World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Classes
Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Hate to be that player, but the only problem I have with Legion rn is that fire mages have mandatory frost spells/talents. X_x
Seen feedback in both directions. "I'm a fire mage, I only want fire spells" & "I'm a Mage I should be able to use all schools" (holinka)

PvE
Please do not force LFR on players (for the artifact upgrade questline). At least let them do Normal Raiding in place of LFR.
You can do it in other difficulties, LFR/LFG is just an option for players without premade groups. (WarcraftDevs)

PvP
I'm kinda surprised, devs didn't take lessons learned from dungeon finder and lfr when they made ashran.
Different situation when direct competition is involved. (holinka)

Will the arena also function in the actual zone? Like free-for-all Nagrand arena in outland Nagrand? Would be nice!
No. This location in the world is used by the Feral Druid artifact acquisition line and will not function as such. (WarcraftDevs)

the new arena looks amazing. Did Julien work on it?
Yup Chris and Julien collaborated on it and did a great job! (holinka)

Lore
Are Horde players going to get an option to fire back at Tyrande's insults in Val'Sharah, like the Alliance had with Vol'jin?
The dialogue in the beta got a lot of deservedly negative feedback, it's being changed! (DaveKosak)

Pets and Pet Battles
So there might be 'collector content' but not so much 'battler content', which will upset one side. Or vice versa. Tough to find a balance.
I think that both groups both can and should be satisfied, the game is richer for having both, and cross-pollination. (Muffinus)

After 22 years, I'm leaving Blizzard.

The time has come for me to pursue personal projects that I love. I'll be moving from California to Washington State. My last day at Blizzard will be March 25th.

I look forward to working with Blizzard on freelance projects, one of which will be announced shortly. Aside from that, my upcoming works might include more game-related writing, script writing, consultation...and most certainly, novels. All of which will be announced and discussed right here in this newsletter, once a month.

I spent some of the best years of my life at Blizzard. It's a bittersweet departure to say the least. But I'm excited for the all the opportunities that lie ahead!

So...there you have it, the big news. Thank you for all your continued support!

Hope this finds you all well.

Stay awesome,
--Mick

Death Knight (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Blood Death Knight Feedback -- Build 21287 -- 17-Mar
Bone Shield is still a 2 sec ICD and going to stay that way for the foreseeable future, right?
Correct. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Balance Druid Feedback -- Build 21287 -- 17-Mar
We're going to try out Moonfire and Sunfire generating 6 Astral Power on cast.

We think this will help in a number of ways. It will help with AP generation in AoE situations, letting you actually use Starfall more often. It will help maintain AP generation in movement-heavy situations. And it will help make AP generation more consistent.

Great starting idea but it would make Natures Balance even worse than it currently is, regardless of the fact that it HAS NOT GRANTED THE PROPER TIME INCREASE TO DOTS SINCE ALPHA 0.0.0.0.0.0.0
This should have been fixed with this latest alpha build.

To be blunt, I believe we will spam Moonfire and Sunfire in almost all non-raid content, especially PVP and leveling (especially low-level). It's not quite the same as Cata's "Solar-cleaving," but it's uncomfortable how close it is.
I'm not sure how that wasn't already the case, though. It makes it less of a DPS penalty to move, certainly. Solar Wrath is still clearly better than Moonfire. It could be close enough though that we see you happily moving at even the slightest provocation instead of trying to get casts off, in which case we're fine with spreading them further apart (4 or 5 AP instead of 6, for example). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Paladin (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Holy Paladin Feedback -- Build 21287 -- 17-Mar
We'll continue to look at overall tuning throughout beta, especially after such a significant change. But it was most important at the moment to get the L100 row to something more reasonably conducive to having competitive options in different situations. In addition, we didn't like the somewhat tacked-on mastery bonus to Beacon of the Lightbringer. It undermined one use case of the talent, namely, partially opting out of the importance of positioning for Lightbringer. When discussing alternatives, it became clear that we should not actually have to find a large passive healing bonus to add to any talent, simply for the purpose of competing with Beacon of Faith. It's better to make the change now, with a reasonable starting point for the offsetting tuning changes that would obviously be necessary after a such a change, and have the rest of beta to reconcile the tuning.

Rule of Law is a new concept and we're open to feedback on how it plays or how useful it winds up being. We are planning to add default UI support for the changed range, and we recognize it may be difficult to use naturally until then (aside for Druids: the same is true of Balance Affinity). We also want it to affect all spells that you expect to be able to use on people that are shown as within range (Cleanse, Blessing of Protection, etc.). (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Discipline Priest Feedback -- Build 21287 -- 17-Mar
Edit: I should add, Radiance is still showing the double-cast effect, where it has a chance to be cast a second time with the casting priest as the target.
Right, this should be fixed next build. As well as the Atonement bug in Legion scaling areas.

Radiance is indeed meant to have the Atonements represent a large portion of its value, which is also reflected in its costing. We can make it prefer non-Atoned targets--that does remove the ability to repeatedly cast it on the same targets (for example with Grace), but that's fine since it's generally not the desired use. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Shadow Priest Feedback -- Build 21287 -- 17-Mar
Hey Void-dwellers. Let’s talk a bit about Shadow, shall we? There are a variety of topics to touch on:

Re: Multidotting and AoE in General
Shadow is one of our most heavily DoT-based specs, and that implies that multidotting should be their preferred method of attacking several enemies at once. But, unlike Affliction, your rotation also includes direct damage spells as well (especially the Void abilities). So, we need to make sure that a balance is struck between the two. Our goal is that you can apply your DoTs whenever you want, but that you’ll prefer to do so while not in Voidform, so that you can spend more of your Voidform time nuking the life out of your enemies with Void Bolts and the like. We’ve got this cool cyclical rotation going on, in and out of Voidform, trying to stay in Voidform as long as possible and then getting back into it as fast as possible. But multidotting doesn’t really fit into that well right now; it slows down your rotation massively, and requires reapplying DoTs to multiple targets while in Voidform, leading to longer times out of Voidform, and shorter times in Voidform. That doesn’t flow very well, so we’re going to make some changes to try to solve that:

• Void Bolt will refresh Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain to their original duration, instead of just extending them by a few sec. With this, and rotating between targets with each Void Bolt, you should be able to maintain several sets of DoTs, through full Voidform sequences.
• Vampiric Touch and Shadow Word: Pain will generate a small amount of Insanity on cast (same amount per cast time as Mind Flay). This should let you multidot without slowing down your Insanity generation rate. To preemptively answer why we don’t put Insanity generation of DoT tick, it’s primarily for two reasons: A) we tried it internally and found that it made Insanity generation feel very disconnected from your actions, feeling more like a constantly-generating resource like Energy, and b) it would scale exceptionally well with target count, leading to unacceptable overall Voidform uptimes when multiple targets were around, and too stark of a feeling difference between single- and multi-target situations. Insanity generation on cast doesn’t have either of these issues, so we’re going with that.

Re: Ramp Up Time
For the cyclical rotation to work, it’s important that there is significant time on both sides of the Voidform line. And the Lingering Insanity letting you speed the cycle up as you maintain it creates some really fun gameplay. But that first ramp up of the fight can feel like it drags on to some, and so we want to make sure that there are talent choices that let you kickstart your rotation. Currently, Shadow Word: Void, and to a lesser extent Power Infusion, do that, but we think they’re not quite strong enough to live up to that goal. We’re planning to tweak Shadow Word: Void to help it really deliver on getting you into Voidform quickly.

Re: Mobility
Every spec needs to have some weaknesses, but Shadow’s current immobility is fairly stark in that regard. It’s especially painful that their cycle slows to a crawl when they can’t get cast time spells off. The aforementioned change to Shadow Word: Pain generating Insanity on cast should help significantly with that. That said, we are concerned about the risk of Shadow Priests running around spamming SW:P constantly in PvP, and will be keeping an eye on that.

Re: Utility
Shadow is in a very odd situation when it comes to utility, especially in PvP. The amount of potential utility they offer is astronomical. It’s a staggeringly long list: Body and Soul, Dispel Magic, Dominate Mind, Mass Dispel, Mind Bomb, Power Word: Shield, Psychic Horror, Psychic Scream, Purify Disease, Shackle Undead, Shadow Mend, Silence, Vampiric Embrace… probably something else I’ve forgotten offhand. But at the same time, despite the crazy number of utility spells at their fingertips, it’s actually quite hard for them to actually use many of them. Since their rotation is based on continuously generating Insanity as fast as possible, any time lost to utility is punishing, especially in Voidform, where you’re actually losing Insanity while casting other things. And then on top of that, many of the spells cost huge chunks of Insanity as well. We’re not happy with that situation, and are considering other potential options. They could probably stand to lose at least a couple spells off that list, but we’re also considering bringing back Mana as an additional resource that would just be used for limiting your usage of the many utility spells, with costs proportional to their impact.

Re: Survivability
We see a fair number of complaints that Shadow is squishy. That’s true, and intended. The offsetting factor should be their shields, and their self-healing. Vampiric Touch provides very strong constant self-healing (so strong that we had to nerf it recently, as it alone outhealed the damage of outdoor quest mobs). Shadow Mend is an extremely strong spammable heal. And Vampiric Embrace (the new version) is great group and self-healing. The one thing that we think isn’t living up to its goals is Dispersion. It’s extremely strong, but the DPS cost on you rotation is also quite strong. We’re going to try pausing your Insanity decay when you use it during Voidform.

Re: Surrender to Madness
Talents as mind-blowing as this are a ton of fun. The fantasy here is extremely strong, and the gameplay concept as well. We don’t agree at all that it needs a redesign, and are totally fine with many people considering it ‘too niche’ or ‘too extreme’. We may tweak the exact implementation (increased Insanity generation vs decreased Voidform Insanity decay, for example), but are very happy with the overall design.

Thanks for the great feedback, keep it coming!

Also like I said on Twitter, you did not address the issue of people 100% wanting full Insanity on every pull.
That's what the Ramp Up paragraph is about. Any mechanic that lets you start a raid fight with 100 Insanity will be fixed.

Not even sure that turning SW:V into like a chaos bolt/pyroblast type attack would truly excite me, except when it was needed for an encounter. To me shadow is about high consistent damage, not mega burst spells.
Shadow Word: Void's damage is decent, but not intended to be especially strong. It's not a Chaos Bolt or Pyroblast. Its point is on-demand, bankable, massive burst Insanity generation.

Can you share what the planned SW:V tweak is?
Currently thinking of raising the Insanity generation and recharge time to 30 Insanity / 30sec. Same total over time, but more bursty, to help get there at the start of the fight in just a few GCDs. Still playing with it though, may not settle on exactly those numbers.

A normal non-execute Voidform seems to be about 20-24 seconds for me. An StM Voidform with Reaper of Souls under 35% is 1:30-1:40 minutes.
This is roughly in the ballpark of what we expect Voidform to look like with and without STM (modulo variance to due to gear etc.). The way that any amount of movement interfered with STM was likely holding it back more than was apparent--for most of alpha, it's been possible to get 90 stack+ STM Voidforms in ideal conditions. But any break in your casting can end it very quickly if it delays a Mind Blast. With the movement change, so long as you can maintain the tight rotation even while moving (which can be somewhat frenetic, but that's the intended feel of the talent), you should be able to get full value. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator / Artifact Calculator / PvP Talent Calculator)
Restoration Shaman Feedback -- Build 21287 -- 17-Mar
We have been discussing the Spirit Link issue a good bit. No promises on timing for this, but we believe the correct solution to the underlying problem is a gamewide fix to made reticle-targeted spells easier to use. Essentially, making the spell queueing system usable with those spells, so that you can bring up the reticle and place the spell in time for it to happen smoothly following your current GCD. This would go a long way toward stopping all reticle-targeted spells (on all classes) from feeling so disruptive in any sequence of casts, and we want to get it working as soon as we can.

In the case of SLT, we recognize this isn't the perfect setup for the case of using it as a personal save in PvP, since it still requires a click. However, in most cases this would allow a practiced player to drop the totem with no delay introduced by the click, and value of projecting SLT in every other use case is sufficiently high that it's still appropriate for the spell. (Blue Tracker / Official Forums)

We understand that not everyone enjoys Ashran, but we also receive feedback from some people that they really enjoy Ashran. Since the content is fairly recent, we will support it for a while longer. But we won't be offering any unique rewards from Ashran going forward.

Patch 6.2.4 will be going live Tuesday, March 22.

This patch will transition to a new Battle.net infrastructure and includes some memory optimization along with a multitude of back end improvements for communication between World of Warcraft and Battle.net.