World of Warcraft Dev Tracker

We regularly make combat design adjustments based on gameplay data and feedback from players on class performance. With scheduled weekly maintenance in each region, we’ll make the following changes to classes that are over- and under-performing in various areas:

Classes

• Evoker
  • Preservation
    • All healing increased by 6%. Does not apply to PvP combat.
• Druid
  • Restoration
    • Moonfire now costs 0.3% mana (was 1.2%).
• Hunter
  • Survival
    • Survival Hunter 4-set Focus cost reduction increased to 20 (was 10).
    • Survival Hunt...

May 30, 2024

Cataclysm Classic

• When Nitro Boosts malfunction in a raid encounter, they will now also grant increased movement speed as well as damage their user.
• The Greater Inscription shoulder enchants available at exalted with Therazane are now Bind-to-Account.
• Death Knight
  • Fixed an issue where Death Knights sometimes did not gain the benefit of Improved Blood Presence.
• Priest
  • Fixed an issue where the spell casting haste from Time Warp and Primal Rage was able to stack with Power Infusion’s spell casting haste, which was not intended.
• Rogue
  • Blind can no longer trigger poisons applied to the Rogue’s ranged weapon.
• Warlock
  • Fixed an issue where some Warlocks retained the benefit of the Nemesis talent from Wratch of the Lich King Classic, which ...

May 30, 2024

WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria

• Righteous Frenzy can no longer be cast on non-party members.
• In the Throne of Thunder Dark Animus encounter, the increased damage and attack speed by Anima Golems casting Acceleration Link has been reduced to 100% per stack (was 250%).
• In the Throne of Thunder Iron Qon encounter, Storm Cloud should no longer deal extreme damage to players.
• In A Brewing Storm, Viletongue Skirmishers’ Viletongue Sting now reduces healing by 60% (was 90%).
• Fixed a bug that unintentionally added additional enemy health for highly geared players against Heroic raid bosses.
  • Developers’ notes: In combination with previous recent hotfixes, this should result in health and damage versus Heroic raid bosses being as intended for players of higher and lower item levels, so that players of mixed item levels can have a better experience playing together. Overall, players...

Noting that this was fixed at about 3:25 p.m. PDT today.

Just want to follow-up on how the issue wrapped up in this region. (Other regions had the vendors disabled from the start of the Season.)

For a brief time on Tuesday, it was possible for a few players to go over the cap on item purchases. After we disabled the vendors, we looked and found that no one had gone so far over the cap that we needed to make adjustments to them.

This is because it’s a Seasonal cap, and it increases each week. So if someone purchased an item on Tuesday morning that took them above the intended week 1 cap, it will count against their total cap in week 2.

Again, we thank you for your patience and understanding here.

May 29, 2024

Cataclysm Classic

• Fixed an issue that could cause disconnects while aiming and shooting the Siege Tank during the “Battlezone” quest in Uldum.

May 29, 2024

Classes

• Shaman
  • Restoration
    • Resolved an issue causing the Restoration Shaman Season 4 two-piece class set bonus to be cancelled when a Healing Stream Totem expires while two or more Healing Stream Totems are active.
  • Warlock
    • Affliction
      • Resolved an issue causing Drain Life to sometimes incorrectly consume mana while Soul Rot is active.
    • Warrior
    • Protection
    • Battle-Scarred Veteran has been updated. Now, when a damage event reduces your health below 30%, the portion of that damage event that would apply to the last 30% of your health is also reduced by 80%.
      • Developers’ notes: For example, if you are at 50% health and receive damage for 40% of your health, your damage taken will be 20% + 20% * (1-0.8), or 24%, and ...

May 29, 2024

WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria

• Endgame tuning adjustments have been made to Heroic Scenarios, Heroic Dungeons, and Normal Raids so that they increase in power more slowly between levels 60 and 70. Heroic and Mythic raids have been adjusted so there is a smoother transition between them.
• Players who completed the Pearlfin Jinyu questline can now bring Lesser Charms of Good Fortune to Elder Lusshan for additional reputation.
• Players who completed the Forest Hozen questline can now bring Lesser Charms of Good Fortune to Chief Kah Kah for additional reputation.
• Fixed a bug that inadvertently capped the maximum stats that can be gained on a Cloak of Infinite Potential. That cap has been removed.
• Shado Pan Assault reputation earned per boss kill increased to 1000 (was 300). This amount is available daily.
• Elder Great Turtles and Ancient Spineclaws have migrated back to the Timeles...

The realm restarts are scheduled for 7:00 a.m. PDT tomorrow (May 30).

We expect the vendors to spawn as expected when realms come back up.

Hello Timerunners!

As we approach the end of the second week of WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria, we’d like to take a moment to talk about some very recent updates we’ve made and look forward to the next 11+ weeks that the event will be available.

We’ve now made several changes to address some issues we’ve seen, especially around max level content such as heroic scenarios, heroic dungeons, and raids. Our goal here is to address the sudden increase in enemy power at level 70 for group content and make the transition to higher difficulty raids smoother for players.

• Heroic Scenario, Heroic Dungeon, and Normal Raids increase in power more slowly between levels 60 and 70. When first reaching level 70, players will continue to be challenged by max-level content, but that increase in difficulty should now be noticeably lessened.
• Heroic and Mythic raids have been adjusted so there is a smoother transition between them. Before these changes, there was a stark ...

Today’s Alpha build update includes changes for Aldrachi Reaver Demon Hunters.

We’ve heard your feedback regarding short-duration buff windows and the rotational pressure they impose, and we’re taking steps to address that.

By reducing the frequency with which Art of the Glaive triggers, we open up some room to let your buffs persist for longer periods of time; we intend for this to smooth out the precision required and generally introduce more flexibility on timing. We’ve adjusted the value of several related effects to compensate for this slower cadence and will be continuing to iterate on pacing.

Please keep the feedback coming!

Hello, Priests.

We’ve updated the Oracle tree for this week’s build with a few changes. Primarily, we’ve updated Premonition to rotate through its spells only by casting Premonition. There is no longer an option to change the spells based on casting spells on the global cooldown. We like that players will rotate through the available spells and removes complications with choosing which Premonition to use after casting each Priest spell. We’ve also replaced the capstone with an effect that triggers all Premonitions at once after each have been cast. While this effect is not available immediately in combat, we feel that with 2 charges of the spell and the availability of a cooldown reduction talent there is space for the effect to occur during your activity of choice.

We’ve removed Prompt Deliverance, which reduced the cooldown of Purify. Oracle Priests can still uniquely use Premonition of Insight to lower Purify’s cooldown if needed during a clutch moment, but we’ve de...

Greetings, Death Knights.

In today’s new Alpha build, we have updates to the Blood talent tree and new talents for the not-yet-implemented talents for both Frost and Unholy.

Our focus for Blood updates were heavily focused on the tree layout, updating existing talents to have more synergy with Blood’s kit, reducing the amount of 2-point talents, and moving a couple talents baseline (like Crimson Scourge and Death’s Carress). One major pain point we’ve heard expressed with Blood is how much friction there is to pick up Gorefiend’s Grasp in content where you may need it. In response to that we’ve updated the tree to have Gorefiend’s in a much more accessible location. While we generally like the accessibility it has in the new tree, we’ve been testing it internally and have realized that its new location has made it a bit difficult to avoid in scenarios where you might need the AoE grip. We will update the pathing again to make it still accessible but a bit more optional...

Greetings Warlocks.

In today’s new build, we’re focusing on the Affliction and Destruction specialization trees. We’ve changed the structure and pathing of both trees and would like to provide context for some of the other changes you’ll see in this build.

Affliction
We’ve moved Darkglare upwards in the tree to make it much easier to get. We’ve shifted talents to the third section and added new talents to increase how many options are available. We’re evaluating how many two-point nodes are available and are looking to revise in a future build.

We’ve also looked at Haunt and increased the amount of damage it does baseline to make it feel more impactful upon cast. We’ve introduced Improved Haunt as well, which is a new talent that further expands upon Haunt. Lastly, we’ve moved Haunt to the second section of the tree to make it easier to pick given how much it adds to Affliction’s single-target toolkit.

Destruction
...

Hello mages!

We have another round of changes to all three specs showing up in the build today, and wanted to provide some more context for you.

Time Anomaly
In general, we’re happy with the gameplay around Time Anomaly. We feel the randomness it provides can create some fun (and frustrating) moments across pulls that helps to add texture to the Mage experience. An outlier here is for Frost Mage, which across all three specs has the weakest bonuses by a decent margin. We’ve changed Time Anomaly to now grant Brain Freeze instead of Fingers of Frost for Frost Mages to help increase the impact that this talent creates for that spec specifically.

For Mages who want to opt-out of the randomness of Time Anomaly, we are adding a new talent: Inspired Intellect, which will provide a flat increase to your Intellect. We’d like Inspired Intellect’s tuning to hit the expected value of Time Anomaly across a reasonable amount of pulls, and we will make ad...

This week is mostly a suite of effect tuning for Druid of the Claw. Several Druid of the Claw bonuses provided uneven value to different abilities or specs, and we’ve adjusted the bonuses granted to various abilities to give them more comparable value.

We also adjusted the defensive value that the tree gives Feral and Guardian Druids. Tank specs should generally get more defensive value than DPS specs from their shared trees so that the tree doesn’t become a lock-in choice for DPS players in hard content, and Feral Druids of the Claw were getting a lot of defensive value.

Our intention for the Empowered Shapeshifting / Wildpower Surge node is for it to offer mostly defensive value for Feral and a mix of offensive and defensive power for Guardian, with a passive and more active shapeshifting option. Wildpower Surge should offer meaningful damage for Guardians who use it regularly (as well as granting them the defensive bonuses of effects like Ursine Vigor and Wildshape ...

Below are the following changes and updates in today’s build of The War Within Alpha:

CHARACTERS

• New Human Racial: No Place Like Home – Your Hearthstone cooldown is reduced by 5 minutes and gains an additional charge. Replaces Diplomacy.

CLASSES

• DEATH KNIGHT
  • Deathbringer
    • Wave of Souls damage increased by 50%.
    • Exterminate second scythe damage increased by 50%.
  • Rider of the Apocalypse
    • Mograine’s Heart Strike damage increased by 250%.
    • Trollbane’s Obliterate damage increased by 33%.
    • Trollbane’s Obliterate cast frequency increased by 100%.
    • Nazgrim’s Scourge Strike damage increased by 100%.
    • Nazgrim’s Scourge Strike cast frequency increased by 100%.
    • Whitemane’s Death Coil damage increased by 100%.
  • San’layn
    • Inc...

Earlier today, in order to address an issue with items that can be purchased for Conquest, we sent all of the Conquest vendors on a vacation.

We’ve been working diligently to understand and fix the issue, but it has turned out to be a particularly tricky one. At this time, we don’t know how long it’s going to take to fix.

Something we do know is – we’ll probably have to do realm restarts to make the fix for this work correctly and bring the Conquest vendors back from their trip. So you can keep an eye out for scheduled realm restarts to know when we have it all sorted.

Thank you for your patience!

May 28, 2024

Cataclysm Classic

• Fixed an issue that was causing Glubtok to summon adds in Normal Deadmines.
• Fixed an issue with many guild profession achievements not tracking as expected.
• The Twin Peaks battleground is temporarily unavailable while some issues are addressed.
• Death Knight
  • Fixed an issue with Desecration not being removed by Bladestorm.
• Druid
  • Leader of the Pack’s tooltip now correctly states that the Druid’s melee critical strikes in Cat and Bear for cause them to heal 4% of their total health (incorrectly showed 5%).
• Hunter
  • Primate Hunter pets now understand that they can’t move while using their Bad Manner ability and will successfully cast the spell without interrupting themselves.
  • Furious Howl will no longer stack with other % Crit chance increases such a...

May 28, 2024

Player versus Player

• Priest
  • Thoughtsteal can no longer be canceled.
  • Thoughtsteal no longer causes the casting Priest to learn a spell they already know (example: a Shadow Priest stealing Vampiric Touch from another Shadow Priest). The target of the Thoughtsteal still loses access to the stolen ability.
  • Developers’ notes: These changes resolve an issue where Priests could lose access to existing abilities after casting Thoughtsteal.

Quests

• Verdisa did not realize she was sitting on an important location for the quest “Forget Her Not” and has moved a few feet away.

WoW Remix: Mists of Pandaria

• On Friday, May 24, the following changes were deployed:
  • There are now three new quests that grant Bronze to player-characters upon reaching levels 50, 60, and 70.
  ...