World of Warcraft Dev Tracker

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...

• WARRIOR (Warrior Feedback)
  • Developer’s note: The Warrior class talent tree has been significantly reorganized to allow for more player choice and build diversity in Warrior builds, as well as improve access to utility abilities like Storm Bolt and Shockwave. Rage generation for all Warrior specs in Dragonflight has been higher than we’re happy with so we’ve removed or reduced the power of several Rage-generating effects. With tuning, this will introduce more tactical gameplay around when to use Rage spenders and make those spenders more impactful. More details can be found in the Feedback: Warrior Updates thread.
  • Significant re-arrangement of many talents on the Warrior tree.
  • Berserker Rage now auto-learned at level 12.
  • Thunder Cla...

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’ ...

May 1, 2024

Dungeons and Raids

• Aberrus (Awakened)
  • Fixed an issue that caused Thadrion to continually cast Unstable Essence after the encounter had concluded.
• Nokhud Offensive
  • Addressed a Primalist Thunderbeast issue where Thunderstrike’s target is not correctly reflected in the unit frame.

Items

• Amber Skitterfly should now appear in the Mount Collection for players who purchased it from the Trading Post.
• Legendary items can now be upgraded as intended on the Awakened track.
• Fixed a bug preventing legendary item upgrades from receiving appropriate stone/crest discounts.

Quests

• Fixed a bug that sometimes caused the world quest “Zaqali Elders” to fail to start.

Cataclysm Classic

• Archaeology digsites ...

Issues addressed:

• Some pet classes will have their pet action bar missing after relogging.
• New pets that hunters tame that are lower level than the hunter will not properly level up to match the hunter’s level automatically.
• Some pet classes may have their pet action bar missing after logging out in a non-rested area.
• Feral druid weapon normalization is not functioning properly, resulting in druids doing more damage than intended.
• Some spells are missing from players’ spellbooks, or located on the wrong page, or are appearing when they do not exist in Cataclysm.
• There is not currently a way to leave a random dungeon finder group via the UI
• Guild chat is not displayed as expected.
• ...

This is now fixed on all realms.

The first of two hotfixes went live about 30 minutes ago. The items can now be upgraded.

We have a second hotfix in the works that will apply the stone/crest discounts as expected.

We’ve identified this, erm, bug and developed a bugfix for it. We’ll have the bug mount appearing in Mount collections soon.

Tomorrow at 7:00 a.m. PDT, we will perform realm restarts on all Cataclysm Classic realms to pick up hotfixes, including a hotfix for talents appearing where they shouldn’t.

When you next log in thereafter, all of your talents will be reset, and will need to be reassigned.

Thank you for your patience and understanding.

We have turned off Battlegrounds while we investigate and fix an issue.

Thank you for your understanding.

Cataclysm pre-patch 4.4.0 is now live, and we’re aware of and working on issues that are critically impacting guild chat.

We hope to have a solution deployed soon.

Until then, players can expect messages sent to guild chat will likely not be displayed.

We’ll confirm here when the fix is complete.

Cataclysm Classic patch 4.4.0 is now live in this region. What follows is a list of known issues that we’re working on. This list will be updated as issues are resolved or new high-priority issues are discovered.

4.4.0 Known Issues
Updated May 3

Achievements

• Petting Zoo does not deliver Nuts’ Acorn to players upon acquiring 100 unique pets.

Classes

• The Pet Action Bar does not have Assist (instead of Aggressive stance).
• Assist functionality does not appear to function for Warlocks and Hunters.
• Paladins’ Holy Power unconsumed by Word of Glory are not appearing on the Paladin Holy Power resource bar.
• Death Knight
  • Blood Presence is increasing the chance that the Death Knight takes a critical strike.
  • Frost ...

We’ve identified the bug causing this issue on the PTR, and we’re actively investigating solutions to address it in a future build.

We’re working on this as a priority issue. The fix is going to take some time to implement, however.

Thank you for your patience.

Early today, we deployed this hotfix to all realms:

• Reduced the Flightstone costs for Awakened and Special Awakened track Bullion items by 50%.

Thank you for your feedback!