Wrath Classic - PvP Update, Pre-Nerf Ulduar Raid Difficulty, Hotfixes - September 2

[Lumy]

Wrath Classic - PvP Update

Hello again!

We’ve reviewed the engineering items, gathered feedback, and taken a closer look at how certain items and enchantments interacted during the original Wrath of the Lich King. Additionally, the Nitro Boosts enchant can introduce a big advantage for the players that have them as you mentioned, while at the same time, it has the capacity to randomly backfire, which can introduce an unfair loss of rating. For original Wrath, the dev team tried different iterations and still decided to just remove it. So thanks to your feedback, and in the spirit of the competitive nature of ranked Arenas, we will remove them from Arenas starting with the first season of Wrath of the Lich King Classic.

We’ve decided that the following Engineering enchants and items won’t be available for use in Arenas in the first or any season of Wrath of the Lich King Classic:

• Gnomish Lightning Generator
• Nitro Boosts
• Gnomish Net-o-Match Projector (BC item)
• Hyper-Vision Goggles (BC item)

Thanks again for all of your feedback. We look forward to seeing you in the Deadly Arenas!

Wrath Classic - Pre-Nerf Ulduar Raid Difficulty

Hi Everyone,

Wanted to chime back in here now that we’ve had a few days to digest feedback around this and think on it some more. While we do still feel that adjusting the ilvl curve in the last half of the expansion would be a net positive to the experience overall we cannot argue with the idea that, taken at face value, a nerf is a nerf and that still stings. As a result we’ve studied the commentary from players carefully and come up with an alternative to the original suggestion based on that feedback.

Instead of “nerfing” item levels in ToC, we’d like to see how everyone feels about buffing item levels in Ulduar normal slightly (6 item levels) and Ulduar Hard Modes significantly (12 item levels). Past that, we’d make no other changes.

This would put Ulduar 25 normal gear at 232, placing it 6 ilvls above Kel’thuzad, Sartharion, and Malygos 25 gear and making even normal feel much more rewarding in comparison to Tier 7 raid end-bosses. This would also put hard mode gear at 251, which is definitely a very significant step up in power. This means that Ulduar 25 Hard Mode gear will be slightly higher in ilvl than Trial of the Crusader 25 normal gear (ilvl 245). This might be an alarming jump at first, but there are a few factors that led to us believing that this would be a net positive.

We are doing Pre-Nerf Ulduar

During Early interviews, we suggested we likely would not be doing a “pre-nerf” system to most raids in Wrath of the Lich King Classic, as the changes were not very extensive for most raid dungeons. This remains true, however, after we started actually digging into the data around raid changes that occurred during original Wrath, we realized that Ulduar actually had received fairly massive nerfs both while it was current content and immediately afterwards. As a result we will be implementing pre-nerf modes to Ulduar, including the hard mode bosses. These changes in some cases may make bosses and hard modes significantly more difficult than their final state, and we feel justifies the power gain in hard mode rewards. Just like in 2009, we are somewhat concerned that if we implement pre-nerf Ulduar and ship rewards as-is, it may not feel sufficiently rewarding.

Availability and Volume of Ulduar Hard Mode Gear

In contrast to heroic raids later in the expansion with fully fleshed-out, higher item level loot tables, the loot tables for hard mode boss kills are the same as normal but each boss (other than Algalon) grants one additional bonus piece of gear at the higher item level. Across the entire raid this means that there are a maximum total of around a dozen pieces of additional gear available at this higher item level, per clear. While we would be making these items significantly more powerful, they will remain difficult to obtain and this is not a huge amount of extra items at this level of power, at least not compared to a full tier’s worth of heroic-difficulty items.

As for how this impacts PvP, we still need to evaluate Season 6 gear for similar adjustments there so that Arena players didn’t feel they had to raid Hard Modes to compete. We don’t believe we’d totally re-itemize Season 6 gear, but a few upward adjustments would likely occur to offset this.

All told, our goal really is to make Wrath, and particularly Ulduar the best possible overall experience it can be. We love Ulduar in particular and we think many of you do as well, and want to see it shine. Rewards are one of the knobs we can turn that can really impact the experience, without having to make any kind of other mechanical changes. After some thought we think these changes are a good way to make this phase of the game feel better and maintain relevance for a bit of time after Trial of the Crusader releases, without making later phases feel worse.

As previously mentioned, this is still totally just an idea, and we’d love to continue to get your feedback on it.

Thank you!

WoW Hotfixes - September 2, 2022

Dungeons and Raids

• Fated Raids
  
  • Sepulcher of the First Ones
    
    • Lihuvim, Principal Architect
      
      • Resolved an issue where Creation Spark (Fated Power) could negatively affect the duration of Unstable Mote.
        
      • Resolved an issue where Fated Powers could occur twice at the start of the encounter.
        
      • Resolved an issue where damage taken from the Fated Powers Creation Spark, Reconfiguration Emitter, Chaotic Essence, and Protoform Barrier could be incidentally increased by Protoform Radiance.
        
      • Resolved an issue that could cause Fated Powers to spawn inside Unstable Motes.
        
    • The Jailer
      
      • Resolved an issue which could cause Fated Powers to spawn inside Defile.
        
• Mythic+
  
  • Grimrail Depot
    
    • Railmaster Rocketspark
      
      • Explosives will no longer spawn on top of crates.
        

Wrath of the Lich King Classic

• Classes
  
  • Weapon trail visual effects have been restored to abilities that have them.
    
• Dungeons and Raids
  
  • Blackrock Spire can again be entered by 10-player raids.
    
  • Resolved an issue where selecting certain roles for your class in the Group Finder would not actually display them in your listing.
    
  • Fixed an issue where Group Finder listings would be removed for certain players when moving between zones.
    
  • Fixed an issue where the Talent Specialization’s role could be set to tank after changing zones.
    
    • Developers’ note: The intention here is that this role selection should always default to DPS, and can be set by players based on how they want to describe their talent builds.
      
• Items and Rewards
  
  • Fixed an issue that prevented the auction of some items carried over from Burning Crusade Classic.
    
• Player versus Player
  
  • Updated the current Battleground Bonus Weekend to Warsong Gulch (was Strand of the Ancients).
    
  • Random Battleground Queue no longer shows up for players below level 80.
    
  • Fixed a crash when inspecting another player and opening the PvP tab.
    
• Quests
  
  • For the quest "Runeforging: Preparation for Battle," Instructor Razuvious will now (begrudgingly) provide a spare Runed Soulblade for Death Knights who have managed to misplace theirs.
    

[Neotart]

Arena changes are a joke....

[oleander]

Great changes to Arena Blizzard. Why can’t you just leave this damn classic project alone for once like you promised.

[Will]

Great changes to Arena Blizzard. Why can’t you just leave this damn classic project alone for once like you promised.

because those are sensible changes endorsed by majority of players, like the drums changes were. get over it.

[GUZ]

Add a dungeon finder asap

[Thes]

Great changes to Arena Blizzard. Why can’t you just leave this damn classic project alone for once like you promised.

Because engineering items were dumb when it released and it would be dumb if they released arenas again with them.

No one wants to play against a RMP where they global you with GLGs and rocket gloves.

[Dampoisback]

fix gehennas god damn lagg, 5 days now that we cant play after 4pm. And here we pay for premium game play...And for all of you trolls that say "change server then" why would we change server when we been here since start and blizz opens it up for ppl to migrate to our server. Geez im looking forward to see wotlk launch on gehennas if its 2h que now and stil unplayable betwen 16-00 gmt and while ur at it give us so we can que pvp from anywere in world since you change so much else stuff it aint classic at this point.

[Thes]

fix gehennas god damn lagg, 5 days now that we cant play after 4pm. And here we pay for premium game play...And for all of you trolls that say "change server then" why would we change server when we been here since start and blizz opens it up for ppl to migrate to our server. Geez im looking forward to see wotlk launch on gehennas if its 2h que now and stil unplayable betwen 16-00 gmt and while ur at it give us so we can que pvp from anywere in world since you change so much else stuff it aint classic at this point.

Original wrath launch was unplayable and had massive queues too though Classic experience

[slime]

Original wrath launch was unplayable and had massive queues too though Classic experience

Honestly, what they chose to keep in and what they chose to leave out is just not cool.