World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Classes

• Warlock
  
  • Demonology
    
    • The mana cost of Shadow Bolt has been reduced by 25%.
      
    • The mana cost of Demonbolt has been reduced by 25%.
      
      • Developers’ note: Demonology Warlocks are running out of mana in prolonged fights when using high levels of Haste so we’re reducing the mana costs of their most frequent rotational spells.
        

Items and Rewards

• Corrupted Items
  
  • [With regional restarts] Players with a Corruption level of 200 or higher will now receive an additional negative effect, Inescapable Consequences, which deals 25% of your maximum health in damage every second while you are in combat.
    
    • Developers’ note: While Corruption's damage taken and healing received debuffs are substantial at high Corruption amounts, players possessed of particular ingenuity have constructed strategies allowing them to deal nearly infinite damage during brief windows when they themselves are immune to damage. It's important to us that players feel like they can play around with how much Corruption they can afford to wear, but we're setting a hard limit at 200 Corruption – going beyond that, N'Zoth’s dark power will defeat you.
      

A long time ago, we had the ability for players to go in - it was actually a paid service - and change their character. Much of that is now in the barber shop in the game," he said. "And as we were adding things up in Shadowlands, we realised, 'Gosh the only way you can change your gender in World of Warcraft is to go through this paid service.' And we felt like that's not the right message.

"Unfortunately we can't fix that right now but it is our intent with Shadowlands to take that out of being a paid service thing and [put it] in the barber shop. But that's not something we can easily hotfix - unfortunately we can't do that right now. It is something that we're going to have in Shadowlands itself.

In the next Alpha build, we’ve made this change to Unbound Chaos:

• Activating Immolation Aura will cause your inner demon to slam into nearby enemies at the end of your next Fel Rush, dealing Chaos damage.
  
  • Developers’ notes: We like the feeling of Immolation Aura empowering your Fel Rush, but requiring Fel Rush to be cast while Immolation Aura was active placed too much pressure on that particular window. We want this talent to be for occasionally weaving Fel Rush into your rotation for a big payoff, so we’ve changed the talent to Immolation Aura buffing your next Fel Rush, which means you can find the right time to fit it in.

Thanks for all of the detailed feedback! While there are still some planned changes coming for Warlock, we’ve made a few recently that you should be seeing in the Alpha:

Affliction

• Agony base damage increased by 12%.
• Inevitable Demise increases Drain Life’s damage by 12% per stack (was 5%).

Demonology

• Axe Toss now interrupts stun immune targets, such as dungeon or raid bosses. This does not affect PvP combat.

Destruction

• Soulfire damage increased by 40%.
• Infernals summoned from Rain of Chaos no longer trigger Infernal Awakening.
• Rain of Chaos Infernals now have some bad luck protection built in. Chance also increased to 20% (was 15%).

Some changes in an upcoming build:

Protection: Holy Power generation rearranged somewhat. Hammer of the Righteous is on a shorter recharge again, and Avenger’s Shield has a new effect whereby it generates an additional HP the first time it hits a given target (i.e. on the pull), but Judgment no longer generates.

The Protection rotation had gotten a little bit emptier with the longer recharge on Hammer, and this puts it back closer to BFA. Also, one particular time when Prot really wants Holy Power is the moment of engagement with a large group (but in a way that doesn’t flood the rotation in longer combats). Avenger’s shield will now conveniently start you with some HP when pulling packs of multiple enemies. Finally, with all this added Holy Power, we had to pull some back out of the rotation, and chose to do that on Judgment, since it currently serves a separate important purpose with the Shining Light mechanic.

A few ancillary changes to this are increasing the duration of Redoubt, and making Sanctified Wrath generate 2 HP (so Judgment still gives 2 in total while it is active).

Blessing of the Seasons: Keeping this short for now, since we are considering further updates to this in subsequent weeks that make this change obsolete. But in this week’s build, the Seasons will be in sync for all Paladins within a party, and their effects are stronger if there are multiple Paladins in the party.

Various changes in an upcoming build:

Feral: Various talents are buffed numerically, to try to open up some choices a bit (Feral Frenzy, Lunar Inspiration, Savage Roar), as well as a baseline buff to Rip that’s related to the below discussion.

One notable talent is nerfed: Sabertooth. This has been the subject of much discussion in feedback. While we like the idea of a talent in this slot that simplifies the rotation somewhat, we generally agree that infinite Rip extension has a lot of downsides. It additionally tends to cause balance problems, as an infinitely-extended snapshot-buffed Rip tends to outpace other options for sustained damage. Sabertooth will extend Rip by a smaller amount–keeping a similar mechanic to now, but requiring it to still be occasionally used on a single target.

Relatedly, we’re adjusting Bloodtalons to make it easier to proc–we’ve seen a lot of feedback that sequencing Rake, Shred and Thrash that tightly is a big hassle when you have competing interests of when you need to refresh your Bleeds, when you have a lot of energy, when you need to use a finisher, and so on. Trying to find the sweet spot where it’s not too onerous to use, but still provides a reward for planning your rotation.

Balance: Notably in this build, starting Eclipse requires 2 spells rather than 3. Doesn’t require a big explanation, but should be strongly felt. In particular, the windup at the start of combat is much shorter (especially when you can precast 1 of the 2 spells).

We’re also trying a version of Celestial Alignment that’s not extendable to arbitrary duration; it was simply going to cause nearly certain balance problems later on. It is now a fixed-duration cooldown that still provides a large damage increase.

Thanks for any feedback, please let us know how this all goes.