World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Hello all,

Thanks for everyone’s feedback on the Enlightened Legendary belts and memories, and on the issue of when you can obtain them and what activities they require. We have some changes coming to a future PTR build that I’d like to talk about a bit.

First, what are we doing? The Belt of Unity is moving from the Enlightened reputation and into the campaign quest for Zereth Mortis. You’ll be able to obtain it at the end of Chapter 7 of the Zereth Mortis campaign, which we hope will feel like a nice crowning accomplishment. The Memory of Unity is remaining on the Enlightened reputation vendor, and will remain an account-wide unlock like other Legendary Memories from Shadowlands, but will now additionally require that you’ve completed Chapter 7 in order to purchase it. This Memory means that when your second, third, or tenth character is ready to start Eternity’s End that they’ll be able to craft an Enlightened Legendary right away. The new questing requirement is being added to head off any feeling of needing to rush ahead to Revered for progression on your main character. We’re also still debating some other possible changes to the overall structure of Zereth Mortis rewards, but I don’t have concrete details to share on those yet.

Some folks have asked why there’s a delay in acquiring a second legendary at all. The answer there is that we have goals for your characters to grow over the course of the patch, allowing them to overcome challenges they couldn’t initially overcome. One specific example here is the difficulty of Sepulcher of the First Ones: by keeping the Enlightened Legendary a little bit in The Future from the raid’s launch, we can tune the raid at a difficulty that allows early progression to be bolstered by additional power once players start hitting stumbling blocks. If this power was instead available to your characters on the first day, tuning would have to take that into account for people who expect the first few weeks to be challenging, and that would in turn deprive many raids of what we think will be a fun and enjoyable boost in power after striving as far as they can without it.

It’s important to us that there’s a pretty level playing field with the Enlightened Legendary in terms of when different players obtain it. We want it to be an impactful moment of growth for your characters, getting to change the rules of how they play the game for the rest of Eternity’s End. Our initial plans of putting it on the Enlightened reputation had this intent, in that we were planning to distribute most of the reputation gains on campaign quests and on quests that players would do once or twice a week, but we hear you that this structure still felt unsatisfying for players whose free time lends itself more to periodic long sessions than for frequent shorter ones. We feel that moving the Enlightened Legendary into the quest campaign will be even more egalitarian while still providing a very satisfying growth moment.

As always, we’re still open to and listening to feedback here, so once the changes go up, please do continue to tell us how you feel about them.

So what week is Chapter 7 released on? A timeline would be helpful <3
Good point, yeah, sorry about that. Chapter 7 will be available on the third week after the Mythic raid opens. So there will be two full weeks of Mythic raiding during which nobody can have two legendaries, after which they should be available to everyone.

Having done the questline, I have to ask: Why make the legendary item a belt? We just forged the Crown of Wills, would that not have been a better legendary than some random belt?
Totally fair question. We looked at what slots players have crafted legendaries in, and tried to pick the slot we thought would disrupt as few people as possible. Also, given that tier sets are back in Eternity’s End, we want to avoid putting this new Unity legendary in any slot that conflicts with tier gear. As with many things in design, there’s not an objective right or wrong choice here, but that was the thinking behind picking the Waist slot.

I’m humbled to be part of Blizzard Entertainment–the rich history, the incredible talent, the best player communities, and of course, the amazing games we’re so fortunate to create. I’ve been leading Blizzard for a couple of months now, and in addition to the exciting news this week, I want to share some initial thoughts as we strive to put our team and players at the forefront of everything we do.

2021 was challenging for all of us. As individuals, we care about treating everyone around us with respect and dignity. As professionals, we care deeply about our crafts, and we want to work in the most supportive and safe environment possible.

Our top priority—now and into the future—is the work we are doing to rebuild your trust in Blizzard.

Watching Blizzard work as creatively and diligently as we have throughout this challenging time (on top of an ongoing pandemic) has been inspiring. Navigating these challenges, evolving our development processes, and being introspective and looking at how we can improve our culture shows incredible strength and commitment to one another, our work, and to the player communities.

I also was encouraged in reading forums, social posts, and emails from people within and outside of Blizzard, standing up for what is right and lending us your guidance. I want you all to know we are listening, and we are committed to change. As a first step toward improving communication with the community, I wanted to highlight some of the initial actions we are taking to improve our culture:

• We’re measuring our executive and management teams directly against culture improvement. This means their (and my own) success and compensation will directly depend on our overall success in creating a safe, inclusive, and creative work environment at Blizzard.
  
• We’re dedicating more full-time roles and resources to improving our culture. All too often, this important effort falls to employee resource groups, filled with people who already have full-time jobs. A few of the leadership positions we’ve established for this new team include:
  
  • a Culture leader who will help us maintain the best aspects of what we have today, and change and evolve where needed to ensure everyone brings their best self to Blizzard
    
  • a new organizational leader for Human Resources who will build trust, empower our teams, and help foster a safe, positive work environment for everyone
    
  • a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion (DE&I) leader solely focused on our progress across multiple efforts in this area
    
  We are committed to staffing these teams as a priority.
  
• We tripled the size of our compliance and investigation teams and have articulated clear accountability for unacceptable behavior. This applies to all employees at Blizzard, including leadership and management.
  
• We have shared representation data internally with our teams and have set goals around improvement across thesemetrics.
  
• We’ve put in place an upward feedback program so that employees have confidence in evaluating management, and we will use this to measure the quality and effectiveness of our managers.

These actions are just the beginning of the work that lies ahead for Blizzard. I’m motivated and excited to work directly on building the best environment for our teams, to allow them to bring their visions to life.

We also know we need to deliver content to our players on a more regular basis and innovate both in and beyond our existing games. We have some exciting things to announce, and I’ll be sharing more next week.

I want to thank our communities and our incredible teams for your dedication and guidance, which will always be our north star.

Here’s to an incredible 2022 and beyond.

- Mike "Qwik" Ybarra

CLASSES

• Death Knight
  
  • Class Sets
    
    • Blood
      
      • 4-piece: When you take damage, you have a chance equal to 100% of your Parry chance to lash out, Heart Striking your attacker. Dancing Rune Weapon now summons 2 Rune Weapons.
• Druid
  
  • Restoration
    
    • All healing abilities increased by 10%.
    • All damage abilities increased by 10%.
    • Lifebloom healing over time increased by 12% and bloom heal increased by 20%.
    • Nourish healing (Talent) increased by 15%.
    • Overgrowth (Talent) mana cost reduced by 60%.
    • Inner Peace (Talent) now has an additional effect – While channeling Tranquility, you take 20% reduced damage and are immune to knockbacks.
    • Germination (Talent) now has an additional effect – Rejuvenation duration increased by 2 seconds.
• Mage
  
  • Class Sets
    
    • Arcane
      
      • 2-piece: Enemies affected by Touch of the Magi take 10% increased Arcane damage (was 18%).
    • Fire
      
      • 4-piece: Fire Blast and Phoenix Flames now recharge 50% faster while Combustion is active (was 100%).
• Paladin
  
  • Ashen Hallow (Venthyr Ability) healing reduced by 15% for all specializations.
  • Holy
    
    • Ashen Hallow, Hammer of Wrath, Judgment, and Holy Shock damage reduced by 12%.
    • Avenging Wrath (Rank 3) has been removed.
  • Class Sets
    
    • Protection
      
      • 4-piece: When you take damage, you have a chance equal to 100% of your Block chance to cast Judgment at your attacker.
• Priest
  
  • Holy
    
    • All healing abilities increased by 10%.
    • All damage abilities increased by 15%.
    • Symbol of Hope cooldown reduced to 3 minutes (was 5 minutes) and channel time reduced to 4 seconds (was 5 seconds).
    • Holy Word: Chastise damage increased by 25%.
    • Prayer Circle (Talent) now also reduces the mana cost of Prayer of Healing by 25%.
    • Guardian Angel (Talent) now has an additional effect – When Guardian Spirit saves the target from death, it does not expire.
    • Afterlife (Talent) now has an additional effect – As a Spirit of Redemption, you may cast Resurrection, which ends the Spirit of Redemption.
    • Binding Heal (Talent) has been removed.
    • Cosmic Ripple (Talent) has been moved and replaces Binding Heal (Talent) on row 40.
    • New Talent (Row 30): Binding Heals – 20% of Heal or Flash Heal healing on other targets also heals you.

DUNGEONS AND RAIDS

• Mists of Tirna Scithe
  
  • Drust Spiteclaw’s Bloodletting now has a minimum range, and is only used on players at least 10 yards away.
  • Drust Spiteclaw’s Dying Breath now has a much smaller area of effect. A warning visual and delay has been added to allow time to play around it.
  • Dying Breath debuff duration reduced to 20 seconds (was 30 seconds), and is no longer automatically removed upon leaving combat.
    
    • Developers’ note: We hoped to see Dying Breath used for high-risk/high-reward plays, but players have found that the risk generally outweighed the reward. This update should make the risk more manageable & make the ability more interesting to play around.
• Mythic+
  
  • Affixes
    
    • New Seasonal Affix: Encrypted – Enemies throughout the dungeon possess relics of the First Ones. Destroy the relics to summon the First Ones’ Automa and gain powerful bonuses, based on the order in which they were destroyed.

ITEMS AND REWARDS

• Mechagon Peacekeeper, Rusty Mechanocrawler, and Scrapforged Mechaspider can now soar into the sky with their unique flying animation.

PLAYER VERSUS PLAYER

• New Arena: Maldraxxus Coliseum
  
  • Developers’ note: Maldraxxus Coliseum will be the only arena available in the queue on the PTR for testing.