Kaivax

Wildstalker

• Symbiotic Blooms now prioritize growing on injured targets.
• Strategic Infusion’s chance for your periodic heals to crit is decreased to 8% (was 10%), but its duration is increased to 10 seconds (was 6 seconds).
• Wildstalker’s Power has been updated: Rip and Ferocious Bite damage increased by 5%. Rejuvenation, Efflorescence, and Lifebloom healing increased by 10%.
• New Talent replacing Wildstalker’s Persistence: Lethal Preservation: When you remove an effect with Soothe or Remove Corruption / Nature’s Cure, gain a combo point and heal for 4% of your maximum health. If you are at full health an injured party or raid member will be healed instead.
• Root Network now increases the healing of all your abilities, ...

Hello Druids,

There are a couple pieces of feedback we received on Keeper of the Grove that informed today’s updates.

Keeper of the Grove

• Dream Surge: Dream Burst damage reduced by 15%.
• Harmony of the Grove: Force of Nature treants increase spell damage by 5% (was 3%).
• Power of Nature now increases Force of Nature Treant melee damage by 100% (was 20%).
• Bounteous Bloom: Each treant generates 6 Astral Power per 2 seconds (was 3 Astral Power).
• Early Spring: Now reduces the cooldown of Force of Nature by 15 seconds (was 10 seconds).
• Cenarius’ Might design updated: Balance: Entering Eclipse / Restoration: Casting Swiftmend increases your Haste by 8% for 6 seconds.
• Power of ...

Hello Mistweavers!

We’ve made an update to Revival in this Alpha build that caps the amount of magical debuffs the spell can dispel off of each target.

This is mainly targeted at Battlegrounds, where Revival has been overly oppressive to other specializations that rely on magic debuffs to function. We are not expecting this to impact PvE.

Edited to add: This will not change how Revival functions with debuffs that stack multiple times, such as bursting.

Thank you for your feedback!

Hello, Death Knights–

This week’s Alpha update includes another round of changes for Death Knights – this time focused on the Frost tree. Like our last round of changes for Unholy, we looked at talents that felt more appropriate to be baseline for the spec and talents that worked better as 1 rank instead of 2. Notably, we made Fatal Fixation and Rime baseline, reduced Frostwhelp’s Aid, Enduring Strength, and cut both Cold-Blooded Rage and Invigorating Freeze and reduced their new talents to 1 rank.

The goal with the above changes is to cut down on build friction allowing for more customization as you spec through the tree. These changes alongside other talent movements and new pathing connections should help create a better experience for build variety.

We’ve also created a variety of new talents and added 2 new capstones that focus on your auto-attacks which should help give some better sustained damage outside of Pillar of Frost windows. These talents also com...

Salutations, Shamans!

This week we’re unveiling the Totemic Hero talent tree.

Totemic is centered around a replacement spell for Healing Rain and Windfury Totem called Surging Totem. The goal with this totem was to create an option that alleviates some maintenance in your rotation without adding extra abilities as well as having a meaningful new totem to pay attention to.

As you’d expect, the rest of the tree has improvements to totems in various ways and for Enhance, some extra totem summons. For this week, half of the talents have their tooltips in place but are not yet working. The keystone and capstone are fully functional for you to test.

We look forward to your feedback!

Greetings Warlocks.

Today’s Alpha update focuses on Demonology and addressing feedback received regarding how many talents were available within its specialization tree. You will see several talents removed as well as new talents being added. We’ve also reduced the number of available ranks across the talent tree.

Cooldown Alignment
We are removing all talents that reduce the cooldown of Demonology’s summon abilities and baking in those decreases baseline so that they align in a way that makes sense. These talents, along with the varying cooldowns, made playing Demonology more convoluted and difficult, especially for new players. This should free up some talent points and require less problem solving when it comes to trying to ensure your cooldowns align.

Demonic Tyrant
We are moving Summon Demonic Tyrant to the center of the Demonology tree to make it much easier to access. When we first set out to design the new tale...

Hello Warriors!

We have a few goals for this round of Mountain Thane changes.

Mountain Thane

• Lightning Strikes: Chance for a lightning strike increased to 30% (was 25%). Lightning Strikes occur 30% more often during Avatar (was 50%).
• Strength of the Mountain updated. Shield Slam damage increased by 10% (was 20%) and now causes Demoralizing Shout to reduce damage enemies deal to Protection Warriors by an additional 5%.
• New Talent replacing Valarjar Training - Snap Induction: "Activating [Protection: Demoralizing Shout][Fury: Recklessness] grants a charge of Thunder Blast.”
• Flashing Skies design updated: “Thunder Blast calls down a Lightning Strike on an enemy it hits.”
• Steadfast as the Peaks design updated: “Stamina increased by 5%. Victory Rush increases your maximum health by 10% for 5 seconds. When this health increase expires, you heal for any amount of the original Victory Rush that healed you in exc...

We’re investigating an issue preventing raids from being open as expected.

ETA: The issue was fixed soon after this message.

Thank you for your patience.

Starting Today
1:00 p.m. PDT (4:00 p.m. EDT)

We’ll see you on the Cataclysm Beta PvE realm for raid testing.

Please feel free to leave any feedback you have about in-raid content here.

Thank you!

Specifically, this will happen with the first raid release.

In original Cataclysm, level 85 heirlooms were tied to guild perks. To obtain those heirlooms, players were required to join a guild and boost it to guild level 10, which was meant to be a significant barrier to obtaining them.

In Cataclysm Classic, we chose to make heirloom rewards much more available to players, and since our intention is not to have level 85 heirlooms available during the initial 80-85 leveling, we’ve capped heirlooms at level 80.

When the first raids open, heirlooms that are intended to max at level 85 will be increased to level 85.

Last weekend’s PvP play looked pretty good, so we’re going again starting today, with one adjustment.

This weekend we’re increasing the healing reduction to 30%, which means it will stack with Mortal Strike to a 65% healing protection for 10 seconds after taking damage.

We’ll turn the adjusted PvP aura on at 10:00 a.m. PDT (1:00 p.m. EDT).

The Tol Barad Brawl with the Blues playtest gets underway later today.

Don’t forget

We’ll see you back on the Cataclysm Beta Pv...

Later today, we’re testing the instanced Tol Barad in the Cataclysm Classic Beta. Please join us!

• WHEN: 1:00 p.m. PDT May 10
• WHERE: Cataclysm Classic Beta PvP Realm

Before then, feel free to hop into the Beta PvP realm and create a Template Character at level 85 on the Character Selection screen. Log into the Beta and speak with all of the enormous vendors nearby to prepare for battle.

At 1:00 p.m. PDT, open the PvP window (default hotkey: H) and select Battle for Tol Barad and join us.

See you there!

Greetings Rogues,

This week’s Alpha build includes many changes to Class and Spec talent trees, including a handful of positional swaps, tuning changes, and a few new and redesigned talents.

Feedback about these changes is welcome, so please post here with any notable experiences or opinions from your play in the Alpha test.

More change will be coming over the next few weeks, focused primarily on hero talents. Deathstalker is still lurking in the shadows and will be revealed when it’s ready (sometime in the next few weeks).

For Fatebound, more completed talents will be rolling in over time, and we have also been following gameplay and written feedback which will be cause for iterations to existing talents.

For Trickster, we’...

Please note that the updates described above will be coming in future Alpha builds.

We’ve recently experienced a technical issue causing game crashes.

We’ve temporarily disabled the Earthen Allied Race in the War Within Alpha, so that we can find and fix the issue.

The Earthen will return in a future test build.

Today’s Alpha update focuses primarily on Destruction.

The Path Ahead

Before we dive in, we want to acknowledge that our work with each specialization tree is not complete. We’ve seen the recent discussions regarding how bloated the Demonology and Destruction tree are in terms of available talents and ranks, as well as thoughts on the pathing of the Affliction tree.

In the near future, you will see that the Demonology tree is being restructured and condensed. Both the Destruction tree and the Affliction tree will also undergo a restructuring in the near future. In this context, a restructuring means that: the amount of 2-rank talent nodes will be reduced, talents may be removed, talents may be added, new pathing will be...

Greetings, Death Knights.

This week’s alpha build has our first round of changes to both the core class tree and the Unholy spec tree. As stated in our initial messaging our goals for the core tree updates were to shift some of the damage throughput at the end of the talent tree to earlier in the tree. For Unholy our goal was to address some of the flood of resources, reduce the number of things that need to be tracked to play optimally, increase pathing as well as choice, and reduce the number of nodes you need to pick up to play the spec fluidly. We will go into a little more detail below for both the core and Unholy changes.

Core

The core tree has undergone a decent reshuffling of talent placement, node pathing, ability’s becoming basel...

We’ve been playtesting, and iterating, and reading your feedback about Feral.

We hear that you’re sad to lose the combo of getting AOE value out of Ferocious Bites cast with Apex Predator, and we do want Apex Predator to be an appealing AOE talent. Since we also want to bring significance back to maximizing Tiger’s Fury windows, we’re also not happy with compelling you to overwrite Rips benefitting from Tiger’s Fury with Primal Wrath in AOE to deal damage with Tear Open Wounds. So we’re trying a different version of AOE gameplay by restoring Rampant Ferocity and removing Tear Open Wounds.

This retains the rotational clarity that’s a priority for us - in AOE you’ll maintain Rips with Primal Fury and spend additional combo points and Apex Predator procs on Ferocious Bite. The bonus to Rip and Rake damage from Predator will remain single target, as we don’t want this to feel like a maintenance buff in AOE and would prefer to keep its role funneling damage into your priori...