Dominate League 3  

Heroes!

League 3 is setting the foundation for the future of freepick and draft. It’s no exaggeration to say that this league will  transform the entire landscape of Ascension. 

• League 3 Releases MARCH 4th @ 18:00 Server time!

Heroes across Ascension can test wild new features and play a crucial part in creating technical and design foundations for Ascension’s future. This league continues Season 7’s Ascension Reborn, and as content is stable, both Area 52 and Al’ar will receive updates from the League:

1. When REs are battle-tested and in a good place, they’ll be ported over immediately to both Area 52 and Al’ar
    
2. Area 52 and Al’ar have scheduled content releases during the League
   1. Legion Invasions on Al’ar
   2. Updates from the League to both Realms
       
3. Alar will get as many of the new abilities as possible when it goes into TBC
    
4. Area 52 will get incremental TBC improvements as Al’ar prepares for Chapter 2.
   1. This will likely include Mythic+

Everything else you need to know is here:

Overview

• League Goal: Test and Refine new features before they hit live realms and TBC
  • Season 7 moves to Chapter 2 soon after the League ends
• Duration: 3 months
• Realm Type: Free Pick
• Vanilla+ Realm

Features Overview

• Tamable Undead and Demons
• 30+ NEW abilities in-game
  • From future Expansions
• 14 TBC Spells moved to Vanilla
  • Opens up new builds
• 20+ New Cross-Class Mystic Enchantments
• Free Pick Overhaul
  • Quality System
  • Reduced Cooldowns
  • Reduced AE Cost
  • Talents Added to Baseline Spells
• TANK Overhaul
• World Boss Improvements
• Improved Hotspot and Point of Interest Markers
• Realm Wide RE Collection
• Vanity Collection Transfers Over
• Spells and Ranged Attacks can now Generate Rage
  • To better help cross-class gameplay.

Tamable Demons and Undead

• Heroes can now tame dozens of Demons and Undead throughout Azeroth

New undead allies and demonic companions await you on League 3! Zombies, Ghouls, Dreadlords and more are yours to command. Heroes can learn Dominate Undead and Enslave Demon from the Death Knight and Warlock pages of the Character Sheet, and can use these new abilities to further customize their champion. Over 15 unique families of undead pets are shambling throughout the world, waiting to be discovered and mastered. Each type of minion (zombie, skeleton, abomination, banshee, etc.) has a unique set of skills and rad aesthetics for any Hero looking to raise the dead. 

If you’re taking a more demonic approach, tamble Demons offer an additional 15+ different types of pets to master. Find the minion that’s right for you! 

Bloodsoaked Vellums

Tons of different Bloodsoaked Vellums and Summoner Stones will drop off of Undead and Demon monsters, just like whistles! This means that rare mobs and even Bosses have a chance to drop rare skins for your pets, letting you further customize your look! 

Brand New Spells

• 30+ new spells and skills available in-game

30+ brand new abilities come to Vanilla with League 3 for Heroes to further refine their classless heroes. These skills–pulled from future expansions–are making their way to Ascension to spice up build creation and bring more options in for Heroes to play with.

This huge pool of spells will not only revive old builds via new synergies, but will also create entirely new builds and strategies waiting to be discovered. With so many new spells, Heroes should expect a huge shake up in both the PvP and PvE meta with new ways to play being discovered as time goes on. 

TBC Spells in Vanilla

• 14 abilities from The Burning Crusade ported to Vanilla

With League 3, Heroes now have access to 14 additional spells from TBC! Ice Lance, Shadow Word: Death, Envenom, Incinerate, and more are all here for you to choose. This allows Heroes to construct many iconic builds previously exclusive to The Burning Crusade, meaning more Vanilla build variety and ways to stand apart. Combined with the new spells and new pets, Heroes will have more options than ever before to shape and forge their perfect Classless Identity. 

Most of the TBC spells moving to vanilla are essential damage skills like Arcane Blast for Prophet of Wrath, Envenom for Poison builds, and Kill Command for Beast Masters. By opening up TBC skills in League 3, Heroes can combine iconic TBC spells to create unique level 60 builds, significantly expanding build variety and fostering brand new possibilities forged on unique new synergies. 

Talent Tweaks

• Many talents added to skills baseline
• Replaced these talents with unique talents

League 3’s goal is to test TONS of new cross-class synergy and open up wild new playstyles, builds, and ways to explore Azeroth. To achieve this, many talents that failed to promote cross-class synergy are being redesigned, with their base power going directly into spells. This removes punishing investment costs for builds that stretch across multiple classes, and opens up new gameplay options for creative Heroes.

In pursuit of expanding cross-class options, 5 specific types of talents are being modernized so that cross-class synergy is baked directly into the bedrock of Ascension’s talents. 

Cast Speed Reduction

Cast Speed talents are moving directly into baseline spells. These talents will be replaced with new stat options: 

This change frees Heroes from required cast-speed enhancing talents, promoting the use of multiple casted damage spells in a single builds. It should also allow Heroes to pick more talents that feel strong for their entire build, rather than needing to anchor a tenth of their talent points into cast speed. 

Critical Strike Damage

Talents that boost critical strike damage now impact all spell critical strikes, changed from school or class specific. Each talent now has a unique modifier that effects the school, so that Heroes can choose the one that works best for their build. 

In the past, critical strike damage bonus talents limited cross-class builds by forcing investment.  Now, talents like Ruin will increase ALL spell critical strike damage, along with offering a unique capstone effect to Shadow Spells. Each critical strike booster talent will offer one of these school unique effects, with the goal of allowing Heroes to choose the one that fits their build best. This further supports cross-class builds by freeing up talent points, creating natural bridges of synergy, and introducing brand new capstones that promote classless strategies. 

You can only pick one, by the way.

Range Increasing Talents

Talents that improve spell’s range are undergoing similar transformations. Like cast speed and critical strike talents, choosing range increasing talents currently does not benefit your entire build if you’re choosing to mix multiple classes. To expand this into cross-class, range increasing talents will now increase the generic range of ALL your spells with a cast time. Additionally, each talent will also now grant a unique bonus effect based around the talent tree you find them in. 

Pushback

Pushback Talents also get cross-class polish: talents that reduce your spell’s pushback while casting or channeling will now grant generic spell pushback resistance, along with additional effects,

Mana Management

Talents like Master of Elements that improve the way Heroes manage mana are also receiving cross-class buffs. This greatly expands build opportunities by letting Heroes mix and match similar effects to find what best fits their classless identity.

The goal of these tremendous talent changes is to expand the ways that Heroes can create great builds and homogenize talent tree structuring.  

Freepick Quality System

• Testing the Free-Pick Quality System on a League
  • Goal: Free players, in both PvP and PvE, from bloated toolkits and same-y fights
  • Allows for talents to be more classless, and reduce excessive talent investment

League 3 features a Quality System specifically tailored to Free Pick. This system completely re-defines how Heroes create builds, and serves as the crux of the League. With the Quality System, build creation is flipped on its head: Heroes can build what they want to play, and then before empower their build with powerful Epic and Legendary skills–which are typically CC and Defensive abilities. 

This system synergizes every change on the League into a single package, eliminating the ‘have every CC, Gap Closer, and Defensive CD in the game’ meta and replacing it with unique build variety and tailored strengths and weaknesses. Heroes can now create the build they want to play using Common, Uncommon, and Rare abilities, and then power it up with a few legendary and epic skills. 

The quality system serves many other functions:

• Allows the AE cost of skills to be REDUCED
  • Reverts some of the high-AE cost requirements of spells when Heroes could choose anything
  • Allows extra AE for Heroes to experiment with
  • Enables true cross-class skill selection, due to all Heroes having more AE
• Serves as a guide to help heroes create builds from scratch.
  • Quality Markers help Heroes understand the strength of individual skills, and have visual indicators of what exactly they need to take–and how many of each–to make their build shine.

The Quality System allows Heroes to make meaningful choices, and generally decreases the amount of PvP utility Heroes have in their kits. It also allows talents to become more classless, reduces the need for excessive talent investment, and reduces many 5 pointers to 3 pointers. League 3 will test the success of this system and its effect on Free Pick. 

Hero Architect and Character Sheet Improvements

League 3 features a huge rewrite of Ascension’s Character Advancement and Hero Architect systems. These not only improve the Hero Architect and Character Advancement Sheet, but also Ascension’s stability and functionality. By improving the code involved with these systems, Heroes can look forward to the following:

• Drastically Increased Server Performance
  • Increased visibility range, update times, and allowing the server to hold more players at once
• More Features
  • New rewrite makes it easier to add more features to Character Advancement and improve/iterate much faster
• Solve Issues
  • New rewrite solves some spaghetti code and allows for more meaningful modifications to draft to set up solving longstanding issues. (Draft is very interwoven into the character advancement)

New Mystic Enchantments

• 20+ Uniquely Cross-Class Enchantments
  • Goal: Open up new Cross-Class synergies

20+ brand new, SPECIFICALLY CROSS-CLASS Mystic Enchantments arrive with League 3. These enchantments focus around unique build combinations and strategies deeply rooted in multiple classes. Lucifur, Hoplite, Cryotherapist, and more make their debut with League 3, creating a perfect storm of new cross-class synergy combined with new classless archetypes, all available to be explored. 

Mystic Enchanting Scrolls

Mystic Enchanting Scrolls are brand new items that have a chance to drop from any monster in the open world! They have a chance to contain any Mystic Enchantment in the game on them, and can be used as a consumable to apply their enchantment directly to a piece of your gear! 

For example, you might find a legendary Mystic Scroll: White Walker, which you can either use if that’s your type of hero, or sell on the Auction House if it’s not! Mystic Scrolls are BoE, and serve as one more way that Heroes can collect enchantments, expand their collection, and make gold!

Tank Overhaul

• Moving Threat Management to Tank Stances
  • Limiting threat as the primary Tanking mechanic
• Opening up TONS of new Tank Builds

League 3 MASSIVELY EXPANDS viable Tank builds, moving threat into Tank Stances so Heroes have more freedom to choose the spells and skills they want.

On League 3, Tank Stances now massively increase the threat generation of abilities, essentially allowing Heroes to tank with any combination of spells and skills. This opens up all sorts of new cross-class tanking options, and allows Heroes to focus on their build instead of needing to pick up threat-generation abilities. Tank Heroes should feel confident their classless identity can succeed without needing to carefully balance defensive and aggressive talents. Tanking will now be as easy as toggling a stance. Righteous Fury, Defensive Stance, Bear Form, and the redesigned Mana Barrier will now provide all the bonus threat modifiers a tank could need. 

Heroes are now free to explore whatever classless identity inspires them without needing to overthink how threat management comes into play.

Points of Interest

Points of Interest are brand new markers on your mini map that can show you exactly where interesting things are! Wow! It sounds simple, but it’s actually super useful–and was pretty hard to program and get right. With Points of Interest, Heroes can now enjoy the following:

• World Boss Points of Interest
  • Markers that show where the boss is, even when it’s moving
  • Track down your prey!
• “Bonus Zone” Hotspots
  • Clear, obvious, and consistent Hotspots for Heroes out in the Open World looking for them.

The new Points of Interest (PoI) system has a ton of cool features:

• It can update across Continents, so you can check on bosses and hotspots from Eastern Kingdoms to Kalimdor
• Updates across Zones
  • Look for your next hotspot in your current zone!
• Can track moving Points of Interest - Like World Bosses
• Allows multiple points to be displayed at the same time

Rage Generation

Need to get MAD? Whether you’re smacking your foe with a Frostbolt or pummeling them with Multishot, you’ll be getting frustrated while doing it! On Ascension, Spells and Ranged Abilities now generate rage! 

This opens up new cross-class options for Heroes who want to make better use of their rage bar: reducing friction in mixing and matching different abilities and combos. So watch out: that Frost Mage might walk up and execute you with a full rage bar.

Personal Loot

Personal Loot appears ALONG SIDE normal raid loot! You get BOTH! Both is good.

Conclusion

League 3 Releases on March 4th @ 18:00 server time! We hope you’re there to start Ascension’s first Free Pick league in years, and set the foundations for the future of Classless WoW!