World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Nathanos Blightcaller has faithfully served the Banshee Queen, Sylvanas Windrunner, both in life and in undeath. This service has demanded great sacrifice—and difficult choices. His unlife has been measured out in many conquests as champion of the Forsaken, but the burden of his duty to the Dark Lady has taken a toll upon his ever-decaying body.

Nathanos looked down at his left hand. There was enough skin and sinew remaining to grasp a bow, and to teach even the clumsiest of his pupils how to nock an arrow. But he could tell that his strength had waned. His undead flesh continued its inevitable decay, and there would come a day when this hand would be rendered useless or rot away altogether. What good would he be to her then?

He might be a decomposing husk, he told himself, but he still knew the meaning of duty. "Tell me what you command, my queen."

Taking place just prior to the first demon invasions of Legion, “Dark Mirror” by Senior Game Designer Steve Danuser explores Nathanos Blightcaller's past, the decisions he has faced, and his ultimate transformation. Read it now.

Defy the law of gravity in this week’s PvP Brawl: Gravity Lapse — April 18-25!

Every other week, a new PvP Brawl will be available to players looking for something just a little different. Each Brawl will offer a variety of modes, rules, and scenic changes to the usual Battleground gameplay, and you’ll find them in the Group Finder tool (hotkey “I”) in the Player vs. Player tab. Just like Random Battlegrounds, you’ll receive a reward for achieving victory. Here are just a few of the Brawls you can look forward to:

Gravity Lapse: April 18–25


Gravity getting you down? Step into the Eye of the Storm and be prepared for a whole new en-lighten-ing experience. Every minute, players on the battlefield will find themselves launched into the air, only to gently fall toward the ground again in a perpetual aerial ballet as they try to accrue enough resources to take the win home for their team.

An extra weekly quest and rewards are here.

Get out your best map and plan your route across every part of the Broken Isles, as this is a great time to immerse yourself in World Quests.

This Week
All week, open your map (default hotkey: m) and then select any of the five main Broken Isles zones to consider the World Quests available to you. Hover your mouse over a World Quest on the map to see what tasks are needed complete it, the rewards you’ll receive, and the time remaining that the quest is available to you.

Look for the following all week long:

• Archmage Lan’dalock near Violet Hold in Dalaran has a quest for you.
  
  • Quest requirement: Complete 20 World Quests
    
  • Reward: 5,000 Order Resources
    
• Passive buff: +50% to Reputation gains from World Quests

If you've been looking to impress some emissaries, this is the week to do it!

Broken Shore

• Rewards from the enemies summoned by Nether Portal Disruptors have been changed: These enemies should now drop significantly more Legionfall War Supplies and Dauntless tokens, but no longer drop Netherchunks or Tier 1 Sentinax beacons.
  
  • Developers’ notes: We want to make sure that Nether Portal Disruptors and the enemies they attract are lucrative and exciting without overshadowing other options so that players feel inclined to focus only on the Nether Disruptor for Broken Shore play. This should now be a solid extra to add to your activities when it’s available, rather than something to wait around for.
    
• Witchmatron Magora now respawns more frequently, uses more abilities, and is significantly sturdier.

Classes

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Fire
  
  • [With maintenance in each region] Damage of all abilities increased by 6%.
    

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Marksmanship
  
  • [With maintenance in each region] Damage of the following abilities increased by 4%: Marked Shot, Arcane Shot, Multi-Shot, Aimed Shot, Volley, Black Arrow, Bursting Shot, Piercing Shot, Windburst, Murder of Crows, Sidewinders, Barrage.
    

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Discipline
  
  • Aegis of Wrath now reduces the remaining absorb of Power Word: Shield by 3% every second.
    

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Elemental
  
  • Seismic Lightning is now correctly affected by Elemental Fury.
    
• Enhancement
  
  • [With maintenance in each region] Damage of the following abilities increased by 4%: Boulderfist, Crash Lightning, Flametongue, Lava Lash, Lightning Bolt, Lightning Shield, Rockbiter, Stormstrike, Windfury, Windsong.
    

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Outlaw
  
  • [With maintenance in each region] Damage of the following abilities increased by 4%: Ambush, Ghostly Strike, Killing Spree, Death from Above, Saber Slash, Pistol Shot, Between the Eyes, Run Through, Cannonball Barrage.
    

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Affliction
  
  • Fixed a bug causing the proc chance of Fatal Echoes (Artifact trait) to be quadrupled by Reap Souls. It is now doubled, as intended.
    
  • Fixed a bug causing the proc chance of Sweet Souls (Artifact trait) to be quadrupled by Reap Souls. It is now doubled, as intended.
    

Dungeons
Court of Stars

• Patrol Captain Gerdo
  
  • Improved the visuals for Patrol Captain Gerdo's Streetsweeper ability.
    

Followers

• Lady S’theno should no longer disappear from Felhammer when she is sent on a mission.

Legion Companion App

• Added support for new Follower Missions.
  
• Addressed an issue that caused some Mission duration times to differ from the World of Warcraft client.
  
• Addressed an issue that caused Artifact Power rewards to display incorrect punctuation in tooltips.

Player versus Player
[All PvP hotfixes are in-testing and intended to go live as soon as possible.]

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Fire
  
• PvP template Intellect reduced by 6%.

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)

• Aspect of the Turtle now negates the stun of Call Fel Lord.
  
• Beast Mastery
  
• Separation Anxiety increases the damage of your pet by 15% (was 50%).

Quests

• The arrow markers located in Impsorrow Approach no longer vanish when players enter the area for the quest “A Flare in the Dark”.

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Of Brews And Blackouts (7.2.5)
This devalues the BoC talent as we see 33-25=8% fewer BoC's in our rotation. Considering on single target, with BoC, BoS and TP are my number 1 and 2 damaging abilities, are we going to see compensation in damage for this nerf?
We're worried about gameplay and feel right now, and will adjust damage (overall and per-talent) as needed afterward.

This is very useful feedback, thanks.

As you can imagine, the numbers for Blackout Strike's cooldown and the CDR from Tiger Palm are very important to get right on this; we'll tweak them and try a few things. We started out with the 4-beat cycle for PTR; we may also try the 3-beat cycle soon and see how that feels.

One extremely important thing to evaluating the feel of this is what talents you were using. For example, Rushing Jade Wind + Spitfire feel totally different from Eye of the Tiger + Special Delivery, especially when it comes to GCD utilization. Please let us know which talents you're using when giving rotation feel feedback!

Thanks!

I'll be getting on PTR to test the rotation and such later, but I have one question about Spitfire Celestalon. Why was Chi Burst scrapped for it instead of Chi Wave? Nobody uses Chi Wave because of how weak (and random) it is, but Chi Burst currently sees a decent amount of use on live servers for AoE.
Chi Wave and Chi Burst usage are about the same (and both are extremely rare compared to Eye of the Tiger). We chose Chi Burst to replace to start with, because Spitfire is an AoE talent, same as Chi Burst, so would fulfill the same choice. There's still an argument to be made for Chi Wave being replaced, so we're considering that as well, so discussion one way or another (or alternatives) is quite welcome.

The reason I would think most people use eott is that it is the highest dps AND it doesn't intrude on the already tight rotation for BoC, so there is no opportunity cost in using it.
Right; Eye of the Tiger is currently taken primarily because it doesn't take up any GCDs. We're trying to open that up a bit so that you have room to take abilities like Chi Wave and Spitfire (or theoretically Chi Burst), or Rushing Jade Wind, in your rotation.

The common Blackout Combo-driven rotation right now is, in a way, not GCD locked, because it spends a significant amount of its time off GCD, but in practice it feels more like GCD locked, because that time is in between every few GCDs with little empty half-GCDs, adding a stutter to your rotation that we're trying to clean up.

Awesome feedback so far, especially from those who are actively trying a variety of talent builds. That's the most valuable, especially when you consider swapping to the other side of the Blackout Combo / No Blackout Combo line that divides the community playstyles.

Next PTR build, we're going to try a 12sec base CD on Blackout Strike, to speed things up a bit baseline, and hopefully remove the ~1GCD of pause that has been mentioned by several people. (And in fact add a GCD of slush)

The minor stutter has never really felt bad or prevented me from using something that interrupts the rotation a bit since i can always get back into it. Maybe instead of doing something to change our speed to open rotations, you could make it so some of these other underused moves have a modifier on another skill on their own? That could be a theme for brewmaster to have that martial arts feel which simultaneously offers complexity in but also lets us be fast? Honestly i'd rather break my own rotation that have space forcibly added in.

This slower paced feeling just makes me very unhappy and while my experience may not matter much, it seems to be something a lot of other players are feeling. I hate this new slow paced idea for monk and the new mechanic of reducing BoS CD doesn't feel fun or interesting. It just feels like a rock is being tied to legs.

I just don't understand wanting to make so many people unhappy to solve something i've never heard people actually complain about with stutter. It makes me miserable on my favorite class and spec.

I'm not sure this is exactly the valuable feedback that is desired. I'll give a less emotional/fun based approach later...but it's important to me and I hope that enjoyment is truly a factor here.
This is some of the most valuable feedback here, actually. Your experience matters a ton.

A question that you, and others, have asked here is basically, "Why change this, I didn't mind the hiccup/stutter/awkardness/whatever?". I empathize with that sentiment, and I'd like to try my best to answer that.

Brewmaster is not a particularly popular spec, and the awkwardness of their offensive abilities is one of the prime reasons why. That sort of thing is shrugged off by some people, really bugs some other people, and contributes to a general discomfort with a spec to most (and is usually hard for them to describe exactly why, falling back to works like 'doesn't flow' or 'clunky').

Most of the people here actively discussing this are people who have stuck with Brewmaster, and play it extensively, probably because you fall into that first bucket; the 'clunkiness' doesn't bother you, and you're used to it. So we're not surprised at all that many people here have this reaction of "it was fine, why change?".

The goal of these rotational changes is to find something that flows well to the non-dedicated Brewmasters, while still feeling 'fine' (or better) to all of you currently-dedicated Brewmasters. That second part is more important than the first, and we're going to keep iterating on this until we achieve it.

We hear you that we're not there yet; we're not surprised at all that our first build of it wasn't perfect. We'll keep working on it, and appreciate your constructive feedback and experimentation with different builds, to help us get there.

Thanks!

P.S. Just to further pull back the curtain on potential versions of this rotation that we're thinking about:
- Current PTR build: At least (2 TP + 1 AnythingElse) between Blackout Strikes
- Next PTR build: At least (2 TP) between Blackout Strikes
- Another potential option we're considering: At least (1 TP + 1 AnythingElse) between Blackout Strikes. This would probably mean a 8sec CD on BoS, and a 5sec CDR on TP. It's very hard to truly imagine how rotations will feel without playing them, but some may be interested in thinking about it. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Fenryr Hotfix
Why allow some of the playerbase to cheese this tame, and others have to solo a boss meant for 5 players?
I don't really think 'fun' is the word you're looking for here - people love to scream that we've removed 'fun' from the game when there's a bug that's fixed and then things take a bit of effort, and this really just perpetuates negativity in the community.

Doing a 5-man dungeon and then taking advantage of a broken spawn doesn't really scream 'fun'. It was a cool way around the challenge, sure, but on both sides it wasn't exciting - getting Fenryr was the point of excitement, and that is still possible, so let's try to be sensible.

---

For clarification - the soft reset method was a bug, which has now been fixed, and the intended method of taming Fenryr is to complete this challenge solo.

As others have said, it would be silly to remove those who already obtained the pet, especially when early adopters didn't necessarily realize that the method was unintended, so we have no plans to do so.

Best of luck to all those trying to obtain Fenryr!

For those who haven't tried it yet, could you clarify whether we need to solo the whole dungeon, or just Hymdall / Fenryr?
Just through Hymdall and Fenryr, from my understanding. I can double check on this. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)