally related to the spec that losing them wouldn't be such a problem.) Some, like Unholy's Apocalypse ability, or the Balance Druid's moon cycle, seem like they ought to become baseline for the spec.
This isn't even touching on passives, which could similarly be baseline or talents.
Another thing to consider about weapons is weapon sets. If you have a shield, off-hand item, or off-hand weapon, in Legion the set comes together as a single item that simply fills in both slots on your character panel. Now, everyone has the pain/pleasure of mismatches thanks to relics, but relics are perfectly cumulative. In the past, an Enhancement Shaman would generally want to put the better weapon in the main hand, but this meant Lava Lash could lag behind based on disparity between weapons.
Personally I wouldn't mind seeing weapon sets come in pairs in the future - if I get a good shield, it comes with a good axe/sword/mace. You would obviously preserve them as separate items for transmog purposes, but it could simplify loot tables and make it less penalizing for dual-wielders to gear up.
The last big question is about Warglaives. With Demon Hunters they introduced a whole new weapon type that is only accessible to that class. In an expansion where Demon Hunters' weapon progression is pretty strict (you basically get three sets of weapons not counting your off-spec artifact,) that's pretty easy. But are raid bosses going to be dropping Warglaives in the next expansion? And is it ok that that's a weapon only one class can use?
Now, to be fair, bosses already (well, not this expansion, but in prior ones) drop bows, guns, and crossbows, which as of Mists of Pandaria can only really be used by Hunters. So perhaps Warglaives will be in a similar spot. The only difference is that Demon Hunters can technically just use Swords and Axes, meaning that while Hunters are forced to use those class-exclusive weapons, having Warglaives in the future would simply mean that Demon Hunters get additional options that other classes don't.
In Warlords, at least in Hellfire Citadel, Blizzard was playing with the idea of having a lot of these weapons and items be sort of spec-agnostic, complementing the changes they made to armor. For instance, shields all had both Strength and Intellect on them so that they could be used by tanks as well as casters. Artifact weapons don't need to worry about that, but I wonder if we'll see an expansion of this idea in expansion seven.
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