Kaivax

This was unintended, and we’re deploying a hotfix for it as soon as possible today.

We’re about an hour away from logging into the WoW Classic PTR with level 60 characters and heading to Silithus for our second AQ event stress test.

We’ve got all of our optimizations in place this time, so we expect it to go quite a bit faster than it did last week. We’re really looking forward to seeing you there.

Thank you very much for testing with us!

Updated June 24

In this next build of the Shadowlands Alpha, we have updates to Shadow Priests that are intended to address some common concerns about the spec.

Returning Ability: Devouring Plague

We’ve seen a lot of feedback that Void Form can be challenging to utilize to its full potential in some combat situations, such as in Mythic Keystone dungeons on non-boss encounters, or for leveling and doing outdoor content. We tend to agree that Void Form can feel unrewarding in situations where it becomes difficult to maintain efficient insanity generation. Rather than heavily re-designing Void Form, we’re introducing a new tool for these combat situations with the return of Devouring Plague.

Along with Void Eruption, Devouring Plague will be the only other spell that costs Insanity. Our intent with Devouring Plague is for it to be used on enemies who die quickly, such as common creatures while leveling, or on simple trash pu...

I’ve edited the original post for clarity.

This will be repeatable, up to the current maximum Resistance that the cloak allows.

Updated: June 24

The Shadowlands Alpha now includes Brokers in the Hall of Shapes in Oribos. Brokers are profession trainers and vendors that allow you to craft and test Professions changes coming in Shadowlands. Now, exploring the new zones, you’ll discover zone-specific herbs, ore, and fish, as well as new leathers from the denizens of the Shadowlands.

Professions Supporting Legendary Crafting

In the Shadowlands, you’ll be able to create your own Legendary Armor within the Runecarver’s Chamber, a place of exceptional power locked away in Torghast. Legendary crafting is not currently available for testing yet, but when it is, all players, regardless of their profession(s), will be able to create their own Legendary Armor.

Creating a piece of Legendary Armor requires a Base Item that will be imbued with Legendary powers.

Blacksmiths, Jewelcrafters, Leatherworkers and Tailors will be able to craft the Base Items whi...

Later today, we will apply a hotfix to the game that will allow players who have upgraded the legendary cloak Ashjra’kamas to Rank 15 to purchase Malefic Cores from MOTHER for 2,000 Echoes of Ny’alotha. This will be repeatable, up to the current maximum Resistance that the cloak allows (currently 92 Corruption Resistance, and next week this will increase to 95).

The intent of Malefic Cores was to provide ongoing incremental weekly power gains, to help overcome remaining challenges in this final tier of Battle for Azeroth. This has been similar to past systems in Warlords of Draenor (upgrading the legendary rings via Archimonde drops) and Legion (upgrading trinkets from Argus the Unmaker). While each extra bit of Corruption Resistance only represents a small increase in potential power, we understand the frustration of feeling weeks behind, especially without any controlled way of closing the gap faster. With this hotfix, players can further supplement their progress through t...

Please join us on June 25, on the WoW Classic PTR for a second stress test. We’ll start heading out to Silithus on the PTR at about 2:00 p.m. PDT, and the stress test will begin at 3:00 p.m. PDT (6:00 p.m. EDT).

We’re looking forward to seeing you again. We got a lot of good results from your efforts last week, and we hope to quickly verify our tweaks and adjustments with this one.

Thank you!

Yes!

There’s also (for me at least), a very strange sensation when the facts uncovered contradict my clearly faulty memories.

Story time! Gather 'round if you’d like to hear some fun history.

When the 2020 edition of Love is in the Air ended in WoW Classic, we noticed a behavior we didn’t all expect: the faction leader that won the popularity contest continued to have Kwee Q. Peddlefeet in front of them, and you could continue to target Kwee and /kiss in order to get a +200 HP buff.

We looked into this, and it appeared that this was authentic behavior. We looked at the holiday data and we tested it on our reference server, and we got the same results. In original WoW, Kwee Q. Peddlefeet was first designed to stay with the winner of the popularity content for a full year, up until the start of the next Love is in the Air.

But we then asked around (and read some posts online, both new and very old), and found people who believed that Kwee was only supposed to hang out with the winning leader for one week after the end of Love is in the Air. One of these was the original designer of the e...

Hotfixes

June 22, 2020

WoW Classic

• The combat log range has been increased for players who are inside dungeons and raids.
  • Developers’ notes: This was originally planned for the next patch (1.13.5), but we wanted to gain its benefits in the live game as soon as possible. The combat log range in the open world remains restricted to prevent a larger radius of stealth detection than existed in original WoW.

Tune in now for the EU Qualifiers.

http://YouTube.com/Warcraft

Today:

Yesterday:

Update 5:00 p.m. PDT June 19

For the next few days, we’ll keep the PTR open as much as we can for AQ 20 testing.

OP updated:

June 19, 2020

WoW Classic

• Blade of Eternal Darkness will no longer proc from non-damaging spells.
  • Developers’ notes: In original WoW patch 1.12.1, we fixed some misbehavior with Blade of Eternal Darkness that unfortunately got carried into WoW Classic. We fixed it again in the WoW Classic AQ patch (1.13.5), but decided to go ahead and bring the fix to the live game.
• 40-player raid instances are no longer affected by the 30-per-day limit on entering dungeons.
  • Developers’ notes: We have seen only a small handful of legitimate players encountering the recently added instance limit, but we want to ensure that anyone who does hit the cap is still able to freely participate in raid content.

Thank you very much to everyone who joined us on the WoW Classic PTR today.

We reached our goal of filling the test realm, as well as substantially over-filling the zone.

Good times!

In the Blizzard Desktop App playscreen, select the WoW icon on the left, then go to the version dropdown on the bottom and change your version to “Public Test Realm (Classic)”.

The Install button will then install what you need to play.

1:35 p.m. PDT –

The test realm is now open!

1:25 p.m. PDT

Our plan is to make the test realm available in a few minutes, so that testers can begin logging in and copying their characters over (or creating a template level 60 test character).

Updated June 17

Hello to all of the seasoned soldiers, raging barbarians, and ironclad commanders of Azeroth! The newest Shadowlands Alpha build has a number of changes for Warriors, primarily focused on talents. We’re happy with the playstyle of each spec, and our philosophy for core abilities is generally “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. That said, there are a number of talents in each tree that could use some love. Some were underutilized in Battle for Azeroth (eg., Collateral Damage for Arms, and Inner Rage for Fury) and haven’t seen changes yet, or their first set of changes in Shadowlands haven’t quite hit the mark (Frothing Berserker for Fury). We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on the new and updated talents!

We’d like to call out that Arms’ Mastery and Deep Wounds have been redesigned. We heard your feedback that Deep Wounds’ overwhelming contribution to the damage breakdown felt unrewarding, and we agree. The new design will be a ...

Updated June 17

For Warlock, we’re focused on improving talent choices for Destruction and Demonology, as well as adding rewards for leveling up. In particular, we’d like there to be more viable builds for these specs to experiment with. This led to changes for the highly popular talents Demonic Consumption and Grimoire of Supremacy. Please continue posting your feedback on these changes in this thread. Thank you!

Warlock

• Demonic Gateway no longer despawns when the caster dies. When the gateway is close to despawning, it begins dissolving out of view to warn the caster and allies that they may wish to replace it.
  • Developers’ notes: We’ve heard feedback that the routine of replacing your Demonic Gateway for each boss attempt can be tedious to the point of irritating. We’ve made a change that allows the gateway to persist through death and we’ll be listening for feedback on this change.

A...

Update:

A few minutes ago, we significantly relaxed the throttle on all Auction House operations except canceling auctions.

Please feel free to reply to this with you feedback on how it feels now.

Thank you!