Kaivax

The Stormbringer Hero Talent tree has been implemented in today’s Alpha build.

The Stormbringer is all about the celebration of being the only lightning caster across all classes. Our goal is to to push that fantasy forward with enhancements to your existing lightning spells as well as access to a new spell, Tempest, that occasionally replaces your Lightning Bolt.

Known issues:

• Tuning, sound, and visuals are not final.
• The Conductive Energy talent is currently marked NYI and is not functional
• The final talent, Awakening Storms, has issues with Lightning Bolt overloads while playing Elemental Shaman.

We’re excited for you to try this out and send feedback our way. Thanks!

A few minutes ago, we deployed hotfixes to address issues with Dwarven and Night Elf archaeology projects. The following projects are now available during the Cataclysm Classic Pre-patch:

Dwarf

• Silver Kris of Korl
• Warmaul of Burningeye
• Word of Empress Zoe
• Pipe of Franclorn Forgewright
• Spiked Gauntlets of Anvilrage
• Scepter of Bronzebeard
• The Innkeeper’s Daughter

Night Elf

• Wisp Amulet
• Carcanet of the Hundred Magi
• Umbra Crescent
• Bones of Transformation
• Silver Scroll Case

We also double-checked on the Pterrordax Hatchling and found it waiting as intended in Fossil Digsites at Archaeology skill level 525.

Hello, Destruction Warlocks.

With the release of 10.2.7 yesterday, the scaling of Inferno became heavily reduced when Rain of Fire affects more than 5 targets. We investigated this, and found it was a change that was originally implemented with Shadowlands Season 4, and later became unintentionally broken with the launch of Dragonflight and went unnoticed.

With the release of 10.2.7, the reduced scaling was inadvertently fixed when unrelated changes were made.

Considering the timing of this, we’re going to remove the reduced scaling. In The War Within, we plan to redesign Inferno to address how Destruction scales in power in relation to target count.

Thank you for the reports regarding this issue and we hope to have the fix implemented soon.

Updated the OP. There is no damage reduction in this hotfix tomorrow.

Tomorrow, during scheduled weekly maintenance, we’ll deploy this hotfix:

Items

• Tome of Unstable Power’s AOE target cap set to 8.

Our goal here is to keep the Tome very strong, while bringing it more in line with other DPS trinkets.

We have continued to closely monitor data on class performance and feedback from players. With scheduled weekly maintenance in each region, we’ll make the following adjustments to classes that are over- and under-performing in group content and PvP.

Classes

• Demon Hunter
  • Vengeance
    • Sigil of Silence duration reduced to 4 seconds (was 5 seconds).
    • Sigil of Silence cooldown increased to 90 seconds (was 60 seconds).
    • Cycle of Binding now reduces Sigil cooldowns by 2 seconds per trigger (was 3 seconds).
    • Soul Cleave damage reduced by 8%.
• Druid
  • Balance
    • Season 4 (2) Set Bonus now i...

A few minutes ago, we significantly reduced the cost of all Honor and Arena gear from Wrath of the Lich King.

This is intended to better match the lower Honor gains players are seeing while at level 80, compared to level 85.

Specifically, we reduced the cost of everything across the board by about 66%.

We had to approach this issue in two steps. First, we fixed the bug a couple of days ago, so that it won’t happen to players who max their Archaeology.

Second, we’re working on a fix for players who hit that point before the first hotfix. This second fix is a work in progress, and we don’t have an ETA on it just yet.

Added

Classes

• Death Knight
  • Blood Presence is increasing the chance that the Death Knight takes a critical strike.
  • Frost Presence and Improved Frost Presence are not increasing Runic Power gains.

Dungeons and Raids

• Players cannot enter many Heroic Burning Crusade dungeons.
• Ulduar
  • Yogg-Saron does not spawning any clouds.
  • Enemies in Ulduar are hitting for much more damage than intended.
• Ice Crown Citadel
  • Blood Queen Lana’thel may sometimes refuse to bite.

Leveling

• Opening treasure chests and professionally...

Today’s hotfixes update:

May 3, 2024

Cataclysm Classic

• Fixed a bug causing Hunters to do trap dropping animations twice.
• Account wide pet collection achievements now correctly grant rewards.
• Fixed an issue preventing Bloodlust and Heroism from working as intended.
• Mounting the Violet Proto Drake now grants Master Riding to players who are at least level 80 and have Artisan Riding trained.
• Heal-over-time and damage-over-time ticks should now behave as intended in Cataclysm when refreshed.
  • Developers’ notes: Previously, refreshing a DoT just before it finished its last tick could cause it to miss out on a tick. That was the correct behavior in Wrath of the Lich King, but not Cataclysm.
• Holidays
  • The Children’s Week holiday is now extended for one additional week.
  • “Ridin’ The Rocketway” can now be completed.
  • ...

We’ve developed a fix for this. The fix requires realm restarts, so it will go in with scheduled weekly maintenance on Tuesday, May 7.

Today’s raid testing will begin at 1:00 p.m. PDT (and will end at 1:00 p.m. PDT on Monday).

See you there!

We’re aware of and working on issues with the Children’s Week holiday. Specifically, we’re fixing bugs with the holiday’s quests as well as fixing an issue with the What A Long Strange Trip It’s Been achievement not properly granting the Master Riding skill.

Considering the time it’s taking to complete this work, we’ve decided to extend the holiday by a week to make sure everyone has plenty of time after the fixes.

Thanks again for your patience and understanding.

Hello, Retribution Paladins.

This week’s update is about quality of life improvements.

Wake of Ashes
Retribution Paladin relies on Wake of Ashes for both of their Hero Talent trees, and it is core to Retribution’s rotation. With these in mind, we moved Wake of Ashes before the 2nd gate. Additionally, we’ve noticed that aiming Wake of Ashes caused frustrations when strafing and we’ve made changes to make it feel good while strafing as well.

Expurgation and Templar Slash
Blade of Justice and Templar Strikes are deeply connected to the Holy Power economy, and they both have talent and stat interactions that makes you press them more often. The damage over time effects from these abilities were losing value due to being reapplied in a short cadence. Which in return made pressing your core buttons feel worse. We’ve decided to make the damage over time effects roll over their remaining damage value into the next application....

There are a few Warrior updates in today’s Alpha build.

After giving Arms and Fury access to both Bladestorm and Ravager, it was clear that Ravager had strong advantages in all situations. We’d like Bladestorm to be a strong pick for burst AOE, so we’re buffing its damage significantly, and reducing Ravager’s damage slightly. This should help make the choice between these abilities more meaningful and let each ability shine in different situations.

Arms
We’ve heard the feedback that the Arms AOE rotation lacks definition, so we’re making adjustments to Cleave to make it the centerpiece of Arms’ AOE rotation in The War Within. We think this will give a unique feel to Arms’ AOE rotation while bringing a classic iconic Warrior ability back to the limelight. We want Overpower to be an important part of Arms’ AOE rotation as well, but Dreadnaught was simply too strong in all situations. We’re reducing the damage from Dreadnaught and buffing Strength of...

Greetings Warlocks.

You’re going to see some Demonology changes in the War Within Alpha build today, alongside some additional changes to Affliction, Hellcaller, and Soul Harvester.

Destruction Warlocks – we’re working on changes for you that will become available for testing in a future build.

Here’s some context for the Demonology changes you’ll find in this build. As a refresher, here are the goals we previously stated for Demonology:

• Reduce the amount of resources Demonology generates.
• Redesign Doom to be an attractive talent choice.
• Reduce the amount of major cooldowns Demonology has access to.

Demonic Cores
Over the course of Dragonflight, we’ve wanted to and tried to reduce the number of Demonic Cores available to Demonology warlocks to rein in their mobility, resource generation, and reduce the amount of rotational time spent going back and forth between Hand of Gul’dan and Demon...

Hello Mages!

We have some Arcane Mage changes hitting the War Within Alpha today, and we want to go over them here. As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we have goals that span all mage specializations.

These are:

• Allow you to acquire each specialization’s core gameplay with less talent point investment.
• Simplify rotational complexity.
• Provide new nodes that can help you adapt your damage profile to better match a given encounter’s demands.
• Provide competitive choice nodes that let you opt-out of complex gameplay.

Today we’re talking about Arcane, so let’s dive into the specifics.

Radiant Spark
Arcane Mage has long had the reputation of being one of the most complicated and skill expressive specializations in World of Warcraft. A large contributing factor to this is the way in which Radiant Spark asks you to optimize your rotation. Radiant Spark’s damage bonus was so substantial and so dr...

Last weekend, we tried out a modification to PvP in Season of Discovery and gathered a lot of your feedback on it.

This weekend, we’re going to run a second test with a few modifications. Feedback indicated that the damage reduction was a little too strong, and was a little too strong.

Starting tomorrow, May 3 at 10:00 a.m. PDT, we’ll enable an aura that does the following in PvP combat between players (and player-controlled pets and other units):

• 20% damage reduction f...

Hotfixes

May 3, 2024

Cataclysm Classic

• Fixed a bug causing Hunters to do trap dropping animations twice.
• Account wide pet collection achievements now correctly grant rewards.
• Fixed an issue preventing Bloodlust and Heroism from working as intended.
• Mounting the Violet Proto Drake now grants Master Riding to players who are at least level 80 and have Artisan Riding trained.
• Heal-over-time and damage-over-time ticks should now behave as intended in Cataclysm when refreshed.
  • Developers’ notes: Previously, refreshing a DoT just before it finished its last tick could cause it to miss out on a tick. That was the correct behavior in Wrath of the Lich King, but not Cataclysm.
• Holidays
  • The Children’s Week holiday is now extended for one additional week.
  • “Ridin’ ...