Kaivax

Weekly maintenance next week will include the Shadowlands Pre-patch, and that means the end of Battle for Azeroth PvP Season 4, and the beginning of the post-season.

While placement on the season ladder will be locked for any end-of-season rewards such as the Gladiator mount or title, you can continue to earn Conquest towards the Conquest Schedule, gain random PvP loot, and collect catch-up gear rewarded from strongboxes. You can also purchase Corrupted Aspirant gear from vendors located in Stormwind and Orgrimmar.

If you participated in Season 4, to ensure you receive the rewards that you’re due, please:

• Refrain from transferring your character(s) to another realm or faction until after Battle for Azeroth Season 4 has ended.
• Expect that Battle for Azeroth Season 4 titles and mounts will be awarded approximately two weeks after the season ends.
• Note that PvP Leaderboards will not be available until the start of the new Shadowlands PvP sea...

Hello. We’ve looked into this, and it is a bug, sort of.

The way our system for granting Shadowlands Beta access works is: it flags the Battle.net account, and at the same time flags the whole account for Shadowlands Beta forum access.

Months ago, we had an issue where those who were flagged for the Shadowlands Beta weren’t receiving their forum access. In order to resolve that issue, we hardwired forum access to a marker on the account that says “this is a Beta account”.

The side effect of this was: any account that had Beta access in the last two Betas (Legion or Battle for Azeroth) is now able to post in these Shadowlands Beta forums.

We’...

As we continue to work towards making Shadowlands worth the wait, we have an update on several changes and improvements players can expect to see coming to the Beta over the next few weeks.

The Maw

The Maw is intended to be the desolate and brutal domain of the Jailer, and not a place any soul in the Warcraft cosmos ever hopes to visit. But this is, after all, a video game, and telling that story can’t come at the expense of creating a fun environment for adventurers. We’ve heard feedback that this content is currently falling short of that mark, and we agree.

We’re working to increase visual distinction and combat gameplay variety across the different areas of the Maw, as well as exploring adding new localized events and world interactions. We also want to give players who journey to the Maw a bit more direction, while still preserving the “sandbox” roots of Maw gameplay. Players will venture into the Maw weekly to rescue souls to aid in restor...

October 1, 2020

Impressive Influence

• The Impressive Influence 100% reputation buff has returned and will continue through the entirety of October.

September 22, 2020

System

• Removed the flashing spell effect when teleporting out of the Brewfest Chowdown area.

September 15, 2020

Allied Races

• The mechagnome Allied Race unlock storyline is no longer offered to characters on accounts that have already unlocked mechagnomes.

On Tuesday, October 6, all WoW Classic realms that have not completed their AQ War Supply turn-ins will see them autocomplete to 100%.

Immediately thereafter, the supply delivery period will begin on each realm.

We look forward to seeing you in Silithus!

This is a bug that we’re fixing as soon as possible.

Also a bug: Death Knights might see a strange error message (“Must be in Undead”) if you try to cast abilities in Soulshape right now. We’ll get that fixed.

We’ve seen some questions recently about inconsistencies with abilities that cancel Soulshape and abilities that are usable during Soulshape without cancelling it. This is a work in progress.

The design intention here is that Soulshape should behave similarly to a Shaman’s Ghost Wolf, or a Druid’s Travel Form – all activated abilities should cancel Soulshape, with a few exceptions. When work is complete, Shaman or Druid abilities that do not already cancel Ghost Wolf / Travel Form should not cancel Soulshape. Another example to follow is Glide for Demon Hunters.

As of this latest build of the Shadowlands Beta, Death Knight, Demon Hunter, and Druid abilities are set up appropriately, with the exception of some PvP talents. We’ll make this behavior consistent across the remaining classes in future builds.

In this week’s build of the Shadowlands Beta, we have some notable changes for Outlaw Rogues.

Since both Assassination and Subtlety can apply poisons in AoE relatively easily, we want Outlaw to have access to similar utility. As such, Blade Flurry hits can now apply poisons to any enemies hit.

We’ve also changed the Between the Eyes debuff. It no longer gives you increased Critical Hit Damage against the target; it now gives you increased Critical Strike Chance against the target. This allows Blade Flurry to spread the damage bonus of this debuff to secondary target.

Thanks again for your testing and feedback!

In today’s updated build of the Shadowlands Beta, testers will see a snapshot of the the process of tuning several Shadowlands systems, which is underway. We’re in the midst of recalibrating the throughput of several Covenant abilities, and while in some cases the magnitude of the change may feel large, it’s necessary to bring outlier abilities in-line with our targets, so that players can make more accurate comparisons between abilities.

Thank you for all of your help as we iterate on these abilities based on your feedback.

In this week’s new build of the Shadowlands Beta, we’ve updated two covenant abilities, Abomination Limb and Shackle the Unworthy.

Abomination Limb has been target capped at 5, and its damage has increased by 15%. The grip has also been updated so it may only pull the same target every 4 seconds. This change was made to prevent it from encouraging the Death Knight to repeatedly walk out of range and then pull the same target.

We’ve also added a new functionality to the ability that grants Bone Shield charges, Rime, or Runic Corruption (based on spec) the first time the Limb pulls an enemy (this only occurs once). We hope this change will broaden the usage of the ability outside of PvP.

Shackle the Unworthy has had its damage increased by 15%, but no longer has its cooldown reduced when spending runes. Instead of the cooldown reduction, it now works as follows: “While Shackle the Unworthy is active on an enemy, your direct-damage attacks that spend runes have a 5...

Hello.

In this week’s build of the Shadowlands Beta, the Misshapen Mirror legendary has been changed. It now increases Spell Reflect duration by 60% and only affects your nearest ally.

Previously, this legendary was proving to be stronger than intended.

Thank you very much for your feedback.

Here’s something else that you can do to help out the WoW Server Team during today’s stress tests:

Join and use the Shadowlands Test Discussion Chat Channel.

Right click the General tab at the top of your chat window, then select Settings. Click the Channels tab, and make sure you have the box next to ShadowlandsTestDiscussion checked.

That’s it! Just chat in there normally like you would General or Trade and you’ll help our Server Team gather data.

The World of Warcraft server team needs your help!

Please join us on the Anasterian and Benedictus PTR realms tomorrow, Wednesday September 30 at 12:00 Noon PDT and 7:00 p.m. PDT (3:00 p.m. EDT and 10:00 p.m. EDT) for a stress test. We’ve implemented some behind-the-scenes server updates in the Shadowlands expansion, and we’re looking to bring as many testers as possible onto those realms.

While the changes being tested will not be highly visible to you, they are quite meaningful to our game service. The Shadowlands Beta is already running these changes and we’ve had success testing them there, but never with as extremely high a number of testers on a single realm as we’d like to see.

The format of this test will be straightforward. Please log into the Anasterian or Benedictus PTR realms, create a character, and then enter the game and play however you like for as much time as you can spare us. We expect that we’ll be done with our data gathering after about 20-...

Later this week when we take the Shadowlands Beta offline for its weekly update, all test characters will be removed from the Shadowlands Beta realms. Over recent weeks, many of the bug reports we’ve received are related to player-characters getting into a broken state due to changes in questlines or Covenant flow. These are not bugs that could occur in a live environment, and they often mask other issues that we still need to identify and fix. When the Shadowlands Beta resumes public availability, testers will want to copy or create new characters in order to resume testing.

Thereafter, on test realms you’ll find that Renown with all Covenants will be set back to its initial, Week 1 state. Please note that there will be two options for template test characters: On the Maw and Oribos realms, you’ll find character copy and Level 50 templates for testing the initial experience. On the Torghast realm, there will be Level 60 character templates and vendors that support PvP, dunge...

We’ve recently seen a number of questions about how Conduits work in Shadowlands. Here’s a brief explainer:

Conduits are items, and they have item levels like other loot you’ll see in Shadowlands. Currently in the Beta, Heroic dungeon loot is item level 171 and Normal difficulty Castle Nathria is dropping iLvl 200 gear. Like other loot, the higher the Conduit’s item level, the more powerful its effect.

Conduits can come from many sources, including dungeon bosses, raid bosses, the PvP vendor, and World Quests and content (via Callings). Conduits go into a collection, making it unnecessary to repeatedly earn individual Conduits at a given item level.

Conduits drop as personal loot and are class-based, so they don’t differ based on your active spec or your loot spec. They’re also additive with other loot drops – a Conduit won’t replace an item that a boss might otherwise have dropped. Conduits are not tradeable.

Our goal is to offer one or more ways of targ...

Yes, this is a side effect of Shadowlands development.

We already have plans to reintroduce all of the transmogs in a future patch. So they’ll only be unobtainable temporarily.

Following regularly scheduled weekly maintenance on Tuesday, September 29, the following realms will be taken offline. During this additional maintenance period:

• The Exodar and Medivh realms will be connected to the Alleria and Khadgar realms.

As many players know, this connection was previously planned and ran into issues.

On Tuesday, we’ll begin the additional maintenance period for these four realms at 8:00 am. PDT (11:00 a.m. EDT), and the realms will come back online when the connection process is completed, which we’re estimating to be around 4:00 p.m. PDT (7:00 p.m. EDT).

With updates coming soon to the Shadowlands Beta, we’re updating the Venthyr ability for rogues. It will now be called Flagellation (was previously Slaughter).

Flagellation is an instant cast with a 25 second cooldown that starts once Flagellation is removed from the target. The rogue lashes the target with Anima 3 times, dealing Shadow damage and applying a debuff for 45 seconds that causes an additional lash for each Combo Point you spend. Once the target has been lashed at least 25 times, reactivating Flagellation cleanses their torment and increases your Mastery by 10% for 25 seconds.

We’re looking forward to your feedback on this, once you’ve had a chance to test it out!

Recently, we changed Fae Guardians to apply to your selected target on cast, to help address some usability problems. In this most recent Shadowlands build, there is now also a conduit available that allows you to replicate additional Faeries onto your party. This redesigned conduit is aimed at addressing the feedback (particularly from Discipline and Holy Priests) that it feels punishing to cast healing spells while the Faeries are active.

Over the last few weeks, we’ve also added some notable changes to the Shadow priest.

In some situations, the Priest may want to spend Insanity by casting two Devouring Plagues on the same target in a short time. This can cause a situation where damage in the DoT can be wasted. To address this, we’ve made a change where subsequent Devouring Plagues will cause its damage over time effect to add into the existing DoT. Players may notice how this functionality is similar to the Mage Ignite mechanic.

We’re also introducing a new t...

The Kyrian Covenant ability Resonating Arrow has received several changes in this week’s Shadowlands update. The radius has been increased, which should make it easier to use against targets who are near the pillars in maps such as Nagrand Arena. Additionally, when a target leaves the Resonating Arrow area, the effect that allows you to ignore line of sight towards them will last for an additional 4 seconds.

Flayed Shot has had a minor update that makes the bonus Kill Shot no longer cost any Focus, so it can be used more freely.

We’ve implemented many bug fixes to Death Chakram, and it will no longer chain to targets that are under crowd control effects that break upon taking damage.

The design of Wild Spirits has been simplified quite a bit. Now, when you cast the ability, all targets in the area now take some immediate Nature damage. Any ability you use, including Kill Command, will now cause up to 5 targets in the area to take extra Nature damage. This extra ...