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Shadowlands - Build 35598Shadowlands Beta - Additional Priest Changes
In the last two builds of the Shadowlands Beta, we’ve made further changes to Shadow to address feedback, and to further refine the core spec changes in Shadowlands. Most of these changes are adjustments to talents and spells to bring them more in line, such as Surrender to Madness, which we feel has been too powerful in too many situations.
Damage and Insanity Tuning
In the previous build, you may have noticed that we changed the damage values of various spells on the Shadow Priest. The goal here is to rebalance the spells among each other. For example, how much more damage should Vampiric Touch deal than Shadow: Word Pain? Players should now see a more healthy spread of how much damage each of their spells contributes.
Specifically tuning the Priest in contrast to the other DPS specs will come in a future build.
Additionally, we’ve modified the Insanity values that are generated from many different spells. We feel that Insanity generation is a bit high, but we’re mindful of players positive feelings of the cadence of the rotation.
Legacy of the Void
We want the Legacy of the Void talent to be available for Priests who are fond of the current live Void Form gameplay, and also a viable choice depending on the situation. We recognize that the talent had issues with the revamp design of Void Form and Void Eruption, and made some changes. It now has the ramping haste mechanic players are familiar with. We’ve also added an interact with Devouring Plague, causing your Void Bolt (while specced into LotV) to add duration to Devouring Plague. This may be too powerful, but let us know what you think.
Void Eruption
We’ve removed the Insanity threshold requirement needed to cast Void Eruption, as it doesn’t make as much sense with the new gameplay.
Some additional thoughts:
Devouring Plague is currently healing for too much, and we’re hotfixing the Beta to put it back to its former tuning of healing the Priest for 50% of the damage done. The Beta hotfix will also restore Vampiric Touch to heal the Priest for 50% of its damage done.
Void Bolt is currently extending the duration of Devouring Plague at a greater duration than intended. We’re working on a Beta hotfix to change the design of Legacy of the Void to refresh the duration of Devouring Plague on the target of Void Form, rather than extending the duration of the DoT on all nearby targets.
The tooltip is incorrect for Searing Nightmare. If the targets have Shadow Word: Pain present, it deals 100% increased damage (not 185%).
Damage and Insanity Tuning
In the previous build, you may have noticed that we changed the damage values of various spells on the Shadow Priest. The goal here is to rebalance the spells among each other. For example, how much more damage should Vampiric Touch deal than Shadow: Word Pain? Players should now see a more healthy spread of how much damage each of their spells contributes.
Specifically tuning the Priest in contrast to the other DPS specs will come in a future build.
Additionally, we’ve modified the Insanity values that are generated from many different spells. We feel that Insanity generation is a bit high, but we’re mindful of players positive feelings of the cadence of the rotation.
Legacy of the Void
We want the Legacy of the Void talent to be available for Priests who are fond of the current live Void Form gameplay, and also a viable choice depending on the situation. We recognize that the talent had issues with the revamp design of Void Form and Void Eruption, and made some changes. It now has the ramping haste mechanic players are familiar with. We’ve also added an interact with Devouring Plague, causing your Void Bolt (while specced into LotV) to add duration to Devouring Plague. This may be too powerful, but let us know what you think.
Void Eruption
We’ve removed the Insanity threshold requirement needed to cast Void Eruption, as it doesn’t make as much sense with the new gameplay.
Some additional thoughts:
Devouring Plague is currently healing for too much, and we’re hotfixing the Beta to put it back to its former tuning of healing the Priest for 50% of the damage done. The Beta hotfix will also restore Vampiric Touch to heal the Priest for 50% of its damage done.
Void Bolt is currently extending the duration of Devouring Plague at a greater duration than intended. We’re working on a Beta hotfix to change the design of Legacy of the Void to refresh the duration of Devouring Plague on the target of Void Form, rather than extending the duration of the DoT on all nearby targets.
The tooltip is incorrect for Searing Nightmare. If the targets have Shadow Word: Pain present, it deals 100% increased damage (not 185%).
Shadowlands Beta - Additional Demon Hunter Changes
This week’s build brings a complete set of level rewards for the post-50 Demon Hunter, including the addition of popular spells Furious Gaze and Revel in Pain.
Havoc has also had a few changes to its talent tree to address Nemesis. Nemesis was intended to be a strong single target sustained option, but it hasn’t proven popular among players. We’re reshuffling the tree a bit, bringing a buffed-up version of Fel Barrage down to the level 50 row and adding a new AoE Fury spender, Glaive Tempest, to the level 30 row.
This creates more interesting choices in the rows on the complexity and payoff you want in your damage rotation. Please give them a try and let us know what you think!
Havoc has also had a few changes to its talent tree to address Nemesis. Nemesis was intended to be a strong single target sustained option, but it hasn’t proven popular among players. We’re reshuffling the tree a bit, bringing a buffed-up version of Fel Barrage down to the level 50 row and adding a new AoE Fury spender, Glaive Tempest, to the level 30 row.
This creates more interesting choices in the rows on the complexity and payoff you want in your damage rotation. Please give them a try and let us know what you think!
Shadowlands Beta - Additional Warrior Changes
Protection Warriors will see a few updates in this week’s build. First, a number of talents have been moved around in the tree. After seeing how the layout is playing on Beta, and reading your feedback, we think this updated tree will create more competitive choices in multiple rows.
Thunder Clap and Revenge will now begin dealing reduced damage if they strike more than 5 targets, instead of when they strike more than 1 target. The initial changes to these abilities’ damage has had an outsized effect on threat gameplay for Protection, particularly in dungeons. These changes should make the task of gaining threat on a standard pack of enemies feel closer to the live game, while still making fighting large groups of enemies more of a challenge.
There are two accompanying, smaller tuning changes as well. Tuning is ongoing, but these changes were worked in alongside with the talent rearrangement.
Thanks for your continued playtesting and feedback!
- 15 – War Machine, Punish, Devastator
- 25 – Unchanged
- 30 – Best Served Cold, Booming Voice , Dragon Roar
- 35 – Unchanged
- 40 – Never Surrender, Indomitable, Impending Victory
- 45 – Into the Fray, Unstoppable Force, Ravager
- 50 – Anger Management, Heavy Repercussions, Bolster
Thunder Clap and Revenge will now begin dealing reduced damage if they strike more than 5 targets, instead of when they strike more than 1 target. The initial changes to these abilities’ damage has had an outsized effect on threat gameplay for Protection, particularly in dungeons. These changes should make the task of gaining threat on a standard pack of enemies feel closer to the live game, while still making fighting large groups of enemies more of a challenge.
There are two accompanying, smaller tuning changes as well. Tuning is ongoing, but these changes were worked in alongside with the talent rearrangement.
- Devastate’s damage increased by 50%.
- Dragon Roar generates 20 Rage for Protection (was 10 Rage). It still generates 10 Rage for Fury.
Thanks for your continued playtesting and feedback!
Shadowlands Beta - Additional Death Knight Changes
In the latest Beta build, Unholy and Frost have received a few updates to address some common concerns.
- Frost
- Might of the Frozen Wastes
- Rank 1: While Dual-Wielding your Obliterate and Frost Strike will also strike with your off hand and you can engrave each weapon with a Runeforge Enchant
- Rank 2: Increases your Obliterate damage by 25% and Killing Machine Proc chance when using a two-hand
- Runic Attenuation
- The proc rate has been adjusted to bring Dual Wield and Two-Handed closer together and the Runic Power gain has been increased to 5 from 3.
- Developers’ notes: Our goal here is to bridge the gap of the proc discrepancy between DW and 2H, as well as giving 2-Handed Frost its own passive ability to make up the difference of not having two runeforge enchants.
- Might of the Frozen Wastes
- Unholy
- Soul Reaper
- Has been reworked and once again has execute functionality.
- 1 Rune, 8 second Cooldown
- Strike an enemy for Shadow damage and afflict the enemy with Soul Reaper. After 5 seconds, if the target is below 35% health this effect will explode dealing additional Shadow damage to the target. If an enemy dies while afflicted gain Runic Corruption.
- Unholy Frenzy
- Reworked and renamed Unholy Strike.
- Strike your target with an unholy blow dealing Shadow damage, infecting the target with 4 Festering Wounds, and sending you into a killing frenzy, increasing haste by 15% for 12 seconds.
- Army of the Dead
- Rune cost reduced to 1 (was 3).
- Developers’ notes: These Unholy changes are targeted at helping reduce the start sequence time when paired with specific talents. We hope this will help the overall flow of the spec, without altering too heavily how the spec plays. An additional update (coming soon, that didn’t make it into this build) will also have the Ardenweald ability Death’s Due work with Defile functionality.
- Soul Reaper
Shadowlands Beta - Additional Warlock Changes
In this week’s Beta build, we’ve made some changes to Warlock’s baseline abilities to make sure Warlocks have new spells and rank-ups available for most of their levels. Along the way, we made a few changes that affect Warlocks at max level.
Ritual of Doom
Fear (Rank 2)
Curse of Recklessness
Eye of Kilrogg
Ritual of Doom
- Learned at level 37. Begins a ritual that sacrifices a random participant to summon a Doomguard. Requires the caster and 4 additional party members to complete the ritual. 1 hour cooldown.
- This summons a hostile Doomguard that soon becomes automatically subjugated as an additional guardian pet for the Warlock. Currently, the Doomguard lasts up to 15 minutes, but has a small chance to break free from the subjugation at any time and attack your group. We’re still working on the details of this ability, but we’d love to hear your feedback about it.
Fear (Rank 2)
- Learned at level 52. You no longer suffer spell pushback when casting Fear.
- This functionality has existed in the past but was never explicitly tool-tipped anywhere. We removed the pushback resistance at first, but decided to bake it in as a rank-up instead.
Curse of Recklessness
- This spell has been removed.
- While we liked Warlocks being able to stop enemies from fleeing, we didn’t feel the physical damage increase was working out. Warlocks gave feedback that they felt required to use Curse of Recklessness on as many creatures as possible for the damage gain, and weren’t having fun with the ability. Warlocks still have access to Tongues, Weakness, and Exhaustion in their repertoire of Curses.
Eye of Kilrogg
- Eye of Kilrogg is once again attackable by enemy players, and is usable in rated PvP.
- This was partly in support of using the new conduit Kilrogg’s Cunning, but also to provide more uses for Eye of Kilrogg in all areas of the game.
Shadowlands Beta - Additional Rogue Changes
In this week’s build, Subtlety Rogue gains a familiar name as a new passive talent, Premeditation.
This talent allows the Rogue to skip a step during their opening onslaught, by providing Slice and Dice when Shadowstrike strikes a target from Stealth.
Outlaw Rogues will also see a familiar friend return in their talent tree. Dreadblades delivers a mighty strike to your enemy, and invokes the memory of the Legion Artifact active by causing combo point generating abilities to fill the Rogue’s combo points while active, but at the similar cost of their health when using these cursed combo points on finishing moves.
This talent allows the Rogue to skip a step during their opening onslaught, by providing Slice and Dice when Shadowstrike strikes a target from Stealth.
Outlaw Rogues will also see a familiar friend return in their talent tree. Dreadblades delivers a mighty strike to your enemy, and invokes the memory of the Legion Artifact active by causing combo point generating abilities to fill the Rogue’s combo points while active, but at the similar cost of their health when using these cursed combo points on finishing moves.
Shadowlands Beta - Additional Feral Druid Changes
In an upcoming build, Feral will find some new things and some rearranged things around Berserk, Incarnation, Shred, and Rake. The main goal is to put more power and interest into baseline Berserk.
Not much more to be said, but Berserk should pay off more as a core cooldown, substantially improving various abilities and amping up the pace of your rotation, without putting you under heavy Energy pressure. Let us know any feedback!
- Berserk (without requiring a talent) now makes Shred and Rake deal damage as though you were stealthed, and makes finishing moves refund 2 combo points.
- A new upgrade to Shred makes it generate an extra combo point when used from stealth (and by extension, during Berserk).
- Incarnation, as always, lasts 30 seconds and grants all benefits of Berserk, plus one additional effect–now, some energy cost reduction. It continues to allow one in-combat restealth.
- Stealth bonuses to Shred and Rake rebalanced somewhat (Shred higher than live, and Rake lower than live) both to make them more competitive, and to reflect their presence on a baseline cooldown.
Not much more to be said, but Berserk should pay off more as a core cooldown, substantially improving various abilities and amping up the pace of your rotation, without putting you under heavy Energy pressure. Let us know any feedback!
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