World of Warcraft Dev Tracker

Hello Adventurers! Here are Dragonflight’s development notes for this week:

NEW FEATURES

• DRAGONRIDING
  • Updated the double jump Launch and Skyward Ascent to both be more reliable in their directionality and movement.
  • Re-tuned the turn rate for dragon isle drakes to be more lenient, including a feature wherein the player’s turn rate scales with speed - lower speeds feature quicker turns, while top speeds still come with a need for slightly more planning.
  • Updated the Dragonriding trait window, bringing the zone unlocks and basic skills into the same pane as the unlockable traits for Dragonriding.
    • Developers’ note: We discovered early in Alpha that we’d need a solution for players who rely on /follow or similar features to engage with World of Warcraft, as following wasn’t immediately compatible with Dragonriding. To address this, we’ve added “Ride Along”. Dragonriders can speak with Lithragosa...

Here’s today’s hotfixes to Lower and Upper Karazhan:

AUGUST 23, 2022

Dungeons and Raids

• Mythic+
  • Return to Karazhan: Lower
    • Developers’ note: We wanted to give players time to re-learn mechanics in returning dungeons before making large nerfs, however, Lower Karazhan continues to stand out as an outlier in difficulty so we are making larger changes to bring it in line with the difficulty of the other dungeons in Season 4.
    • Several Skeletal Ushers are taking a break from protecting the Opera Hall.
    • Several Skeletal Ushers have relocated to account for their partners taking a break.
    • Arcane Warden and Skeletal Usher now contribute more credit to Enemy Forces.
    • Spectral Valet’s Demoralizing Shout cast time increased to 3 seconds (was 2 seconds).
    • Coldmist Widow’s Caustic Venom damage over time damage reduced by 50%.
    • P...

We’re planning to playtest the Wintergrasp Battleground on Thursday, August 25 at 3:00 p.m. PDT (5:00 p.m. CDT, 6:00 p.m. EDT).

Please join us on the Wrath of the Lich King Classic Beta PvP realm, and play with the blues. Members of our Classic Development, QA, and Community teams will be online at that time to put Wintergrasp through its paces and rev up some siege engines for the [faction]!

Thank you very much!

Hotfixes
AUGUST 22, 2022

Auction House

• Addressed multiple issues causing degraded Auction House performance.

• Fixed a bug causing Incoming Amount to display the incorrect value for sales of commodities in full stacks.

Dungeons

• All Mythic+ dungeon tuning will occur during scheduled weekly maintenance in each region.
• Iron Docks
  • Sanguine Sphere’s absorb now scales with keystone level.
• Lower Karazhan
  • Galindre and Elfyra’s health reduced by 35%.
  • Winged Assistant’s Throw “Stuff” damage reduced by 40%.
  • ...

Hello. This promotion has just begun rolling out to a wide range of players. We expect that process to continue for up to a week, and we expect players who qualify to receive the Shadowlands expansion and the Level 50 Character Boost separately at different times in the days to come. They’ll appear in the Battle.net launcher as options to be claimed.

Thank you for your patience and interest!

Greetings Warlocks,

Our Eye of Kilrogg has been watching the community discussions unfold over the past two weeks and we have several changes that we’re summoning into this week’s Alpha update, based on the feedback we’ve observed. There’s a lot to cover with Core and each Specialization tree receiving significant changes, so grab your Healthstones and let’s dive into our grimoire of updates:

Core Tree

We took another look at the Core tree and came to the same consensus that a lot of the community shared: while it was cool to get access to buttons previously unavailable or completely new, it created a lot of button bloat and added some additional mechanical complexity to each rotation. In lieu of this, we’ve cut out a lot of the throughput centric...

Today, we’re planning to test our hotfix process. Specifically, we’re going to deploy hotfixes to the Paladin class. This will involve changing various states of both the class and individual spec trees, possibly breaking individual talents or the UI in the process of doing so. You might see some temporary talents added or removed, and the state of the talent trees and any node connections will change throughout the day.

We expect to return the class back to how it previously looked and felt, once we’re done with this test exercise.

Hello.

Season of Mastery has always been planned to run for about one year, and we do not intend to cut Season of Mastery short.

While we don’t yet have an exact date for SoM characters to move to either Classic Era or Wrath Classic realms, we expect that to be about 11-13 months after Season of Mastery began.

Hello Mages!

In this week’s Alpha update, there will be a number of updates to both the Core and Spec trees for the Mage Class. We’d like to talk a bit about our design directions for this iteration and the improvements we’re looking to make.

Core Tree

The Core tree is seeing the heaviest redesign. Our goal has been to increase options by adding new spells, reducing overall multi-point nodes, cutting all existing 3-point nodes, and improve pathing. Several choice nodes have been split into standalone nodes to increase utility options. We’ve also been looking to reduce the number of nodes that may feel required. Cone of Cold will be moving baseline to improve the base kit and remove dependency issues.

Here are some examples of spells you can...

We’re aware of a bug that is causing some items to get stuck in invalid listings.

This is a priority for us to fix, however, we expect the fix to take 2-3 more days.

We’ll let you know as soon as the fix is deployed.