World of Warcraft Dev Tracker

The Hunter Binding Shot change from this week’s PTR update has been reverted.

• Developers’ note: Due to an oversight when changing Binding Shot from a stun to a root, Binding Shot was not updated to obey normal root rules. During our bug fixing process, we updated it to break on damage in 9.1.5. However, we realize this is a big change and that Binding Shot has become a powerful tool for Hunters. As a result, we are reverting this change and allowing Binding Shot to not break on damage.

Week 4 of open Beta (October 27)

• Many groups of Guard NPCs that were removed from Alterac Valley in patch 1.11 have been restored for Season of Mastery.
• The denizens of Blackrock Depths have grown more leery of criminal activity and will now attempt to stash their most valuable items away if they suspect that a thief is in their midst.
• Many adjustments have been made to the raid encounters in Molten Core and Onyxia’s Lair.
• The PvP honor system has been adjusted to accelerate the rate at which players rank up.
  • Developers’ notes: Each week, the Honor system keeps track of players’ PvP participation, and at the end of the week, player-characters with at least 15 honorable kills are sorted by PvP participation. Once sorted, the system decides how many points to award that week, and the sorting is independent of the character’s current PvP rank. The system then awards a calculated number of expected points, and the cal...

The Season of Mastery Beta is back online following maintenance and includes the following updates.

Week 4 of open Beta (October 27)

• Many groups of Guard NPCs that were removed from Alterac Valley in patch 1.11 have been restored for Season of Mastery.
• The denizens of Blackrock Depths have grown more leery of criminal activity and will now attempt to stash their most valuable items away if they suspect that a thief is in their midst.
• Many adjustments have been made to the raid encounters in Molten Core and Onyxia’s Lair.
• The PvP honor system has been adjusted to accelerate the rate at which players rank up.
  • Developers’ notes: Each week, the Honor system keeps track of players’ PvP participation, and at the end of the week, player-characters with at least 15 honorable kills are sorted by PvP participation. Once sorted, the system decides how many points to award that week, and the sorting is independent of the character’s cu...

We’re planning to take the Season of Mastery Beta offline at 11:30 a.m. PDT, in about two hours.

We’ll have a development notes update for you soon thereafter.

Hello everyone. /waves
Here are this week’s PTR notes:

Classes

• Phial of Serenity (Kyrian Ability) and healing potions no longer reset the melee swing timer.
• Death Knight
  • Fixed an issue that prevented Shackle the Unworthy (Kyrian Ability) from spreading to enemies behind the Death Knight.
  • Unholy
    • Unholy Assault’s (Talent) global cooldown (GCD) is now correctly reduced by Haste.
• Demon Hunter
  • The Hunt’s (Night Fae Ability) effect can now be removed with player immunities.
  • Fixed an issue that prevented the Lost in Darkness (Conduit) from improving with higher conduit ranks.
  • Havoc
    • Dancing with Fate (Conduit) damage effect increased by 300% (down from 650%).
    • Fixed an issue where the Dancing with Fate conduit did not increase the damage of the final slash fr...

Greetings!

First, thank you to everyone who hopped on the Season of Mastery Beta last week and helped us test out our first adjustments to Molten Core and Onyxia.

Going into Season of Mastery, our philosophy was to take a light touch when it came to changes to raid bosses and mechanics, and focus instead on restoring versions of raid bosses that existed in the game at one point or another during the course of original World of Warcraft. As we were peeling back the layers of data from early versions of the game, it became obvious quickly that the list of actual changes to most content in Molten Core and Onyxia was extremely short. Onyxia had a conflagrate/disorient effect on her Fireball attack during the air phase, Golemagg had an Earthquake ability, and Ragnaros did a fire splash more frequently, with a weekly timer to limit the number of attempts a group could make.

Some of these mechanics are more impactful than others, but overall, we suspected that the tota...