World of Warcraft Dev Tracker

Players can now earn up to 120 crests of each type per week in Dragonflight Season 4. This was a maximum of 90 per week in Season 3. The increase will allow for up to 8 upgrades per week, per crest type.

For players who don’t reach their maximum crest earnings in a given week, we’ve implemented the increasing-seasonal-cap system from previous seasons.

Please note that this increase is likely applicable to Season 4 only. We expect the weekly maximum to return to 90 for The War Within Season One.

Hello, Classic PvPers!

This coming weekend, we will test an adjustment to Player versus Player combat in Season of Discovery. We will implement a global damage reduction aura on PvP combat between players (and player controlled pets and other units).

When we started Season of Discovery, we knew that PvP would become significantly more fast paced and bursty, with each class being capable of significantly more damage output, and this quickly proved to be true. We experimented with a damage reduction aura in battlegrounds during Phase 1, but it didn’t work as well as we hoped, mostly because healing was scaling more aggressively than damage at that point, causing healing classes to become significantly more oppressive in battlegrounds than they normally would be. Now that we’re in Phase 3, we’ve made many changes and added more runes, and burst damage has significantly outpaced healing output, so we feel that it’s a good time to try this again.

Damage scaling and i...

Hello!

After a great deal of careful testing, we can confirm that earning Heritage armor on Timerunning characters all works as intended. Your Timerunner becomes eligible for the quest when you hit 50 in Pandaria.

Please note that the game won’t offer you the quest or show the achievement as completed while you’re in Pandaria, and until the event ends, you can’t leave Pandaria. So completing it requires the event to end.

After the event ends, you’ll simply log in, and then the quest appears, and then you can turn it in to get the achievement and the Heritage armor reward.

Some updates on the other Priest Hero Talent trees:

We’ve updated Oracle’s design to be focused on healing instead of support mechanics and are looking for feedback about how it plays. There are a couple of talents that are not currently ready, and we’ll update those in the coming weeks, including a revision to the capstone. We’re also very excited about the visual effects for this tree and hope you are, too!

The design for Archon is currently a work in progress. The core of the design revolves around Halo, and we’ll unveil its talents soon.

Hello!

Thanks for this well-written post on the state of Voidweaver for Shadow.

First, to clarify the functionality of the rift: There are not current plans for there to be a pull-in effect. We’re closely watching the power level of utility coming from hero talent trees. Given the frequency of the rift, a pull-in would surpass the power level aiming for.

While we don’t have any specific Hunter changes to announce at this time, we want you to know that we are reading your feedback and we’re working on cleaning up all three of the Hero Talent trees and fixing issues as they arise.

Your feedback on the talents has been very helpful thus far, and we expect to have some revisions in a future build of the Alpha.

Thanks and happy testing!

At this time, we’re working on the designs for Shamans’ two remaining Hero Talent trees: Totemic and Stormbringer.

We’re pleased with the direction we have planned for them and expect to make these trees available for testing and feedback in the coming weeks.

For Totemic, our plan is to make your existing totems, and perhaps a new one or two, feel more impactful and do some unique things when they’re dropped.

For Stormbringer, we’re working on emphasizing the uniqueness of being the sole lightning caster as much as possible.

Thank you for all of your feedback thus far!

Tomorrow, during each region’s normal maintenance period, we will apply the following adjustments to classes in Season of Discovery.

Druid

• The Natural Weapons talents now increases all damage done by druids in Season of Discovery, instead of just physical damage.
• The Gale Winds rune now reduces the mana cost of Hurricane by 60%.
• Swiftmend no longer consumes a Rejuvenation or Regrowth effect on the target when used.
  • Developers’ notes: Please note that it does still require Rejuvenation or Regrowth to be on the target to be used.

...

We’ve made a couple updates to the Season 4 content update notes:

• Awakened raids will rotate weekly, instead of every two weeks.
  • Developer’s note: In an effort to ensure players have variety week over week we are adjusting the schedule of our Awakened raids to rotate weekly.
• Earn 1 Antique Bronze Bullion a week per character by defeating Awakened bosses, with the cap rising by 1 each week. Note that if you miss a week, you’ll be able to catch up to the current weekly max.
• Revival Catalyst charges have been reset to 1. One charge is earned each week (was every 2 weeks).

Hello mages!

We have some updates coming to the Alpha in the next few weeks and want to give you an early look at a significant talent shakeup.

These changes will be almost exclusively specialization tree changes, but the goals are similar across them all. In general, we’re happy with the core gameplay of each mage specialization. These changes aim to elevate existing gameplay, provide choice, and ease frustration.

Goals

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

Mage Class Tree

So far there is one change in the Mage class tree:

• Temporal Warp is being removed.

Temporal Warp has some experiential issues w...

Greetings Warlocks,

We’ve been very excited to see the community’s reactions to the Warlock Hero Talents, and we appreciate all of your feedback.

In the coming weeks, you’ll see multiple changes to the Warlock class and specialization trees, and we’d like to provide some context for these changes here.

Core Goals

• Ensure each capstone is interesting and exciting.
• Reduce the amount of throughput talents, to free up utility choices.
• Reduce the number of ranks for talents that don’t warrant multiple ranks.

Affliction
The Affliction specialization tree forces a choice between a single-target or multi-target profile rather than providing a viable build that is adaptable in both situations. We want to redesign, introduce, and remove talents, as well as address the tuning of Malefic Rapture to help reduce this friction.

Demonology
For Demonology, we want to a...

Hello Death Knights,

We wanted to take a moment to let you know that we are planning some updates for the Death Knight talent trees going into The War Within. While we’re still a few builds away from deploying the changes to the War Within Alpha, we’d like to outline some our goals with the changes, to give a better idea of what to expect.

DK Goals

• Reduce the amount of resource flooding that affects each spec to varying degrees,
• Reduce the throughput nodes toward the end of the tree. It currently has 9 such nodes that add a lot of tension and make it hard to flex into utility you’d otherwise like to take. While we don’t plan to outright cut the DPS throughput nodes, we will rather make them easier to pick up as you naturally progress ...

EVOKER

• Evokers now start at level 10 (was level 58).
• Evokers now unlock the talent pane immediately after choosing a specialization in the Forbidden Reach, and they no longer learn “temporary” talents as they complete the Forbidden Reach experience.
• Several base spells that were previously learned at level 58 are now learned at level 10.
• Mass Return is now learned at level 38.
• Fury of the Aspects is now learned at level 48.

Devastation

Devastation Evoker can generate very high threat at the start of a pull due to a combination of their Mastery: Giantkiller and the burstiness of spells like Fire Breath and Pyre (particularly when used with Dragonrage and Charged Blast). A...

Greetings members of the Artisan’s Consortium!

As we reveal much of the content coming in The War Within, we’d like discuss a new system we’re cooking up for professions.

Inspiration

We added Inspiration in Dragonflight to try and capture the fantasy of critical hits while crafting. If you weren’t quite capped out on your gear and specializations for a given craft, or if you weren’t using max quality reagents to guarantee that max quality item, Inspiration was a way to get that lucky crit. It could save you some money (by using lower-quality reagents) and you could craft a better item than you would otherwise.

That was the hope at least, but it ended up (understandably) becoming a situation where crafters take this luck-based system, te...

The War Within Alpha Development Notes

NEW ZONES AND DELVES

• Isle of Dorn
• The Ringing Deeps
• Hallowfall

NEW DUNGEONS

• Cinderbrew Meadery
• The Rookery
• The Stonevault
• Darkflame Cleft
• The Dawnbreaker
• Priory of the Sacred Flame

WARBANDS

• Class set tokens from legacy raids (Shadowlands and earlier) are now Warbound and can be transferred to characters on the account.
  • Developer’s note: Based on community feedback and to match our overall philosophy on transmog collection, class set tokens from legacy raids...

We greatly appreciate your feedback and we’re looking forward to your thoughts on Druid changes. There are a few topics we’re especially interested in hearing from you on:

• How does it feel to build characters for different types of content? Do you feel you are able to get the tools you need?
• How do the changes help or not help in specific situations that are relevant to you?
• Are there sections of the talent trees that you feel don’t have enough meaningful choices?
• Do you see any degenerate or unintended impacts on rotations, including:
  • Using single target abilities in AOE or vice versa.
  • Being flooded with resources faster than they can be spent.
  • Feeling forced to use (or never use) particular abilities due to how the class is played.

Overall, our goal is to provide interesting choices and options in talent trees that deliver the fantasies of druid and its specializations, including appropria...

Holy Paladin

Our goals are to replace Light of the Martyr with a passive spell but keep the same thematic sacrifice theme, move more of their throughput from Beacon of Light into their baseline spells, and redesign Blessing of Summer to feel more specific to their role.

Blessing of Summer will now work as an external buff that converts healing to damage or damage to healing ability depending on which specialization you place it on. We’re hoping this offers a dynamic and more interesting way to use the spell. This effect will have a slight cap in order to allow us to tune it between AoE and single target scenarios, similar to Ancestral Guidance.

Beacon of Light represents a very large amount of throughput and we’d like to move more of that bu...

Mistweaver Monk

Mistweaver is seeing a few updates including their class 2-set Chi Harmony bonus and the removal of Essence Font. We’re also adding a talent to help Mistweavers who are focused on melee to gain more value out of their Mastery stat. Essence Font’s removal will have a few outcomes, the most important of which to address will be melee Mistweavers in raid healing scenarios.

We’re hoping the removal of Clouded Focus and consequent tuning of Vivify and Enveloping Mist will help Soothing Mist fill the gaps for them, but there are some realities around planting and casting that may feel worse than Essence Font did. Our goal here is to make the risk/reward feel worth it here through tuning, but we’re going to continue looking at this a...

Windwalker Monk

Our updates for Windwalker in The War Within are intended to address a few issues the specialization struggled with throughout Dragonflight. These points of focus for us were the power levels of the Haste and Mastery stats falling behind other options, Jadefire Stomp’s usability, and the Touch of Death gameplay focus. Other areas that we are also looking at are resource bloat, evening out their rate of auto-attacks, and adding more pronounced thematics through both gameplay and visuals.

Fists of Fury’s damage and Glory of the Dawn now scale with your Haste value to help the stat be more impactful for Windwalker Monks. These will help us have the tuning knobs to increase its value more dynamically. We’ve also increased the cost...

Monk Class Tree

Our main goals for the Monk Class tree are to introduce more optionality, refresh the cappers, and add a few new pieces of utility (such as an Enrage dispel), while still cutting down on overall keybind requirements. To accomplish this, we’ve added choice nodes to most active options that offer a passive option or changed pathing to allow more skipping of these spells.

We’ve also cut down on the total amount of throughput being offered within the core tree. Using Mistweaver as an example, they often found themselves feeling required to pick up both the healing and damage nodes offered throughout the tree and were therefore left with only a few points to customize their utility loadout. The reduced number of throughput nodes an...