World of Warcraft Dev Tracker

Greetings Warlocks,

Today, we have various Core and Affliction tree changes hitting the Alpha. We want to take a moment to go a bit more in depth as to what certain changes were made and why. As a refresher, here are the goals for our Core and Afflictions that we posted last week along with some additional goals that we can dig into here.

Class

• 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

• Address the tuning of Malefic Rapture in single-target and multi-target situations.
• Reduce complexity and the amount of active buttons that contribute to it.
• Erase the need to choose between a single-target or multi-target profile by adding more adaptability and flexibility.

While we cannot go over every ch...

Hello Mages!

We have a lot of Fire Mage changes hitting the Alpha today, and we want to take some time to go over what changes were made and why. As mentioned in our update post last week, we have a few 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.

Since we’re talking about Fire only, we can get a bit more granular:

Fire’s AOE
The biggest issue we were looking to address with this iteration was giving you more ways to adjust your talents and rotation to better suit different profiles, which goes hand-in-hand with increasing the effectiveness and excitement of Flamestrike, Phoenix Flames,...

With today’s Alpha update, Fel-Scarred Hero Talents are now available for testing.

Fel-Scarred Demon Hunters embrace the monster within! Blasts of devastating Fel fire are unleashed while in demon form, and activating Metamorphosis greatly empowers additional Fel-themed abilities.

The Fel-Scarred endure a pain that bubbles just beneath the surface, granting increased maximum Fury and a portion of their demon form bonuses at all times. Those who stand in their way will inevitably be introduced to that pain by intense fiery abilities and blades that burn with Fel energy.

Please try it out and let us know what you think here!

Greetings, Alpha testers!

With today’s Alpha update, testers can all rock the Earthen first hand.

First, some context.

To get right into the action, new Earthen on the Alpha bypass their starting quest experience. We also have abilities that are in the final stages of design but aren’t quite ready in terms of visuals or corner-case functionality. If you’d like a higher level experience, you can create a template character using an Earthen, but in this release, we’re particularly looking for your impressions of the extensive customization options the Earthen have to offer. Feel free to show us your awesome creations!

We’re also looking for your thoughts on the set of racial abilities we’ve imbued in our rocky friends.

Earthen’s active ability is Azerite Surge, an empower spell which has the following effects:

(We’re still working on the visuals for this spell, so expect to see changes in the near future as we refine ...

• PALADIN (Paladin Feedback)
  • Multiple applications of Greater Judgment may overlap.
    • This also functions with Retribution’s multiple stack application.
  • Glyph of the Luminous Charger now only works while Crusader Aura is active.
  • Lightsmith
    • Valiance no longer increases the duration of active Armaments, cooldown reduction unchanged.
    • Solidarity’s tooltip updated to reflecting targeting change.
    • Blessing of the Forge has had targeting improvements and visual effects updates.
  • Holy
    • Developer’s note: 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 spe...

Did you buy the insurance?

We are not planning to convert these. Going forward, you can collect them and use them as before.

A few minutes ago, we deployed a hotfix for this issue that should alleviate it going forward.

We’re working on a fix-up for players who were already affected.

Hello!

Earlier this evening, we rolled out a fix-up for players who opened their Timewalking dungeon / Raid cache before 2:30 p.m. PDT today. Affected players have received an in-game mail with the cache replacement.

Players who opened their cache after 2:30 p.m. PDT today should find that they received the intended reward(s).

Thank you!

Just want to confirm this with some details.

Everyone essentially started Season 4 in catch-up mode. Players were able to get 1 Splintered Spark of Awakening from the weekly quest, whether that’s the weekly “Last Hurrah” quest or the PvP weeklies offered by Malicia.

And then you’re able to get another splinter / half-spark from any valid catch-up ...

Greetings!

As we prepare for the release of the Cataclysm Classic pre-patch next week, we want to update you on some of the currency conversions that will take place during maintenance. Just like the original transition from Wrath of the Lich King to Cataclysm, the currency systems used for purchasing many items in Cataclysm Classic will change.

Justice Points

Emblems of Triumph and Emblems of Frost will be converted into Justice Points, and there will be a cap, as detailed below. All emblems and badges that are lesser than Frost and Triumph will be converted into gold. This includes legacy badges, such as Badges of Justice. If any of these older currencies are found on your character, they will convert into gold, and you’ll receive that...

The Dark Heart PTR has been updated to the latest test build: 54366.

We’ve updated the 10.2.7 PTR to the latest test build: 54366.

You should be able to login and test now.

We’re sending out a big wave of invites soon.

Please join Blizzard developers in the Cataclysm Beta on Friday, April 26 at 1:00 p.m. PDT (4:00 p.m. EDT) as we test Rated Battlegrounds. Here are the details:

When

1:00 p.m. to 3:00 p.m. PDT on Friday, April 26 (4:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m. EDT)

Where

The Cataclysm Classic Beta
Realm name: Classic Beta PvP

Who

Everyone should...

Hotfixes
April 23, 2023

Season of Discovery

• Players who have completed the quest “Warranty Claim” but have misplaced their Pristine G-7 C.O.R.E. Processor before handing in the quest “Salvaging the Salvagematic” may now speak with the Lost and Found vendor Rix Xizzix in Booty Bay to recover the misplaced quest item.
• Fixed a Sunken Temple issue where the Atal’ai Defenders encounter would not reset properly.
• 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 Rejuvena...

With the Dark Heart patch, we will increase the maximum number of characters that can be created on a WoW account from 60 to 65.

Have fun!

This morning with scheduled weekly maintenance, in addition to previously-planned adjustments to other classes, we deployed several changes to Hunters in Season of Discovery.

Hunter

• Rapid Killing now reduces the cooldown of Rapid Fire by 80% (was a reduction of 2 minutes).
• Chimera Shot weapon damage percent increased to 135% (was 120%).
• Explosive Shot base damage before attack power increased by 50%.
• Snipe...

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...