World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

We’d like to give everyone a heads up that we’re working on tuning adjustments to several Corruption Effects. While we don’t have exact amounts just yet, we have some certainty that in the next 24 hours, we will:

• Reduce the effectiveness of Echoing Void significantly.
• Increase the effectiveness of Void Ritual by a small amount.
• Increase the duration of Deadly Momentum, so that its buff doesn’t fall off.

At this time, we’re also considering:

• Reducing the damage done by Twilight Devastation.
• Increasing the effectiveness of other Corruption Effects.

Again, we intend to complete these changes in the next 24 hours, and we’ll let you know as soon as we’re set on final tuning numbers.

Thank you!

Sharpen your swords and reinforce your boards, because you’re called to the PvP Arena for the hectic mayhem of Skirmishes.

This Week: Arena Skirmishes

All week, from anywhere in Azeroth, open the Group Finder (default hotkey: i), select the Player vs. Player tab on the bottom of the window, and then under Casual, choose Arena Skirmish and JOIN BATTLE. You’ll be matched up with teammates and provided with opponents to kill in the Arena. You can also queue for a Premade group or create your own group within the Premade tab.

Look for the following all week long:

• Chronicler Shoopa in Zuldazar and in Boralus has a quest for you–The Arena Calls. Or, if you forget to pick it up there, you can start it from within the Adventure Journal.
  
  • Quest requirement: Win 10 Arena PvP Skirmishes
    
  • Reward: A PvP loot box
    
• Passive buff: +50% honor gains from Skirmishes

If you’ve been looking to make some Honor gains, this is the week to do it!

Sharpen your blades and prepare yourself for a culinary battle in this week's PvP Brawl—Cooking Impossible running February 4–11.

Nomi is hosting a Pandaren Chili Cookoff in the Valley of the Four Winds between the Alliance and the Horde! The first to bring Nomi all of the required ingredients wins.

Classes

• Hunter
  
  • Angerhoof Bull, Anzu, Blaithe, Doe, Greathorn Stag, Irewing, Motorback Ape, and Porkchop are now tamable.
    
  • Ji-Kun, Ssinkrix, Qroshekx, Xaarshej should now retain their names when tamed.
    

Creatures and NPCs

• Lalathin should now appear in all phases of Suramar.

Horrific Visions

• Further reduced the health of enemies in Horrific Visions for players who enter the instance as a solo healer or tank specialization; healers will face enemies with 42% less health and tanks will fight enemies with 25% reduced health.
  
  • Developers’ note: We'd like players to be able to upgrade their legendary cloak without feeling like they have to change specialization. The difficulty of Horrific Visions adjusts dynamically based on party composition, but they're still a bit rough for solo healers and tanks, so we're making some tweaks to help those players out.
    
• Fixed an issue that prevented Vision Hunters’ buff text from displaying the proper values.

Items and Rewards

• The Humming Black Dragonscale proc no longer affects character movement, but it can be activated to slow the wearer's falling speed as long as they are wearing their legendary cloak.
  
• Unequipping Manifesto of Madness will remove its associated effects.
  
• Unequipping Humming Black Dragonscale after using it will cancel its effects.

Hail War3 Players,

We’ve been following the discussions the past couple days and want to thank you for your feedback as well as your support. First off, we want to say we’re sorry to those of you who didn’t have the experience you wanted, and we’d like to share our plans for what’s coming next.

There were a few hours during launch day where we experienced server-load issues that impacted players’ ability to jump right in, but we were able to resolve those later in the day. Separate from that, we’ve seen community feedback about different aspects of Reforged that we wanted to take some time to address.

Before we go on: the team is excited that Warcraft III: Reforged is finally upon us and we’re fully committed to supporting the game for a long time to come. The next few patches and updates we’ll discuss below are just part of our ongoing plans. This game is an integral part of the Blizzard DNA, with a team that loves Warcraft III, and we’re looking forward to pouring our hearts into Reforged and the Warcraft III community for the long term.

One of the concerns with Reforged that we’ve seen are the visuals when selecting Classic Mode. We’ve identified the bug causing the colors and shading to look different from the original Warcraft III, and we’re testing a fix that will be incorporated in a larger patch addressing this issue and others. We expect to release that late this week. The patch will also address many other known issues, such as fixing some portrait animations and audio bugs, implementing some UI fixes, and more. Please keep an eye out for the patch notes for a detailed list of all the bug fixes.

Another area of concern we’re seeing is regarding online features such as leaderboards and clans, which applies to all Warcraft III players, including those who haven’t purchased Reforged. At BlizzCon we talked a lot about how the team is actively working on standing up the back-end to ensure a smooth transition to this new MMR system, much like we did with StarCraft: Remastered. As with Remastered, these and other features will be included in a major patch for Reforged, which will also address the issue for players of the original game. We’ll share release plans as work progresses in the coming weeks—please be assured that the team is hard at work on standing these features up.

There are some individual concerns we’ve seen that we’re not currently planning to address and we wanted to give the community a heads-up. As of Version 1.30 of the original game, we saw very low usage of tournaments and of the Reign of Chaos ruleset, so we removed both in mid-2019 (in Version 1.31). Eliminating the maintenance for underused elements has helped us streamline our overall support of the game and focus on areas impacting the most players. That said, we do anticipate that players who prefer Reign of Chaos will find custom games with similar rulesets, which we hope will help satisfy that concern.

Related to that, as we talked about last year at BlizzCon, we did not want the in-game cutscenes to steer too far from the original game. We went a little deeper into the thought process behind that at the show, but the main takeaway is that the campaigns tell one of the classic stories in Warcraft history, and we want to preserve the true spirit of Warcraft III and allow players to relive these unforgettable moments as they were (albeit rebuilt with new animations and the higher fidelity art).

We know this update doesn’t address all questions, but we’re committed to the development and support of this game. We hope you’ll keep an eye out for this week’s patch and future updates and let us know what you think as we continue fine-tuning things. Until then, thank you as always for your support and passion for Warcraft III. We appreciate all your feedback and will continue to keep the Warcraft III community updated on everything we’re working on.

Sincerely,

The Warcraft III: Reforged Team