World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Classes

• Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
  
  • Holy
    
    • Light of Dawn now functions correctly with Aura of Sacrifice.
      

Dungeons and Raids

• Cathedral of Eternal Night
  
  • Shadow Swipe damage dealt reduced by 50%.
    
  • Thrashbite the Scornful
    
    • Throw Arcane Tome, Throw Silence Tome, and Throw Frost Tome damage decreased by 50% in Mythic difficulty.
      
  • Agronox
    
    • Timber Smash damage reduced by 25% in Mythic difficulty.
      
  • Domatrax
    
    • Fel Portal Guardian health reduced by 25% in Mythic difficulty.
      
  • Mephistoroth
    
    • Dark Solitude initial damage reduced by 90% in Mythic difficulty.
      
  
  
• Upper Return to Karazhan
  
  • The Curator
    
    • Arcane Barrage damaged reduced by 30% in Mythic difficulty.
      
    • Static Charge damage reduced by 20% in Mythic difficulty.
      
    • Arc Lightning damage reduced by 20% in Mythic difficulty.
      
  
  
• Lower Return to Karazhan
  
  • There are now 2 Arcane Wardens in the Banquet Hall while Teeming is active (was 3).
    
  • Pennies from Heaven damage reduced by 40%.
    
  • Multi-Shot damage reduced by 30%.
    
  • Moroes
    
    • Garrote initial damage reduced by 90% in Mythic difficulty.
      
    • Will Breaker damage reduced by 25% in Mythic difficulty.
      
  • Attumen the Huntsman
    
    • Trampling Stomp damage reduced by 30% in Mythic difficulty.
      
    • Smash from Spectral Journeyman now only hits one target.
      
  • Maiden of Virtue
    
    • Sacred Ground damage reduced by 40% in Mythic difficulty.
      
  • Opera Hall
    
    • Firelands Portal damage reduced by 40% in Mythic difficulty.
      
    • Heat Wave damage reduced by 25% in Mythic difficulty.
      
  
  
• The Tomb of Sargeras
  
  • Harjatan
    
    • Harjatan's Drenching Waters should no longer affect Priests in Spirit of Redemption form.
      
  • The Desolate Host
    
    • Eternal Soulguards should now cast Sever Soul with much less frequency.
      

Quests

• Players should no longer receive an error if they already have Spoiled Sample in their bags when completing a weekly PvP quest.

Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Frost Death Knight in 7.3
We're definitely walking an unusual line with a talent that on its face does damage, but is on a "utility row." The goal would be that you can't use it to gain damage in non-movement situations (and we may have to tweak the timing or other aspects of exactly how it works in order to do that).

And on a fight where you are forced to sometimes be off-target (which is common), Inexorable Assault would add damage, to be sure--but so does essentially every movement talent on any spec. The fact that it has a place in your damage meter breakdown is unusual but is a bit of a red herring. It's still merely recouping some damage that you'd otherwise have lost, no differently from a talent that lets you get back to the boss more quickly. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Tier 21 Outlaw 4pc Bonus
I think there may be some misunderstanding with what the set bonus does.

When you Run Through, sometimes you get a buff on yourself that makes the next time you use Roll the Bones grant you one additional buff on top of whatever it already would have given you.

It does not give you a 25% chance per buff you did not get from Roll the Bones to get that buff.

If you choose Slice and Dice as a talent, you get a bonus to attack speed. The tooltip should change dynamically if you pick that talent.

With the 2 piece bonus:
Run Through procs a buff on yourself that gives you +1 bonus buff from your next Roll the Bones. You press Roll the Bones and happen to get 1 buff (base) +1 buff (set bonus) for a total of 2. Your set bonus buff has now gone away. If you press Roll the Bones again because you didn't get your favorite two buffs, those two buffs go away, and you may get 1 buff, or 2, or 5 on your next press. You have lost the 1 bonus buff from the 2-piece until Run Through procs for you again.

Maybe I misunderstood what is being discussed here.

Are you saying that for some reason when you get the set bonus to proc, and then use Roll the Bones, that for some reason you may want to immediately press Roll the Bones again if the buffs you gain aren't the ideal combinations?

Or are you saying that when the set bonus procs, you immediately want to use Roll the Bones as soon as you can? Is the concern that you potentially overwrite the set bonus buff or that the set bonus will fade before you Roll the Bones again?

Also it should work just fine with the Loaded Dice trait. If Loaded Dice and the set bonus are both lined up to happen, you should get 3 buffs guaranteed. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

For Arena teams across North America, the competition is about to come to a head!

The World of Warcraft Arena North American Championship finals will be held at the MLG Arena in Columbus, Ohio, September 7-10. The top 12 teams from North America will be invited to compete, based on hard-earned points amassed during the tournament. You can see the point standings here.

Who You Can Expect to See

• Tempo Storm (Jahmilli, Pikaboo, Gorecki)
  
• Method: Reborn (Cdew, Snutz, Samiyam, Bean)
  
• Union (Sethcurry, Mageiden, Prevy, Brain)
  
• Method: Synergy (Mes, Maldiva, Kolo)
  
• Panda Global (Rubcub, Rositajones, Jellybeans, Wallabare)
  
• And many more!
  
• Catch all the action on our Twitch channel.

Prize Pool: $100,000

• 1st Place - $50,000
• 2nd Place - $20,000
• 3rd Place - $12,000
• 4th Place - $8,000
• 5th and 6th Place - $5,000

BlizzCon Final
Only the top 4 teams will get to compete at BlizzCon, representing North America at the World Championship. And with $280,000 up for grabs, the competition will be fierce.

Regional Events

The World of Warcraft Arena Championship is truly global, and all regions in the tournament will be sending teams to the BlizzCon finals. Want to know who you’re up against? Keep an eye on the international team play on the dates below.

• Asia Pacific Regional Championship: July 29–30
  
• China Regional Championship: Aug 11–13
  
• EU Regional Championship: Aug 23–26
  
• Latin America Regional Championship: Aug 26

Cups #4 and #5 Are Still Up for Grabs!
The North American Championship finalists are far from decided, and with two more cups to play for there’s plenty of opportunity for late contenders to taste glory. Want to compete? Sign up for Cup #4 here and Cup #5 here. For those of you following at home, you can watch all the action from Cups #4 and #5 on the dates and times below.

• Watch the NA Arena Cup #4 at 11:00 a.m. PDT on July 29
  
• Watch the NA Arena Cup #5 at 11:00 a.m. PDT on August 5

We’ve added a heap of new content to the 7.3 PTR in this build, including:

• The Seat of the Triumvirate 5-player dungeon
• The third (and final) area of Argus, including World Quests
• The Frost Death Knight updates we mentioned a few days ago
• A few new updates, quests, and World Quests for Professions
• The Netherlight Crucible

The Netherlight Crucible (accessible from the Vindicaar after completing the quest “An Offering of Shadow”) is a new way to upgrade new and existing Artifact Relics by adding additional effects and item levels. As your Artifact grows in power, the system will expand to allow more and more customization. We’d love your feedback on this system, including on the pacing of the upgrades as well as the upgraded effects themselves, so please let us know what you think!

At this stage, most of 7.3’s content is now available for testing on the PTR (with the raid being a notable exception). From this point, we’ll be focusing primarily on fixing bugs and tightening up the new content based largely on your feedback, so if you haven’t checked out the PTR yet, now’s a great time. Thanks, and happy testing!

Few quick fixes:
--Frozen Orb should be affected by Shatter
--Ice Time should be included in the spec passive (0% anyway).
--Ebonbolt damage can proc procs (rarely matters much since most procs are RPPM)
--Ebonbolt and Flurry damage no longer log a second cast entry
edit: --Freezing Rain last 12 seconds, unmodified by haste. This didn't match its tooltip anyway, so I changed the tooltip, and I don't see any reason it needed to be affected by haste.

Quick comment:
It's generally right that Frost's mastery is very narrow (scaling-wise, essentially a % buff to Frostbolt with a few quirks). The narrower a mastery is, the more potential problems with needing to attach very high numbers to it for stat balance, that risk interfering with the rotation priority somehow. It's become more of an issue in Legion, since the large number of added effects on the class (as with every class) means that Frostbolt is a much lower % of damage done as it used to be. I'm not sure there's a short-term fix, but ideally Frostbolt would be a more substantial portion of damage in the future in the first place.

Short update for some changes in the next PTR build:

Thrash will generate 1 combo point baseline - as an energy-spending non-finishing move attack, it feels like it should. The Tier 19 2pc bonus which previously had this effect has been changed to a 15% damage increase to Thrash. With these changes, Thrash is still intended to not be used in the baseline single-target rotation (not counting the effects of sets/legendaries).

Additionally, to help out Feral AOE a bit more, the energy costs of Thrash and Swipe are being reduced by 5. (to 45 Energy and 40 Energy, respectively).

Moment of Clarity will, as an additional feature of the talent, allow Omen of Clarity's clearcasting proc to stack up to 2 times (and is now tooltipped). This should be sufficient with how the clearcasting procs are better spaced out in 7.3.

I believe a few more updates actually made their way into the next PTR (some potentially still in progress):

--Obliteration now causes Howling Blast to grant Killing Machine, as well as Frost Strike. This should help with feeling like you can use Rime procs without interfering with Obliteration.
--The overall damage buff is 21%, not 27%. Just a new estimate of what's correct to roughly account for all the talent changes. Rest assured the goal is to find the accurate amount by which the talent changes would hurt total DPS and correct for that, even before looking into possible further adjustments for class balance.

Finally, the L75 row is generally redesigned. The overall situation seemed to be that Permafrost did a rather low amount of shielding, but was usually taken because the other options had so little use. Some of this might be a little preliminary, but the ideas on PTR are:
--Permafrost shields for 75% of autoattack damage (from 30%).
--White Walker redesigned to: "Wraith Walk cools down 100% more quickly anytime no enemy is within 10 yards."
--New talent Inexorable Assault (replacing Volatile Shielding): "For every 2 seconds spent in combat without melee attacking, you gain a stack of Inexorable Assault. Each stack causes your next autoattack to deal additional Frost damage."
(PTR numbers might vary slightly from the above)

Both of the new talents are going in a direction we want to better explore on slow melee specs like Frost: helping to address time off target, without power-creeping general movement capability. Overall, sprints and gap closers are very prevalent on melee specs (likely too much so across the game), and it's been increasingly hard to deliver on slower, heavy-hitter melee archetypes. Most of that discussion is much longer-term, but I wanted to give some context for trying to resist the direction of having every melee spec use a short-cooldown sprint/charge, and try to branch out into more class-appropriate ways of dealing with the problem.

Greetings all,
PTR realms will be coming down today in order to deploy a new 7.3.0 build. No ETA for today's push but I'll do my best to update this thread if things look like they're going to take longer than usual (~4-6 hours).

As usual I'll leave this thread open for discussion so long as conversations remain civil and adhere to forum guidelines.

Thanks for your patience everyone.

Sharpen your swords and reinforce your boards, because you’re called to the PvP Arena for the hectic mayhem of Skirmishes.

This Week: Arena Skirmishes
All week, from anywhere in Azeroth, open the Group Finder (default hotkey: i), select the Player vs. Player tab on the bottom of the window, and then under Arena Battles, choose either 2v2 or 3v3 and JOIN BATTLE. You’ll be matched up with teammates and provided with opponents to kill in the Arena.

Look for the following all week long:

• Archmage Timear near Violet Hold in Dalaran has a quest for you.
  
  • Quest requirement: Win 10 Arena PvP Skirmishes
  • Reward: A PvP loot box
    
• Passive buff: +50% honor gains from Skirmishes

If you’ve been looking to make some Honor gains, this is the week to do it!