Patch 1.17.2 — Class & Gameplay Changes

Post by **Dragunovi** » Sat Oct 12, 2024 6:10 pm

Greetings! Since our start on the class balancing journey we’ve been gathering your feedback and insights.

While we're happy with the first batch of class changes, they were done under a much more conservative mindset with minor changes, and so vanilla's unbalanced state was still very much felt. Due to this, it fell short on fixing the issues for some of the specializations and failing to make enough impactful changes. It has now been 2 years since those changes and we’re finally taking a deeper dive into balancing and building a solid foundation that’ll serve as the core for all specializations for years to come.

These changes aren’t the final word on class updates. We’ll continue making balance adjustments and potentially soft reworks if a specialization’s changes don’t play out as expected.

Please note that numbers are subject to change along the way throughout 1.17.2. If they do, we will notify you accordingly.

With that said, we’re now ready to unveil the preliminary changelog for the second batch of Class Changes, coming with Patch 1.17.2: Tower of Karazhan. This changelog will be updated if any further changes and tweaks are made.

You can find the talent trees and calculator at this link. Learn more about your class below:

Druid

Hunter

Mage

Paladin

Priest

Rogue

Shaman

Warlock

Warrior

Updates | October 21 2024

Updates | November 1 2024

Updates | November 20 2024

Updates | December 20 2024

GAMEPLAY CHANGES

The Weapon Skill formula has been altered.

In short this means that any form of extra Weapon Skill now affects your character linearly and no longer works with awkward breakpoints causing Weapon Skill on items or spells to change in value based on your character's amount.

You can now acquire books that grant +5 skill increases to specific weapon types via new quests.

Fighting bosses and creatures 3 levels higher than you no longer applies a 1% hit suppression, so the hit cap against them has been effectively moved from 9% to 8%. This also means that the "soft cap" of 305 skill that used to counteract the 1% hit suppression, no longer exists.

In addition, the benefit provided by skill from 300 to 304 and 305 to 308 has been smoothed out, each point of skill now providing the exact same benefit of 0.2% hit chance and 2% reduced glancing damage penalty.

Reduced the amount of weapon skill granted by racials from +5 to +3.

Throwing Weapons now spend durability when used instead of consuming a stack of your item.
For this reason the following changes have been made:

The buy and sell prices have been increased.

Throwing weapons are now disenchantable.

Quests that give throwing weapons now give only one on completion.

Creatures that drop throwing weapons now only drop one.

Vendors that sell throwing weapons now sell one every purchase.

Throwing weapons have higher durability depending on their quality, meaning they can be used for longer without repairing.

Throwing weapons now only stack to one.

Throwing weapons currently in possession will be updated retroactively upon patch release.

Goblin Brainwashing Device now incurs a personal 10 minute cooldown after use. This cooldown persists through death and continues to count while offline.

You can no longer move a player between raid groups if they are in combat.

Removed spells that are learned above level 6 from starting zone class trainers. These were primarily introduced in the first iteration of Class Changes by accident.

Abilities that were changed to be a baseline ability or to be a talent learned ability in the first and second batches of class changes have had training prices updates to reflect that change.

Tea With Sugar and Nordanaar Herbal Tea now grant 525-875 health and 810-1350 mana instead of 1050-1750 health and mana. These items now stack to 20 instead of 5.

Developer Note: This change allows Demonic and Dark Runes to be a proper alternative to the tea consumables, granting more mana at the cost of health compared to less mana and small amounts of healing.

The Bow Specialization granted by Tome of Expertise: Bows in Hyjal is now retired. This means:

The book no longer functions and is removed from all players.

The quest is no longer available and removed from all players.

Bow Specialization is now removed from everyone that has learned it with this method. Everyone that has completed the quest will be refunded 50 Bright Dream Shards. This does not affect races that have Bow Specialization as a normal racial such as Trolls and High Elves.

RACIAL CHANGES

These changes aim to reduce the gaps between racials and how much power they contribute to your character, especially in cases where some race-class combos are much more dominant compared to other races. While we tune down severe examples of these, we’ve also added new racials, buffed or added new functionality to old racials of underperforming races that increase power, which was also done to races that got affected by the global nerf to weapon skill racials. While making these changes we have focused on making sure that all racials remain flavorful and fit their race.

General

Reduced the amount of weapon skill granted by racials from +5 to +3.

Human

Perception now also grants 2% increased physical and spell critical strike chance for the duration.

The Human Spirit now allows 5% of your Mana regeneration to continue while casting.

Dwarf

Stoneform now reduces physical damage taken by 5% instead of increasing armor by 10%.

Night Elf

Quickness now also increases your attack and casting speed and movement speed by 1%.

Developer Note: Unlike other similar movement speed increasing effects, the movement speed granted by this racial additively stacks with other movement speed increasing effects.

Shadowmeld now persists for 2 seconds after being canceled or moving. Cooldown increased from 10 seconds to 3 minutes.

Gnome

Escape Artist’s cooldown has been increased from 1 minute to 1.5 minutes.

Arcane Resistance removed.

New racial: Disassembler: Damage dealt versus Mechanicals increased by 5%.

High Elf

Quel’dorei Meditation has seen a small rework:
- Now activates after a 1.5 second cast instead of being a 5 second channel.
- Now generates 10% total mana, 20 Rage or 50 Energy over 5 seconds instead of 4% maximum mana, 6 Rage and 13 Energy every second.
- Cooldown reduced from 6 minutes to 3 minutes.
- You are now given a specific version of the racial that generates only your resource instead of a general one that generates them all. This means that if you’re a mana user, your racial will only generate mana, if you’re a Rogue it will only generate Energy and if you’re a Warrior it will only generate Rage.
- Warrior Version: You are now considered in combat for the duration, this is to prevent rage decay while the racial is active.

Arcane Resistance removed.

New racial: Swiftness of the Rangers: Agility increased by 2%.

Orc

Blood Fury now increases your Attack Power and damage dealt by magical spells and effects by an amount equal to your level for 15 sec. and reduces healing effects on you by 25% for 25 sec.

Hardiness now reduces the duration of Stun effects by 15% instead of increasing your chance to resist Stun effects by 25%.

Troll

Berserking now grants between 10% - 15% attack and casting speed depending on how badly you are hurt instead of between 10% - 30%.

Regeneration now increases health regeneration by 20% instead of 10% and allows 25% of total health regeneration to continue in combat instead of 10%.

Undead

Will of the Forsaken’s duration has been reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds and it can’t be activated while under crowd control.

Shadow Resistance removed.

New racial: Vengeance: Damage against Humanoids and Undead is increased by 2%.

Tauren

War Stomp’s stun duration has been reduced from 2 seconds to 1.5 seconds.

Goblin

Exit Strategy’s cooldown reduced from 5 minutes to 3 minutes.

Prospecting now grants Mining and Jewelcrafting skill instead of just Mining.

Chemical Superfreak removed.

UPDATES | Dated: October 21 2024

Developer Comment: Racials in Vanilla have always been a tricky topic. On one hand, they encourage diversity and avoid homogenization by having races excel in niches through unique traits, this fits Vanilla flavor perfectly. On the other hand however it is common knowledge that the Horde has always had the upper hand when it comes to combat racials, especially in PvP. Our changes to these Racials sought to remedy this issue by keeping Racials unique and flavorful to their race while evening out the power of the outliers. That being said, after extensive discussions and player feedback we realize that some Racials were hit too hard while others got a little less love than they deserve.

Will of the Forsaken: Duration reduced from 4 to 3 seconds. Cooldown increased from 2 minutes to 2.5 minutes. Can now be used while under crowd control to break out as before.

Vengeance: Now only affects non-player Humanoids.

Blood Fury: Attack Power bonus increased from 100% of your level to 200% of your level, no longer part of the global cooldown.

Shadowmeld: Cooldown reduced from 3 minutes to 1 minute.

War Stomp: Duration increased from 1.5 to 2 seconds, cooldown increased from 2 minutes to 2.5 minutes.

Exit Strategy: No longer slows the user after sprinting.

Post by **Dragunovi** » Sat Oct 12, 2024 6:20 pm

Druids were among the few classes receiving small updates throughout the years following our first round of Class Changes. The ability to equip polearms and the addition of Feral Attack Power on many of the more undesirable weapons found on Azeroth were a great boon to their itemization. While already receiving many alterations before, the Druid class and all its specializations still had some pain points that were in need of some ironing out.

Starting with their base spells and abilities, there have been many voices lamenting the power of druid's two Area of Effect spells: Hurricane and Tranquility.

The former has a very useful attack speed slow component attached to it, yet its long cooldown and meager damage output held it back in fights with multiple enemies. In order to rebalance its power, we removed the attack speed slow and moved it to the Balance tree as a talent. This allowed us to reduce Hurricane's cooldown by half, while also strengthening its scaling with the Spell Power stat.

Tranquility is an iconic spell from Warcraft 3. As the ultimate ability of the Keeper of the Grove hero unit, its World of Warcraft counterpart sadly does not live up to its legacy. More often than not it is not beneficial to use this spell when faced with a lot of incoming damage, as the other healing spells offer a stronger rescue potential. To grant Tranquility an effect worthy of its origin and visual, it will now affect all raid members in close range of the druid, at a significantly decreased healing power and increased cooldown. Only Restoration druids will be able to unlock Tranquility‘s true potential.

BASELINE CHANGES

Druids will now be able to undergo a challenging and expensive questline to learn the Swift Travel Form. This form takes on a set appearance and has the same functionalities as any other epic mount, meaning it cannot be used in combat or indoors and grants a 100% movement speed bonus. To start this questline, accept 'Mount Hyjal In Turmoil' at the Druid trainer Loganaar in Moonglade.

Manual Crowd Pummeler and Battery-Powered Crowd Pummeler now increases swing speed by 20% instead of increasing attack speed by 50%, meaning the haste amount is reduced from 50% to 20% and no longer functions in shapeshifting forms and the ability now has a 20 minute cooldown. Attack speed increased from 2.0 to 2.9, the DPS remains the same.

All ranks of Tranquility have been reworked. Here is an example of the new Rank 4: Regenerates all raid members within 30 yards for 87 every second for 10 seconds. The druid must channel to maintain the spell.

Increased cooldown from 5 to 30 minutes.

Doubled the mana cost.

Healing tick rate changed from 2 seconds to 1 second.

Baseline threat removed.

Now affects all members of your raid instead of just your group.

Ranks 1 to 4 now last for 4, 6, 8 and 10 seconds respectively.

New Spell: Ferocious Bite (Rank 1)
Learned at Level 24
Finishing move that causes damage per combo point and converts each extra point of energy into 1 additional damage. Damage is increased by your Attack Power.

1 point : 35-51 damage

2 points: 67-83 damage

3 points: 99-115 damage

4 points: 131-147 damage

5 points: 163-179 damage

All other ranks of Ferocious Bite have been upped by one number.

Cat Form’s Combo Points will no longer vanish upon switching targets, but instead reset when applying combo points on a new target.

Regrowth: Reduced Mana cost of all ranks by 20%.

Owlkin Frenzy: No longer a baseline ability and instead acquired as a new talent, refer to the Balance section for more details.

Hurricane: No longer increases time between attacks by default. Cooldown reduced to 30 seconds. Scaling from Spell Power slightly increased to 9.6% per damage tick.

Swipe: All ranks of Swipe now scale with 8% of the Druid’s attack power.

Savage Bite: Increased threat from damage from 175% to 350%. Updated the tooltip to reflect this change.

Developer Comment: Savage Bite currently acts as a way to spend excess rage without any other purpose. To balance out the removed dependency of the Manual Crowd Pummeler, this ability will now cause additional threat.

Frenzied Regeneration: Healing formula has been changed for all 3 ranks to the following: Heals the Druid by converting 10 points of rage per second into health. Each point of rage equals to 6/7/8% of your total stamina. Cooldown increased to 6 minutes.

Druids will now be able to use consumable items in their Cat and Bear forms.

New Spell: Barkskin (Feral)
Learned at Level 44 with new ranks at Level 52 and 60.
Requires Bear Form, Dire Bear Form, Cat Form
The druid's skin becomes tough as bark, reducing the damage of the next 5/10/15 melee attacks by 50%. Movement speed is reduced by 20% during its duration. Lasts for 12 seconds.
(10 Minute cooldown)

Moonfire: Duration of Ranks 2 to 10 has been increased to 18 seconds, adding two more ticks to the damage over time component.

Insect Swarm: Duration of all ranks has been increased to 18 seconds, adding three more ticks to the damage over time component.

Wrath: Increased base damage values and spellpower scaling coefficient by 5%.

Enrage: Now applies a physical debuff for the armor reduction part of the ability instead of being tied to the rage gain buff.

Tiger’s Fury: Increased the damage bonus of Rank 3 to 35 and Rank 4 to 50.

Rake: All ranks of Rake now scale 12% of their initial damage and 3% of their bleed effect with the Druid's Attack Power.

BALANCE

In the past, the Balance specialization has provided their fair share of indispensable utility and buffs. While highly beneficial to their group, the Moonkin itself suffered in a few select areas, both during leveling and endgame content. We set it our goal to uplift Balance druids and offer an engaging playstyle to alleviate the hurdles standing in the way of our druid players. This is done in part by allowing their two Damage over Time spells to augment their main spells Wrath and Starfire, creating a rotation between maintaining Insect Swarm and Moonfire and alternating Wrath and Starfire.

New Talent: Sylvan Blessing (Row 1) (2 Ranks)
Gives you a 50/100% chance after killing a target that yields experience or honor to allow your Mana to regenerate at a 100% rate while casting. Lasts 15 sec.

Improved Moonfire now costs 2 points instead of 5 points.

New Talent: Guidance of the Dream (Row 2) (3 Ranks)
Gives you a 23/46/70% chance to avoid interruption caused by damage while casting your Balance spells.

Improved Thorns: Removed.

Improved Entangling Roots: Removed.

Moonfury: Moved to Row 3. Now has 3 ranks (down from 5) and includes Hurricane and Insect Swarm.

Vengeance: Moved to Row 4.

Moonglow: Moved to Row 4. Now includes Hurricane and Insect Swarm.

Moonkin Form: Armor Increase has been reduced from 360% to 180%.
The talent has been moved to Row 5 and becomes available at Level 30. Instead, players can now learn an improved version at Level 40, regaining their 360% armor Increase.

Owlkin Frenzy: Can no longer be learned and instead is a talent in Row 5 with 3 ranks. Spell pushback protection reduced from 100% to 30% and now regenerates 1% maximum mana every second for 10 seconds. The effect can only trigger once every 25 seconds.

Improved Starfire: Moved to Row 5.

New Talent: Balance of All Things (Row 6) (5 Ranks)

Damage from your Insect Swarm spells now has a 6/12/18/24/30% chance to reduce the cast time of your next Starfire by 0.5 seconds.

Damage from your Moonfire spells now has a 6/12/18/24/30% chance to reduce the mana cost of your next Wrath by 50%.

Both effects can stack to a maximum of three.

New Talent: Gale Winds (Row 6) (2 Ranks)
Your Hurricane spell now reduces the attack speed of enemies by 12/25%.

New Capstone Talent: Eclipse (Row 7)
Align natural and astral energies. Critical strikes with Starfire increase your Nature damage by 25% and critical strikes with Wrath increase your Arcane damage by 25%.
Each effect lasts 15 seconds and has a separate 30 seconds cooldown. Both effects cannot occur simultaneously.

Omen of Clarity: Now acts as a passive effect when learned.

Nature’s Grace and Improved Wrath: Updated the talent description to properly show both talent’s functionality. Improved Wrath now properly displays the global cooldown reduction that was falsely part of Nature’s Grace’s tooltip.

RESTORATION

Restoration Druids are in a great spot at the moment. Their talents allow for a variety of playstyles, be it Moonglow, Regrowth or Tree of Life - there is a little bit of everything for everyone. With the addition of the Tree of Life Form, we tried to steer Restoration Druids into the niche of the ‘healing over time’ healer; and would like to continue that path. However, there is an obstacle in that path we need to overcome: the anti synergy of having more than one restoration druid in your group. We did not want Healing over Time spells to stack, as we deemed this approach to be too powerful. Instead we opted for a way to allow other druids to overwrite already applied healing over time effects and cause a direct heal.

New Passive Spell: Efflorescence
Learned at Lvl 60
Requires Tree of Life Form
Any time your Regrowth and Rejuvenation effects are about to be replaced they instantly heal for a portion of the remaining duration.

Improved Rejuvenation: Removed.

Gift of Nature: Moved to Row 3

New Talent: Genesis (Row 4) (3 Ranks)
Increase the damage and healing of your periodic spells and effects by 5/10/15%.

Tranquil Spirit: Now includes Regrowth.

New Talent: Aessina’s Bloom (Row 5) (2 Ranks)
Your Healing Touch spells have a 30/60% chance to instantly heal a friendly target an amount equal to 6 sec of Regrowth if the target is affected by Regrowth.
Any Druid's Regrowth is applicable for this effect.

New Talent: Preservation (Row 5) (3 Ranks)
Increases the periodic healing of Regrowth by 10/20/30% if the friendly target is affected by Rejuvenation.

Improved Tranquility: Moved to Row 6 and now increases the healing done by Tranquility by 20/40%.

FERAL COMBAT

There are a few issues Feral Combat Druids are facing right now. The biggest contender is their relative dependency on the Manual Crowd Pummeler. Its item effect greatly amplifies damage for both forms and subsequently the threat gain for bears. To alleviate their need for this item for optimal threat, we introduced a few adjustments to abilities and talents. Furthermore, we lifted the restriction of feral forms not being able to use consumable items such as potions, healthstones and similar. A new defensive spell, Barkskin (Feral), will help them survive the more risky and unpredictable situations during combat.

For the Cat Form Druids, we’re offering a way to utilize the player’s bleed abilities, by making them interact with their main attack skills. Additionally, a new early rank of Ferocious Bite at Level 24 will give druids more options during their leveling journey.

New Talent: Open Wounds (Row 2) (3 Ranks)
Increases the damage of Claw by 10/20/30% if the target is afflicted by Rake. In addition, your Rip ability increases your Claw damage by 3/4/5% per combo point spent for 15 sec.

Feline Swiftness: Name changed to Feral Swiftness and now grants its dodge bonus to Bear and Dire Bear form as well.

Blood Frenzy: Increased attack speed bonus from 12% to 30%. Now generates 10 rage when using Enrage, as a bug formerly made it generate double the intended amount.

New Talent: Feral Adrenaline (Row 5) (3 Ranks)
Suffering a physical critical strike while in Bear, Dire Bear or Cat Form increases your chance to dodge by 15/30/45% until you dodge the next physical attack against you.
This effect can only occur once every 30 seconds.

Developer Comment: Critical strikes are one of the many dangers bear druids face when tanking powerful foes. To alleviate the peril after suffering a critical strike, Feral Adrenaline will offer a small buffer window for healers and the tank to react to sudden damage spikes.

New Talent: Ancient Brutality (Row 6) (3 Ranks)
Dodging an attack while in Bear or Dire Bear Form imbues you with the spirit of the Ancients, returning 5/10/15% of your damage dealt as healing and generating 1/2/3 rage per second for 5 sec. This effect can only occur once every 6 sec.

Developer Comment: Although dodging is one of the few ways for druids to avoid damage, it is not as desired as a stat as one would assume. While blocking generates rage for warriors, dodging does not for druids. Still, they cannot avoid accumulating this stat due to how Agility grants additional dodge chance. This talent will allow druids to gain benefit from it by generating rage on successful dodges.

UPDATES | Dated: October 21 2024

Insect Swarm: Applications of the same rank now stack when cast by two or more druids. This does not apply to the reduced chance to hit component of this spell.

Mighty Rage Potion can now be used by Druids.

UPDATES | Dated: November 1 2024

Blood Frenzy's attack speed increase reduced from 30% to 20% and the effect duration is increased from 12 seconds to 18 seconds.

Reduced Swipe's scaling for all ranks of Swipe from the Druid's attack power from 8% to 6%.

Reduced the threat modifier on damage from all ranks of Swipe from 175% to 140%.

Reduced the threat modifier on damage of Savage Bite from 350% to 225%

Improved Shred now also increases damage caused by Shred by 5/10% for 5 seconds after entering Cat Form.

Increased Open Wounds' damage increase for Claw from 3/4/5% to 2/4/6% per combo point spent with Rip.

Post by **Dragunovi** » Sat Oct 12, 2024 6:24 pm

Our first batch of changes were successful in making Marksmanship Hunters scale better with their gear with the introduction of Trueshot but there are more problems that were not touched on. These are:

Marksmanship’s power being unattached from its talent tree for the most part.

Survival lacking identity.

Beast Mastery’s viability in raid environments due to lacking scaling.

Pet choices being very limited due to some cutting way ahead of the rest.

We’ll go into detail on these issues at their respective sections.

BASELINE CHANGES

Hunters now have access to unlock two extra stable slots, doubling the amount of pets you store in a stable master.

Aimed Shot is now baseline, learned at level 20.

Avoidance area of effect damage reduction has been increased from 50% to 80% and it should no longer be removed when resetting your pet’s abilities.

Renamed Trueshot to Steady Shot.

Steady Shot learning levels have been adjusted due to its first rank being moved into the Marksmanship talent tree.

Rank 1 (Talent): 36 -> 20

Rank 2: 42 -> 30

Rank 3: 48 -> 40

Rank 4: 54 -> 50

Rank 5: 60 -> 60

Aspect of the Wolf now has multiple ranks that have the same mana costs, attack power and level requirements as Aspect of the Hawk, giving melee attack power instead of ranged attack power. The current Aspect of the Wolf is now the first rank of the ability. Additionally, Aspect of the Wolf no longer prevents you from using ranged attacks and abilities. The 7th rank of Aspect of the Wolf is also acquirable out in the world instead of being trained similarly to Aspect of the Hawk but we’ll leave where you acquire it a mystery.

Scorpid Sting now only has one rank, costs 10% of your base mana to cast and now does the following:
"Stings the target, reducing their physical damage done by 2% and their attack speed by 10% for 20 sec. Only one Sting per Hunter can be active on any one target."

Developer Comment: This attack speed reduction does not scale with similar effects such as Thunderfury, Frostguard and Dream’s Herald.

Viper Sting mana burn amount has been reduced by 15% and now has a 6 second cooldown.

Wing Clip now has a 6 second cooldown and deals a percentage of your weapon damage instead of a flat value. Slow percentages, learning levels and mana costs remain the same.

Rank 1 (Level 12): 25% Weapon Damage, 50% Slow

Rank 2 (Level 38): 30% Weapon Damage, 55% Slow

Rank 3 (Level 60): 35% Weapon Damage, 60% Slow

Mongoose Bite no longer requires you to dodge to use it, now deals 60% Weapon Damage in addition to its current flat damage and resets your auto-attack swing timer.

Rank 1 (Level 16): 60% Weapon Damage + 25 Damage

Rank 2 (Level 30): 60% Weapon Damage + 45 Damage

Rank 3 (Level 44): 60% Weapon Damage + 75 Damage

Rank 4 (Level 58): 60% Weapon Damage + 115 Damage

PET CHANGES

These changes aim to make other pet families more viable, giving Hunters a more diverse pool of pets to use.

Added two new pet families with new family specific abilities: Serpents and Foxes.

Charge (Boar): Rank 4 can now be acquired out in the world.

Lightning Breath: Rank 1 can now be acquired out in the world.

Dash: Raptors can now learn Dash.

Furious Howl: Focus cost reduced from 60 to 50 and range increased from 15 yards to 40 yards.

Thunderstomp: Now has a x1.5 threat modifier and its cooldown is reduced from 1 minute to 40 seconds. Also added a new Rank 4 with higher damage values.

Scorpid Poison: Focus cost reduced from 30 to 25, cooldown reduced from 4 seconds to 3 seconds, base damage increased by 20%.

Shell Shield: Attack speed reduction reduced from 43% to 35%.

Bite: Cooldown reduced from 10 seconds to 6 seconds.

Adjusted Spell Power and added Attack Power scaling for most damaging pet abilities:

Poison Spit (Serpent): 0.25 for each periodic damage tick.

Lightning Breath (Wind Serpent): 0.5

Scorpid Poison (Scorpid): 0.1 for each periodic damage tick.

Thunderstomp (Gorilla): 0.21

Bite: 1 extra damage for every 20 Attack Power.

Claw: 1 extra damage for every 42 Attack Power.

Developer Comment: This change mainly affects Beast Mastery Hunters granting their pets Spell Power and Attack Power with the revamped Spirit Bond talent, though the attack power scaling should very slightly affect other hunters' pets, increasing their Bite and Claw damage by 15 and 6-7 respectively when the pet is level 60.

BEAST MASTERY

This specialization is near perfect flavor wise, but lacks proper scaling for the focus of the specialization: Your pet. We plan on fixing this by introducing pet scaling into the individual pet buffing talents, with damage scaling being deep in the tree to avoid other specializations from acquiring them.

Improved Predator Aspects: Renamed to Swift Aspects, proc chance has been increased from 1/2/3/4/5% to 10% but the attack speed increase has been reduced from 30% to 3/6/9/12/15%. The attack speed is scaled with the talent instead of the proc chance.

Developer Comment: This change is done for two reasons, the first reason is smoothing the benefit of this talent, spreading its damage out for overall the same benefit in PvE scenarios meanwhile reducing the burst granted by this talent for PvP scenarios. The second reason is that this talent was often not fully taken due to the benefit of the talent not scaling and instead the trigger chance, which this change intends to fix.

Endurance Training: Now also adds 6/12/18/24/30% of your Stamina to the Stamina of your pets too.

Improved Eyes of the Beast: Text changed to: “Increases the duration of your Eyes of the Beast by 30/60 sec. While channeling Eyes of the Beast, your pet deals 5/10% additional damage and gains 10/20% increased Focus regeneration.”

Developer Comment: There is no functional change, this is done to clarify the talent description.

Improved Aspect of the Monkey: Renamed to Improved Primal Aspects. Now requires 3 points instead of 5 points, dodge granted increased from 1/2/3/4/5% to 2/4/6%, now heals you for 2/4/6% of your melee damage while Aspect of the Wolf is active.

Developer Comment: This talent should now be more flexible to acquire with the reduced point requirement, additionally it now serves as sustain for Melee Hunters as hunters normally don’t need it due to being far away from their enemies and avoiding area of effect damage effects.

Thick Hide: Now also adds 12/24/36% of your Armor value to the Armor value of your pets.

New Talent: Elusiveness (3rd Row / 2 Points): Adds 20/40% of your resistances to the resistances of your pets and increases the Dodge chance of your pets by 2/4%.

Pathfinding: Removed and integrated into Bestial Swiftness.

Bestial Swiftness: Now also increases the speed bonus of your Aspect of the Cheetah and Aspect of the Pack by 6% and increases the attack speed of your pet by 3%.

Developer Comment: The talent Pathfinding got merged into the first capstone of the Beast Mastery tree to open room for Elusiveness and give some usefulness even when outdoor movement speed increase is inactive.

Improved Mend Pet: Now also increases the amount you heal your pet with Mend Pet by 20/40%.

New Talent: Bestial Precision (5th Row / 2 Points): Increases the physical hit chance of your pets by 4/8% and spell hit chance of your pets by 6/12%.

Developer Comment: Pets generally struggle with hitting their targets in raid environments due to lacking any source of hit chance gain, this talent aims to alleviate this issue, though we might revisit the values depending on how the talent performs. Do note that the spell hit chance also applies to the Intimidation talent and the Growl threat generation ability.

Intimidation: Now grants your pet 50% increased threat generation for 8 seconds instead of applying a flat amount of threat on application. This threat generation buff is applied even if the stun component is resisted.

Developer Comment: Intimidation has issues with being unreliable due to the entire ability (both the threat and stun components) depending on whether it successfully lands on its target or not. To alleviate this we’ve guaranteed that the pet gains a threat generation buff even if the stun component is resisted or the target is immune to it. In addition to this, moving this effect to a percentage also allows the talent’s threat generation to properly scale with the pet’s power.

Bestial Discipline: Text changed to: “Increases the Focus regeneration of your pets by 2/5 each tick.”

Developer Comment: There is no functional change, this is done to clarify the talent description.

Spirit Bond: Now grants your pet melee Attack Power equal to 12/25% of your ranged Attack Power and Spell Power equal to 7/15% of your ranged attack power. The interval between the heals reduced from 10 seconds to 5 seconds. Moved from the 5th row to the 6th row.

Developer Comment: This talent serves as the main scaling component of the specialization, granting a portion of your attack power to them as melee attack power and spellpower. In addition to this, the periodic healing portion of the talent has been buffed to trigger twice as often to make it more worthwhile.

Bestial Wrath: Damage increase reduced from 50% to 30%.

Developer Comment: In the light of Spirit Bond providing a consistent damage scaling component to your pet, we’re moved some of the power provided by this ability into the aforementioned talent while still ending up as a net gain in overall damage.

MARKSMANSHIP

There are no performance nor flavor issues with Marksmanship, but there are issues that impact other specializations. The main culprit is the talent tree, you get most of your power by the time you reach the 4th row and get Mortal Shots, with the second and last capstone talents being largely irrelevant in raid environments, the former being useful for player combat and the latter lacking any sort of scaling, making it fall off in power as you progress throughout the raiding tiers.

While the specialization does well even with these issues, this poses a problem now that we’re properly touching up the other specializations, where the lack of talent reliance for scaling would divert Marksmanship players to only take surface level talents and then go deeper into the other trees, making them even stronger than before while being only Marksmanship in definition.

For this reason we've added a few more powerful talents deeper below in the talent tree to incentivize going deeper into it, and allowing their final capstone talent to remain relevant in all stages of the endgame with a scaling addition.

Improved Hunter's Mark: Moved from the 2nd row to the 3rd row, now requires 3 points instead of 5 points.

Improved Serpent Sting: Renamed to Improved Stings, moved from the 4th row to the 2nd row, damage increase for Serpent Sting increased from 2/4/6/8/10% to 6/12/18/24/30%, now also increases the amount of mana drained by Viper Sting by 1/2/3/4/5%.

Developer Comment: This talent has seen a big lift in power due to the older version being quite underwhelming. Additionally it was raised up as it has a synergy with Survival’s Poison Nettle Lacing talent.

Improved Scorpid Sting: Now requires 2 points instead of 3 points, moved from the 5th row to the 3rd row and now reduces enemy attack speed by an additional 5/10% and reduces their damage done by an additional 1/2% instead of reducing Stamina by a percentage of Strength reduced.

Developer Comment: This change was done due to the Scorpid Sting rework, refer to the Baseline Changes section for more details. After taking this talent the attack speed reduction is increased to 15/20% and the physical damage reduction is increased to 3/4%.

New Talent: Steady Shot (3rd Row Capstone): A precise shot with a ranged weapon that strikes the target for 10 additional damage. (5% base mana cost, 1 second cast time, 8-35 yard range).

Developer Comment: Steady Shot works the exact same way as Trueshot currently does, but it has been moved to be the first capstone of the Marksmanship tree instead of Aimed Shot, which is now baseline.

Hawk Eye: Now requires 2 points instead of 3 points, moved from the 3rd row to the 4th row.

Improved Arcane Shot: Renamed to Swiftshot, now requires 3 points instead of 5 points and now reduces the cooldown of Aimed Shot in addition to Arcane Shot.

New Talent: Piercing Shots (5th Row / 2 Points): Your critical Aimed, Steady and Multi-Shots cause the target to bleed for 10/20% of the damage dealt over 8 sec. This bleed generates no threat.

Developer Comment: The damage over time applied by critical hits functions like Warrior’s Deep Wounds talent, but should be more effective in general due to this effect being limited to abilities that hit harder and not being triggered by auto-attacks that reset the more powerful version of the bleed, hence the damage percentage being lower than Deep Wounds.

New Talent: Improved Steady Shot (5th Row / 2 Points): Increases the damage of your Steady Shot by 13/25%.

New Talent: Endless Quiver (6th Row / 2 Points): Your Auto Shot, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot and Multi-Shot have a 3/6% chance to fire an extra normal ranged attack. This attack does not spend ammo.

Developer Comment: This effect can trigger from your auto attacks, Arcane Shot, Steady Shot and Multi-Shot and does not reset your auto-shot timer.

Trueshot Aura: Now has a scaling component in addition to the flat Attack Power, the flat Attack Power has been nerfed to compensate for this.

Rank 1 (Level 40): 50 Attack Power -> 30 Attack Power + 3% Attack Power

Rank 2 (Level 50): 75 Attack Power -> 40 Attack Power + 4% Attack Power

Rank 3 (Level 60): 100 Attack Power -> 55 Attack Power + 5% Attack Power

Developer Comment: This change allows Trueshot Aura to stay relevant as its recipients get better gear, keeping it a powerful utility buff. We’ve opted to keep part of the talent a flat attack power increase as making it entirely a percentage scaling would make it weaker for less geared players. As a note, the scaling is dependent on the recipient’s gear and not based on your Attack Power.

SURVIVAL

This specialization has seen the most changes out of all other Hunter specializations, as it lacked a proper identity that differentiates it from the other two. To alleviate this, we’ve given Survival a near complete makeover, branding it as a new Melee Hunter archetype, preferring to be up close with their pet and traps in the thick of the combat..

For this reason there are quite a few new talents and adjustments to others to support this. There have also been changes to Mongoose Bite and Wing Clip to support this, which can be found in the Baseline Changes section.
The player combat oriented builds that went into this tree should work the same way as they did before as the majority of these talents were untouched for this playstyle.

Superior Strikes: Removed and integrated into Rapid Strikes.

New Talent: Resourcefulness (1st Row / 5 Points): Reduces the Mana cost of all traps and melee abilities by 2/4/6/8/10%.

Deflection: Renamed to Swift Reflexes, now requires 2 points instead of 5 points but now grants 2% melee and ranged attack speed and 2% parry instead of 5% parry.

Savage Strikes: Reduced the critical strike chance increase from 10/20% to 3/6% and now affects all melee abilities instead of just Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite.

Developer Comment: This talent had to be tuned down considerably due to there being more viable weapon strikes and the increase being absurdly high, it should now be equal to similar talents that increase your critical chance by up to 5%.

Savage Strikes affect Raptor Strike, Mongoose Bite, Carve and Wing Clip.

Improved Wing Clip: Now requires 3 points instead of 5 points.

Clever Traps: Removed and integrated into Trap Mastery.

New Talent: Planning Ahead (3rd Row / 2 Points): The duration of your Frost trap effects and the damage of your Fire trap effects are increased by 13/25% if the traps are not triggered for the first 5 seconds after being placed.

Developer Comment: This talent rewards placing your traps ahead of time before you engage a creature. It might not make sense at a glance as you need to be out of combat to place a trap, but it becomes relevant with Feign Death trapping and the new Untamed Trapper capstone.

New Talent: Carve (3rd Row Keystone): A sweeping attack that strikes up to 5 enemies in an 10 yard cone in front of you for 60% weapon damage.
This ability shares a cooldown with Multi-Shot.
(6 second cooldown, 8% base mana cost, instant cast.)

Developer Comment: Carve is the main area attack of Survival Hunters, it works quite differently than other melee area attacks in the fact it checks a cone in front of you instead of chaining from a target or being an area around you, being more akin to Cone of Cold. As a note, Deterrence is still in this row as an extra defensive capstone in addition to Carve.

New Talent: Stinging Nettle Lacing (4th Row / 2 Points): Your Mongoose Bite and triggered Fire traps now apply your highest rank of Serpent Sting with 80/60% reduced duration.

Developer Comment: The duration of Serpent Sting applied is equal to 3/6 seconds of it, giving you two ticks of damage and allowing you to keep up your sting without having to go into range to apply it.

Explosive Trap applies the sting to all targets hit on activation, further boosting your area damage capabilities.

Killer Instinct: Now also increases your melee critical strike damage bonus by 7/14/20%.

Trap Mastery: Now requires 3 points instead of 2 points, also increases the duration of Frost trap effects and the damage of Fire trap effects by 10/20/30%.

Counterattack: Removed.
New Talent: Rapid Strikes (5th Row Keystone): Your Rapid Fire ability now also increases your melee attack speed by the same amount and the cooldown of your Raptor Strike and Mongoose Bite abilities is reduced by 1 sec.

Developer Comment: This talent integrates the old Superior Strikes talent, reducing the cooldown of the strikes from 6 seconds to 5 seconds. Additionally now you gain 40% melee attack speed from your Rapid Fire, giving Survival Hunters a proper damage cooldown.

New Talent: Vicious Bite (6th Row / 2 Points): Your Mongoose Bite now deals 15/30% additional weapon damage.
Developer Comment: The additional increase means that the Mongoose Bite damage is increased from 60% weapon damage to 75/90% weapon damage.

Developer Comment: The damage of Mongoose Bite had to be split between baseline and Vicious Bite to prevent ranged hunters from gaining too much close range burst especially for Player vs Player scenarios while keeping melee hunter abilities impactful if they go deep enough in the tree.

Lightning Reflexes: Agility bonus reduced from 3/6/9/12/15% to 2/4/6/8/10% and now also increases your melee attack power by 20/40/60/80/100% of your Agility.

Developer Comment: Normally Hunters gain only 1 Attack Power for every point of Agility, this talent allows them to scale akin to other melee damage specializations.

New Talent: Untamed Trapper (7th Row Capstone): Your Fire traps' damage is now increased by your melee Attack Power and allows you to use traps while in combat.

Developer Comment: The damage scaling values are the following:

Immolation Trap DoT: 1 extra tick damage for every 10 Attack Power

Explosive Trap Initial Damage: 1 extra damage for every 6.5 Attack Power

Explosive Trap DoT: 1 extra tick damage for every 30 Attack Power

Wyvern Sting: Removed.

UPDATES | Dated: October 21 2024

Wing Clip: Cooldown reduced from 6 seconds to 3 seconds.

Improved Wing Clip: Proc chance increased from 7/14/20% to 14/28/40%.

Piercing Shots: No longer generate threat to avoid breaking Feign Death with uncontrolled application.

UPDATES | Dated: November 1 2024

Swapped the talent tree locations of Hawk Eye and Improved Hunter's Mark, moving Hawk Eye to the 3rd row and Improved Hunter's Mark to the 4th row.

Post by **Dragunovi** » Sat Oct 12, 2024 6:25 pm

Mage is luckily one of those classes that does not struggle with viability, being a class that’s always been a staple for levelling and amongst groups for all types of content. Fire and Frost both have their spots and deal good damage, but their rotations are infamously bland compared to other classes, meanwhile Arcane has a lot of issues with its viability and identity, being a specialization locked to one single target and one area of effect ability. For this reason we’ve added a few things for Fire and Frost to add another layer to their rotations and have done a major rework on Arcane, making it a specialization fitting the nature of Arcane as a spell school that’s wild and uncontrollable.

BASELINE CHANGES

New Spell: Arcane Surge: Blast your target with overloaded mana, dealing X-Y Arcane damage. Only usable after one of your spells are fully or partially resisted. This spell cannot be fully or partially resisted.
(Flat mana cost, 8 second cooldown. Instant cast, 65% Spellpower Scaling)
This ability is learned at Level 32 with new ranks at Level 40, 48 and 56.

Rank 1 (Level 32): 85 Mana Cost, 202 - 244 Arcane Damage

Rank 2 (Level 40): 110 Mana Cost, 290 - 349 Arcane Damage

Rank 3 (Level 48): 140 Mana Cost, 398 - 474 Arcane Damage

Rank 4 (Level 56): 170 Mana Cost, 517 - 612 Arcane Damage

Increased Arcane Missile's spellpower scaling coefficient per missile for ranks above level 20 increased from 28.6% to 32.8%.

Developer Comment: This coefficient was initially 20% in Vanilla and was raised to 28.6% in our first batch of class changes, which still felt short on competing with the scaling values of Frostbolt and Fireball when their cast times were reduced by their respective "improved" talents.

This change might seem quite minor at a glance but equals to a 21% increase in spellpower scaling for one complete channel of Arcane Missiles and this scaling increase also scales multiplicatively with Arcane Rupture's damage and mana cost increase effect. With this increase Arcane Missiles should be equal to the scaling values of the aforementioned spells even when they're talented to cast faster.

Dampen Magic and Amplify Magic now only have one rank, cost 6% of your base mana and now grant the following:

Dampen Magic: 2% Reduced magic damage taken and 1% reduced healing taken.

Amplify Magic: 2% Increased healing taken and 1% increased magic damage taken.

The mana cost of Arcane Intellect have been reduced to the following:

Rank 1 (Level 1): 60 -> 50

Rank 2 (Level 14): 185 -> 100

Rank 3 (Level 28): 520 -> 240

Rank 4 (Level 42): 945 -> 340

Rank 5 (Level 56): 1510 -> 445

The mana cost of Arcane Brilliance have been reduced to the following:

Rank 1 (Level 56): 3400 -> 1200

ARCANE

Arcane has been a specialization that has been left in the dark both damage and flavorwise, only serving to be the specialization for utility spells such as conjuring, teleportation and portals with a side of actual damaging abilities. We plan to fix this with our rework and give Arcane a proper rotation and flavorful talents and abilities.

Wand Specialization: Now also increases your chance to hit with Wands by 5/10% and gives your wands a chance on hit to grant you an amount of mana equal to 150% of your level. This chance is increased with every point.

Magic Absorption: Now requires 3 points instead of 5 points, mana return reduced from 1/2/3/4/5% of your total mana to 1/2/3% of your total mana, cooldown increased from 1 second to 2 seconds but now triggers when one of your spells is partially or fully resisted instead of fully resisting a spell cast on you.

Arcane Concentration: Now has a 8 second cooldown.

Arcane Impact: Now affects all arcane spells.

Magic Attunement: Now requires 1 point instead of 2 points, effect increase is increased from 25/50% to 100% and now allows you to cast Amplify Magic and Dampen Magic on targets below level 63.

Developer Comment: These abilities have been reworked, refer to the Baseline Changes section for details.

New Talent: Arcane Rupture (3rd Row Keystone): Rupture your target with concentrated arcane force, dealing X-Y Arcane damage and increasing the damage and mana cost of your Arcane Missiles by 25% for 8 seconds.
(Flat mana cost, 2.5 second cast time, 15 seconds cooldown, 100% Spellpower Scaling)

Rank 1 (Level 20/Talent): 80 Mana cost, 111 - 125 Arcane Damage

Rank 2 (Level 28): 145 Mana cost, 189 - 209 Arcane Damage

Rank 3 (Level 36): 210 Mana cost, 334 - 366 Arcane Damage

Rank 4 (Level 44): 270 Mana cost, 416 - 475 Arcane Damage

Rank 5 (Level 52): 320 Mana cost, 556 - 605 Arcane Damage

Rank 6 (Level 60): 390 Mana cost, 703 - 766 Arcane Damage

Improved Mana Shield: Decreases the mana lost per point of damage taken when Mana Shield is active by 13/25% instead of 10/20%.

New Talent: Temporal Convergence (4th Row / 3 Points): Your Arcane Missiles have a 5/10/15% chance to reset the cooldown of your Arcane Rupture spell and cause it to refund its base mana cost on its next cast. This effect can only occur once every 15 sec.

Developer Comment: The buff that refunds the mana cost on the next cast lasts 12 seconds.

Arcane Meditation: Mana regeneration while casting increased from 5/10/15% to 7/14/20%, additionally this effect is now tripled while below 35% total mana.

Arcane Instability: Moved from the 6th row to the 5th row and now does the following instead: “Your successful damaging Arcane spells have a 8/16/25% chance to uncontrollably erupt, consuming 2% of your base mana to deal 25% more damage.”

New Talent: Accelerated Arcana (5th Row Keystone): Increases the casting speed of your Arcane spells by 6%. In addition, casting speed increase effects increase the cooldown recovery speed of your Arcane spells and the tick speed of your Arcane Missiles, reducing their duration.

Developer Comment: Arcane abilities include: Presence of Mind, Evocation, Arcane Power, Arcane Surge and Arcane Rupture.

Arcane Potency: Moved from the 6th row to the 5th row, now requires 2 points instead of 3 points and increases your critical strike damage bonus by 50/100% instead of 17/33/50%.

New Talent: Resonance Cascade (6th Row / 5 Points): Your successful damaging Arcane spells have a 4/8/12/16/20% chance to duplicate for 50% of the damage. This effect can trigger off of itself and duplicated Arcane Missiles are channeled in tandem with the original cast.

Developer Comment: Self trigger has a hard limit of 4 duplications, as the damage after that is too insignificant to calculate. Only one target is subject to duplication for Arcane Explosion, meaning no matter how many targets you hit, the original and duplicated explosions only roll their trigger chance once. Additionally these additional casts do not trigger on hit spell effects.

Arcane Power: Completely revamped, now does the following: “When activated, your casting speed is increased by 35% while draining 2% of your maximum mana every second and reducing all mana gain by 75%. Falling below 10% maximum mana causes you to violently combust from uncontrollable power, killing you instantly. Lasts 20 sec and cannot be cancelled.”

Brilliance Aura: Removed.

FIRE

Fire is one of the top performing specializations in raids, for this reason we do not think it requires a lot of number tuning. Mechanically though, Ignite has a few issues that we aim to resolve which we talk about in detail in Ignite’s section. Additionally, Fire’s rotation is dull, similarly to Frost, outside of upkeeping the Scorch debuff on the target which we plan to remedy with the addition of Hot Streak.

Ignite: Now deals its damage over 6 seconds instead of 4 seconds. The threat generated by ignite is now split amongst all Mages that have contributed to the Ignite damage.

Developer Comment: Ignite has issues with being a debuff that is contributed to by all the Fire Mages in a group but loading all the threat into the initial applying Mage. In addition to this, we’ve foreseen that Fire Mages might have difficulties with the uptime of Ignite due to Arcane now being a much more desirable specialization and in result reducing the amount of Fire Mages.
For this reason we’ve also increased the duration of Ignite, increasing the window of upkeep. We’re aware that this reduces the DPS of the effect, but we believe that this is compensated by the mages no longer requiring to stop their spells to avoid Ignite reaching critical threat values and possibly causing a wipe due to it.

Improved Fire Blast: Now also reduces the global cooldown of your Fire Blast by 0.17/0.34/0.5 seconds.

New Talent: Hot Streak (5th Row / 3 Points): Gives your Fireball and Fire Blast spell criticals a 33/66/100% chance to grant you the Hot Streak effect. The Hot Streak effect lowers the cast time of your next Pyroblast spell by 0.5 sec per stack, and lasts 30 sec. Stacks up to 3/6/9 times.

FROST

Frost performs pretty well for most parts of the game, but has one apparent problem: the rotation is entirely composed of a single ability in most raid encounters, which is Frostbolt. We don’t want to complicate rotations too much due to Vanilla being much simpler than its expansion counterparts, but we felt like Frost was too simple even for Vanilla standards. For this reason we’ve added new functionality to Ice Barrier to reward its upkeep, a new rotational ability called Icicles and the Flash Freeze talent that synergizes with Icicles and primarily activates against creatures due to its trigger condition.

Moved Piercing Ice to the 2nd row.

Developer Comment: This change was done for a smoother talent progression in the second and third rows of the tree.

Improved Blizzard: Slow amount reduced from 30/50/65% to 20/30/40%.

Shatter: Critical strike chance bonus reduced from 10/20/30/40/50% to 7/14/21/28/35%.

New Talent: Icicles (5th Row Keystone): You draw upon frost leylines, becoming frozen in place, and you launch icicles at the enemy, causing 101 Frost damage every second for 5 sec. Damage taken has a high chance to shatter your icy prison, dealing 30% of your base health as Frost damage to you. Cancelling the effect early, won't remove the root effect.
(Flat Mana cost, 30 Second Cooldown, 5 Second Channel, 30 Yard Range)
(Every Icicle has a 40% Spellpower scaling coefficient.)

Rank 1 (Level 30) - 200 Mana Cost, 101 Damage Per Icicle

Rank 2 (Level 40) - 265 Mana Cost, 147 Damage Per Icicle

Rank 3 (Level 50) - 330 Mana Cost, 213 Damage Per Icicle

Rank 4 (Level 60) - 400 Mana Cost, 272 Damage Per Icicle

Developer Comment: We’ve opted to give this new part of the Frost Mage rotation a downside and the inability to slow your targets as we want to avoid giving even more power to Frost Mages in Player vs Player scenarios as they’re already a strong contender in that field while giving another tool to your rotation for Player vs Enemy scenarios where these downsides are much less likely to matter. The freeze effect functions like any other root effect and can be broken with Blink and other effects.

New Talent: Flash Freeze (6th Row / 2 Points): If your target is immune to freeze effects whenever one is applied, you have a 50/100% chance to gain Flash Freeze instead, finishing the cooldown of your Icicles spell. Additionally, your next Icicles spell has 400% increased channel speed. Lasts 10 sec.
Developer Comment: This effect can be triggered by your Frostbite talent and Frost Nova, the former allowing this effect to naturally trigger from your Frostbolt rotation.

Ice Barrier: Now increases your Frost damage by 15% while active.

Developer Comment: This change allows Ice Barrier to be an overall damage gain if it lasts for the majority of its duration, rewarding proper timing of its activation such as being aware of area of effect damage while not majorly affecting Player vs Player scenarios due to it being much more likely to break.

Post by **Dragunovi** » Sat Oct 12, 2024 6:27 pm

The design of the Paladin class in Vanilla is often considered unfinished, with urban legends (which may or may not be true) suggesting that the lead designers specifically disliked the class. Just before release, both Crusader Strike and Holy Strike were removed. In raids, the main role of Paladins was to bless each member individually every 5 minutes, as Greater Blessings didn't yet exist. Blizzard recognized their mistake and how boring this playstyle was in Patch 1.9, with the opening of Ahn'Qiraj, when Greater Blessings were added. However, the base design of the class was still lacking, and Paladins in any role other than healer were considered very weak compared to other classes, making levelling incredibly dull.

Holy Strike, in its beta form, was restored to Turtle during the server's early days when the client was an unmodified 1.12 version. At the time, this seemed like a good idea, and while it addressed many Paladin issues, it was also quite unbalanced in scenarios with percentage damage increases or in player combat. Crusader Strike, added in the first batch of class changes, was also a restored beta ability, but it too suffered from fundamental issues, resulting in an unrewarding gameplay loop of spamming downranked spells to force chance on hit effects from weapons and armor.

We decided to redesign these abilities from the ground up, offering a new, unified, and improved gameplay experience for all specializations. The new strikes are now a core part of the rotation, regardless of your role. Additionally, the baseline Paladin receives numerous quality-of-life improvements, such as a baseline taunt, increased blessing duration, and the conversion of certain Blessings into Hand spells which do not remove your normal buff Blessings.

BASELINE CHANGES

Crusader Strike
Reworked to the following:
A strike that causes X% weapon damage plus an additional Y and grants you a stack of Zeal. Zeal stacks up to 3 times. Lasts 30 sec.

Zeal increases your attack and casting speed by 3%.

(Instant attack, 6 Second Cooldown which is shared with Holy Strike, the additional damage has a 33% Spell Power scaling coefficient, reduced for ranks below level 20.)
(This strike can trigger Judgement effects and refreshes its duration. Does not proc Seals.)

Damage and Mana Cost Values:

Rank 1 (Level 8): 80% Weapon Damage + 31 Damage, 20 Mana

Rank 2 (Level 20): 85% Weapon Damage + 47 Damage, 40 Mana

Rank 3 (Level 30): 90% Weapon Damage + 71 Damage, 70 Mana

Rank 4 (Level 40): 95% Weapon Damage + 107 Damage, 100 Mana

Rank 5 (Level 50): 100% Weapon Damage + 161 Damage, 120 Mana

Holy Strike
Reworked to the following:
Strike your target for X to Y Holy damage, restoring Z health and Z mana to you and your party.

(Instant attack, 6 Second Cooldown which is shared with Crusader Strike, damage has a 43% Spell Power scaling coefficient and the healing has a 5% healing power scaling coefficient, both reduced for ranks below level 20.)
(This strike can trigger Judgement effects and refreshes its duration. Does not proc Seals.)

Damage, Restoration and Mana Cost Values:

Rank 1 (Level 4): 20-22 Holy Damage, 5 Mana and Health restored, 5 Mana Cost

Rank 2 (Level 12): 41-45 Holy Damage, 12 Mana and Health restored, 12 Mana Cost

Rank 3 (Level 22 -> 20): 64-67 Holy Damage, 25 Mana and Health restored, 25 Mana Cost

Rank 4 (Level 34 -> 28): 94-101 Holy Damage, 38 Mana and Health restored, 38 Mana Cost

Rank 5 (Level 42 -> 36): 152-171 Holy Damage, 51 Mana and Health restored, 51 Mana Cost

Rank 6 (Level 48 -> 44): 193-214 Holy Damage, 64 Mana and Health restored, 64 Mana Cost

Rank 7 (Level 54 -> 52): 242-267 Holy Damage, 75 Mana and Health restored, 75 Mana Cost

Rank 8 (Level 58 -> 60): 293-325 Holy Damage, 90 Mana and Health restored, 90 Mana Cost

Developer Comment: Holy Strike, as mentioned above, has always been a problematic ability. It was double dipping from Vengeance and all other percentage increases. It was piercing armor. With how bursty pvp in vanilla is, this was a very feel bad ability for the person on the other side of the screen.

On the other hand, as an ability used against creatures it was quite underwhelming. There was little tactical decision when you should use it, and overall it was quite boring as a spell, being just a copy of heroic strike. It was *something* to press, but it lacked meaningful synergy with the rest of the kit or any talents.

As for Crusader Strike - its low damage made it very low impact ability on press, and it lacked the power and feeling core rotational ability should have. It also made paladins global cooldown capped and spammy, because if you had a free gcd, you would just press it, which was rather uninteresting.

That in itself was not the biggest problem of the ability. Its biggest issue was how it interacted with certain buffs provided by consumables and more so, shamans, such as flametongue and windfury. Playing paladin without these external buffs felt like playing an incomplete spec, and with them, paladin’s damage would get out of control quickly, making it a balance nightmare.

We believe new iterations of these abilities should provide paladin with a more balanced, tactical gameplay in combat, where you use strikes accordingly to your need, while also limiting their power in pvp combat.
Moreover, once you look at the talent trees, you can notice that every tree has a 5 pointer talent that enhances these abilities, making them more useful for the respective specs.

New Ability: Hand of Reckoning
Taunts the target to attack you, causing a high amount of threat.
(10 Second Cooldown, 10 Yard Range, 90 Mana Cost)
Learned at level 10.

Developer Comment: Experiment with Judgement of Justice being a taunt was a worthy one, but it missed the mark in a few places. While it gave paladins a taunt that basically couldn’t miss, it was also very clunky, as it was basically using up two global cooldowns and a lot of mana to get back to normal rotation after taunting. We have decided to give paladins a baseline taunt, working in the same way as druid and warrior one, with the added benefit of talenting into additional hit in protection tree to give Paladins back their old taunt niche.

Added a new rank for Flash of Light:
Heals a friendly target for 428 to 493.
(180 Mana Cost)
Learned at level 60.

Judgement of the Crusader: Reverted to its original behavior.

Developer Comment: Judgement of the Crusader was in a weird place after our first batch of class changes, when the addition of Crusader Strike made the ability almost useless. New version, added in a patch after between the batches of class changes, was poorly thought out and led to multiple issues with weapon chance on hit effects, where individual weapon effects had to be nerfed or changed just to accommodate the ability's existence. This proved to be too hard to design and balance around, that's why we are removing forced weapon chance on hit abilities from it, as cool as the ability is. To ease the minds of all concerned Discipline Priests and Retribution Paladins: it should be much easier to keep the holy damage increase on targets now, thanks to the strikes refreshing judgements.

Blessing of Freedom, Blessing of Sacrifice and Blessing of Protection are now Hand of Freedom, Hand of Sacrifice and Hand of Protection. They do not remove active blessings, but are exclusive to each other (for example, the target can’t have Hand of Freedom and Hand of Sacrifice from one Paladin at the same time.)

All ranks of Blessing of Might, Blessing of Wisdom, Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Salvation, Blessing of Light and Blessing of Sanctuary now have a 10 minute duration.

All ranks of Greater Blessing of Might, Greater Blessing of Wisdom, Greater Blessing of Kings, Greater Blessing of Salvation, Greater Blessing of Light and Greater Blessing of Sanctuary now have a 30 minute duration.

The first rank of Holy Strike is now learned at level 4 from class trainers instead of a quest from Stormwind or Ironforge.

Divine Shield now reduces all damage dealt by 50% instead of reducing attack speed by 100%.

Developer Comment: This change was done at a patch between the first and second batches of class changes but we deemed it important that it's listed in this changelog.

Seal of Wisdom
Mana gained from the chance on hit effect increased by 100%. Two new ranks have been added for level 18 and 28.

Developer Comment: This change will help with mana sustain of paladins without the need to rely on items that deal extra elemental damage when attacking (which was previously used to trigger Judgement of Wisdom additional times) or other gimmicks.

HOLY

Holy is considered to be the most complete paladin specialization, and in good hands can perform quite well. However, when it comes to raw throughput, it is the weakest healer overall, as it suffers from poor scaling. Its main strength, mana efficiency, is not as important on Turtle as there are better and more efficient ways of gaining mana than in 1.12.
Moreover, Holy Paladin lacks identity that would separate it from other healers. Holy Paladin right now is a priest in all but name, and our changes aim to address that, incentivizing holy paladin to increase their throughput and sustain by going into melee range while keeping the old playstyle at similar power level.

Removed: Improved Blessing of Wisdom
Talent has been removed and its effect has been added to a new talent in the first row of the Retribution talent tree that increases the potency of both Blessing of Might and Wisdom.

Developer Comment: We believe that this change will make it easier for raiding paladins to manage their blessings.

New Talent: Holy Judgement (Row 2 / 3 Ranks)
Casting Judgement reduces the cast time of your next Holy Light by 0.3/0.6/1 seconds.

Developer Comment: As said before, we want to incentivize Holy Paladins going into melee range. This talent should help with that, reducing the cast time of your most powerful healing spell.

Adjustment: Spiritual Focus
Now requires 2 points instead of 5 points.

Adjustment: Improved Seal of Righteousness
Damage increase reduced to 10% from 15%, but now affects total damage (after Spell Power) instead of base damage.

Developer Comment: We believe this talent will help both protection and spell retribution, allowing their main seal to scale into endgame.

Adjustment: Illumination
Mana restoration lowered from 20/40/60/80/100% to 12/24/36/48/60% of the base cost of the spell.

Developer Comment: Holy Paladins are incredibly mana efficient with their heals compared to other healers, which is problematic when it comes to balancing their healing capabilities. Theoretically they would excel in long fights with high healing requirements, but such fights simply don’t exist in vanilla.

That’s why we decided to power down their sustain a bit, while increasing their overall healing throughput and healing capabilities. In addition, buffed Seal of Wisdom should provide Holy Paladins with additional mana regeneration, so Holy Paladins willing to stop healing for a while and melee the boss have a way to restore their mana.

New Talent: Ironclad (Row 4 / 2 Ranks)
Increases your healing power by 1/2% of your Armor contribution from items.

Developer Comment: Paladins are infamous for wearing cloth dresses in vanilla. This change aims to give some additional healing power to plate pieces and improve the overall scaling of the class.

Rework: Holy Shock
Now acquired at row 5. Can no longer target enemies, but the amount of healing is increased and now has a chance to reset its own cooldown which starts at 5% and is increased by 1% for every 100 healing power you have.

Developer Comment: Holy Paladin’s damage right now can be quite bursty at times, thanks to Holy Shock. With the new talents allowing for it to reset, we felt like the ranged burst could become too dangerous. Overall Holy damage should be higher thanks to the new strikes, but will require you to remain in melee.
While we understand that the “shockadin” specialization is beloved by many, it does not fit our vision for the class.

Rework: Divine Favor
Now has 5 ranks and grants 6/12/18/24/30% critical chance to your Holy Shock passively instead of being an active ability.

Developer Comment: We felt like the niche of Divine Favor as an emergency critical spell was rather bland and uninteresting, and in most scenarios was just combined with a Holy Shock cast. We believe this talent will be a good way to increase Holy Shock potency passively, while old-style paladin builds can just skip it.

Adjustment: Holy Power
Now has 3 ranks granting 2/4/6% critical chance to Flash of Light and Holy Light, no longer affecting Holy Shock.

New Talent: Blessed Strikes (Row 6 / 5 Ranks)

Crusader Strike has a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to reset the cooldown of your Holy Shock. (after resetting holy shock’s cooldown that way, it will have global cooldown reduced by 1 second)
Holy Strike healing effect is increased by 30/60/90/120/150%.

Developer Comment: Both of these talents are meant to push Holy into melee range, either by improving their aoe healing capabilities with Holy Strike, or single target instant healing with Crusader Strike. We hope this will make Holy an engaging healer who has way more options in their arsenal, while playing into paladin melee healer fantasy.

New Capstone Talent: Daybreak (Row 7 / 1 Rank)

Critically healing an ally leaves Daybreak on them for 12 seconds. Daybreak increases healing taken from Flash of Light, Holy Light and Holy Shock by 20% and increases their maximum hit points by 5%.

Developer Comment: Holy Paladin by design was meant as a healer excelling in single target, tank healing. Unfortunately, current design does not promote it in any way, and people see Holy Paladins as a good single target healer mostly because they can’t do anything else. Their raw single target healing throughput is lower than other healing classes. We hope this talent will help solve this issue, promoting healing same targets by keeping the critical strike buff on them. Moreover this buff provides paladin synergy, making it more worthwhile to bring more Holy Paladins to the raid.

PROTECTION

Protection compared to 1.12 Vanilla already received a lot of changes on Turtle. While they somewhat helped the specialization to become viable, it was still behind bear and warrior tanks in raiding. While you could do a good amount of threat as a paladin, the setup required was not equal to the rewards.
Main issue was that Vengeance was almost always the optimal play for raid tanking and deep protection talents were lackluster, which led to people speccing retribution, which was against our intent.
With these changes we aim to make the sword and board Protection Paladin the optimal way to play a specialization and overall increase its survivability and make gameplay more enjoyable and less reliant on gimmicks.

Adjustment: Anticipation
Reduced down to 3 ranks, and now grants 7/14/20 Defense skill instead of the original 2/4/6/8/10.

Adjustment: Shield Specialisation
This talent's mana restoration on block can no longer occur more than once every 5 seconds instead of 1 second.

Developer Comment: Mana sustain of Protection Paladin against multiple creatures was already crazy good, and with the new changes it became even better. We decided to reduce power of this talent against multiple creatures to keep mana sustain on similar levels as in 1.17.1.

Adjustment: Improved Righteous Fury
Now increases the amount of threat generated by your Righteous Fury spell by 25/50/75% instead of 16/33/50%.

New Talent: Righteous Defense (Row 5 / 3 Ranks)
While Righteous Fury is active, your damage taken is reduced by 3/6/10%.

New Talent: Sacred Duty (Row 6 / 3 Ranks)
Increases your total Stamina by 2/4/6%.

Developer Comment: Both of these talents aim to increase Protection Paladin survivability, which was lacking. They require quite an investment of points, but we believe that for a hybrid class it is appropriate.

New Talent: Improved Hand of Reckoning (Row 4 / 2 Ranks)
Increases your chance to hit with Hand of Reckoning by 4/8%.

Developer Comment: We wanted to give Protection Paladins an easier time hitting with their taunt, as was the case with Judgement of Justice.

Adjustment: Holy Shield
Increased the block chance granted from 30% to 50%, increased the Spell Power scaling coefficient for Holy damage dealt when blocking from 5% to 33% and increased the threat modifier for the Holy damage dealt when blocking from 30% to 45%.

Developer Comment: Block chance increased to make it easier for Prot Palas to reach crush immunity. With combination with Righteous Strikes, paladins will need only a bit of block chance on their gear to reach this breakpoint.
In addition, we increased the threat and damage of this ability.

Rework: Reckoning
Now gives you a 5/10/15/20/25% chance to gain an extra attack after blocking an enemy's attack, replacing the old effect.

Developer Comment: Reckoning as it was was purely a joke ability which relied on getting critically struck just like old Redoubt. It was a failed design of Vanilla, as tanks actively don’t want to be critically struck because in many cases it leads to damage spikes and death. That’s why we changed it to promote blocking, which fits the Protection flavor much better.

New Talent: Righteous Strikes (Row 6 / 5 Ranks)
Zeal (Buff granted by Crusader Strike) increases your chance to block by 1/2/3/4/5% per stack.
Holy Strike causes 50% additional threat and its damage is increased by 10/20/30/40/50%.

New Capstone Talent: Bulwark of the Righteous (7th Row Capstone)
Requires Shields.
Bash the target with your shield, dealing X to Y Holy damage and reducing damage you take by 30% for 12 seconds.
(5 Minute Cooldown, 200 Mana Cost, 5 Yard Range, has a 43% Spell Power scaling coefficient for all ranks.)

Damage Values:

Rank 1 (Level 40/Talent): 274 - 301 Holy Damage

Rank 2 (Level 50): 417 - 451 Holy Damage

Rank 3 (Level 60): 556 - 601 Holy Damage

Developer Comment: The old capstone Ardent Defender was extremely unrewarding and fairly weak, so we decided to replace it with an active button. This ability can serve both as an emergency threat generation and a powerful defensive cooldown, which gives it flexibility and reinforces in-combat decision making, which was our goal.

RETRIBUTION

Retribution Paladin number wise is a competitive specialization that has its niche and multiple viable builds. However, we don’t like how it plays and its reliance on Windfury Totem and Flametongue Totem. We also think that items that grant extra elemental damage on attacks being almost required to keep up Vengeance and sustain mana are unhealthy in the long run. Lastly, this specialization suffers from threat issues and a weak capstone talent.
With this rework, we tried to handle all these concerns, and create a more unified design, but still with multiple viable build and gearing options.

Adjustment: Improved Blessing of Might > Improved Blessings
Now also affects Blessing of Wisdom, increasing its effect by 4/8/12/16/20% too.

Developer Comment: We wanted to unite these talents to make it easier to manage raids buffing by preventing conflict between differently talented paladin blessings

Adjustment: Heart of the Crusader
Reverted to original behavior:
Increases the melee attack power bonus of your Seal of the Crusader and the Holy damage increase of your Judgement of the Crusader by 5/10/15%.

Adjustment: Vindication
Now gives a chance to reduce the target's damage by 1/2/3% for 10 seconds instead of reducing the target's Strength and Agility.

Developer Comment: Old Vindication was straight up not working against non-player enemies, due to mobs not having Agility and Strength values. It was often misleading, so we replaced it with a similar effect that actually works.

Adjustment: Two-Handed Weapon Specialization
Now grants 1/2/3 weapon skill for two-handed Swords, Maces and Axes.

Removed: Sanctified Command

Developer Comment: Mana restoration part of this talent has been quite useless, and paladin can now provide this type of support with Holy Strike. However, we recognize the utility this talent possesses for player combat- we will closely monitor paladin matchups against Purge and make Seals undispellable if those matchups prove to be too oppressive.

Rework: Vengeance
Moved to Row 5, Physical and Holy damage bonus reduced from 3/6/9/12/15% to 1/2/3/4/5%, now reduces threat generation by 2/4/6/8/10%, duration increased from 8 seconds to 30 seconds and now stacks up to 3 times.

Developer Comment: 1.12.1 Vengeance is a cool concept, but flawed due to existence of items that add elemental damage to your attacks. We believe it will be healthier to remove some burst and explosiveness from Vengeance in favor for a stacking buff thats easier to keep up.

In addition, we added threat reduction to Vengeance to combat both Protection Paladins taking this talent and using a two handed weapon, and to help with threat issues of Retribution.

Adjustment: Seal and Judgement of Command
Seal of Command now has a small Spell Power modifier, and Judgement of Command now has a small Attack Power modifier.

New Talent: Crusading Strikes (Row 6 / 5 Ranks)
Crusader Strike deals an additional 3/6/9/12/15% damage and Zeal increases your attack and casting speed by an additional 2% per stack.
Holy Strike infuses you with Holy Might, increasing your Strength by 4/8/12/16/20% for 20 seconds.

Rework: Repentance
Now has an effect if the target is immune to crowd control and can be used on all creature types:

Puts the enemy target in a state of meditation, incapacitating them for up to 6 sec. Any damage caused will awaken the target.
If the target is immune to the effect, it repents for their sins, taking 160 Holy damage every time they attack or cast a harmful spell for 30 sec.
(The secondary new effect has a 12% Attack Power and 50% Spell Power scaling coefficient, this effect can only trigger once 0.5 seconds and generates no threat.)

Damage Values:

Rank 1 (Level 40/Talent): 80 Holy Damage

Rank 2 (Level 50): 120 Holy Damage

Rank 3 (Level 60): 160 Holy Damage

Developer Comment: Repentance is extremely underwhelming against creatures, but an important tool against players. We decided to keep it as a capstone and give it some additional functionality against bosses that fits flavor of Retribution very well.
Note: The damage component will never apply to players.

UPDATES | Dated: October 21 2024

Bulwark of the Righteous: CD increased from 3 minutes to 5 minutes, damage reduction reduced from 40% to 30%.

Sacred Duty: Removed.

UPDATES | Dated: November 1 2024

Crusader Strike's weapon damage reduced by 10% for all ranks.

Righteous Strikes' Holy Strike damage increase reduced to 5/10/15/20/25%.

Post by **Dragunovi** » Sat Oct 12, 2024 6:28 pm

Priest as a whole functions very well both as a healer and a damage dealer since the changes done with our first batch of class changes, though it's not without its issues.

First and foremost, Discipline was quite neglected in our first batch of changes, failing to give it tools that allows it to be functional and viable by itself instead of being just a secondary specialization you go into for a few tools.

Secondly, the Holy tree is quite independent of its talent tree to perform well as a healer, perhaps too independent. This allowed Holy to specialize deep into Discipline instead of its own tree, making it feel redundant for the most part. You can read more about these issues and our solutions to them in each specializations’ own sections.

BASELINE CHANGES

Inner Fire now grants spell damage instead of Attack Power.

Rank 1 (Level 12): 13 Spell Damage

Rank 2 (Level 20): 24 Spell Damage

Rank 3 (Level 30): 34 Spell Damage

Rank 4 (Level 40): 46 Spell Damage

Rank 5 (Level 50): 61 Spell Damage

Rank 6 (Level 60): 74 Spell Damage

The mana cost of Power Word: Fortitude have been reduced to the following:

Rank 1 (Level 1): 60 -> 50

Rank 2 (Level 12): 155 -> 100

Rank 3 (Level 24): 400 -> 160

Rank 4 (Level 36): 745 -> 240

Rank 5 (Level 48): 1170 -> 340

Rank 6 (Level 60): 1695 -> 445

The mana cost of Prayer of Fortitude have been reduced to the following:

Rank 1 (Level 48): 2600 -> 900

Rank 2 (Level 60): 3400 -> 1200

The mana cost of Divine Spirit have been reduced to the following:

Rank 1 (Level 30): 285 -> 160

Rank 2 (Level 40): 420 -> 240

Rank 3 (Level 50): 785 -> 340

Rank 4 (Level 60): 970 -> 445

The mana cost of Prayer of Spirit have been reduced to the following:

Rank 1 (Level 60): 1940 -> 900

The mana cost of Shadow Protection have been reduced to the following:

Rank 1 (Level 30): 250 -> 240

Rank 2 (Level 42): 450 -> 340

Rank 3 (Level 56): 650 -> 445

The mana cost of Prayer of Shadow Protection have been reduced to the following:

Rank 1 (Level 56): 1300 -> 900

The mana cost of Feedback have been reduced to the following:

Rank 2 (Level 30): 245 -> 175

Rank 3 (Level 40): 355 -> 190

Rank 4 (Level 50): 470 -> 205

Rank 5 (Level 60): 580 -> 220

Pain Spike no longer requires Shadowform to learn and can be cast outside Shadowform.

Pain Spike now has new ranks that are acquired at earlier levels. The current rank of Pain Spike has been converted into the first rank, so make sure to train the later ranks.

Rank 1 (Level 30): 80 Mana, 66 to 85 Shadow Damage

Rank 2 (Level 40): 140 Mana, 149 to 172 Shadow Damage

Rank 3 (Level 50): 185 Mana, 209 to 240 Shadow Damage

Rank 4 (Level 60): 265 Mana, 333 to 378 Shadow Damage

Power Word: Shield’s Spell Power scaling coefficient has been increased from 10% to 35%.
Note that this does not affect pre-level 20 ranks.

Mana Burn has been moved from the Discipline specialization to Shadow.

Developer Comment: This change allows Mana Burn to benefit from talents in the Shadow talent tree.

Fear Ward is now baseline, learned at level 20.
Dwarf Priests are getting a new racial ability due to Fear Ward becoming baseline.
The quest to acquire your level 20 Priest racial will be reset if you’re a Dwarf to get your new racial for this reason. The new racial is shown below:

Avatar. Turns your target into stone, increasing their armor by 25% and increasing all resistances by an amount equal to 150% of your level for 15 sec. (30 yard range, 1 Minute cooldown, 6% of your base mana as cost.)[

Elune's Grace has been removed.
Night Elf Priests will now be able to use Bows with the ability to auto shoot and learn the ability Searing Shot at level 20, the new racial is shown below:

Fire a searing arrow, dealing weapon damage plus X- Y Fire damage.

Rank 1 (Level 20): 14-18 Additional Fire Damage

Rank 2 (Level 32): 25-29 Additional Fire Damage

Rank 3 (Level 44): 37-42 Additional Fire Damage

Rank 4 (Level 58): 51-57 Additional Fire Damage

Rank 5 (Level 60/Book): 68-74 Additional Fire Damage

(5% Base mana, 10 Second Cooldown, 33% Spellpower scaling coefficient)
Rank 5 will be learned by using a book, we'll leave it up to you to discover the source of this rank.

Developer Comment: To reflect the origin of Night Elf priests in the Priestess of the Moon, we are giving them the ability to wield bows, just like Tyrande Whisperwind did in Warcraft 3. This is rooted in the lore of every priestess of Elune being a skilled huntress as well.

Lightwell has gotten a number of changes:

No longer removed on damage taken.

The Lightwell cannot be re-clicked while you have the heal over time effect already on you.

Lightwell’s renew heal over time effect now scales 17% with your healing power and benefits from talents that buff your healing amount such as Spiritual Healing and Swift Recovery.

A new first rank of Lightwell is now acquired at Level 30, with the current ranks being shifted up by one.

The base healing values for ranks above level 30 and Spell Power scaling for all ranks have been reduced by 15% for the following spells: Lesser Heal, Renew, Heal, Flash Heal, Prayer of Healing, Greater Heal, Desperate Prayer and Lightwell.

Developer Comment: This change has been done alongside a buff to Spiritual Healing, the introduction of Swift Recovery and updates to Lightwell making it an useful part of a healer’s toolkit. Most players have felt that the majority of the healing talents haven’t felt important enough for most healers which caused them to go deeper into Discipline instead of Holy. The healing output should be about the same as before if not higher when Holy is talented deeper.

DISCIPLINE

Discipline really lacks any sort of identity outside of a few spells such as Power Word: Shield and Power Infusion. Instead of treading the same path done by other expansions we’ve decided to steer this specialization into another way, reworking Discipline into a holy damage dealing support specialization.

The first part of this is the damage dealing capabilities. For this we’ll be properly tuning Smite and Holy Fire abilities to be reliable tools, add new talents to integrate Holy Fire into the rotation of this revamped specialization and a talent that allows you to properly benefit from the critical strike chance stat, differentiating from Shadow as a damage dealing specialization.

The second part is the support centric abilities that lean into the fantasy of both being disciplined and disciplining others, granting powerful boons at the cost of some health, which also synergizes with your shielding capabilities absorbing this damage.

Smite has seen a few buffs:

Increased base damage values by 10%.

Reduced the mana cost of the following ranks:
- Rank 3 (Level 14): 60 to 40
- Rank 4 (Level 22): 95 to 60
- Rank 5 (Level 30): 140 to 105
- Rank 6 (Level 38): 185 to 135
- Rank 7 (Level 46): 230 to 165
- Rank 8 (Level 54): 280 to 210
- Rank 9 (Level 60/Book): 300 to 240

Holy Fire has seen multiple buffs:

Increased initial cast Spell Power scaling coefficient from 85% to 100%. Note that this was increased from 60% in the first iteration of class changes.

Increased base damage values by 10%.

Developer Comment: These changes are meant to compensate the removal of the original Searing Light, scale the mana cost and Spell Power coefficients proportionally to its base cast time. We’ll be keeping a close eye on these abilities due to the numerous buffs and will make adjustments as needed.

Wand Specialization: Now requires 2 points instead of 5 points, also increases your chance to hit with Wands by 5/10% and now gives your wands a chance on hit to grant you an amount of mana equal to your level. This chance is increased with every point.

New Talent: Piercing Light (1st Row / 3 Points): Reduces the chance for enemies to resist your Holy and Discipline spells by 2/4/6%.

Mental Agility: Moved from the 4th row to the 1st row and now also reduces the mana cost of your offensive Holy and Discipline spells by 2/4/6/8/10%.

Spell Warding: Moved from Holy 2nd row to Discipline 2nd row and requires 3 points instead of 5 points.

Unbreakable Will: Moved from the 1st row to the 2nd row.

Improved Inner Fire: Moved from the 4th row to the 3rd row and now requires 2 points instead of 3 points.

Developer Comment: This talent also affects the newly added spell damage increase component of Inner Fire too.

Improved Power Word: Shield: Moved from the 2nd row to the 3rd row.

New Talent: Searing Light (4th Row / 3 Points): Your damaging Holy and Discipline spell criticals have a 33/66/100% chance to cause your next Smite spell to be instant cast and cost no mana. Lasts 10 sec.

Developer Comment: As a note, instant cast Smites still trigger your global cooldown, in a pure damage output sense this equals to a 0.5 second cast time reduction but the talent giving an instant cast gives Discipline movement flexibility in movement intensive boss fights and player combat.

New Talent: Purifying Flames (4th Row / 2 Points): Your Holy Fire has a 50/100% chance to increase your Holy damage by 12% for 8 sec.

Mental Strength: Now requires 3 points instead of 5 points, increases total intellect instead of mana, and now also increases your casting speed by 1/2/3%

New Talent: Enlighten (5th Row Keystone): Bring a party member under your tutelage. Whenever you cast a damaging Discipline or Holy spell, you have a 15% chance to burn them for 4% of their total health as Holy damage and increase your and their spell damage and healing by 10% for 8 sec. If this spell is used on yourself, the spell damage and healing bonus is increased to 15%. You can only have one party member under your tutelage at a time. Lasts 30 min.
(10% base mana, 1 minute cooldown, 30 yard range, Instant cast.)

New Talent: Resurgent Shield (5th Row Capstone): When your Power Word: Shield is broken, 25% of its base mana cost is refunded. Additionally, your damage done by Holy spells and effects will be increased by 6% of the shield's total absorption amount for 8 sec.
Developer Comment: This talent ties in the shield aspects of the specialization to the new holy damage dealing role that Discipline now has, rewarding them for successfully blocking damage with their shields.

Reflective Shields: Removed.

Force of Will: Now also increases the amount of damage absorbed by your Power Word: Shield by 4/8/12/16/20%.

New Talent: Chastise (7th Row Capstone): Chastise the target, causing X to Y Holy damage and disorienting enemies for up to 3 sec. Any damage caused will remove the effect. If the target is an ally, their attack and casting speed is increased by Z% for 6 sec., increased to 8 sec. if the damage critically strikes the ally.

Cannot be used on allies with less than 50% health and below Level X (Check Below).

(6% of base mana, 30 second cooldown. 65% Spell Power scaling, 30 yard range which is affected by Holy Reach. Instant cast.)

Damage Values, Haste Increase Amount and Level Limitations

Rank 1 (Level 40): 139-161 Damage, 10% Haste, Below Level 35

Rank 2 (Level 50): 209-241 Damage, 13% Haste, Below Level 45

Rank 3 (Level 60): 278-322 Damage, 15% Haste, Below Level 55

Power Infusion: Removed.

HOLY

Holy performs quite well in all types of content, but the majority of its talent tree tends to feel optional at times, causing Holy healers to specialize more into Discipline instead of their actual trees. We plan to nudge them in the other direction with a buff to the healing increasing talents while applying a baseline nerfs to their healing, meaning they can get the original healing power back by specializing deep into their tree. Additionally some of the talents were adjusted to also work with the revamped Discipline and its support damage abilities.

Healing Focus: Renamed to Holy Focus and affects all Holy spells instead of just healing spells.

Holy Specialization: Renamed to Divinity and affects Holy and Discipline spells.

Martyrdom: Moved from 2nd row Discipline to 2nd row Holy and renamed to “Blessed Concentration”.

Holy Reach: Moved from the 4th row to the 2nd row and now affects all offensive Holy and Discipline spells.

Holy Nova: Now causes normal threat.

Searing Light: Removed.

New Talent: Swift Recovery (4th Row / 2 Points / Connects to Improved Renew): The amount healed by your healing spells is increased by 3/6% if the target is affected by Renew.

Improved Healing: Now includes Prayer of Healing.

Spiritual Guidance: Moved up from the 5th row to the 4th row.

Improved Prayer of Healing: Removed.

Spirit of Redemption: Now increases your Spirit by 5% in addition to its current effect.

New Talent: Reservoir of Light (5th Row / 3 Points): Increases the amount of charges on your Lightwell by 1/3/5.

Spiritual Healing: Healing increase has been increased from 2/4/6/8/10% to 6/12/18/24/30%

Developer Comment: This change has been done to compensate for the baseline healing nerfs, which you can read more on the Baseline Changes section.

SHADOW

We’re quite happy with the current design of Shadow and its support capabilities as a Shadow damage dealer enhancer and mana battery via Vampiric Embrace, so there won’t be any major changes to the specialization aside from some number tuning, nerfs mainly aimed at player combat power and a talent move from Discipline.

Pain Spike’s Spell Power scaling coefficient has been reduced from 42.85% to 25% and its cooldown has been increased from 30 seconds to 40 seconds.

Blackout: Duration reduced from 3 seconds to 2 seconds.

Mind Flay: Spell Power coefficient increased from 45% to 75%.

Mind Blast’s Spell Power scaling coefficient has been increased from 42.85% to 60%.
Note that this does not affect pre-level 20 ranks.

Vampiric Embrace: Now has a 2 second cast time.

Developer Comment: While this change hardly matters for combat against creatures, it adds precious few seconds needed to setup for a player kill.

Vampiric Touch: Reduced the percentage healing increase from 5/10% to 2/5% and reduced the mana granted from 2/4% to 1/2% of any Shadow spell damage the priest deals.

Developer Comment: While we love how the supportive aspect of Shadow Priest functions, these changes are done to account for the power increase coming with the increase in Spell Power coefficients and the fact the original talent (Improved Vampiric Embrace) wasn’t adjusted in power for the new mana generation factor. While this nerf looks big, the damage increase is an direct improvement to the healing factor to Vampiric while the mana regeneration is less impacted than initially assumed.

Improved Mana Burn: Moved from the Discipline 4th row to Shadow 3rd row.

Holy Nova is now usable in Shadowform. Doing so will cause self-damage instead of self-healing.

UPDATES | Dated: October 21 2024

Power Word: Shield can be cast in Shadowform.

Developer Comment: This was already the case but the talent builder did not reflect this. This clears that up for good.

Enlighten: Can now trigger off of healing spells.

Proclaim Champion: Now also restores a small portion of damage taken by your Champion as Mana.

Champion's Resolve: Removed.

Revive Champion: Cooldown increased from 300 seconds to 45 minutes. Cast time reduced from 10.8 seconds to 5 seconds. Mana cost increased. Can now be used in combat.

Searing Shot: Mana cost increased from 5% to 10% of base mana, this is equal to 137 mana at max level.

Avatar: Cooldown increased from 1 minute to 5 minutes.

UPDATES | Dated: November 1 2024

The Human Priest racial, Feedback has seen its mana burn and damage effects doubled:

Rank 1 (Level 20): 18 -> 36

Rank 2 (Level 30): 35 -> 70

Rank 3 (Level 40): 54 -> 108

Rank 4 (Level 50): 77 -> 154

Rank 5 (Level 60): 105 -> 210

The Night Elf Priest racial Starshards has been reworked with significant damage buffs, doubled mana cost and has a new 30 second cooldown. We've also fixed an issue with the damage model, restoring the behavior of the channel causing 2 small ticks, 2 medium ticks, and 2 large ticks of damage. The values are as follows:

Rank 1 (Level 10): 100 Mana Cost, 24 / 24 / 36 / 36 / 48 / 48 Arcane Damage

Rank 2 (Level 18): 170 Mana Cost, 40 / 40 / 60 / 60 / 80 / 80 Arcane Damage

Rank 3 (Level 26): 280 Mana Cost, 70 / 70 / 105 / 105 / 140 / 140 Arcane Damage

Rank 4 (Level 34): 380 Mana Cost, 105 / 105 / 158 / 158 / 210 / 210 Arcane Damage

Rank 5 (Level 42): 490 Mana Cost, 145 / 145 / 218 / 218 / 290 / 290 Arcane Damage

Rank 6 (Level 50): 600 Mana Cost, 190 / 190 / 285 / 285 / 380 / 380 Arcane Damage

Rank 7 (Level 58): 700 Mana Cost, 240 / 240 / 360 / 360 / 480 / 480 Arcane Damage

Ranks 3-7 have a 0.4 Spell Damage scaling coefficient, while Rank 1 and 2 have 0.2 and 0.35 respectively.

Force of Will's spell damage boost now applies to Channels and DoT effects.

Reduced the mana cost reduction granted by Searing Light procs from 100% to 40%.

Increased the duration of Purifying Flames buff from 8 seconds to 10 seconds.

Post by **Dragunovi** » Sat Oct 12, 2024 6:29 pm

There weren't a lot of changes done for Rogues in our first batch of class changes. Similarly to Hunter, Rogue has a specialization that works fine aside from a few pain points, one that’s spot-on flavor but falls short gameplay-wise and one that lacks proper identity and tools especially in a raiding environment. These specializations being Combat, Assassination and Subtlety, in that order, we plan to tackle all these issues in their respective sections.

BASELINE CHANGES

Combo Points will no longer vanish upon switching targets, but instead reset when applying combo points on a new target.

Rogues can now wield One-Handed Axes.

Ghostly Strike is now baseline, learned at level 20.

Heightened Senses is now baseline being learned at level 30, but no longer reduces your chance to get hit by attacks. Its stealth detection increase is equal to the fully talented version of the Subtlety talent.

Sinister Strike’s Energy cost is reduced from 45 to 40.

Developer Comment: This change was done due to Combat’s Improved Sinister Strike talent going baseline.

New Poison: Corrosive Poison:
Each strike has a 30% chance of poisoning the enemy for X Physical damage over 12 sec. Stacks up to 5 times on a single target. 105 charges.

Rank 1 (Level 56): 100 Damage

Rank 2 (Level 60/Book): 128 Damage

The Handbook of Deadly Poison V now also teaches the rank 2 of Corrosive Poison.
Rogues that already know Deadly Poison V will be retroactively taught Corrosive Poison II.

Developer Comment: This poison deals slightly less damage than Deadly Poison, but its corrosive properties allows it to bypass conventional Nature and poison immunities, allowing poisons to be a dependable factor in the Rogue’s arsenal no matter the opponent.

New Ability: Deadly Throw
Finishing move that causes thrown weapon damage plus additional damage per combo point:

1 point : 132-228 damage

2 points: 216-312 damage

3 points: 300-396 damage

4 points: 384-480 damage

5 points: 468-564 damage

(35 Energy cost, 30 yard range, requires Thrown weapon.)

Developer Comment: This ability was introduced in the first batch of class changes but its addition replaced the original Surprise Attack which was not documented when the changelog was first released, so we’re including this addition for brevity sake, and the fact throwing weapons have seen a rework making this ability much better to use without permanently losing your weapon.

Sprint and Evasion’s cooldown reduced from 5 minutes to 4 minutes.

Developer Comment: This cooldown reduction was done due to Endurance talent from the Combat tree being removed, this way the majority of the talent’s benefit is preserved and granted to all Rogues regardless of their specialization while opening much needed room in the talent tree.

Wound Poison now reduces effectiveness of any healing by 5% per stack, stacking up to 5 times instead of reducing the target’s healing power attribute. All items that were crafted above the first rank are now obsolete and have been converted into the first rank.

Developer Comment: Changing how Wound Poison function allows it to counter more healing sources, primarily those that didn’t have any healing power scaling such as healing potions and effects that spend non-mana resources for healing such as Frenzied Regeneration. While Envenom is active this effect is increased by 25% like other poisons, allowing each stack to reduce healing by 6.25% instead of 5%.

Crippling Poison (Rank 2)’s slow amount has been reduced from 70% to 60%.

Developer Comment: This change has been done due to the poison being more debilitating that we would like, and that Envenom boost on this effect would be too effective if the slow amount was kept the same, ramping it up to 87.5% slow while active, where now its raised slightly above to its pre-nerf value at a 75% slow.

ASSASINATION

This specialization is in a pretty good place flavor-wise but struggled to find its place as a viable damage dealing specialization due to a few reasons:

The first big issue was that poisons were contending for their spot as a temporary weapon enchant with Windfury Totem, with the latter generally being better than poisons. This has now been solved with the totem becoming an aura instead of a weapon enchant.

The second issue is that poisons were not applicable in all content as some creatures have high resistances to the Nature spell school or an outright immunity to Nature or poisons, such as Elementals, Mechanical creatures, Dragons of Nightmare and Solnius. The addition of the Corrosive Poison should solve this issue at its core, you can read more about it in the Baseline Changes section.

The last issue was that its last cornerstone Vigor was especially niche, only seeing use in player combat and nowhere else. We plan to remedy this by introducing a new capstone, moving Vigor a row higher and giving it new additional functionality.

Remorseless Attacks: Duration increased from 20 seconds to 40 seconds.

Ruthlessness: Proc chance increased from 20/40/60% to 33/66/100%.

Improved Slice and Dice: Renamed to “Improved Blade Tactics” and the text has been changed to: “Increases the duration of your Slice and Dice and Flourish ability by 15/30/45%.”

Developer Comment: There is no functional change, this is done to clarify the talent description.

Throwing Weapon Specialization: Moved from Combat 5th row to Assassination 4th row. Now gives your Deadly Throw a 50/100% chance to interrupt the target for 3 sec.

Developer Comment: The interrupt was added during the first batch of class changes but wasn’t listed in the changelog.

Vile Poisons: Now requires 3 points instead of 5 points.

Improved Poisons: Now requires 3 points instead of 5 points.

Improved Kidney Shot: Removed and replaced with “Taste for Blood”.

New Talent: Taste For Blood (5th Row / 3 Points): Casting your Rupture ability grants you Taste for Blood, which increases your damage done by 3/6/10% for 6 sec + 2 sec per combo point spent.

Developer Comment: This talent grants Assassination a possible extra combo point dump they can use in the situations they have an overflow of combo points and still have both their Slice and Dice and Envenom still active. This effect will be applied no even if the target resists or is immune to the effect of Rupture.

New Talent: Efficient Poisons (5th Row / 3 Points): Reduces the chance your poisons will be resisted by 4/8/12% and gives your poison applications a 15/30/45% chance to not consume a charge.

Vigor: Moved up from the 7th row to the 6th row, now requires 2 points instead of 1 point and now gives a 50/100% chance to gain 5 Energy when applying a poison to your target. This effect can trigger only once every 8 sec.

Developer Comment: This revamp to Vigor gives it functionality outside its maximum Energy increase, giving you a reliable source of energy generation to compete with Adrenaline Rush in the long run.

New Talent: Envenom (7th Row Capstone): Finishing move that increases your poison application chance and effectiveness by 25%.

1 point : 12 seconds

2 points: 16 seconds

3 points: 20 seconds

4 points: 24 seconds

5 points: 28 seconds

(25 Energy cost)

Developer Comment: Effectiveness means that it increases damage for damage dealing poisons, slow amount for Crippling Poison and healing reduction for Wound Poison.

COMBAT

This specialization is the bread and butter of all Rogues in the original Vanilla and in the current iteration of class changes. We’re overall happy with the state of Combat, but that does not mean it doesn’t have its fair share of issues. Maces being behind other weapon types in performance due to lacking a power increasing weapon specialization talent, Improved Sinister Strike feeling like a mandatory talent and Combat’s rotation lacking variation. We aim to solve these issues alongside some changes to Blade Flurry aimed to grant other specializations the option of a cleave cooldown.

Improved Sinister Strike: Now baseline and therefore replaced by Swift Strikes, see Baseline Changes.

New Talent: Swift Strikes (1st Row / 2 Points): Increases your melee attack speed by 1/2%.

Improved Backstab: Now also gives your Backstab a 15/30/45% chance to award an additional combo point.

Setup: Moved from Subtlety 4th row to Combat 3rd row.

Blade Flurry: Moved from the 5th row to the 3rd row, but no longer grants 20% attack speed baseline.

Developer Comment: This change allows all specializations to have access to a cleave cooldown, which was not possible before due to Blade Flurry’s placement. As a note, Riposte is still in this talent row as an extra capstone and has not been removed.

Mace Specialization: Renamed to “Concussive Blows” and moved up from the 5th row to the 4th row. No longer grants weapon skill to Maces.

Developer Comment: The stun component has been made a separate talent due to Maces now being included in the Close Quarters Combat talent, and the random stuns sometimes interfering with some fights such as Battleguard Sartura.

Close Quarters Combat: Also includes Maces and now requires 2 points instead of 5 points, increasing your chance to get a critical strike with Daggers, Fist Weapons and Maces by 2/5%.

New Talent: Surprise Attack (5th Row Capstone): A surprise strike that deals 120% weapon damage. Only usable after the target dodges. Awards 1 combo point.
(10 Second cooldown, 10 Energy cost.)

Developer Comment: This attack is triggered on your next attack like Heroic Strike or Raptor Strike. Surprise Attack intends to make Combat feel more active than it was before, rewarding the Rogue for keeping their eyes peeled similarly to Warrior’s Overpower.

Sword Specialization: Renamed to Hack and Slash, also includes Axes and now now requires 2 points instead of 5 points, giving you a 2/5% chance to get an extra attack on the same target after dealing damage with your Sword or Axe.

New Talent: Blade Rush (5th Row / 2 Points): Reduces the cooldown of your Blade Flurry by 30/60 sec. Your Blade Flurry now increases your attack speed by 5/10% for the duration.

Weapon Expertise: Now gives weapon skill to Maces too.

Aggression: Damage buff increased from 2/4/6% to 3/6/10%, now also includes Riposte and Surprise Attack.

SUBTLETY

This specialization lacks both identity and falls off in performance in raiding environments due to not being able to use their openers after their stealth and vanish are spent. We’ve considered abilities that would solve this such as Shadow Dance but after lengthy talks the conclusion was that Rogue did not need another flavor of dealing damage, and we’ve gone ahead with quite a different approach: a specialization that focuses on supporting their allies.

Due to this new direction, Subtlety has seen a slew of new talents and changes to existing talents to lean into this direction, doing decent damage themselves but excelling when they’re boosting their allies with their toolkit.

Keep in mind that the majority of the damage talents were left intact, so this change should not harm any of the existing builds used for player combat that utilize this specialization’s talent tree.

Master of Deception: Merged into Camouflage.

Camouflage: Moved from the 2nd row to the 1st row, now also reduces the chance enemies have to detect you in Stealth mode.

Sleight of Hand: Removed.

Improved Ambush: Moved from the 3rd row to the 2nd row, now refunds 5/10/15 Energy if the Ambush does not critically strike.

Serrated Blades: Moved from the 4th row to the 2nd row. Now also increases the damage of your Garrote by 10/20/30% alongside Rupture.

Initiative: Proc chance increased from 25/50/75% to 33/66/100%.

Ghostly Strike: Now baseline, learned at level 20.

New Talent: Improved Ghostly Strike (3rd Row / 3 Points): Your Ghostly Strike has a 33/66/100% chance to increase your party members' chance to dodge by 3% for 7 sec.

Developer Comment: The dodge cannot be stacked via Preparation recast and multiple Rogues using it in the same party.

New Talent: Smoke Bomb (3rd Row Keystone): Creates a cloud of thick smoke in an 8 yard radius around you for 8 sec. All targets inside the smoke have a 20% reduced chance to be hit by attacks and spells for the duration.
(5 Minute cooldown, 35 Energy cost)

Hemorrhage: Moved from the 5th row to the 3rd row, now only has one rank, grants 2% increased physical damage dealt instead of a flat value, amount of charges increased from 30 to 50, energy cost increased from 35 to 45 and now subject to weapon normalization.

Developer Comment: These changes should make Hemorrhage a more reliable support tool that scales with gear as its now a percentage base increase. The energy cost increase compensated for with the Bloody Mess talent deeper into the tree.

New Talent: Irritating Agent (4th Row / 3 Points): Reduces all damage dealt of targets hit by your Blind by 2/4/6% for 8 sec. This effect is guaranteed to be applied even if the target is immune to Poisons or Blind is resisted or misses.

Developer Comment: The hit chance reduction is applied alongside the disorient effect itself, this is done to minimize its effects in PvP while being a formidable tool to use on powerful creatures and bosses that are immune to the disorient effect. The irritation effect is separate from the disorient effect that is a new Physical debuff that does the effect.

New Talent: Blinding Haze (4th Row / 3 Points): Targets hit by your Distract have their chance to hit reduced by 2/4/6% for 5 sec. This effect is guaranteed to be applied.

Developer Comment: This works similarly to the Irritating Agent talent, applying a separate Physical debuff with this effect.

Heightened Senses: Now baseline, learned at level 30.

New Talent: Dust of Disappearance (5th Row Keystone): Throw a pouch of vanishing powder at a friendly player, reducing their threat by 20% and reducing the chance for enemies to detect their presence for 5 sec.
When the effect is cancelled or expires their next damaging spell or ability will deal 15% more damage.
(2 Minute cooldown, 30 yard range, 25 Energy cost, costs 1 Flash Powder.)

New Talent: Bloody Mess (5th Row / 2 Points): Reduces the Energy cost of your Hemorrhage by 5/10 and increases the physical damage dealt bonus of your Hemorrhage by 50/100%

Deadliness: Removed.

New Talent: Honor Among Thieves (6th Row / 2 Points): Physical critical hits by party members within 20 yards grant you 2/5 Energy. This effect can only trigger once every 2 sec.

New Talent: Tricks of the Trade (6th Row / 5 Points): Your opening and finishing moves have a 4/8/12/16/20% chance per combo point to increase your party's chance to critically strike by 2% for 10 sec. Stacks up to 2 times.
Developer Comment: This effect cannot be stacked by separate rogues and just refreshes the duration.

Premeditation: Removed.

New Talent: Exploit Vulnerability (7th Row Capstone): A marking strike that deals 135% weapon damage and informs your party members of the target's vulnerabilities, increasing their damage dealt to the target by 15% for 6 sec. Awards 2 combo points.
(3 Minute cooldown, 40 Energy cost)

Developer Comment: This buff does not stack, reapplying it via Preparation or another Rogue using it will only refresh it.

UPDATES | Dated: October 21 2024

Improved Backstab: Now also gives your Backstab a 15/30/45% chance to award an additional combo point.

Close Quarters Combat: Now requires 2 points instead of 5 points, increasing your chance to get a critical strike with Daggers, Fist Weapons and Maces by 2/5%.

Hack and Slash: Now requires 2 points instead of 5 points, giving you a 2/5% chance to get an extra attack on the same target after dealing damage with your Sword or Axe.

UPDATES | Dated: November 1 2024

Throwing Weapon Specialization now has a 10/20% chance per combo point instead of a 50/100% chance to interrupt its target.

Surprise Attack can no longer be blocked, dodged or parried.

Post by **Dragunovi** » Sat Oct 12, 2024 6:30 pm

Shaman changes revolved around fleshing out the class’ melee damage and healing specializations, alongside tackling major issues within its ranged facet; through talent compression and overhaul, we sought to have their trees properly function as the framework on which the class’ diverse iterations could flourish. Rendering their capstones worthy of investment without stifling hybridization between the specializations.

BASELINE CHANGES

Many of the changes you’ll read about further below aim to introduce quality of life changes to the class, both during levelling and in its gameplay at level 60. We aim to introduce these changes while preserving its mechanical and thematic flavor as well as rendering its progression in the endgame accessible to players without losing sight of Shaman’s ability to perform competitively with different pieces of gear and a talent choices spanning multiple trees. Mana cost reductions; increases to the duration of class enchantments, elemental shields and totems; allowing shaman’s enhancement-focused toolkit, namely their shocks and elemental shields, to also scale with a portion of their attack power.

Windfury Totem went through major changes which go as follows:

The totem's effect is now an Aura, not an imbue. This proc only works for main-hand attacks, meaning that the totem works the way it did before this change but does not compete with temporary weapon enchants.

The totem now only has one rank.

The totem no longer grants an Attack Power increase on the extra attacks.

This effect now has an internal cooldown of 1.5 seconds instead of 1 second.

Shaman's imbues takes priority over the totem, meaning the totem does not affect the Shaman while any of their imbues is active.

Flametongue Totem went through a few changes which go as follows:

The effect is now an aura.

Now stacks with Windfury Totem.

No longer scales with Spell Power.

Shaman's imbues takes priority over the totem, meaning the totem does not affect the Shaman while any of their imbues is active.

The extra damage granted by this totem can no longer trigger on-hit effects.

Developer Comment: We are more than aware of the value Windfury Totem brings to the table and how close it is to the hearts of players. However, its Vanilla implementation was too big of a percentage of Shaman’s overall output, pushing their personal performance down while it also made other temporary weapon enchants like sharpening stones or rogue poisons irrelevant. That’s why we decided to redesign these two totems to instead apply their effect in an area similar to other totems like Grace of Air, and lower their power since they will no longer be mutually exclusive with other temporary weapon enchants.

Totemic Slam (New Tauren Shaman Racial): Slam your target with your ancestral totem, causing damage equal to 10% of your attack power and concusses your target, reducing their attack and casting speed by 25% for 8 sec.
(1.5 Minute cooldown, 5% base mana cost.)

Developer Comment: This new racial has been added as Spirit Link will now be the last capstone talent of the Restoration talent tree. This ability should retroactively replace your Spirit Link.

Weapon imbues such as Flametongue, Frostbrand and Rockbiter now last 1 hour instead of 5 minutes.

Spirit Wolves summoned by Feral Spirit no longer scale with your Attack Power.

New Ability: Earthshaker Slam: Slams your target with your shield, taunting it. Has no effect if the target is already attacking you.
(5 Yard Range, 10 Second Cooldown, 3% Base Mana cost, requires a Shield.)

Earth Shock now has a x1.5 increased threat modifier instead of a x2 modifier.

Earth Shield now has new ranks that can be acquired at lower levels. The current version is now the max rank. The spellcast pushback reduction is the same for all ranks, being 30%.

Rank 1 (Level 40): 200 Mana Cost, 85 Healing on Ht

Rank 2 (Level 48): 245 Mana Cost, 115 Healing on Hit

Rank 3 (Level 56): 300 Mana Cost, 150 Healing on Hit

Water Shield now has new ranks that can be acquired at lower levels. The current version is now the max rank.

Rank 1 (Level 26): 34 Mana Restoration

Rank 2 (Level 34): 55 Mana Restoration

Rank 3 (Level 42): 76 Mana Restoration

Rank 4 (Level 50): 102 Mana Restoration

Rank 5 (Level 58): 130 Mana Restoration

Chain Heal’s baseline cast time duration has been increased from 2.5 seconds to 3 seconds.

Developer Comment: This change aims to steer Restoration Shamans deeper into their respective talent tree, as the new Improved Chain Heal talent reduces the cast time of Chain Heal by 1 second when fully talented.

Totemic Recall will now be available at level 10 and will correctly refund the mana cost of every totem. Additionally, the refunded amount is now displayed in the combat log.

Windfury Weapon's cooldown between procs increased from 3 seconds to 6 seconds and it's proc chance has been reduced from 20% to 15%.

Developer Comment: Although this might seem like a harsh nerf to Windfury Weapon's effect, it proved to be a major outlier during testing sessions, where Enhancement performed as an overwhelmingly strong outlier in its individual performance by pulling ahead of every single dps spec in the game by several hundreds of damage per second.

Within the specialization's rotation it also completely outshined every other performance tool in Shaman's toolkit often making up for two thirds of the damage dealth by the spec, as if Enhancement now was solely the windfury specialization and every other spell existed alongside it.

As a team we did not want to revert or diminish the scaling on shock and shields spells in order to keep Shaman in check, mostly because our aim with these changes is to bring the feel of progression to a specialization which has been desperately asking for it since its inception and it did not seem right to have these new and enjoyable tools pay for the imbue's overwhelming and polarizing performance.

ELEMENTAL

We’re generally satisfied with where Elemental Shaman was after first class changes so it is only receiving minor improvements. Adjustments to this specialization aim to smooth out their random burst spikes both for player and creature combat, taking care of their threat issues, bump up their mana sustain and encourage the use of Flame Shock and Searing Totem into the rotation.

Elemental Devastation: Now increases your chance to hit with melee attacks and spells by 1/2/3% and your melee critical strikes increase your chance to hit with spells by additional 3/6/9% for 15 sec. Previous functionality removed.

Developer Comment: This hybrid talent was moved up to 2nd row and repurposed to address both Elemental and Enhancement spell hit problems. Borne of Nature’s Guidance, this is a prime example of the aforementioned talent compression, while maintaining a focus on the talent’s utility for Enhancement, we felt that originally having to spend a substantial amount of talent points to earn spell and melee hit was detrimental to a class with so much variety across its playstyles, forcing it to thinly spread across the board; we are confident this change allows for more efficient and smoother gameplay performance for both elemental and enhancement.

Elemental Focus: Mana cost reduction Increased from 40% to 60%,

Developer Comment: Clearcasting is a big part of shaman’s resource management and we felt that as a talent it was incapable of properly addressing the class’ mana issues across the board, prompting us to increase its effectiveness. We see Clearcasting as a good example of the class indirectly increasing its mana pool as it acquires better gear, and wanted to push this concept further through this change.

Call of Flame: Now also increases your Fire damage by 5/10/15%.

New Talent: Flame Guidance (5th Row Capstone): Increases the range of your Searing Totem and Flame Shock spells by 10 yards and casting your Flame Shock spell will now cause your Searing Totem to focus that target.

Elemental Fury has been replaced by Electrify: Your Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning spells charge you with electricity, increasing your Nature damage dealt by 2% and the critical strike damage bonus of your offensive spells by 20%. Lasts 20 sec. Stacks up to 5 times.

Developer Comment: Replaces Elemental Fury with a stacking Nature damage and critical damage increase. While the upfront critical damage bonus is momentarily lost at the start of an encounter, revised Elemental Mastery will carve its place into any Elemental shaman’s rotation by quickly bringing them up to old Elemental Fury critical damage levels while making it worth it to do so through the stacking nature damage bonus.

Elemental Mastery: Now also gives you 2 stacks of Electrify buff.

ENHANCEMENT

This specialization suffered from over-reliance on their strong supporting capabilities, weak personal performance and a lack of enjoyable rotation resulting in Enhancement shamans were either taken solely for their strong Windfury Totem or that Restoration shamans were forced to specialize deep into Enhancement to provide their teammates with Bloodlust. That’s why both of these powerful support tools were changed to open up the possibility for Shamans to focus more on their personal performance instead of just being a support for others. The Enhancement tank builds also got some new tools to help them properly fulfil a tank role in levelling and early end-game content.

Rank 7 of Earth Shock and Rank 4 of Frost Shock now scale with your Attack Power, increasing damage by an amount equal to 10% your Attack Power.

The base damage values have been reduced by 25 due to the base Attack Power values, meaning these ranks should do the same damage as before if you do not have anything increasing your Attack Power. The spell description of these ranks now indicate that the spell benefits from Attack Power.

Rank 5 and 6 of Flame Shock now also scale with your Attack Power, increasing initial damage by an amount equal to 6% of your Attack Power and each tick of damage over time damage by an amount equal to 1.5% of your Attack Power, equaling to 6% with four ticks of damage.

The base initial damage has been reduced by 16 and the base damage of each damage over time tick has been reduced by 4, meaning these ranks should do the same damage as before if you do not have anything increasing your Attack Power. The spell description of these ranks now indicate that the spell benefits from Attack Power.

Fire Shock, Earth Shock and Frost Shock now enable your auto-attacks.

Rockbiter Weapon now increases all threat you generate by 30% instead of generating a flat amount of extra threat every attack.

Developer Comment: The two changes above allows both damage dealing Enhancement Shamans to include this spell in the rotation, while not diminishing their tanking potential when needed.

Ancestral Knowledge: Now increases all of your base stats by 2/4/6/8/10% instead of increasing your maximum mana.

Developer Comment: The stats granted by this talent do not scale with any of your gear as they’re only your base stats.

Shield Specialization: The amount of damage blocked is increased from 5/10/15/20/25% to 6/12/18/24/30% to be in line with similar talents.

Guardian Totems: Merged into Enhancing Totems.

New Talent: Totemic Alignment (2nd Row / 2 Points): 30/60% of the threat generated by your totems is transferred to you.

Developer Comment: This threat is further increased by all threat increasing factors such as the Rockbiter Weapon rework.

Improved Lightning Shield has been replaced by Stable Shields: Increases the number of charges of your shield spells by 2/4/6 but increases the cooldown between activations by 1 sec.

New Talent: Lightning Strike (3rd Row Capstone): Instantly strikes your target, causing 60% (Physical) weapon damage and 20% weapon damage as Nature damage. This strike also triggers an empowered version of your active shield, consuming 1 charge.
(10 second cooldown, 8% of base mana cost.)

Empowered means that shields expended by Lightning Strike benefit from your Attack Power, the amount of scaling go as follows:

Lightning Shield: 4 Attack Power for 1 extra damage.

Water Shield: 20 Attack Power for 1 extra Mana.

Earth Shield: 15 Attack Power for 1 extra Health.

Developer Comment: With these two talents we set out to tackle two of Enhancement’s issues, namely its inability to interact with its elemental shields in group content and the lack of another skill capable of taking advantage of the specialization’s melee-oriented stat growth. With both of these talents combined we are confident Shamans can now take full control of their elemental shields while being rewarded from their creative and effective utilization as both a damage tool and resource management tool; all the while having a second way of expressing their strength as a melee specialization.

New Talent: Calming Winds (3rd Row / 3 Points): Reduces threat generated by your physical attacks, weapon imbue effects and your Lightning Strike and Storm Strike abilities by 5/10/15%.

Ancestral Guardian: Now requires 3 points instead of 5 points, now grants 15% increased armor value from items instead of 10% and chance to dodge increased from 5% to 6%.

Spirit Armor: Now requires 2 points instead of 3 points.

Enhancing Totems: Moved from the 3rd row to the 5th row and now does the following: “Increases the effect of your Strength of Earth and Grace of Air Totems by 8/15% and reduces the cooldown of your Grounding Totem by 1/2 sec. Your Stoneskin Totem's damage reduction is increased by 15/30% and additionally it increases block amount by 15/30%.”.

Stormstrike: Now only has one rank, its cooldown is reduced from 12 to 8 seconds, mana cost is reduced from 12% to 7% base mana and now grants a buff that increases the damage of your next 2 sources of Nature damage you deal to be increased by 20% instead of applying a magic debuff that increases the damage of the next 2 sources of Nature damage the target takes by 20%. Additionally, you now need a weapon equipped to use this ability.

Developer Comment: This change to the Nature damage functionality allows Enhancement to not lose their damage potential to other classes’ abilities and Nature damage dealt by weaker effects such as item effects.

Elemental Weapons now does the following: “Imbuing your weapon gives you a special benefit based on the imbue.

Flametongue: Increases the damage done by your Fire Totems and spells by 5/10/15%.

Rockbiter: Reduces your damage taken by 4/7/10%.

Frostbrand: Increases the chance to proc the effect by 8/16/25% and becomes guaranteed to critically hit if the target is afflicted with Frost Shock.

Windfury: If one of the bonus attacks of your Windfury Weapon doesn't land, your attack speed is increased by 10/20/30% for your next strike.

Developer Comment: Through this talent we had the opportunity to work on the role of each of the Shaman’s imbues and make them focus on their niches more. Flametongue and Frostbrand Weapon imbues have been rendered capable of interacting with their corresponding shock, slotting respectively into a sustained or burst melee spellcaster capable of fighting from both afar and up-close.

Rockbiter Weapon allows the Enhancement Shaman builds that specialize into taking blows for their allies to perform this task easier by granting them increased survivability for all kinds of situations.

Windfury Weapon is left untouched as it falls in line with our concept of it acting as the imbue of choice for a pure melee damage dealing Shaman; while turning up the dial on this imbue would’ve been coherent with the changes applied to the others, we decided to instead have Windfury become more internally consistent by rendering it an inescapable menace for anyone on the receiving end of its effect, reducing the lows of missing a Windfury proc while avoiding rendering its power level polarizing when confronted with the other class enchantments.

Weapon Mastery: Now affects melee skills too.

Developer Comment: This change allows this 6th row talent to feel much more worthwhile, buffing the damage of Stormstrike and Lightning Strike.

Bloodlust: Now only has one rank that grants 15% melee and casting speed, can only be cast on yourself, duration increased from 20 seconds to 30 seconds, and while under its effect, your melee critical hits increase melee, ranged, and spell casting speed of all party members within 30 yards by 5% for 5 sec.

Developer Comment: Following the focus on personal contribution of the Shaman, Bloodlust was reworked to be a buff for the shaman first and foremost, while the party support component was reworked to depend directly on the shaman’s aforementioned personal contribution as well as its gearing progression; magnifying Shaman’s individual performance while toning down their reliance on buffing others to indirectly contribute to group performance.

RESTORATION

We are satisfied with Restoration’s identity as an effective AOE healer and tank healer, with the power level of the spec being, to us, adequate; we’re of the opinion the tree in Class Changes 1 has nothing of value beyond nature’s swiftness and have found Mana Tide Totem was lacking the strength that is reserved to a tree’s capstone feature. Taking this opportunity for an update to restoration’s tree, we have decided to push for Chain Heal as restoration shaman’s identity and have tailored our changes around making the tree speak to it without leaving Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave behind; with this new tree we think we’ve struck the balance between the two souls of shaman’s healing kit, its slow-cast high value AOE healing and their slow-cast high output single target healing.

Tidal Focus: Now also reduces the mana cost of your totems by 5/10/15/20/25%.

Totemic Focus: Merged into Tidal Focus.

Ancestral Healing: Moved from the 3rd row to the 2nd row.

Tidal Mastery: Moved from the 4th row to the 2nd row.

Nature's Guidance: Merged into the revamped Elemental Devastation.

Healing Focus: Now requires 2 points instead of 5 points.

Nature's Grace: Now reduces threat generated by all Nature spells instead of just healing spells.

Restorative Totems: No longer increases the effect of your Mana Spring Totem and instead reduces its mana cost by 10/20/30/40/50%.

Developer Comment: This mana cost reduction stacks with the Tidal Focus talent’s mana cost reduction.

New Talent: Improved Water Shield (4th Row / 3 Points): Allows 2/4/6% of your Mana regeneration to continue while casting. This is increased by 1/2/3% for each of your Water Shield charges.

New Talent: Undertow (5th Row / 2 Points): Your Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave spells have a 25/50% chance to restore a charge of your active Water Shield. When at maximum charges, this effect consumes a charge instead.

Developer Comment: Our aim with Undertow and Improved Water Shield is to encourage the use of Healing Wave and Lesser Healing Wave by bringing its efficiency up to speed with that of other healers, a department in which the class is severely lacking. These talents are to function as the framework on which Shaman’s single target healing is rendered sustainable when used properly instead of restraint.

Healing Way: Moved from the 5th row to the 3rd row, now has a 11/22/33% chance of triggering from Chain Heal and now also increases the effect of subsequent Chain Heals.

New Talent: Tidal Surge (5th Row / 2 Points): When you heal a target affected by your Healing Way effect gain a stack of Tidal Surge. Tidal Surge gives you a 15/30% chance for your next healing spell to refund 10% of the base mana cost. Stacks up to 3 times and stacks are consumed when the effect is triggered.

Developer Comment: One of our marks was to have this new Restoration tree embody both sides of shaman’s healing; with Healing Way’s newfound ability to interact with Chain Heal we want our shamans to take full advantage of the options offered by their toolkit, while expressing their expertise through an apt and proper use of both it and the Healing Waves.

Tidal Surge is the the other pole behind Restoration’s new mana-efficient ecosystem, we felt the class was too heavily punished for precasting due to the risk of causing high heavy amounts of overhealing, these two talents want to ease players into the idea of pre-casting and using their healing spells much more freely, by rewarding them for keeping a steady supply of healing throughout a fight.

Purification: Removed.

New Talent: Improved Chain Heal (6th Row / 5 Points): Reduces the cast time of your Chain Heal spell by 0.2/0.4/0.6/.8/1 sec.

Developer Comment: This last talent is the cherry on top of Restoration’s identity as an multi-target healing and its foundation moving forward. Know that this talent, specifically, is introduced in parallel with the removal of Stormcaller’s 5 piece set bonus, with the philosophy that items should add on top of a class’ strengths and not be the entire foundation of them.

Mana Tide Totem: Removed.

New Talent: Spirit Link (7th Row Capstone): You link your target ally and their two closest allies within 15 yards together. When linked targets take damage, 30% is distributed among the other linked allies. Lasts 30 sec.
(6 minute cooldown. 15 yard range.)

Developer Comment: This spell has been on our radar for a while and its popularity is felt through the community, when looking at its performance it had the power level akin to that of a capstone and given its popularity we opted to make it so. Restoration Shaman now has a seat at the forefront of damage prevention and a tool synergizing with its area healing gameplay which can be used both to reduce incoming damage in preparation of . In stark contrast with mana-tide totem we are fairly confident this will push enterprising Restoration Shamans to invest into the tree and take full advantage of how it expands upon the specialization's gameplay.

UPDATES | Dated: October 21 2024

Lightning Shield: Now guaranteed to land, this also affects the empowered version triggered by Lightning Strike.

UPDATES | Dated: November 1 2024

Reduced Windfury Weapon's internal cooldown from 6 seconds to 0.5 seconds and its proc chance has been increased from 15% to 20%.

Increased Stormstrike mana cost from 7% to 12% base mana and Lightning Strike mana cost from 8% to 15% base mana.

Reduced Shaman's Flurry attack speed increase from 10/15/20/25/30% to 7/9/11/13/15%.

Stormstrike and Lightning Strike can no longer trigger chance on hit effects such as Windfury.

Flame Guidance now increases your Fire totems' critical strike modifier by 100% to make up for that being removed when Elemental Fury was replaced by Electrify.

Post by **Dragunovi** » Sat Oct 12, 2024 6:31 pm

Warlocks did not receive any major changes in the first wave of class changes and continue to lack a proper identity between their 3 specializations. While you certainly had an Affliction Warlock with more potent dots, tanky Soul Link Warlock for player combat or the most favorite Demonic Sacrifice/Ruin Warlock, they all were just a Shadow Bolt turret with barely any differences in gameplay. New changes will focus on enabling new spell rotations that better reinforce the fantasy of playing each of the specializations.

BASELINE CHANGES

Soul Shards will now stack up to 3 instead of 1.

Soul Bags are getting a passive effect similar to Hunter Quivers and Ammo Pouches. The effect is "Your spells have X% chance to not consume a reagent." with a chance percentage ranging from 5% to 25% increasing with the size of the bag.

Infernal Stone’s price is reduced to 10 Silver and Demonic Figurine price to 20 Silver. In addition, both will be able to be placed in Soul Bags and benefit from the new Soul Bag effects.

Drain Soul has seen a rework and now does the following: “Drains the soul of the target, causing X Shadow damage over 6 sec. This damage is dealt slowly at first, and builds up as the drain reaches its full duration. If the target dies while being drained, and yields experience or honor, the caster gains a Soul Shard. Soul Shards are required for other spells.”

Damage Values:

Rank 1 (Level 10): 110

Rank 2 (Level 24): 280

Rank 3 (Level 38): 460

Rank 4 (Level 52): 760

Rank 5 (Level 60) (New Rank): 950

(Every tick of damage has a 16.67% Spell Power scaling coefficient.)

Mana Cost:

Rank 1 (Level 10): 55 -> 90

Rank 2 (Level 24): 125 -> 235

Rank 3 (Level 38): 210 -> 405

Rank 4 (Level 52): 290 -> 540

Rank 5 (Level 60) (New Rank): 655

Soul Fire now has two new ranks acquired at earlier levels and slightly shifted the level requirements of the current Soul Fire ranks. With this change the current ranks of Soul Fire have become the lower level versions, so make sure to train your higher ranks.

Rank 1 (Level 30), 175 Mana Cost, 453 - 571 Fire Damage

Rank 2 (Level 38): 260 Mana Cost, 544 - 685 Fire Damage

Rank 3 (Level 48 -> 46): 305 Mana Cost, 623 - 784 Fire Damage

Rank 4 (Level 56 -> 54): 335 Mana Cost, 703 - 883 Fire Damage

Soul Fire now scales more with Spell Power, gaining 125% of your Spell Power as damage instead of 100%. Due to this spell now having scaling above 100%, its description was updated to specify that it benefits greatly from spell damage.

Soul Fire’s cooldown has been reduced from 1 minute to 30 seconds.

Searing Pain no longer has an increased threat generation component.

Developer Comment: This threat removal is compensated by the new Wrathstone.

Curse of Weakness now only has one rank and now reduces the attack speed of your target by 15% instead of a flat damage reduction.

Corruption’s cast time has been reduced from 2 seconds to 1.5 seconds.

Baseline Demon Changes: Going forward, demons will not be able to benefit from player buffs and consumables. Allowing buffs on demons meant that you were actively discouraged from using enslave, greater demons or swapping to other common demons because of the downside of losing all the buffs and consumes you (and your raid) put on your demon. This also made greater demons comparably weaker because they did not have all these buffs when summoned mid combat. For warlock specs that actively focus on their demon, this will be compensated by the Demonology tree buffs.

Greater Demons (Infernal, Felguard, Doomguard): These flavourful spells that are meant to allow you to summon powerful demons were severely underpowered and/or clunky to use before and did not fit their intended fantasy. That’s why we decided to rework them and address many pain points of using these spells, while also applying numbers balancing. These greater demons will no longer be a valid target for Enslave Demon and will be immediately under the control of the warlock when summoned, will have set duration for how long you can control them, and after the time is up, they will turn on their master (without ensuing chaos for your whole party). Usefulness and power of these greater demons will be further enhanced in the deep Demonology tree.

Demon Gate: renamed from Demon Portal, 30 min cd, 4 sec cast time, no longer is ritual, but instead drops down a demon gate object that spawns the Felguard after anothe 6 sec, 1 min duration.

Inferno: cooldown reduced from 20 min to 10 min, cast time reduced from 2 sec to 1.5 sec, 30 sec duration.

Ritual of Doom: lowered required players for the ritual from 4 to 2, no longer randomly kills one of the participants, 1 min duration

Avoidance area of effect damage reduction has been increased from 50% to 80% and it will also effect your greater and enslaved demons.

New and Reworked Conjured Stones (Felstone, Firestone, Wrathstone and Spellstone): The original Firestone and Spellstone, while flavourful, were really inconvenient to use since they replaced your off-hand. These new and reworked stones will serve as a new baseline personal buff for Warlocks to use, with Demonology further improving them. All of these stones will only have 1 rank, will give a 30 minute buff on use, are mutually exclusive and not usable in combat.

Stone Effects:

Firestone (Level 22):, Increases the critical strike chance of your Fire spells by 2% and your main hand and wand attacks have a 40% chance to deal 15 to 20 additional Fire damage on hit. This damage is increased by an amount equal to your level.

Felstone (Level 32): 3% of damage dealt is returned as healing. Additionally, Health restored this way will also heal your active demon.

Wrathstone (Level 42): Increases the threat generated by your Fire spells by 40% and reduces self inflicted Fire damage from Hellfire spell by 30%.

Spellstone (Level 52): Reduces threat generated by your spells by 10%.

Healthstones will now all share the same cooldown, no matter their rank or number of talents spent in the Master Conjuror talent. In addition, Soulwell created Healthstones will also properly benefit from the Master Conjuror talent.

Demon Skin and Demon Armor are getting merged into one spell. Existing Demon Skin ranks will be renamed to Demon Armor and existing demon armor ranks will be bumped up by two. These skills were always basically the same and this distinction caused unnecessary confusion.

AFFLICTION

Affliction at its core is decent, but lacks some identity similarly to Demonology lacking variations in its rotation. It also suffers from issues such as not being able to use Curse of Agony due to requiring to use raid support curses, such as Curse of Elements and Curse of Shadow and overall suffering from the 16 debuff limit that was prevalent in original Vanilla. This issue was fixed at an earlier version of Turtle but we deemed it worthy of mentioning as it was the main blockade that stopped Affliction from properly functioning as a damage over time oriented specialization.

We’re fixing these issues with the revamp to Drain Soul acting as a proper damage dealing ability with Soul Siphon rewarding your damage over time effect upkeep by buffing your Drain Soul damage on the target in addition to the new Dark Harvest capstone being added to your rotation, while the curse issue is solved with the new Malediction capstone allowing you to use Curse of Agony with other support curses.

Improved Corruption: Now reduces the casting time of your Corruption spell by 0.3/0.6/0.9/1.2/1.5 seconds instead of 0.4/0.8/1.2/1.6/2 seconds.

Developer Comment: This change was made to accommodate for the baseline cast time reduction, Corruption still becomes an instant cast spell when this talent is fully talented.

Improved Curse of Weakness: Removed.
Improved Drain Soul: Removed.

New Talent: Improved Debilitating Curses (2nd Row / 2 Points): Increases the attack speed reduction of your Curse of Weakness by 3/5% and increases the speed reduction of your Curse of Exhaustion by 10/20%.

Developer Comment: Refer to Baseline Changes section for more details on Curse of Weakness’ rework.

New Talent: Resilient Shadows (2nd Row / 3 Points): Reduces the duration of any Interrupt effects used against your Shadow spells by 10/20/30%.

Improved Drains: now increases the amount of Mana drained by your Drain Mana by 5/10% instead of dealing damage equal to 15/30% of the mana drained.

Improved Curse of Agony: now is a requirement for getting new talent Malediction and the damage bonus increased from 2/4/6% to 3/6/10%.

Fel Concentration now also affects Dark Harvest.

Curse of Exhaustion: Moved from the 5th row to the 3rd row and the slow amount increased from 10% to 30%.

Improved Curse of Exhaustion: Removed.

Amplify Curse: Removed.

Nightfall: Now triggered by Corruption, Dark Harvest and all drain spells instead of Corruption and Drain Life and now has 3 ranks with a 1/3/5% chance to proc.

New Talent: Rapid Deterioration (5th Row / 2 Points): Increases the casting speed of your Affliction spells by 6%. In addition, casting speed increase effects increase the tick speed of your damage over time and channeled Affliction spells with 50/100% efficiency, reducing their duration.

Developer Comment: This talent might seem hard to utilize due to the casting speed increase not being widespread in gear, but we’re also adding alternative tier sets for Affliction that replace the mostly useless critical strike chance with casting speed alongside set bonuses catered towards the specialization.

New Talent: Malediction (5th Row Keystone): Your Curse of Agony can now be used alongside your other curses, excluding Curse of Doom.

New Talent: Soul Siphon (5th Row / 3 Points): Increases the damage of your Drain Soul, Dark Harvest and Death Coil by an additional 2/3/4% for each of your Affliction effects on the target, up to a maximum of 4 effects.

Developer Comment: The debuff effects caused by the drain spells do not contribute towards this effect.

Dark Pact: Removed.

New Talent: Dark Harvest (7th Row Capstone): Reap your target's life, dealing 700 Shadow damage over 8 sec. Reduces the time between periodic ticks of your Affliction spells on the target by 20% while channeling.
(Flat mana cost, 30 second cooldown, new ranks learned at level 50 and 60.)

Rank 2 (Level 50): 900 Damage

Rank 3 (Level 60): 1150 Damage

DEMONOLOGY

While the core identity of this spec is solid in theory, gameplay-wise there wasn’t much that supported it or differentiated it from other two Warlock specializations. Another huge inconsistency in the original Vanilla design was the placement of Demonic Sacrifice so deep into the tree, because it directly clashes with the focus of the rest of the tree. Compared to the other pet specialization, the Beast Mastery Hunter, we decided to focus on exploitation of your demons and other “forbidden” resources like the Soul Stones, which fits the flavor of Demonology Warlock well. Just like Beast Mastery though, demons will be getting some form of scaling from their master’s power.

Soul Entrapment: While you have no demon under your control, all damage dealt is increased by 1/2/3%.

Demonic Sacrifice: Demonic Sacrifice was moved higher in the tree and has a new prerequisite talent that both focus on the demon-less Warlock playstyle for other two specializations to pick.
The effects are:

Imp: Increases your Fire damage by 6%.

Voidwalker: Restores 3% of total Health every 4 sec.

Succubus: Increases your Shadow damage by 6%.

Felhunter: Restores 2% of total Mana every 4 sec.

Master Conjurer: Healthstones created with different ranks of this talent will now be mutually unique, meaning that you will always be able to only have one Healthstone at a time.

Soul Funnel: Funnel spells, even with this talent, were pretty underpowered, that’s why this talent will now scale with the missing Health/Mana of your demon, lowering the Warlock’s dependance on other players healing their demon in clutch situations while also synergizing with the new Power Overwhelming capstone ability.

Demonic Aegis: Moved to row 2.

Fel Intellect: Replaced static benefits with Intellect scaling based on 7/14/21/28/35% of your total Intellect and allows 15/30/45/60/75% of your demon's Mana regeneration to continue while casting..

Fel Stamina: Replaced static benefits with Stamina scaling based on 7/14/21/28/35% of your total Stamina and reduces chance of them being critically struck by 1/2/3/4/5%.

Fel Domination: Reduced the cooldown of this ability from 15 min to 5 min and cast time reduction from 5.5 sec to 4 sec. This change gives Demonology more versatility in swapping demons based on their situation. In addition, lowers the cooldown of your Inferno spell by 2.5/5 minutes and the cooldown of your Demon Gate spell by 7.5/15 minutes.

Master Summoner: Increased mana reduction to 40/60% to again incentivize easier demon switching and now it also lowers the cooldown of your Inferno, Demon Gate and Ritual of Doom spell by 25/50%.

Improved Stones (Row 4 / 2 points): Increases the effects of you Wrathstone and Spellstone by 25/50%, increases damage returned as healing of your Felstone by 1/2% and critical strike bonus of your Firestone by 1/2%

Nether Studies: Replaces the original 3 demon specific talents with this new general utility talent while replacing the damage boosting effects with other Demon scaling talents deeper into the tree. The new effect is:
Increases the effect of your Succubus' Seduction, your Voidwalker's Torment, your Imp's Blood Pact, and your Felhunter's Tainted Blood spells by 15/30/45%.

Unholy Power: Changed from 5 to 3 points, damage increase reduced to 5/10/15% and now affects all demons.

Unleashed Potential (Row 5 / 3 Points): Your direct damage spells have a 60% chance and your funnel spells have a 100% chance to grant your demon Unleashed Potential for 3 sec.
While Unleashed Potential is active, you demon's Attack Power is increased by 20/40/60% of your bonus spell damage, and its damage done by magical spells and effects is increased by 5/10/15% of your spell damage.

Power Overwhelming (Row 5 Capstone): Grant your active demon Power Overwhelming that increases its damage dealt by 20% for 10 sec. The demon receives 40% of its Health as damage over the duration.
(14 second cooldown, 7% base mana cost)

Developer Comment: This new capstone ability serves to differentiate your playstyle as Demonology Warlock from the other two specializations while also putting a greater emphasis on managing your demons. It also makes it easier to dispose of your greater demons when their time is running out.

Demonic Precision: Your demons gain 1/2/3% increased melee and spell hit chance. In addition, they now benefit from 33/66/100% of your own spell hit chance for both melee and spell hit chance.

Developer Comment: Similarly to Hunter pets, demons also lack hit chance in the end-game raiding environment, this talent addresses it by transferring your hit to your demons.

Master Demonologist: Reworked bonuses to further support the unique strengths of each demon and incentivize swapping based on the situation you find yourself in. Also new additional effects were added for Infernal and Felguard that give you more power at the cost of downsides further emphasizing their “borrowed power” flavor.

The bonuses are as follows:

Imp: Reduces spell costs by 3/6/9/12/15% and increases casting speed by 1/2/3/4/5%.

Voidwalker: Reduces physical damage taken by 2/4/6/8/10% and increases pushback resistance by 8/16/24/32/40%.

Succubus: Increases all damage done by 2/4/6/8/10% and threat caused by 5%.

Felhunter: Increases all resistances by 0.2/0.4/0.6/0.8/1 per level and enemies attacking you have a 10% chance to get affected by Tainted Blood.

Infernal: Increases casting and attack speed by 3/6/9/12/15%, but reduces healing taken by 50%.

Felguard: Increases all damage done by 4/8/12/16/20%, but increases mana costs by 20%.

Soul Link: Reduced the damage transfer to your demon from 30% to 20% and increased the damage bonus from 3% to 5%. This skill will now be a passive so you don’t have to reactivate it every time you change your demon, will apply to any demon under your control (so both Greater demons and enslaved ones) and will be simply inactive if you don’t have any demon under your control.

DESTRUCTION

Destruction serves as the primary damage dealing specialization for Warlock in Vanilla, but these specializations are often a mix of talents such as Shadow Mastery/Ruin and Demonic Sacrifice/Ruin, meaning deeper talents in this specializations are ignored after acquiring Ruin. This is primarily the case as Immolation is too mana intensive to constantly cast while Searing Pain has a threat modifier that doubles as threat you generate, forcing you to constantly stop casting in order to not over-aggro the targets you’re damaging.

To solve these issues we have removed the threat modifier from Searing Pain (Check Baseline Changes for more details), tinkered with numbers of Soul Fire baseline and via the new Improved Soul Fire talents to make it a viable ability to use on cooldown and made Conflagration a more desirable capstone to top off this specialization.

Improved Shadow Bolt: Now has a flat 5/10/15/20/25% chance of proccing instead of on critical strike, Shadow damage increase reduced from 4/8/12/16/20% to 15%, duration reduced from 12 seconds to 10 seconds and no longer has charges that cause it to be removed when spent.

Cataclysm: Mana cost reduction increased from 1/2/3/4/5% to 2/4/6/8/10%.

Improved Lash of Pain and Improved Firebolt have been merged into a new 2 point talent in the 2nd row: Demonic Swiftness: “Reduces the casting time of your Imp's Firebolt spell by 0.25/0.5 sec and reduces the cooldown of your Succubus' Lash of Pain spell by 3/6 sec.”

Aftermath: Has seen multiple changes:

Now requires 3 points instead of 5 points for the same chance of daze.

Also increases the periodic damage of your Immolate by 2/4/6%.

Description updated to say that it slows by 50% instead of dazes.

Developer Comment: This daze listed in the description never actually worked like a daze and was quite misleading, so this was corrected to specify that it actually functions like all other slows.

New Talent: Improved Soul Fire (5th Row / 2 Points): Your Soul Fire has a 50/100% chance to refund a Soul Shard and increase your Fire damage by 8% for 25 sec.

Intensity and Pyroclasm have been moved up a row.

Improved Immolate: Now increases all damage dealt by immolate instead of just initial damage but the damage increase has been reduced from 5/10/15/20/25% to 4/8/12/16/20%.

Conflagrate: No longer requires and consumes an active Immolate damage over time effect to cast, instead it consumes 3 seconds of your Immolate spell to deal damage equal to it on the target if it's active. Additionally its global cooldown has been reduced from 1.5 seconds to 1 second, this change is reflected in the spell description.

UPDATES | Dated: October 21 2024

Conjured Stones: No longer share 30 minute cooldown, they are instead unusable in while in combat.

Fel Domination: Changed cooldown to 5 minutes and no longer lock your demon from summoning.

Added new effects to Master Summoner: In addition, lowers the cooldown of your Inferno, Demon Gate and Ritual of Doom spell by 25/50%.

UPDATES | Dated: November 1 2024

Increased the Shadow damage bonus granted by Improved Shadow Bolt from 15% to 20%.

Power Overwhelming's mana cost has been reduced to 80.

Post by **Dragunovi** » Sat Oct 12, 2024 6:31 pm

Warrior in Vanilla observably has a healthy amount of working builds, with Arms seen in leveling dungeons and battlegrounds, with Fury in leveling and both damage dealing and tanking in raids, and Protection in late dungeons and early raiding. And even better, these builds are fun to play.

We know we can do even better, preserving what already works while also allowing Arms players to continue into raids, see Fury open up options for solo sustain in the world and battlegrounds, and improve Protection's playstyle where we've carved in a niche in leveling and battlegrounds, as now offer a portion of the thrill and performance of the Fury tanking builds.

As such, the changes we've made to Warrior involve a good amount of shuffling class power around, and so it's easier to explain by writing the changelog in a slightly different format as you'll see below.

BASELINE CHANGES

Rage Generation.

In Vanilla, the rage generation formula rewards players with the resource with a simple formula converting auto-attack damage done to rage gained, only modified by a coefficient that scales the damage requirements each level.

While Vanilla’s system shines for late 60 raiders, unfortunately everywhere else, players are harshly punished and suffering rage-starvation, especially for:

Levelers that don’t have the absolute greatest weapon possible.

Dungeoneers and fresh raiders, in fights where you are unable to offtank for the added rage income.

When dueling the more heavily armored (and especially shield wearing) player classes.

We do recognize the enjoyment found in top-end raiding, and we aim to retain a similar game-feel there. To retain this, and relieve the widespread pain points above, we find that a new rage generation formula that's calculated 90% depending on your gear and 10% of it is predetermined based on your weapon speed best helps achieve this. With the formula change, players will notice significantly increased rage generation in these cases. The top is the same, but the bottom has been raised up.

Rage decay portion of Anger Management has been made baseline, while the in combat part is compensated by the rage generation changes.

Execute has seen a rebalance, reducing its base damage while increasing the extra rage conversion damage, the values go as follows:

Rank 1 (Level 24): 125 to 75 Damage, 3 to 4 Damage per Extra Rage
Rank 2 (Level 32): 200 to 150 Damage, 6 to 8 Damage per Extra Rage
Rank 3 (Level 40): 325 to 225 Damage, 9 to 12 Damage per Extra Rage
Rank 4 (Level 48): 450 to 300 Damage, 12 to 16 Damage per Extra Rage
Rank 5 (Level 56): 600 to 375 Damage, 15 to 20 Damage per Extra Rage

Execute now also has a 5.5 second cooldown.

Your off-hand weapon attacks are no longer guaranteed to land while your Heroic Strike is queued.

Developer Comment: While this mechanic promoted different gearing in comparision to Rogues, it has proven to be quite unintuitive and clunky to use. To compensate for this change the Dual Wield Specialization now increases your chance to hit with your off-hand weapon by 2/4/6/8/10%, more details on that in the Fury section.

Dual Wield is now taught at level 10.

Intervene is now taught at 20 instead of a book item.

Pummel now only has one rank that deals 5% of your Attack Power as damage instead of a flat value and is now taught at level 18 and will be available for use in Battle Stance.

Slam is now taught at level 14 and pauses your weapon swing timer instead of resetting it.

Developer Comment: This change will help two-handed warrior builds and reduce the unfair advantage of players with better internet connection.

Rend now scales with your Attack Power.

Rage Decay when out of combat is now consistently 2 rage per 2 seconds.

Hamstring now has a 6 second cooldown.

Sunder Armor's rage cost has been reduced from 15 to 10 rage.

Developer Comment: These changes were done to reduce Warrior's stickiness in player combat while elevating Sunder Armor as a tool to trigger weapon effects in its place.

Shield Wall is now ended prematurely if you unequip your Shield while the effect is active.

ARMS

The Arms tree in Vanilla did see plenty of use both early and deep, but builds dipping lower were really only done because of the cleaving power of Sweeping Strikes and/or the healer counter on Mortal Strike. We've fleshed out the lower half of the tree, and have re-homed an ability earlier in the tree as well. This, in combination with becoming the true home of twohanded Slam builds, should now see Arms builds function into raiding, all while maintaining a similar power level for battlegrounds.

Tactical Mastery has been moved from the 2nd row to the 1st row.

Improved Rend now requires 2 points instead of 3 points, and increases the bleed damage done by your Rend ability by 10/20% instead of 15/25/35%.

Deflection has been moved from the 1st row to the 2nd row.

Amount of rage generated by Improved Charge has been increased from 3/6 rage to 5/10 rage.

Deep Wounds now deals damage every 1.5 seconds and lasts 6 seconds.

Developer Comment: This change makes Deep Wounds more useful even in situations where its quickly refreshed by multiple Warriors (such as raids), allowing it to deal atleast a part of its damage before its replaced while doubling its output for situations outside of raids.

Improved Hamstring has been removed.

New Talent: Counterattack (3rd Row Keystone): A strike that becomes active after parrying an opponent's attack. This attack deals X damage plus 10% of your Attack Power and immobilizes the target for 3 sec. Counterattack cannot be blocked, dodged, or parried.
(5 second cooldown.)

Damage Values:
Rank 1 (Level 20/Talent): 40 Damage
Rank 2 (Level 30): 80 Damage
Rank 3 (Level 40): 120 Damage
Rank 4 (Level 50): 160 Damage
Rank 5 (Level 60): 200 Damage

Improved Slam is now an Arms tree talent, total points have been reduced from 5 to 2, and now affects global cooldown of Slam in addition to regular cooldown.

Two-Handed Weapon Specialization now requires 3 points instead of 5 points, increases the damage you deal with two-handed weapons by 2/4/6% and now increases your skill in all two-handed weapons by 1/2/3.

Poleaxe Specialization and Sword Specialization has been removed.
New Talent: Master of Arms (5th Row / 5 Points): Adds the following effects to your weapon, based on the weapon type.

Axe - Increases your chance to get a critical strike by 1/2/3/4/5%.

Mace - Causes your attacks to ignore 2/4/6/8/10 of your target's Armor per level.

Sword - Gives you a 1/2/3/4/5% chance to get an extra attack on the same target after hitting your target.

Polearm - Increase the range of melee attacks with melee attacks by 0.4/0.8/1.2/1.6/2.0 yards.

Sweeping Strikes now costs 20 rage instead of 30 rage and is no longer spent by off-hand hits.

New Talent: Precision Cut (5th Row / 3 Points): Increases the damage done per extra rage point spent on Execute by 20/40/60%.

New Talent: Boundless Anger (6th Row / 3 Points): Increases your maximum rage by 10/20/30.

Improved Disciplines now reduces the cooldown of Retalliation, Recklessness and Shield Wall by 4/8/12 minutes instead of 2/4/6 minutes.

FURY

Fury Warrior in Vanilla is famous for its performance and high octane gameplay in raiding, and we intend to not only keep this intact but even enhance it with significant Enrage uptime. However, in all other regards, this tree is lacking. With our talent reworks, ability tuning, and efforts to enhance the tree's neglected berserker flavor, we've carved an additional niche into the Tree, and building into Fury should now be less questionable for use in leveling and in battlegrounds.
In the end, Fury gameplay should remain very similar to the old playstyle, with new exciting Enrage procs and better scaling in early game.

Booming Voice now increases the area of effect of all shouts and its effects have been increased from 10/20/30/40/50% to 12/24/36/48/60%.

Developer Comment: All shouts indicate that this talent now also affects Intimidating Shout, Piercing Howl and Challenging Shout.

Unbridled Wrath's proc chance has been increased from 8/16/24/32/40% to 15/30/45/60/75% and its effect is now doubled for two-handed weapons.

Dual Wield Specialization has been moved from the 4th row to the 2nd row and now also increases your chance to hit with your off-hand weapon by 2/4/6/8/10%.

Improved Demoralizing Shout has been merged with Improved Battle Shout into a new talent called Improved Shouts in the 3rd row, possessing the effects of both talents.

Blood Craze's healing has been increased from 1/2/3% to 2/4/6% of your total health.

Improved Execute has been replaced by Reckless Execute, reducing the cooldown of your Execute by 2/4 seconds. The second point removes the cooldown of your Execute.

Enrage now lasts 8 seconds instead of 12 seconds but no longer has a maximum of 12 swings.

New Talent: Improved Pummel (4th Row / 2 Points): Gives your Pummel ability a 25/50% chance to daze the victim for 4 seconds, and spellcasting school lockouts now last 1/2 sec longer.

Improved Slam has been moved to the Arms tree.

New Talent: Improved Whirlwind (5th Row / 3 Points): Reduces the cooldown of your Whirlwind ability by 1/1.5/2 sec.

Improved Intercept has been renamed to Battlefield Mobility and now also reduces the cooldown of Intervene.

Improved Berserker Rage has been removed.

New Talent: Blood Drinker (6th Row / 3 Points): While under the effects of Enrage, Death Wish, or Recklessness, your critical strikes with abilities cause your next 5 melee attacks to heal you for 1/1.5/2% of your maximum health.

Bloodthirst has been reworked to the following ability: Instantly perform a reckless attack dealing X damage plus 30% attack power, and you suffer a self-inflicted wound for your recklessness.

Damage Values:
Rank 1 (Level 40/Talent): 80 Flat Damage
Rank 2 (Level 48): 100 Flat Damage
Rank 3 (Level 56): 120 Flat Damage
Rank 4 (Level 60): 150 Flat Damage

Developer Comment: This self-harm does half the base damage, half the scaling and takes your armor damage reduction into account. This self damage can critically strike you and proc Enrage, this chance is equal to your physical critical strike chance.

PROTECTION

Protection is an odd tree in Vanilla, with the top half offering good defensive options, while the bottom half offered basically nothing good until the capstone. In the interest of improving Protection leveling builds and opening up new builds for end-game, Shield Slam (now talentable at lv 30) has gained significant damage scaling, and alongside it the lower half of the tree has been jazzed up with many new threat and damage options, as well as one relocated defensive option.

Improved Bloodrage moved to row 1. Now generates additional 5/10 instant rage.

Shield Specialization now generates 1/2/3/4/5 rage when a block occurs in addition to increased block chance.

Anticipation reduced to 3 ranks, grants 7/14/20 Defence.

Improved Shield Block removed.
Developer Comment: This ability is probably one of the most overtuned single talent points in vanilla, as it doubles the potency of Shield Block, an ability which itself is extremely potent in its hidden feature of granting nearly any user immunity to both critical strikes and crushing blows for the single block. While this isn’t that useful in dungeons and versus fast attacking mobs, this ability plus its talent grant 4.4 sec of this immunity every 5 seconds, versus the average raid boss. We don’t want to take away this uniqueness from Warrior tanking, but we also felt that this power being available in row 3 was a little too good. Instead, we’ve moved the power onto a side talent of Shield Slam.

Toughness now additionally increases the amount of damage absorbed by your shield by 3/6/9/12/15%.

New Talent: Improved Intervene grants a 50/100% chance to gain immunity to movement impairing effects for 3 sec after using Intervene.

Improved Taunt moved from row 4 to row 3.

Improved Revenge now reduces cooldown of Revenge by 0.5/1/1.5 sec. in addition to the previous effect.
Developer Comment: Improved Revenge didn’t see much effective use, especially in raiding, so we’ve added a cooldown reduction component that makes it more generally useful.

Defiance moved from row 3 to row 4.

Improved Sunder Armor removed. Base cost of Sunder Armor has been reduced by 5 rage.

Improved Shield Bash renamed to Gag Order and moved to row 4. Now gives your Shield Slam additional 25/50% chance to dispell a magic effect from the target in addition to he previous effect.

Improved Disarm reduced to 2 points. Now decreases the cooldown of your Disarm ability by 10/20 secs instead.

One-Handed Weapon Specialization moved from row 6 to row 5.

Shield Slam moved to row 5. Damage of Shield Slam is now modified by your attack power in addition to shield block value.

New Talent: Improved Shield Slam: Reduces the cooldown of Shield Slam by 0.5/1 sec, and using this ability will also grant you an extra 35/70% chance to block the next attack within 5 sec.

New Talent: Reprisal: Increases the damage dealt by your Revenge ability by 25/50%, and has a 50/100% chance to refund its rage cost if successful.

Improved Shield Wall moved from row 5 to row 6. Now reduces the cooldown of Shield Wall by 5/10 min and increases its duration by 1/2 sec.
Developer Comment: We found that the increased duration of Improved Shield Wall is far less useful than simply being able to use it more often. We don’t want players feeling like they’d have to go deep into Arms for Improved Disciplines to enjoy a smaller cooldown for Shield Wall, so we’ve moved some of the power of this talent off of the duration extension, and into a cooldown reduction.

New Talent: Defensive Tactics: While wearing a shield, you retain 50/100/150% of the increased threat generation from Defensive Stance in other stances.

Concussion Blow moved from row 5 to row 7. Now deals damage, causes a high amount of threat and penetrates 50% of the enemy's armor in addition to the previous effect.
Developer Comment: Another disparity between Vanilla raiding Deep Protection and Fury/Prot hybrid, is how Death Wish’s damage bonus provides for noticeably increased opener/snap threat, while Deep Protection has no such equivalent.
Additionally, vanilla Concussion Blow as it stands is a simple clone of Paladin’s Hammer of Justice, so we feel it warrants some differentiation.
As Concussion Blow is less of a magical stun and more of a strong head-cracking blow, we have added a damaging component that half-penetrates the enemy’s armor. This design should result in Concussion Blow being used for maximizing single target opener/snap threat as the first global cooldown.

UPDATES | Dated: October 21 2024

Improved Shield Slam: Effect duration and cooldown reduced from 5 seconds to 4.5 seconds and the cooldown reduction on Shield Slam increased from 0.5/1 seconds to 0.75/1.5 seconds.

UPDATES | Dated: November 1 2024

Damage increase bonus granted by Enrage reduced from 25% to 15%.

Bloodrage now activates your Enrage.

Slam cast time increased from 1.5 seconds to 2 seconds.

Decisive Strike cast time increased from 2 seconds to 2.5 seconds.

Rend now scales by 5% of your Attack Power per tick of damage, for all ranks.

Mortal Strike now does 105/110/115/120% weapon damage, instead of weapon damage plus 85/110/135/160.

Defensive Tactics' multipliers have been raised to 55/110/165%.

Post by **Akalix** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 9:01 pm

So... no tinkerer?

Horyoshi · Post by **Horyoshi** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 9:44 pm

oh please don't push these class changes to the PvP server...

Staywhimsy · Post by **Staywhimsy** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 9:46 pm

This is no more vanilla+... this is totally custom. Sorry im not liking it :(

Tawneyturtle · Post by **Tawneyturtle** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 9:50 pm

dead server.

Blackduck3 · Post by **Blackduck3** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 9:52 pm

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uz-6AbvPDTw

Crustman · Post by **Crustman** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 9:58 pm

Absolutely love the changes thanks guys :) -Donker

Grizb37 · Post by **Grizb37** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:03 pm

New Talent: Open Wounds (Row 2) (3 Ranks)
Increases the damage of Claw by 10/20/30% if the target is afflicted by Rake. Increases the damage of Claw by 3/4/5% per combo point spent with Rip for 15 seconds.

Please add back the shred dmg, atleast 15%, no one uses Claw.... even with this change it will still do less dmg than shred

Saronsen · Post by **Saronsen** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:04 pm

Did no one on the team actually talk to a/play a ret paladin?
I'll give it a shot but I'm HIGHLY skeptical of the changes.

Karmakatxd · Post by **Karmakatxd** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:07 pm

Love it! Thanks for the hard work

Fugus · Post by **Fugus** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:20 pm

As a Tauren Feral Druid.

The nerf to Warstomp makes it virtually 100% useless for me. To even use Warstomp takes me out of my form and it takes exactly 2 seconds to cast a regrowth assuming I get the cast started instantly.

So I have to drop form, spend 0.5 seconds to cast it only to get a 1.5 second stun that doesn't last long enough to get the regrowth off meaning I still will have the major pushback trying to cast it and then I STILL have to spend another GCD to get back into a form. Even using it in forms would be crap as I believe it also would share the DR with bash and (unless it was changed here) still resets your swing timer.

At this point, I would rather you just turn it into an AoE interrupt similar to Blood Elfs old Mana Tap that was usable in form. That would actually give it a use that would be great for every class and spec.

Warstomp: (Instant Cast) A deafening stomp that interrupts the spell casting of all enemies in melee range and prevents that school from casting for 1.5 seconds.

Also:

Really want the ability to have my abilities function indoors. Really sucks to have your talent points, spells and pvp set bonus all disable just from walking indoors and really hard to balance around something that doesn't actually work in most instances and a great deal of PvP locations. I can understand Travel Form not working, but let my cats speed and entangling roots actually be usable. Nothing overpowered about that request at all.

Akos1896 · Post by **Akos1896** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:21 pm

I can't decide if the demonology tree with wraithstone and master demonologist:voidwalker can be considered a dungeon tank. Threat modifier is there, reduced hellfire damage taken is there, pushback reduction is also there.

Topdreamer · Post by **Topdreamer** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:24 pm

Staywhimsy wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2024 9:46 pm This is no more vanilla+... this is totally custom. Sorry im not liking it :(

Same, sorry I'm probably out when the patch hits. I had fun while it lasted though

Fugus · Post by **Fugus** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:25 pm

Also, I know pretty well that it will likely never be done but.....

I really dislike the current Tiger's Fury. I never wanted Kitty Slice and Dice and all the upkeep around trying to maintain it.

I would have much preferred it turned into a cooldown ability for Cat and Bear that actually worked like "Blade Flurry"/"Sweeping Strikes" to give them a limited AoE. Then the actual rotation can be more about actually using damaging abilities instead of baby sitting Slice and Dice.

Also hated Savage Roar in WotLK for the same reason.

Edit:

Maintaining Rake and Rip while weaving in Shreds and Claws with the occasional bite while using the occasional Tiger's Fury when an AoE pack came along would be much more fun and satisfying ramp up while also giving Bear Form a little help on AoE threat.

Fugus · Post by **Fugus** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:36 pm

Grizb37 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:03 pm New Talent: Open Wounds (Row 2) (3 Ranks)
Increases the damage of Claw by 10/20/30% if the target is afflicted by Rake. Increases the damage of Claw by 3/4/5% per combo point spent with Rip for 15 seconds.

Please add back the shred dmg, atleast 15%, no one uses Claw.... even with this change it will still do less dmg than shred

Maybe it is to try and put claw more on par with Shred for the fights where you can't just part on their butts and how facing a druid doesn't cut their damage so much. Unless druids are actually hurting on top end DPS? Not max level yet on here so still don't know.

Sparos · Post by **Sparos** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:41 pm

i quit sod because of the changes and now this =(

Cabum · Post by **Cabum** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:42 pm

I would like to see some dmg racial on dwarfs. Humans didn't really need another racial dmg, for example...

Grizb37 · Post by **Grizb37** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:42 pm

Fugus wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:36 pm
Grizb37 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:03 pm New Talent: Open Wounds (Row 2) (3 Ranks)
Increases the damage of Claw by 10/20/30% if the target is afflicted by Rake. Increases the damage of Claw by 3/4/5% per combo point spent with Rip for 15 seconds.

Please add back the shred dmg, atleast 15%, no one uses Claw.... even with this change it will still do less dmg than shred
Maybe it is to try and put claw more on par with Shred for the fights where you can't just part on their butts and how facing a druid doesn't cut their damage so much. Unless druids are actually hurting on top end DPS? Not max level yet on here so still don't know.

There's 1 boss in the entire game that you cant get behind in naxx, and even then it depends what charge you get.

Believe me, no raiding cat will ever use rake or claw.

Fugus · Post by **Fugus** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:47 pm

Grizb37 wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:42 pmThere's 1 boss in the entire game that you cant get behind in naxx, and even then it depends what charge you get.

Believe me, no raiding cat will ever use rake or claw.

If they can make Rake + Rip boosted Claw close to shred, they might.

But, how does Feral Cat rate when it comes to single target DPS in the raids? If they are near the top, they might want to avoid buffing us with shred to take us too far and to actually make using Claw as less of a detriment if used.

Anniebee43 · Post by **Anniebee43** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:48 pm

With all of the horrible negative comments, I'd like to pitch in and say this is exactly what I started playing Turtle Wow for, and this is the full realization of the last several years of this servers life. This is Vanilla+ in every way I ever wanted or imagined, and it looks so fun. I'm so excited to dive in.

Noxilis · Post by **Noxilis** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:52 pm

Humans racials are so much better than other races, it's not even close...

Human vs Nightelf melee for example

-Human
2% crit for 20s, great for execute phase or during other big cooldowns.
3 sword skill
3 two hand sword skill
3 Mace skill
3 two hand mace skill

Night elf
1% attack speed...

Please actually try to balance the racials properly, or remove them all.

Why do some races get 5% stat increase, and high elfs get 2% only

Doonis · Post by **Doonis** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:59 pm

Noxilis wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:52 pm Humans racials are so much better than other races, it's not even close...

Human vs Nightelf melee for example

-Human
2% crit for 20s, great for execute phase or during other big cooldowns.
3 sword skill
3 two hand sword skill
3 Mace skill
3 two hand mace skill

Night elf
1% attack speed...

Please actually try to balance the racials properly, or remove them all.

Why do some races get 5% stat increase, and high elfs get 2% only

Yeah, what about these race changes "reduce the gaps between racials" when the most played race gets a massive boost, while orcs and trolls get their best abilities nerfed significantly?

Fugus · Post by **Fugus** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 11:02 pm

Doonis wrote: ↑Wed Oct 16, 2024 10:59 pmYeah, what about these race changes "reduce the gaps between racials" when the most played race gets a massive boost, while orcs and trolls get their best abilities nerfed significantly?

I play a tauren druid, my choices were this or Night Elf. The Warstomp nerf guts any real benefits I had playing a Tauren at all.

As it stands, this puts Night Elf as the undisputed best option for a druid if you can stand watching those hot dog ears wave when they run. I can never unsee that once I noticed. Those hotdog ears and the thought of trying out plainsrunning is the only reason I went Tauren on here other than ease of access to Wailing Caverns and Scarlett Monastery.

1% more dodge + 1% faster attacks + 1% more speed + 1 level higher stealth versus a stun you can't really use much and 5% more health.

And, if the change to shadowmeld works on casts as well as movement, that would give you a free 2 seconds of your cast time while invisible before you break the stealth.

xippieftw · Post by **xippieftw** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 11:03 pm

Ok so what I gather from this is. Devs/Leadership play alliance. Screw horde lets nerf them to hell. We will make a killing on race changes. Further adding to the alliance horde imbalance when horde is already out numbered. Is this for real? like....??????????

Mimmy · Post by **Mimmy** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 11:18 pm

whats with the will of the forsaken nerf? it's literally my favorite racial and the change makes it so lame, I love pressing will of the forsaken while im feared it makes me feel cool

Zulazibah · Post by **Zulazibah** » Wed Oct 16, 2024 11:20 pm

everything is looking really great and you can see the hours the team has put into this. Really great work everyone.

I have 3 suggestions for Shaman Talents: I will Bold & Underline what the suggested changes are

Earth's Grasp Talent - Increases the health of your Stoneclaw Totem by 50/75% and the radius of your Earthbind Totem by 10/20%. Earthshock now taunts your enemy to hit you and has its range reduced to melee range.

Enhancing Totems - Stoneskin Totem now increases block amount by 15/30% and its flat damage reduction is increased by 15/30%, increases the effect of your Strength of Earth and Grace of Air totems by 8/15%, Windwall Totem also now reduces Magical damage taken by 3/5% and its flat ranged damage reduction is increased by 15/30% , and reduces the cooldown of your grounding totem by 1/2 sec.

Eye of the Storm - Gives you a 25/50/75% chance to gain Focused Casting Effect that lasts for 6 sec after being the victim of a melee or ranged -- strike and reduces the chance you will be critically hit by melee and ranged attacks by 2/4/6%. The Focused Casting effect prevents you from losing casting time when taking damage.

Please consider these to support a highly sought after playstyle, These talents are PERFECT for these additions(earths grasp, come on its right there!). I also want to highlight the Eye of the Storm change --> Remove CRITICALLY strike and change to just a strike but reduce the % for focused from 100 to 75% to still make it proc around the same. Adding in the Crit immunity will give shaman viability to tanks in raids. Im not talking about MT naxx, but lets let them tank ZG and OT in the big ones and what not.

FINAL suggestion.
Hordes Paladin Alliance Shaman please.

Turtle WoW

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