World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Classes

• Paladin
  
  • Holy
    
    • Fixed an issue where Divine Resonance would not heal if no target was selected.
      
  • Protection
    
    • Fixed an issue preventing Inner Light's damage effect from triggering.
      
  • Retribution
    
    • Fixed an issue where Crusade incorrectly increased damage dealt without having the corresponding Avenging Wrath talent.
      

Dungeons and Raids

• Algeth’ar Academy
  
  • Overgrown Ancient
    
    • Increased the amount of time between abilities, particularly in relation to Burst Forth.
      
      • Developers’ Note: The combination of Germination and Burst Forth is the most dangerous part of the encounter. We hope by giving this moment more space, players will be better able to prepare for and recover from it.
        
• Azure Vaults
  
  • Azureblade
    
    • Increased the time it takes for Azureblade to drain their mana.
      
• The Nokhud Offensive
  
  • Nokhud Lancemasters are less talkative when firing their ballistae.
    
  • The Raging Tempest
    
    • Lightning Strike damage reduced by 10%.
      
    • Energy Surge damage reduced by 50%.
      
    • Surge of Power duration increased to 18 seconds (was 15 sec).
      
  • Teera and Maruuk
    
    • Slightly increased Maruuk's movement speed.
      
    • Added a slight delay on Quick Shot after Teera uses Gale Arrow.
      
• Ruby Life Pools
  
  • Melidrussa Chillworn
    
    • Reduced the absorb value of Ice Bulwark by 25%.
      
    • Reduced party-wide periodic damage of Chillstorm by 33%.
      
  • Erkhart Stormvein
    
    • Interrupting Cloudburst now has a 2 sec. school lockout when it interrupts a spell (was 4 seconds).
      
    • Stormslam is now cast less frequently.
      
• Temple of the Jade Serpent
  
  • Lesser Sha and Malformed Sha’s ability ‘Sha Eruption’ no longer ignores line of sight.
    
  • Sha of Doubt
    
    • Increased the recast cooldown of Touch of Nothingness.
      
    • Wither Will now prefers targets that are not under the effects of Touch of Nothingness.
      
• Vault of the Incarnates
  
  • Fixed an issue with the intermission enemies’ Presence abilities being able to pierce magic immunities on the Kurog Grimtotem encounter.
    

Player versus Player

• Classes
  
  • Paladin
    
    • Protection
      
      • Fixed an issue preventing Guardian of the Forgotten Queen from benefiting from cooldown reduction from Gift of the Golden Val'kyr.
        
      • Fixed an issue preventing Aura of Reckoning from correctly extending Sentinel.
        

Professions

• Many professions’ weekly quests have had their quest item drop rates increased.
  
• Alchemy
  
  • Aerated Phial of Quick Hands is now a valid target for Reclaim Concoctions.
    
• Enchanting
  
  • Reduced the vendor price of Chromatic Focus to be more in line with other uncommon profession equipment vendor prices.
    

So something is seriously off with respect to TW dungeons this week.

Grimrail Depot

The brute’s charge attack is doing substantially more damage than tank health, even when your back is completely against the crates. Even when doing this on a 20+ key, I never had to use a major defensive to survive the charge, but it’s now somehow required on a TW? It’s literally as though the boss is being affected by Tyrannical semantics and yet it’s TW.

Skyreach

The second boss slam is a high damage ability, but even with the same set of buffs up, no tank major defensives, it’s hitting the tank for varied amounts. Sometimes its upwards of 60% of my health and other times its only 15-20%, with no externals and no defensives used, just always having active mitigation up.

The third boss, its simply not doable. The damage output of the DPS is all lower than tanks, this causes a plethora of birds to spawn throughout the fight, despite them kiting them, and this just leads to eventual attrition and birds fixating the tank and causing a wipe.

I’m not sure what’s going on, but I don’t recall TW ever feeling like I was doing a +20 key and having to utilize so much control, finesse, and defensives; ergo, some scaling is clearly off in some of the dungeons and needs to be looked into.

Hey all,

We are aware that the gear level in Timewalking Dungeons is currently being scaled down more than intended. We are working on a hotfix and will deploy it as quickly as possible.

Hi Everyone,

We talked about this a fair amount before the holidays and sort of went back and forth about what to do with Tier Sets, and in the end, we’ve decided that it will not see any further adjustments past the normal 6 item level bump. There were definitely proponents of buffing it further on our team internally and we’d like to share some of the reasoning why we are leaving it the way it is. For simplicity I am only going to make reference to 25-player item levels for the remainder of this post.

When discussing this internally, one thing we kept coming back to was that, for most guilds, the jump from 232 to 252 will not be quick and most groups can expect to be wearing a lot of 232 gear for most of the time that Ulduar is current content. The reason for this is twofold;

1. The hard modes are actually fairly hard and clearing all of them week 1 is not a given for all guilds. Some will clear them all quickly, most will not.
2. Ulduar is not itemized like ToC and ICC heroic are, e.g. there is not a full hard mode loot table for every boss, and when you complete a hard mode kill, you will only recieve a single extra piece of ilvl 252 loot from most bosses.

This means that if you are looking at your BiS list and plan on getting a full set of 252 gear, and if you assume every other person in your 25 player raid wants the same, you’ll be looking at over 33 weeks of full clearing all hard modes to fully gear your raid out in 252. This is also assuming zero “waste” in terms of disenchanting duplicate or unwanted items.

I think some folks have been looking at the 252 gear and fixating on that as they are thinking of their BiS lists. In reality however, some of those 252 pieces will be “chase” items you may be seeking for many weeks or months and may never get based on RNG or loot competition. And really, that’s fine. That’s a very “classic” model and gearing up first in 232 and then slowly replacing those pieces with the rare but highly desirable 252 gear should give the gear progression in Ulduar a long and satisfying arc. This is how this worked in the original Ulduar as well, the only difference being that hard mode items were perhaps not as compelling considering their modest power gain over normal, especially when compared to the very significant increase in challenge for Hard Mode bosses.

So, could we have bumped tier to keep it relevant longer? Yes, but ultimately, we are increasing player power significantly as it is, and we feel like we are in a really nice place when you combine the pre-nerf boss difficulty with the ilvl bumps we have now. Hard modes will be really, really, hard for many guilds coming into ulduar in mostly full 213 gear but will get steadily easier as 232 gear is gathered. If we inject too much more power past that 6 ilvl normal jump or add additional drops to hard modes as some players have suggested, it could cut the legs off of that Hard Mode progression much faster than we’d like.

Time will tell how it actually plays out, but for now, the team is very happy with the difficulty vs. reward within Ulduar in general. It’s likely your tier set gear isn’t your ultimate BiS for the phase, but it may still last you many weeks or months while you work towards those hard mode items and are waiting your turn to get them. We think that will feel pretty good and provide a great sense of progression within the phase as you take those stepstone upgrades.

I hope that helps clarify our thoughts on this. Sorry for the length of this post and thank you for taking the time to read it. In previous communications we stated we’d like to spend more time explaining the “why” behind certain decisions, and as we’ve seen a lot of debate about this issue, we felt this was a good topic to chime in on. We really appreciate the feedback we’ve gotten for Ulduar so far and are super excited to see it go live in the not-too-distant future.

Thanks to everyone who joined us on PTR for Ulduar testing and we hope everyone had a great holiday!

The first Wrath Classic PvP season will be ending at 10:00 p.m. for each region. In this region, Season 5 will end at 10:00 p.m. PST on January 9 (1:00 a.m. EST, January 10).

During maintenance on January 10, we will update the game, and all Arena points will be converted to Honor.

Good luck fighting to the finish!