World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies RSS Feed

by Published on 2022-06-27 06:19 PM

Diablo II: Resurrected Patch 2.4.3 Coming Soon

World of Warcraft - The Tavern
Blizzard has released "The Tavern", a new video aimed at bringing new players to World of Warcraft. The website playworldofwarcraft.com has also been updated recently, and now features resources for new and returning players.

by Published on 2022-06-25 01:33 AM

Patch 9.2.5 Hotfixes - June 24
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Classes

Druid
  • Guardian
    • [With realm restarts] Mangle and auto attack damage increased by 10%.
      • Developers’ note: Vengeance Demon Hunter and Guardian Druid have fallen behind in damage, particularly in single target. Our intent with these changes is to improve their performance in single-target without unduly impacting AOE environments.

Demon Hunter
  • Vengeance
    • [With realm restarts] All damage and healing abilities increased by 3%.
    • [With realm restarts] Fracture and Shear damage increased by 20%.
    • [With realm restarts] Auto attack damage increased by 10%.
      • Developers’ note: Vengeance Demon Hunter and Guardian Druid have fallen behind in damage, particularly in single target. Our intent with these changes is to improve their performance in single-target without unduly impacting AOE environments.

Warlock
  • Affliction
    • [With realm restarts] All ability damage increased by 5%.
      • Developers’ note: We’re seeing Affliction falling behind a bit in various content and feel a straight increase to their damage is warranted.
  • Destruction
    • [With realm restarts] (4) Set Bonus: Blasphemy no longer grants Rain of Chaos.
    • [With realm restarts] Chaos Bolt damage increased by 5% in PvE combat.
    • [With realm restarts] Incinerate damage increased by 20%.
    • [With realm restarts] Immolate damage increased by 20%.
    • [With realm restarts] Conflagrate damage increased by 10% in PvE combat.
      • Developers’ note: In order to address Destruction’s excess soul shard generation issues, we’re removing the ability for the Blasphemy to grant Rain of Chaos. This will prevent their shard generation from getting out of control and rein in their AOE output. However, this will have some effect on Destruction’s single-target damage and to help counter the impact we’re increasing the damage of several single-target spells in the Destruction toolkit. This is a big shift so we’ll be monitoring feedback closely and will adjust in the future if needed.

Dungeons and Raids
  • Sepulcher of the First Ones
    • Halondrus
      • Fixed an issue causing players to be unable to pick up Earthbreaker Charge immediately after recovering from the effects of Podtender (Dreamweaver Soulbind).
  • The Necrotic Wake
    • Fixed an issue causing Destruction Warlock’s Rain of Fire to not proc Rain of Chaos or trigger Blasphemy while fighting on the necropolis.

Player versus Player
  • Developers’ note: We have been monitoring PvP balance over Season 3 and are making the following adjustments. We look forward to continue to watch how the rest of the PvP season progresses.

Druid
  • Balance
    • (2) Set Bonus: Fixed an issue where Celestial Pillar would break players from stealth.

Hunter
  • [With realm restarts] Craven Strategem (Runecarving Power) now reduces the cooldown of Feign Death by 5 seconds in PvP combat (was 15 seconds).
    • Developers’ note: The short cooldown of Feign Death from Craven Strategem can be frustrating to play against, especially for classes whose primary damage comes from damage over time effects. We are changing the cooldown reduction from Craven Strategem to address this.

Mage
  • [With realm restarts] Flow of Time (Conduit) effectiveness reduced by 50% in PvP combat.
  • [With realm restarts] Netherwind Armor (PvP Talent) now reduces the chance of suffering a critical strike by 10% (was 15%).
    • Developers’ note: Mage survivability has continued to be higher than we would like, so we are targeting some of their defensive tools to address that while keeping the overall feel of Mage gameplay intact.

Monk
  • Mistweaver
    • [With realm restarts] Renewing Mist now heals for an additional 25% in PvP combat (was 10%).
    • [With realm restarts] Enveloping Mist now heals for an additional 10% in PvP combat.
    • [With realm restarts] Chrysalis (PvP Talent) now reduces the cooldown of Life Cocoon by 45 seconds (was 30 seconds).
      • Developers’ note: Mistweavers are continuing to have a difficult time responding to burst damage reliably, as they regularly have to open their primary school in order to catch up. Increasing healing over time effects and having Cocoon available more frequently is intended to provide them with better tools to respond to burst damage more reliably.

Paladin
  • Retribution
    • [With realm restarts] Templar’s Vindication (Conduit) now causes Templar’s Verdict to deal an additional 15% damage (was 30%) in PvP combat.
    • [With realm restarts] Shield of Vengeance damage reduced by 40% in PvP combat. Absorption amount unchanged.
      • Developers’ note: Retribution Paladin burst damage has scaled higher than we’d like, outpacing survivability and counterplay. We are looking to address some of those bigger swing moments without affecting their overall toolkit.

Priest
  • Holy
    • [With realm restarts] Mana regeneration reduced by 65% in PvP combat (was 60%).
    • [With realm restarts] Holy Word: Chastise now incapacitates enemy players for 3 seconds (was 4 seconds).
    • [With realm restarts] Censure (Talent) now causes Holy Word: Chastise to stun enemy players for 3 seconds (was 4 seconds).
    • [With realm restarts] Ray of Hope (PvP Talent) cooldown is now 90 seconds (was 60 seconds).
      • Developers’ note: Holy Priests have been outperforming other healers, and we are looking to reduce the power of commonly picked talents and mana efficiency to better fit within other spec representation and performance.
  • Shadow
    • [With realm restarts] Shadow Word: Pain damage increased by 15% in PvP combat.
    • [With realm restarts] Vampiric Touch damage increased by 10% in PvP combat.
      • Developers’ note: Shadow Priest has not received as much benefit from its set bonus as other specializations in PvP, so we are increasing parts of their consistent damage to help their overall performance.

Rogue
  • Outlaw
    • [With realm restarts] Float like a Butterfly (PvP Talent) now reduces the cooldown of Evasion and Feint by 0.5 seconds per combo point spent (was 1 second).
      • Developers’ note: The uptime of defensive abilities for Outlaw has been a point of frustration due to less opportunity for enemies to capitalize on gaps of defensive cooldowns. This is intended to address that, while keeping the feel of Outlaw intact.

Warlock
  • [With realm restarts] Dark Pact (Talent) now provides an absorb shield based on 300% of health sacrificed in PvP combat (was 250%).
  • [With realm restarts] Essence Drain (PvP Talent) now causes the target to deal 9% less damage to the Warlock per stack.
  • [With realm restarts] Essence Drain (PvP Talent) now stacks up to 4 times (was 5).
  • [With realm restarts] Gateway Mastery (PvP Talent) now reduces the time between how often players can take your Demonic Gateway by 30 seconds (was 15 seconds).
  • Affliction
    • [With realm restarts] Soul Leech grants an absorb shield based on 12% of damage dealt in PvP combat (was 8%).
      • Developers’ note: In 9.2.5 we removed the PvP talent Demon Armor and changed Gladiator’s Echoing Resolve to no longer interact with interrupt effects, which impacted Affliction Warlocks with their spell casts being a single school. With the combination of these changes, Affliction Warlocks’ defensives have been lower than we’d like even after our stamina increase to their base kit, so we are targeting to equip them with better survival tools in PvP.

Warrior
  • [With realm restarts] The amount of Mastery granted by Conqueror’s Banner (Necrolord Ability) reduced by 33% in PvP combat.
  • Fury
    • [With realm restarts] Crushing Blow (Raging Blow from Reckless Abandon (Talent)) now deals 20% reduced damage in PvP combat.
      • Developers’ note: Overall Fury damage has scaled higher than we’d like in Season 3 especially with their set bonus. We are intending to bring down some of the moments of volatility while still maintaining the high consistent damage that fulfills the fantasy of a Fury Warrior.
by Published on 2022-06-23 06:58 AM

Overwatch 2 Reddit AMA - Q&A Compilation

WoW Hotfixes - June 22, 2022
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
User Interface and Accessibility

  • Fixed an issue where the camera’s field of view could be increased past 90.
    • Developers’ note: The ability to restrict the field of view was added in 9.2.5 as an accessibility measure to help alleviate motion sickness. All of World of Warcraft -- the art, combat mechanics, and player interactions -- are built within the parameters of the user interface experience and scale. Increasing the field of view beyond the limit that has been in place since WoW launched was not intended.

Burning Crusade Classic

  • [With realm restarts] To address a bug that prevented Midsummer Fire Festival bonfire quests from resetting for players who previously completed them, all Midsummer bonfire quests will be reset. This includes any yearly quests that players might have completed for the first time since the event began at 12:01 a.m. on June 21.
    • Developers' note: This fix requires that we restart all realms, so to get the fix applied as soon as possible, we're preforming realm restarts soon during off-peak hours in each region.
by Published on 2022-06-22 09:24 PM

Wrath of the Lich King Classic Beta Opt-In

Wrath of the Lich King Classic Beta Development Notes
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Welcome to the Wrath of the Lich King Classic Beta!
The team has been working hard to get Northrend ready for you to jump in and begin your adventures, and we’re excited to have you join us! Over the coming weeks we will post notes and updates in this forum with each new update to the Beta.

Beta Test Release Build 44301 - June 22, 2022

Level Cap: 76

Focus:
  • Questing/Level-up Experience
  • Northrend Zones
  • Dungeons
  • New Spells, Talents, and Abilities
  • Death Knight Starting Experience
  • New Systems and Features:
    • Revamped Group Finder
    • Vehicles
    • Quest phasing
    • Glyphs and Inscription
      Note: To facilitate Glyph testing, a Glyph Vendor has been placed in Dalaran, near the Inscription building.

The Wrath of the Lich King Classic Beta Has Begun!
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
The Wrath of the Lich King Classic beta test has begun! Over the course of the test, we’ll be inviting opt-in beta testers and more to check out the upcoming Classic expansion and give us feedback.

Players selected to participate in the beta test will receive an email invitation directing them to download the beta client directly from the Battle.net desktop app. As always, please be aware of phishing attempts—if you’re unsure whether your invitation is legitimate, please log in to your Battle.net account to verify that there is a Wrath of the Lich King Classic beta license attached (under Your Game Accounts).

If you haven't received an invite this time, don’t forget to sign up for the beta* for your chance to participate. Additional invite waves will happen as we get further into development.

Getting Started

If you’ve been selected to participate in the beta test, your Battle.net account will already be flagged for access.

  • Make sure your graphics drivers are up to date.
  • Run the Battle.net desktop app—it may need to update itself if you haven’t run it recently. If you don’t have the app installed, get started here.
  • Once Battle.net is installed and updated, select World of Warcraft from the list of games.
  • In the Game Version drop-down menu above the Play button, choose the Wrath of the Lich King Classic Beta (listed under In Development) option, then click Install.
  • Allow installation to complete, click Play and select any of the available Test Servers.
  • Create a new test character or copy over a character from your live Burning Crusade Classic account using the Copy Character button.
  • Enter the game and test the content.

If you have issues installing and operating the Wrath of the Lich King beta, please check our Common Technical Issues and Solutions to begin troubleshooting.

Providing Feedback

We’d love to hear about your experiences in Wrath of the Lich King Classic, so once you’ve had a chance to play, please send us your feedback on the Wrath of the Lich King Classic beta forums, or follow the discussion on the WoW Community Council forums.

*Accounts must have an active World of Warcraft subscription or game time in order to be eligible for beta access selection.
by Published on 2022-06-22 05:17 PM

Junker Queen - Hero Preview and Gameplay Trailer

Developer Update: A Look at What’s Ahead for Wrath of the Lich King Classic
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)
Wrath of the Lich King Classic provides new opportunities to make a few changes that will improve the gameplay experience in the next chapter of Classic WoW. In this Developer Update, the World of Warcraft Classic Team takes you through some of those changes and what they can mean for the future of Wrath Classic.

#SomeChanges
When World of Warcraft Classic first launched, it followed a very strict design pillar: #NoChanges. At Blizzard, we faithfully recreated World of Warcraft as it existed in 2006, with as few changes as possible, while still making it able to run in the more modern environment of 2019. But World of Warcraft didn’t stop in 2006. It continued to evolve and change over the years. So, we re-released the Burning Crusade expansion last year in 2021, and plans are underway to re-release the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

However, as we re-release these expansions, we find the design pillar #NoChanges isn’t sufficient anymore. With World of Warcraft’s expansions came design changes to the game, and some of those changes were not consistent with the way Classic World of Warcraft felt. It’s undeniable that the latest 2021 modern expansion, Shadowlands, feels very different than the original launching game in 2004. Where should the evolution of the game stop, if we want to retain that Classic feel even while releasing new content? Many players today choose to play Classic WoW because they love that feel, and don’t want it to be lost. The World of Warcraft Classic team has given this a lot of thought, and we would like to share with you today our design pillars for what we call #SomeChanges.

Nurture and Protect Social Experiences
The first and most important design pillar is: Nurture and Protect Social Experiences. The compelling social experiences within World of Warcraft are why many of us first fell in love with the game. To retain these experiences, we want to help players build friendships and deepen their relationships within parties, raid teams, guilds, and server communities. Online social experiences are a complex phenomenon and can be very easy to damage. Positive relationships build community, reduce toxicity, and forge friendships that have kept players coming back to our game for many years. We need to nurture and protect these relationships. One very big key to this is providing “Social Proximity” in our game, or what some cognitive scientists call “Repeat serendipitous interactions”. Put a little more simply, you need multiple interactions over time with the same people in a way that feels happy or beneficial. Classic WoW provided this in abundance, where you would often meet the same people from day to day while running through the Stranglethorn Jungle, on your way to a Scarlet Monastery run, or heading into Blackrock Mountain for a raid. As we roll out new expansions for WoW Classic, the pillar of protecting this Social Proximity helps inform our decisions about features like dungeons, raids, quests, phasing, and tools for finding party and raid members. When we make changes to Wrath of the Lich King Classic, we will make changes that help maintain Social Proximity, and in so doing, nurture and protect social experiences.

Approachable and Familiar
Another important design value for us is: Approachable and Familiar. We want you to feel like you are coming home to a place you know well. Classic’s combat pacing is more deliberate. Class designs are more familiar, with fewer changes from patch to patch. Classic often tells simpler stories about a particular place and time. We love to see players with intrinsic motivations founded on exploration, experimentation, and wonder, in addition to pursuing more powerful items and epic storylines. Classic WoW provides players with a sense of agency over their character’s destiny, telling their own player story about how they explored and interacted with the world. Dungeons and raids in Classic are most often defeated through careful preparation: collecting consumables, perfecting gear sets, mastering class skills, and memorizing encounter details. We want to maintain that approachability and familiarity.

This pillar works to limit the changes we make, as that familiarity can be easily damaged. But it also encourages us to make changes when an excessively complex system can be reworked into something more elegant and easier to understand. A good example of this can be found in the Emblem system from Wrath of the Lich King, which became needlessly complex and confusing by the time we defeated Arthas. We’re planning for each raid tier of Emblems to work the same, with one Emblem dropped by the latest raids and used to purchase gear equivalent to those raids, plus a second Emblem dropped by dungeons and older raids and used to purchase less powerful items. We’re hoping a few small changes there can make the system more approachable for everyone, but still fill the cherished role it served in the original Wrath of the Lich King.

The World is the Main Character
The third and final design pillar of the Classic WoW team is: The World is the Main Character. We want you to maintain the feeling of being immersed in a living world (of Warcraft). We love your exploration and your player-driven stories and want to make sure you have a reason to visit various locations in the world over and over again. Gathering and crafting professions are important to that sense of world, and of its economy, where you are interacting with thousands of other players in a vibrant player community. This pillar means we need to preserve the world we have created from excessive changes. You should be able to collect the lost pages of the Green Hills of Stranglethorn, to rescue the town of Darkshire from Stitches, or to return to Tempest Keep and face off against Prince Kael’thas one more time (and hope for rare mount drop). You should be able to tell your personally unique stories about your exploits, even as you follow along the epic stories of Azeroth’s most famous personalities.

Wrath of the Lich King Itemization Changes
Those pillars can come across feeling very abstract. So, we want to give you a concrete example of how we are applying them to changes for Wrath of the Lich King Classic (WotLK). We’re taking a hard look at itemization in that expansion and have decided to make some changes we think will help improve the experience. Taking our pillars and applying them to itemization, we’ve come up with four goals for making changes to WotLK itemization:

  • Foster a vibrant player ecosystem engaging in all WotLK instanced content.
    • Serves: Nurture and Protect Social Experiences
  • Maintain a healthy density of players enjoying Heroic dungeons throughout the entire expansion.
    • Serves: Nurture and Protect Social Experiences and Approachable and Familiar
  • Preserve nostalgic itemization elements.
    • Serves: Approachable and Familiar and The World is the Main Character
  • Provide a consistent itemization scheme across all expansion phases.
    • Serves: Approachable and Familiar

That first goal is all about nurturing our WoW communities. We know players in Burning Crusade Classic have experienced a great environment with raiding. Players are active in multiple raids at all four raid tiers, participating in both 10-player and 25-player raids, and raiding with their alts and in pickup groups at all tiers. We want to make sure that continues in WotLK. To further this, we've been exploring a lot of ideas that we've decided not to implement at this time, such as 10-player and 25-player raids dropping the same items, Heroic dungeons getting improved drops, or increasing the starting difficulty of Heroic dungeons. One change we have decided to make, is to increase the health and damage of monsters in Naxxramas. Our 2008 design intention was for it to be a little easier than the 2006 original, but we missed the mark and it ended up much easier than we intended. Bringing up the difficulty a bit will make for a more fun and interesting challenge while awaiting the opening of Ulduar.

The second goal is about making sure Heroic dungeons stay attractive throughout the entire expansion. The Emblems and items they drop should always be valuable, even late in the expansion. They should also remain an interesting challenge throughout the entire expansion, rather than becoming excessively easy as your gear improves. We are exploring plans to add challenges to Heroic dungeons as the expansion proceeds, which would also provide more valuable rewards.

We also want to preserve nostalgic itemization. No matter what changes we make, we will ensure all WotLK raid and dungeon items can still be acquired, as well as their unique art.

Finally, the itemization and raid lock systems for Wrath of the Lich King evolved several times during the expansion. Rather than changing per phase, we want to make it more consistent. This means that Emblems should drop and work in the same way every tier, set pieces should be acquired the same way every tier, and ideally raid lockouts should function the same way every tier. To support this, both 10-player raids and 25-player raids will drop Emblems of Valor at launch, while dungeons will drop Emblems of Heroism, matching the design pattern for Emblems that was used in Trial of the Crusader and Icecrown Citadel.

#SomeChanges
We hope that this glimpse of the in-progress itemization design helps you better understand how we plan to adhere to these pillars as we move forward. Each time we consider a change to the Wrath of the Lich King experience, we will keep these pillars in mind: Nurture and Protect Social Experiences, Approachable and Familiar, and The World is the Main Character. If the change doesn’t serve them, then we won’t make it. But, if the change can strengthen those pillars, we will carefully consider it. As always, our goal is to deliver the best possible World of Warcraft Classic experience to you, our dedicated players.

We look forward to your feedback and we’ll see you in Northrend!

Site Navigation