WoW Forever: all beta testers to get 16 Legacy Points

Blizzard plans to hand every tester in the WoW Forever beta 16 Legacy Points. Community manager Kaivax posted the plan late on 1 October. He wrote that over the first 2 weeks of the beta Blizzard has seen an increasing number of testers pushing to earn points in the Legacy system, and that in a future week of the beta Blizzard plans to grant all testers 16 Legacy Points, so that the system can be tested without first requiring a great deal of levelling different classes, clearing dungeons and so on. Once the points are applied, he wrote, Blizzard expects to keep the grant in place until the end of the beta. The same post went up on Blizzard's American and European forums at the same time.

The Legacy system is Forever's account-wide progression system. You finish set challenges — Blizzard lists 65 of them in 6 categories, from classes and tradeskills to dungeons and raids — and each one you complete earns 1 Legacy Point. The points sit on your Battle.net account, and each character then spends them on its own perks in 3 trees. At launch a character can spend at most 16 of them, so the planned grant is exactly what one character can use. We have set out how the system works and what it rewards in more detail.

Earning those points in the beta takes a while. For most players the system opens when their first character reaches level 25, and the beta started with a level cap of 20; the other 2 ways in are reaching 150 in a primary tradeskill that is not a gathering one, or exploring the whole world map. Blizzard said the cap would rise to 30 with the build that follows maintenance on the evening of 1 October. That levelling and dungeon work is what Kaivax says the grant is meant to skip, so that testers can try the trees themselves.

Blizzard did not say which week of the beta the points will arrive in. It also did not say what will happen to the points testers have already earned: the post does not say whether the 16 points will be added on top of them, or will replace them. Nor does it say anything about the live game — there is no word on whether Legacy Points earned in the beta will be reset when Forever launches. The beta runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever launches at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe.