Season of Discovery Class Tuning Incoming - February 20

With scheduled weekly maintenance in each region, we’ll make the following adjustments to a few classes in Season of Discovery.

Druid

• Swipe now scales with attack power, gaining 10% of attack power as damage. Threat caused by Swipe has been greatly increased.
• The Berserk rune now also causes Lacerate to hit 3 targets.
• The duration of Rip has been increased to 16 seconds (was 12 seconds).
• The next Starfire cast after the Starsurge rune ability now has its damage increased to 80% (was 66%).
  • Corrected a bug causing this bonus damage to be lower than intended at level 40.

Shaman

• The Dual-Wield Specialization rune now provides 50% bonus damage to your offhand weapon swings.
• Lava Lash now gains 50% increased damage if Flametongue Weapon is imbued on your offhand.
• The proc chance of Maelstrom Weapon is now roughly 50% higher when your main hand weapon or your two-hand weapon is imbued with Windfury Weapon.

Mage

• Conjure Water (Rank 5) will now conjure a full stack of 10 with each cast (was 2).
  • Developers’ notes: The tooltip will still indicate that only 2 are conjured. We hope to adjust the tooltip in the future.

Paladin

• Art of War now reduces the mana cost of Exorcism and Holy Shock by 80% when active.
• Beacon of Light base mana cost has been greatly decreased.

Priest

• Mind Spike damage increased by 10%.

• Void Plague damage increased by 10%.

• Shadow Word: Death base damage before modifiers decreased by 40% and spellpower coefficient adusted to 42.9% (was 64.3%).

• Developers’ notes: Overall, this should result in a 33-40% damage reduction on Shadow Word: Death, depending on the amount of spellpower the priest has. Shadow Word: Death has been doing a larger percentage of overall priest damage than intended, and we feel like this could begin to put additional pressure on healers in PvE, as spellpower gear improves and the damage that priests inflict on themselves continues to scale upwards. It could also prove to be increasingly oppressive in PvP, as it’s an instant attack that can be used on the move, from range, with very little counterplay.

The Paladin changes above were activated on all Season of Discovery realms yesterday, February 14. In this region, the rest of the changes above will go live on February 20.

Added to the OP here, as we now intend to make the following additional adjustments with scheduled weekly maintenance:

Priest

• Mind Spike damage increased by 10%.

• Void Plague damage increased by 10%.

• Shadow Word: Death base damage before modifiers decreased by 40% and spellpower coefficient adusted to 42.9% (was 64.3%).

• Developers’ notes: Overall, this should result in a 33-40% damage reduction on Shadow Word: Death, depending on the amount of spellpower the priest has. Shadow Word: Death has been doing a larger percentage of overall priest damage than intended, and we feel like this could begin to put additional pressure on healers in PvE, as spellpower gear improves and the damage that priests inflict on themselves continues to scale upwards. It could also prove to be increasingly oppressive in PvP, as it’s an instant attack that can be used on the move, from range, with very little counterplay.