Mage Tower Up, Patch 7.2 Hotfixes - April 19, Tank Artifact Challenge Nerfs

Update: Added some Priest and Warlock blue posts

Anduin Broken Shore Cinematic, Patch 7.2.5 Class Changes

PTR/Beta Patch 45113 - New Necromancer Item Passives

An Ancient Recipe is This Week's Brawl!

US: Mage Tower Up - Artifact Challenge Tips
Will you be joining the 0.006% of Blood Death Knights with the appearance? If you were able to complete a challenge, feel free to leave some tips for other users!

  • End of the Risen Threat - Mistweaver Monk, Resto Druid, Resto Shaman, Holy Priest, Holy Paladin
  • The God-Queen's Fury - Arcane Mage, Ret Paladin, Demonolgy Warlock, Enhancement Shaman, Assassination Rogue
  • Thwarting the Twins - Frost Mage, Balance Druid, Affliction Warlock, Shadow Priest, Marksmanship Hunter
  • An Impossible Foe - Outlaw Rogue, Unholy Death Knight, Elemental Shaman, Fury Warrior, Feral Druid, Fire Mage
  • Closing the Eye - Frost Death Knight, Havoc Demon Hunter, Survival Hunter, Subtlety Rogue, Arms Warrior
  • Feltotem's Fall - Destruction Warlock, Windwalker Monk, Beast Mastery Hunter, Discipline Priest
  • The Highlord's Return - Blood Death Knight, Vengeance Demon Hunter, Brewmaster Monk, Protection Paladin, Protection Warrior, Guardian Druid


Patch 7.2 Hotfixes - April 19
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Artifact Challenge
  • The difficulty of the Tank Artifact Challenge at the Mage Tower has been adjusted:
    • Highlord Kruul’s health reduced by 10%.
    • Inquisitor Variss health reduced by 10%.
    • Kor’vas Bloodthorn’s health increased by 100%.
    • Nether Horror health reduced by 20%.
    • Tormenting Eye health reduced by 20%.
    • Smoldering Infernals are now summoned less frequently.

Broken Shore
  • When you first activate a portal of any given type with a beacon, it will now last 10 seconds longer.
  • The chance to loot Portal-Stones that can be used to call down powerful Lieutenants has been doubled.
  • The Warden Initiate has received additional training, and can now fly alongside you. She has also learned to use her abilities more frequently and in a smaller area of effect.
  • Players can now vendor excess Sentinax beacons that they don't wish to hold on to.
  • The Ashtongue Felsmith has become aware of his burning region, and is no longer standing in his forge at Deliverance Point.

Classes

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
  • Fixed a bug that occasionally kept Gon from spawning as expected.

Items
  • Fixed a bug that prevented Rethu’s Incessant Courage from counting certain hostile creatures as valid targets.

World
  • The flight path between Algen Point (Broken Shore) and Hafr Fjall (Stormheim) has been adjusted to follow a better route.

Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Discipline in 7.2.5
There are various things still being discussed, so it will be better to talk about it after some changes settle down more, but one good point of feedback was about the targeting on PW: Radiance. We're going to try smart targeting of some sort in the next PTR build. Details TBD, but potentially: "true smart" (lowest-HP) targeting while maintaining the current behavior of favoring targets without Atonement. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Affliction Warlocks - Malefic Grasp
Hi Affliction Warlocks. Thanks for the posts and feedback so far. I'd like to talk a bit about the change to Malefic Grasp. In general, we agree that communication is warranted since we changed/nerfed a widely taken talent.

Malefic Grasp is very powerful on live. With the current state of Affliction, the talent is taken on virtually every situation in Nighthold, from single-target to sustained multi-target boss fights. There are things about Affliction that we’re not entirely happy with, many of which the community has echoed, and the current feel of Affliction being a single-target spec that focuses its damage into one target rather than spreads its damage out over many targets more evenly, is generally one of them. Malefic Grasp at a high tuning value is a heavy contributor to that. It’s not ideal that even on a sustained multi-target fight right now, Malefic Grasp wins out over Writhe in Agony on the same row, when at first glance Writhe in Agony looks like it should be the go-to talent for sustained multi-target since its benefit scales up uniformly per additional target whereas Malefic Grasp reads as a single-target talent.

Separately, we want to allow Haunt to be a viable Soul Shard spender talent. We’ve heard this from players and also want a Soul Shard spender other than Unstable Affliction in single-target situations. Ways to make Haunt as a Soul Shard spender competitive with a Malefic Grasp at the live value of 70% include dramatically increasing its instant nuke damage, drastically increasing its damage bonus %, or reducing its cooldown further – none of which would feel right on Affliction for a variety of reasons.

Lastly, Affliction’s first talent tier is a really high-power talent tier compared to most talent tiers we have, with Malefic Grasp being over a 20% DPS increase as a single talent. Generally, we aim for talent tiers to be more in the 5-10% range. Very high values can both have distortive effects on the spec and make it hard to balance other talents on the same tier.

That all said, in the next PTR patch, changes you should see are:
  • All Affliction damage done increased by 15%
  • Malefic Grasp will go down to a +25% damage increase (down from +70% on live)
  • Writhe in Agony will be reduced to increase Agony’s max stacks by +5 (down from +10 on live)
  • Haunt will stay as it currently is on PTR

Based on our numbers, 1) this 15% damage buff negates the 70%->25% reduction to Malefic Grasp, coming out as neutral change DPS-wise for Affliction Warlocks using Malefic Grasp going from 7.2->7.2.5 and 2) brings the relative balance of the Level 15 talent tier much closer to each other. As usual, the numbers may change during PTR according to further playtesting and feedback.

As a footnote, the most recent PTR patch with the current reduction to Malefic Grasp from 70%->40% that came with no other explanation or indication that further changes (compensatory buffs to the baseline spec, further relevant talent adjustments) were coming wasn’t ideal and we’ll try to be more mindful of that in future PTR cycles. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
This article was originally published in forum thread: Mage Tower Up, Patch 7.2 Hotfixes - April 19, Tank Artifact Challenge Nerfs started by chaud View original post
Published on 2017-04-20 12:44 AM
32 Comments
Comments 32 Comments
  1. healme's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Alcsaar View Post
    Why would you give affliction a flat 15% damage increase to make up for the talent nerf? They're already dominating dps charts.

    Shit like this is the reason I quit this game. Shadow priests are good for one patcth and you nerf them into the ground making them mediocre at best. You turn around and make affliction a BETTER VERSION of shadow priest in every way and then you don't even nerf them as they sit in the top 10 on nearly every fight in nighthold holding all 10 slots on multiple fights.

    Last time I did the math after looking at the top 100 affliction and shadow priest logs for every single fight, on average affliction was 160k dps ahead of shadow AT MINIMUM, and on some fights 500k+ ahead of it.
    This.

    After the recent buffs to other classes shadow priests will be bottom dps. No AoE, bad single target, no moving and casting, crappy new traits.

    And what do shadow have to look forward to in the next Tier, shadowfiend set bonusm you couldn't make it up.

    Amount of posts about shadow in 7.2.5 from blizzard : Zero
  1. chaud's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Bloodydemize View Post
    0.006% of Blood Death Knights? Is this just a random number thrown out or is there somewhere that shows all the stats for all the different classes and specs? I would love to see the breakdown for the numbers of players and % of players from each spec and class that has completed their challenges
    Not random, just a fun number. Full list coming soonish.
  1. qnik's Avatar
    Nerfs to the tank challenge, wish they would leave it alone so it could remain a challenge; 10% health is massive
  1. Rizzu's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by ssynec View Post
    Are there statistics available for other classes/specs? I'd be curious to see which classes had the easiest time with each of their challenges, or specifically if a challenge has far more completions for one spec than it has for another.
    I was looking for one at the last mage tower and couldn't find anything, it definitely sounds like the type of easy census MMO-Champ is capable of though. From an analyst perspective, I think you'd just have to cross reference characters that have two achievements:

    (my account is not permitted to post automatic links on MMO due to being a low activity account, I apologize)
    Code:
    A) Reached 110 {max statistic} - wowhead.com/achievement=10671/level-110
B) A Challenging Look {min statistic} - wowhead.com/achievement=11611/a-challenging-look

(B) / (A) =  Eligible % of Completion
Repeat/Filter by Class and graph
    How this data is gathered as a collective database is beyond me however.
  1. sluddyazin's Avatar
    Shit like this is the reason I quit this game. Shadow priests are good for one patcth and you nerf them into the ground making them mediocre at best. You turn around and make affliction a BETTER VERSION of shadow priest in every way and then you don't even nerf them as they sit in the top 10 on nearly every fight in nighthold holding all 10 slots on multiple fights.
    Priests are hybrid classes that can Heal or DPS.
    Warlocks are a pure DPS class.

    You can't really compare SPriest to Lock. Pure damage classes should always come out above hybrid classes. By how much? Now you can argue that point.
  1. Mamut's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by sluddyazin View Post
    Priests are hybrid classes that can Heal or DPS.
    Warlocks are a pure DPS class.

    You can't really compare SPriest to Lock. Pure damage classes should always come out above hybrid classes. By how much? Now you can argue that point.
    You can because theres no longer "hybrid dps class penalty". Its just thing from the past that was discarded long time ago by devs.
  1. huldu's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by sluddyazin View Post
    You can't really compare SPriest to Lock. Pure damage classes should always come out above hybrid classes. By how much? Now you can argue that point.
    That argument does not fly these days. I'd be all for having specific roles for each class but honestly people would be so angry at a change like that. For example you have a couple superior single targets classes, but they're bad at AE, then you have a couple of really good AE classes. Let's go one step further, then you have a couple of classes that focus on crowd control - yeah this means that only these few classes will even have stuns, roots, silences and things like that. I'd be all for a game like that, ie "old" school rather than "everyone should be on the top".
  1. Frozenbeef's Avatar
    Love the warlock post...

    Yeah so we've had a lot of feedback of this spec, players have told us they want another output for soulshards rather than just unstable affliction. Sooooooo yeah here's a 15% damage increase to every spell. oh yeah turns out you liked the drain soul and agony talents a bit too much so we are nerfing them to force you to pick haunt. Because who wants choices anyway.
  1. ONCHEhap's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Silversorrow View Post
    Would love to see this too!
    As far as I know only one blood DK has the appearance so far
    So from this it's not hard to pull some number
  1. sluddyazin's Avatar
    That argument does not fly these days. I'd be all for having specific roles for each class but honestly people would be so angry at a change like that. For example you have a couple superior single targets classes, but they're bad at AE, then you have a couple of really good AE classes. Let's go one step further, then you have a couple of classes that focus on crowd control - yeah this means that only these few classes will even have stuns, roots, silences and things like that. I'd be all for a game like that, ie "old" school rather than "everyone should be on the top".
    Good point and I agree with you.
  1. EllesmereGaming's Avatar
    I like how we get waterwalking a few days after most people get flying... Thanks for the useless tower Blizzard lol I want my AP affixes back!
  1. mmocf1ecf98c48's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by EllesmereGaming View Post
    I like how we get waterwalking a few days after most people get flying... Thanks for the useless tower Blizzard lol I want my AP affixes back!
    Agree,

    Why challenge mode is for classes 910+ ilvl.... The better way would be to scale it to the boss level or to the character level. I tried x times to do my challenge and my dps dont allow me to do that with gear ~900. Every video depicts players with lvl ~915+ and they do it with ease. 10ilvl its abount 150-250k dps (for me) its not small.. ;/
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