What the Legacy Tree Does to Your Gold
Legacy turns up on our other pages as a single line, usually attached to professions or to consumables. The mechanic itself is bigger than that: a capped pool of points, 3 separate trees, a reset that is charged for, and rewards handed out at thresholds rather than sold. Each of those four parts touches the economy from a different side, and this is the one place we put them together.
16 points, 3 trees, one budget
Legacy is an account-facing progression track rather than a talent page: points accumulate as the character plays, and they are spent inside a structure split into 3 trees. The part that matters for money is the ceiling. A character can hold 16 points, which is fewer than the number of nodes worth taking, so every allocation is made against the others. A system with no cap would be a convenience; a capped one is a budget, and budgets get planned, argued over and occasionally bought out of.
Where those points come from is the first half of the question, and what Legacy points are worth in coin covers the earning side rather than the spending side. The second half is which tree gets them. A roster that pushes points into gathering and crafting nodes is building supply; one that spends them elsewhere is buying comfort and time. Neither choice is wrong, but only the first one shows up on the auction house as stock.
The reset is priced in gold
Points are not locked forever, and that is exactly why the system is a sink. A reset is paid for, which means a player who planned badly, or who changed what the character does, pays gold to move the budget around. Nothing about that is unusual for this line of realms; it is the same design idea as a respec, applied to a longer-lived track. The practical effect is that coin leaves the world each time a plan changes, and the sinks that remove coin are the only counterweight the realm has on the supply side.
The closest comparison already on the site is the talent page, where what a talent reset charges rises with use rather than sitting still. We are not claiming the Legacy fee behaves the same way, because we have not seen that published. What we can say is that the two sit in the same pocket: a player who respecs talents on raid nights and reshuffles Legacy points on top of that is paying twice for the same indecision.
The planning advice that follows is dull and holds up well. Treat the first allocation as a purchase rather than a draft. Spend points on the thing the character actually does for most of its hours, not on the thing it might do if a guild forms, and keep the reset fee as a correction tool instead of a weekly habit.
Threshold rewards never reach the shelf
The third piece is the one most market plans miss. Rewards granted at point thresholds arrive on the character that earned them. They are not stock, they cannot be posted, and no amount of gold moves them from one player to another. For the auction house this means a slice of the game's reward table simply does not exist as a listing. For anyone pricing their evening, it means part of what Legacy gives back is paid in hours and cannot be shortcut with coin.
That does not make the system invisible to the market, only indirect. Getting to a threshold through a trade pulls materials off the shelf, and crafting done to earn points buys reagents at full price while producing output nobody ordered. The demand is real, the supply it creates is accidental, and both move at once. A gatherer who notices which reagents are being consumed that way is reading a buyer list that is not about raiding at all.
Players who want the outcome without the hours are left with the ordinary route: pay a person rather than a vendor. That is where work sold between players absorbs the demand, and it is the same pattern as every other account-bound reward in the game.
What we have not seen published
We are not going to put numbers on the reset fee, because none have been published that we can check. We do not know whether it is flat, whether it scales with the number of resets, whether it scales with level, or whether it resets on its own after a period. We also do not have a per-tree list of which thresholds hand out what, so any claim that one tree pays better than another is a guess until a full breakdown exists.
The other open item is stability. Legacy is being tuned alongside the rest of the beta work, the same way racials and recipe lists are, and a pass that moves one node can move the thresholds beside it. Anything written here about allocation is measured against the system as it stands before 4 November, not against the version that ships. Where that uncertainty matters most is for players building a roster plan around specific perks, and perks that attach to professions are the part of the tree most likely to be adjusted.
Questions
Can I undo a Legacy point without paying?
We have not seen anything that says so. The reset is described as a paid action, which is the normal pattern for this kind of track, so the safe assumption is that moving a point costs gold every time you do it. If a free grace window exists, it has not been documented anywhere we can verify, and we will not guess at one.
Do Legacy rewards have a market price?
No, because they never become tradeable goods. A reward granted at a threshold belongs to the character that reached it, so it cannot be listed, mailed to a friend or bought from a seller. The only money attached to it is indirect: the materials spent on the way to the threshold, and whatever a player pays someone else for help getting there.
Is it worth spending points on profession nodes?
It depends on whether the character is a supplier or a consumer. Points in gathering and crafting nodes pay back through stock that other players buy, so they compound for anyone who sells. Points elsewhere buy convenience, which is real value but never shows up as income. With a 16-point ceiling, you are choosing one of those two uses rather than having both.
Should I bank points instead of spending them?
Holding points unspent avoids the reset fee, but it also means the character gets nothing from them in the meantime. The more practical middle ground is to spend on the nodes that match what you already do every evening and leave the contested choices unspent until the character's role settles. That way the fee is paid once, if at all, rather than every time a plan shifts.
Sources
- Official World of Warcraft news feed, where feature breakdowns and patch notes for the Forever line are posted — World of Warcraft news.