Azerite Trait Tuning - September 25, Patch 8.1 - Taunt Tooltip Changes, Blue Posts

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Azerite Trait Tuning - September 25
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
With scheduled maintenance this week, we intend to make some targeted adjustments to Azerite Traits:

All Classes

Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Demon Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • (Balance, Guardian, Restoration) Craggy Bark: absorption increased by 15%.
  • (Balance) Dawning Sun: damage increased by 40%.
  • (Balance) Streaking Stars: damage reduced by 40%.
  • (Balance) Sunblaze: damage increased by 35% (unchanged in PvP).
  • (Feral) Iron Jaws: damage increased by 66% (unchanged in PvP). The benefit of having multiple copies of this trait active is reduced.
  • (Guardian) Gory Regeneration: healing increase increased by 15%.
  • (Guardian, Feral) Masterful Instincts: bonuses increased by 10%.

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • (Beast Mastery, Marksmanship) Rapid Reload: damage increased by 25% and tooltip corrected to say "more than 2 targets."
  • (Beast Mastery) Pack Alpha: damage increased by 60% (unchanged in PvP).
  • (Beast Mastery) Dance of Death: Agility increased by 20%.
  • (Marksmanship) Unerring Vision: Critical Strike increased by 100%.
  • (Marksmanship) Focused Fire: damage increased by 30%.
  • (Survival) Blur of Talons: Agility increased by 65%.
  • (Survival) Up Close and Personal: Damage increased by 40%.

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
  • (Assassination, Subtlety) Sharpened Blades: damage reduced by 30% (unchanged in PvP). The benefit of having multiple copies of this trait active is reduced.
  • (Assassination) Poisoned Wire: Critical Strike increased by 50%.
  • (Outlaw) Brigand's Blitz: Haste increased by 50%.
  • (Subtlety) Blade in the Shadows: damage reduced by 25%.
  • (Subtlety) The First Dance: Now grants 2 stacks of the Critical Strike bonus when activated. Critical Strike bonus reduced by 25%.

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Warlock (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)

Alongside these changes, we plan to increase the damage output of a few affected specs:
  • Arcane Mage: all damage increased by 3%.
  • Balance Druid: Starsurge and Starfall damage increased by 15%.
  • Destruction Warlock: Incinerate, Conflagrate, and Immolate damage increased by 10%.
  • Fury Warrior: all damage increased by 6%.

You'll see the final adjustments in our hotfixes update post on Tuesday.

In addition to the tank and healer trait tuning originally posted in this thread, we're planning to adjust several DPS-focused traits, as well as make a few broader tuning changes to a couple of specs. I've updated the original post with the full details.

Patch 8.1 - Taunt Tooltip Changes
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Sorry for the delay in responding to this; I wanted to make sure I had all my info 100% correct before I said anything, rather than risk giving you incorrect or incomplete info.

So first off: the threat bonus from using taunts is not being removed. That's a tooltip change that was made entirely for consistency; every taunt increases threat generation while it's active, but it was only mentioned in the tooltip for a few of them for some reason. So that's just basic housekeeping.

However, separate from the tooltip change, we are going to experiment a little with reducing how big the threat bonus is on the 8.1 PTR. Currently, it's pretty massive, which is a holdover from when it was first added in Mists of Pandaria. Remember, back then active tanks were dealing huge amounts of damage (and thus, threat) due to the Vengeance mechanic, and so the offtank needed a huge threat boost to be able to keep aggro through tank swaps. That mechanic hasn't existed for a few expansions now.

Nowadays, in BFA, threat is once again something tanks need to keep in mind, and that massive bonus opens us up to all sorts of wacky issues as DPS (both from tanks and from damage dealers) increases. As one example, there's a risk that we end up in a situation where certain tanks need to use their taunt on cooldown as part of their single target rotation. That would be bad for several fairly obvious reasons.

So, we're going to try it with a lower bonus on the PTR and see what happens. Our expectation is that there is no tangible effect on your gameplay; you still use taunts exactly how you do now, and they have the same result.

I'm a little confused- you expect threat issues bad enough with DPS scaling over time that you worry tanks might feel like they need to weave Taunt into their rotations because it gives them extra threat, so you're reducing the bonus, taking away an option to deal with that apparent inevitability? Are you adding something else? What gameplay do you see arising instead?
If we get to that point (it's not clear if it'd ever actually happen), we wouldn't want "use Taunt on cooldown" to be the way to deal with it anyway. We'd rather just make sure you're generating enough threat.

Blue Posts
Originally Posted by Blizzard Entertainment
PvP Enchants Not Account WIde
Hey there, as I’m sure some of you guys already know the new pvp enchant at 2100 is not accountwide, which seems weird seeing as every previous pvp enchant was made accountwide, I opened a ticket about it once I found this out myself to see if maybe it was a bug and the gm that replied said as of now it’s working as implemented
This enchant is intended to not be account wide. Our philosophy here is that if you see a player with this enchant, you know they earned it on that character. We realize the enchant may of been account wide once upon a time and that other similar systems may be account wide but that is not our stance with this particular reward. Sorry for the confusion. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Cap'n Crackers Update
Here to give the best update ever.

Cap'n Crackers now sits on your shoulder when you target him and use /whistle.

Also Crackers does the same as well.

Wait... we're not done. Petey sits on the opposite shoulder too. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Anchor Weed Supply
Yeah though. Considering time invested people are not asking unreasonable prices for these pots. Something is very wrong with the supply of herbs to the market.
Right now its the lack of Anchor Weed driving it all up.

We've got a current hotfix in the works that should address some of the right now problems by increasing the amount of Anchor Weed per gather for ranks 2 and 3.

In case anyone hasn't seen the datamining for 8.1, we're also looking at tweaking the recipe costs a little to bring the material cost of recipes requiring Anchor Weed down as well. This of course isn't final and could change, but just wanted to let you guys know that we're looking into these kinds of things. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
This article was originally published in forum thread: Azerite Trait Tuning - September 25, Patch 8.1 - Taunt Tooltip Changes, Blue Posts started by chaud View original post
Published on 2018-09-25 04:54 AM
28 Comments
Comments 28 Comments
  1. morph4037's Avatar
    Wheeeeew thanks for the Ele buf...oh wait.
  1. azazal's Avatar
    no shaman changes
  1. Th3Scourge's Avatar
    Pls remove those two DK traits, they are completely useless
  1. Vultoric's Avatar
    Hope y'all kept all those extra Azerite gear pieces because your optimal builds just got fucked.
  1. Agrossive's Avatar
    RIP streaking stars
  1. lol's Avatar
    More ridiculous azerite trait tuning patch notes. Biggest botch-job from this expansion is going to be the complete and utter failure of properly tuning most things before the game released, clearly rushed.
  1. Kaver's Avatar
    We are definitely not going to get any new quality content this expansion as Blizzard are clearly going to use all their time tuning these stupid Azerite traits.. I mean.. when they are off by those %’s from the get go, it is going to be an infinite task to get them right.
  1. SinR's Avatar
    It's like they have a dartboard with Traits on it, and a coin that says "Buff" or "Nerf" at this point.

    Worst Enhance Traits get a buff to still be far far far below any other trait available
  1. mmoca1bc9cb6f0's Avatar
    I really don't know what the fuck Blizzard is doing. The streaking stars buff just about equals out the starsurge buff. Unless you had just 1 trait or none at all of course. But with 2, it accounted for around 10% of your dmg, while starsurge was around 25%. So a 40% nerf to those 10% is about the same amount as a 15% buff to the 25% starsurge dmg.
    And ofc nothing for ele but LETS FUCKING BUFF ARCANE MAGES, unless their trait nerf is the same fucking thing like with boomkins.
  1. Kaver's Avatar
    Blizzard should also refund all the gold that people are going to use on rerolling traits after this and future nerfs.

    Personally I’m just going to use the non-class specific mid-range traits because I don’t want to deal with this “tuning hell”.
  1. mmoca1bc9cb6f0's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Kaver View Post
    Blizzard should also refund all the gold that people are going to use on rerolling traits after this and future nerfs.

    Personally I’m just going to use the non-class specific mid-range traits because I don’t want to deal with this “tuning hell”.
    Just always go with the Uldir azerite pieces and traits. They may not be the best right now with not enough kills, but Blizz cleary wants them to be the best and they will be as soon as you get 5 stacks of the origination buff thingy.
  1. mmoc47b4060ff1's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by Stormstrîke View Post
    I really don't know what the fuck Blizzard is doing. The streaking stars buff just about equals out the starsurge buff. Unless you had just 1 trait or none at all of course. But with 2, it accounted for around 10% of your dmg, while starsurge was around 25%. So a 40% nerf to those 10% is about the same amount as a 15% buff to the 25% starsurge dmg.
    And ofc nothing for ele but LETS FUCKING BUFF ARCANE MAGES, unless their trait nerf is the same fucking thing like with boomkins.
    It is. Galvanising spark is arcane a bis trait and you have 3 of them stacked
  1. tristannarutofan's Avatar
    . All the people here are stupid blizzard balance is under tuned traits and yall say thays bad? Fuck off

    - - - Updated - - -

    Quote Originally Posted by Kaver View Post
    Blizzard should also refund all the gold that people are going to use on rerolling traits after this and future nerfs.

    Personally I’m just going to use the non-class specific mid-range traits because I don’t want to deal with this “tuning hell”.
    A great example . Its 5 gold base cost.

    What a cheap noob.
    Literally every patch has tuning hotfixes this isn't any different from brass or cataclysm I know you idiots going to realize that tuning every few weeks every patch and RNG is something that's been in this game since vanilla
  1. Krawu's Avatar
    Well great, Fury Warriors now had their 3 best traits nerfed by at least 25% each so there really aren't any good ones left. We now have a large selection of mediocre garbage. Every single time our BiS pieces change, so back to grinding it is. Thanks, Blizzard.

    Oh, and those Uldir pieces? Sure they're great as long as you're doing Uldir, but they're pretty bad if you're doing anything else. For M+ you really need other high level Azerite gear from Mythics. Which are now changing again. Can they not limit these major balancing reworks to major patches?
  1. Terion's Avatar
    Delete azerite armor - put class traits in neck - balance it = profit. Those 3 armor pieces with wheel of Fortune just doing nothing in playstile and in dps overall. They are just harder to get with no reason. The same armor with secondary stats gives the same dps output if not to mention raid traits with titans, matrix and overall raid buff.
  1. Sarsoman's Avatar
    Let's buff the useless Demo traits that still won't be used, then go ahead and buff Destro, which is already better than Demo! GG Blizz. 3 expansions you've screwed over Demo now.
  1. sugarfree's Avatar
    Welcome to BFA, where you're fully balanced around azerite traits. Oh, your azerite gear just got nerfed? Go get a different one noob!

    At this rate, they need to increase storage solely for azerite gear. This is WAAAAAAYYY harder to switch and transition. They're literally doing a majority of their balance through gear now. Not talents, classes, auras, modifiers, but by GEAR. Which can also be STACKED. Which makes the whole balance thing even HARDER.
  1. Cyteriz's Avatar
    You need to be able to farm Azerite gear, this is way to RNG based, almost worse than Legion
  1. Kaver's Avatar
    Quote Originally Posted by tristannarutofan View Post
    . All the people here are stupid blizzard balance is under tuned traits and yall say thays bad? Fuck off

    - - - Updated - - -



    A great example . Its 5 gold base cost.

    What a cheap noob.
    Literally every patch has tuning hotfixes this isn't any different from brass or cataclysm I know you idiots going to realize that tuning every few weeks every patch and RNG is something that's been in this game since vanilla
    1) it’s pretty expensive if you have already rerolled manny times.

    2) Adressing people as “noobs” and “idiots” doesn’t make your argument stronger. Try to be more constructive.

    3) Tuning in BFA is a massive task due to the Azerite Traits. Based on the numbers from this hotfix I would say Blizzard isno where near close to getting it right. They will need the whole expansion to tune these traits. They are adding tuning problems on top of tuning problems.
  1. Hyrican's Avatar
    this is probably the biggest balancing nightmare they have ever introduced in WoW. ...

    Who knew that 3 items of stackable 2-3 traits of a selection of >30 traits with effects increasing on item level at different rates and different diminishing returns would be a nightmare to balance?

    Each of them of course not generally better but different depending on pvp, raid/specific raidbosses, mythic+ with different affixes, specs, classes with common traits..

    Before you could balance a single legendary or a class set if they were the culprit. Could actually improve specific skills without massively changing the whole gearing thingy
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