No Realms, Legacy Points and Campfires

Rulesets instead of realms

The Legacy system

• Account-based rewards for progress across all your characters — Blizzard's framing is that the journey matters more than the destination.
• 65 Legacy points are earnable at launch; one per challenge, across 65 challenges in six categories — and a single character can spend up to 16 of them.
• Three trees: Adventure, Professions and Resourcefulness. Points are earned account-wide, and each character spends them on its own.
• Every point earned also counts toward a reward track, past the spending cap too. Four rewards at launch: the Replica Ironforge Air Rifle toy, the Spectral Bear Cub pet, the Spectral Bear Tabard and the Reins of the Spectral Bear mount.
• Normal, PvP and Roleplaying share one pool. Hardcore, when it arrives, is one-way: a challenge completed there counts on every ruleset, one completed elsewhere does not count in Hardcore, and Hardcore gets challenges of its own in place of the PvP ones.

Campfires

• The Cooking Fire becomes a Basic Campfire, which makes a campsite. It holds three crafted objects, one per player; cooks can learn bigger campfires that hold five and then ten.
• Objects give vendors, repairs, crafting stations and one-hour buffs. Every profession has three objects of its own, learned at skill 20, 140 and 300: the first from trainers or starter-zone quests, the later ones as recipes that drop in dungeons and raids. The buffs do not stack with the class buffs they copy: the Sharpening Wheel’s Strength, for one, is exclusive with Strength of Earth Totem.
• The bonuses need about a minute sitting or crafting at the camp, and then last an hour; all camp objects share a one-hour cooldown. That short stop is the mechanic Blizzard is using to turn chance meetings in the world into something.
• Cooked meals now grant an experience bonus on top of their stats, which makes cooking worth levelling for once.

Transmog, on Blizzard's terms

• Optional, and it can be hidden entirely: you can play with everyone in the gear they are actually wearing.
• Two display modes at launch, Classic and Enhanced.
• Uncommon and rare bind-on-pickup dungeon drops unlock their appearance for the whole group. Epic raid drops unlock only for the person who receives them.
• Dungeon boss loot is blue at minimum from now on, so the green-drop endgame of 2004 is gone.

Eight things from the lead designers, 17 September

• No Season of Discovery class roles at launch: no shaman tanks, no rune-style experiments. “Not quite yet — but never say never,” is the exact hedge.
• Every raid tier ships with at least one 10-player and one 20-player raid, so a ten-person guild is a complete guild.
• Mount training costs more gold than it did in 2004, on purpose: the mount is meant to be earned.
• Meeting stones do not summon. You still need a warlock to bring people to a dungeon or raid.
• Computational add-ons — the ones that automate decisions — will be restricted. Which ones is not published.
• No one-button rotations. The retail convenience does not carry over.
• PvP is honor from battlegrounds, seasonal ranks up to 14, with cosmetic and stat rewards along the way.
• Level 60 is the permanent cap: the promise is that nothing you build is invalidated later.

Still to verify