Shadowlands Feedback - Class Changes in the Upcoming Build

This week’s Shadowlands build has a few updates to address recent Unholy feedback. Our focus with these changes is: Rune economy, Scourge Strike not preferring targets with Festering Wounds, and the start sequence.

• Scourge Strike now prefers targets with Festering Wounds while inside Death and Decay
• Apocalypse has a new rank upgrade, learned at level 58, that causes it to generate 2 Runes.
• Unholy Blight now applies Virulent Plague to enemies it hits.
• Unholy Strike is renamed Unholy Assault, the Rune cost is removed, and the haste increased back to 20%.
• Soul Reaper’s cooldown is reduced to 6 seconds (was 8 seconds) to help promote more gameplay around the ability and its duration.

Thank you for all the feedback and we look forward to hearing more as you get a chance to play with these changes.

Shooting Stars baseline thank you and good night

…I see, you’re still here. Ok, two somewhat significant changes to Balance in the upcoming build:

–Shooting Stars is moved baseline on the spec, with a new passive talent taking its place. We generally agree with the feedback that the DoTs didn’t communicate with the rest of the core rotation in any way. It’s a good foundation if the generators, the spenders, and the DoTs all feel like they reinforce each other in some way.

–Starsurge’s interaction with Eclipse is changed: it now increases the Eclipse bonus rather than extending the duration (Eclipse duration will simply be fixed at 15s). It still serves similar goals—Starsurge feeding back into the Eclipse/nuke cycle, as mentioned, and some depth around resource planning/pooling. But overall less frenetic to not have to worry about keeping an Eclipse going, and frankly avoids some likely balance issues that would occur as Eclipse duration scaled nonlinearly with haste. This also allows the Starsurge-Eclipse mechanic to function with Celestial Alignment again, which is a plus.

More minor changes:
–Soul of the Forest adds a new effect to each Eclipse, rather than merely increasing its numbers.
–Shooting Stars procs more often than it had been in beta
–Fixed an error that was causing Moonfire/Sunfire durations to be double-extended by a levelup upgrade. They are intended to be the same as in BFA.
–Increased DoT damage by about 10%.

A hotfix is on the way to remove an incorrect additional -50% Focus Regen modifier for Survival Hunters. After this change Survival Hunters should be back to 5.0 Focus/sec, before Haste.

Thank you, Monk community, for your patience throughout Shadowlands development. We’re especially grateful for the many detailed bug reports that Monk testers have submitted.

In this week’s build, you’ll see a number of updates to Monk leveling rewards. These include several spell upgrades, as well as the removal of Dual Wield and 2-handed requirements for Fists of Fury (Windwalker) and Blackout Kick (Brewmaster). We also performed a pass on all of the Celestial invocation spells, adding Rank 2 upgrades for each and re-designing Yu’lon and Chi-Ji for Mistweavers.

Brewmaster
Level 58 – Invoke Niuzao, the Black Ox – Rank 2

• The damage of Niuzao’s Stomp is now increased by 25% of the Stagger damage you have purified in the last 5 seconds.

Windwalker
Level 58 – Invoke Xuen, the White Tiger – Rank 2

• Xuen strikes your enemies with Empowered Tiger Lightning every 8 seconds, dealing 10% of damage you have dealt to those targets in the last 8 seconds.

Mistweaver
Level 34 - Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent

• Mana cost increased to 5% base Mana (was 0%).
• Yu’lon now idles near the Mistweaver and casts Soothing Breath on an injured target, healing the target and up to 4 nearby injured allies.
• Soothing Breath gains benefit from Soothing Mist bonuses, similar to Summon Jade Serpent Statue.

Level 45 – Invoke Chi’Ji, the Red Crane

• Mana cost reduced to 5% base Mana (was 10%).
• Chi’Ji is now assists the Monk and deals melee damage.
• While Chi’Ji is active, your Physical attacks cause Chi’Ji to heal up to 3 injured allies with a Gust of Mist, and reduce the cast time of your next Enveloping Mist by 33%, stacking 3 times.
• Chi’Ji’s Gust of Mist currently heals for 200% of a normal mastery heal.
• Activating Invoke Chi’Ji, the Red Crane clears the Mistweaver of all movement impairing (snare, root) effects, and provides immunity to these effects for the duration.

Level 58 – Invoke Yu’lon, the Jade Serpent – Rank 2

• Yu’lon and Chi-Ji now heal up to 5 nearby targets with Enveloping Breath when you cast Enveloping Mist, healing over 6 seconds, and increasing the healing they receive from you by 10%.

We’ve been working hard to address the many bugs that have been submitted, with a focus on those bugs that are impacting testing, and we expect to have Monk testing in a much better place with next week’s build of the Shadowlands Beta (the first week of September).

Our goal is to make use of the feedback we’ve received here and elsewhere, with respect to Covenant class abilities, core class abilities, and legendaries. Thank you for your commitment to providing us with so much valuable information. Please look for more updates next week!

The most prominent changes in an upcoming build will be two new talents for Retribution.

–A redesigned Execution Sentence brings back the iconic falling hammer, and delayed burst of large damage, on a 1 min cooldown.
–As discussed previously, Inquisition was slated for replacement, due to having its role largely supplanted by the classwide talent Seraphim. Look on row 50 for an entirely new active damage talent, Final Reckoning.

More minor changes:
–Ashen Hallow slightly reworked to be more normal AoE damage, as well as providing a stronger buff to Hammer of Wrath.
–Healing Hands (Ret) redesigned to buff both Lay on Hands and Word of Glory, and to have it effect scale continuously with target health rather than having a cliff.
–Bestow Faith (Holy) generates 1 Holy Power
–Light’s Hammer (Holy) healing substantially increased

A few things for healing Priests this update:

Holy:
–Apotheosis now resets the cooldowns of Holy Words when activated

Disc:
–Lenience (talent) returned to the level 50 row
–Spirit Shell now appears on the level 50 row, in place of Luminous Barrier, as an active talent that replaces Rapture. An old favorite, adapted to the current Discipline spec to work with Atonement, and providing an alternate method of preparing an absorb shield on your group.
–Rapture now instantly casts a PWS on the target when activated. Casting with a target is optional; it will put the shield on you if there isn’t one.

Additionally, this week we want to highlight a change we’ve done to the Shadow Priest mastery.

In this change we’ve redesigned the mastery to be something more inline with the new changes, encouraging the Priest to stack their damage over time effects on targets for maximum effect. For each of your damage over time effects on the target, your damage is increased.

A twist: while in Void Form you gain full benefit of this mastery by dealing full damage on all targets, assuming they have all of your DoTs, whether they’re present on the target or not. We’ve decided to call this new mastery “Shadow Weaving,” invoking the name and spirit of an a legacy Shadow Priest talent.

• Your damage is increased by x% for each of Shadow Word: Pain, Vampiric Touch and Devouring Plague on the target. During Void Form, all targets receive the maximum effect.

Let us know what you think!

In this week’s PTR and Beta builds, several changes have been made to bring the Maelstrom resource back for Elemental Shaman. Many months ago, we had opted to try not having a special resource on the Shaman class, and went forward with the plan to remove Maelstrom and rebuild Fulmination as the ability it was prior to the Legion expansion. Ever since the first Alpha builds, we have been watching reactions and listening to how people feel about using the Fulmination buff. Many changes were made to make more and more spells and abilities interact with Fulmination, any sort of randomness was removed, and we’ve wound up back in a place that feels almost exactly like Maelstrom, only instead of an easy-to-read resource bar on your unit frame, it’s hidden as a stacking buff in your buff bars.

After some discussion in the past weeks, we have decided to just revert the changes that replaced Maelstrom with Fulmination.

There are still a few remaining places where Fulmination may be mentioned, but those will either be changed to interact with Maelstrom, or be redesigned entirely in an upcoming build.

Thank you all for your testing and feedback!