Forums

RIP Avatar, you were my favorite part of destruction

Blizzard have shared this week's Rogue changes, as well as plans for future adjustments to Fatebound and Trickster Hero trees. (Source) Greetings Rogues, This week’s Alpha build includes many changes to Class and Spec talent trees, including a handful of positional swaps, tuning changes, and a few new and redesigned talents. Feedback about these changes is welcome, so please post here with any notable experiences or opinions from your play in the Alpha test. More change will be coming over the next few weeks, focused primarily on hero talents. Deathstalker is still lurking in the shadows and will be revealed when it’s ready (sometime in the next few weeks). For Fatebound, more completed talents will be rolling in over time, and we have also been following gameplay and written feedback which will be cause for iterations to existing talents. For Trickster, we’ve been following all of your feedback, and it has generated significant internal discussion. While the core pieces will remain in place (Unseen Blade, the Fazed debuff, and a grand finish in Coup de Grace), we expect to revisit the gameplay that fuels this engine, and most notably move away from Feint being a primary applicator of Unseen Blade. Unexpected randomly-timed procs of Unseen Blade have also proven to cause trouble and are being similarly reconsidered, in addition to minor updates for other talents. Thank you to those who have played the Alpha and spent the time to share experiences and opinions so far. Keep it coming! And here are this week's changes: (Source) ROGUE New Talent: Shadowheart – Leech increased by 3% while Stealthed. Acrobatic Strikes has been redesigned – Auto-attacks increase auto-attack damage and movement speed by 1% for 3 seconds, stacking up to 10%. Developer’s note: Acrobatic Strikes no longer increases the range of melee attacks. We are revisiting increased melee range talents across the game, and most are being removed. Default melee range has increased since these talents were originally created, allowing specs with increased range to attack from well outside where it appears they should be able to. Cut to the Chase moved from Assassination talent tree to baseline all specs, triggering from Envenom/Dispatch/Eviscerate. Vanish’s guaranteed stealth duration now 1.5 seconds in PvP combat (base 3 seconds). Tight Spender now reduces Energy cost of finishing moves by 6% (was 10%). Subterfuge is now a 2-point talent, effect duration 3/6 seconds. Some talents have moved locations. Without a Trace moved from Subtlety to Class tree in capstone location, replacing Shadow Dance. Nightstalker has been removed. Assassination New Talent: Rapid Injection – Envenom deals 10% increased damage while Envenom’s effect is active. Serrated Bone Spike has been redesigned – (Passive) Prepare a Serrated Bone Spike every 30 seconds, stacking up to 3. Rupture spends a stack to embed a bone spike in its target: Deals Physical damage and Bleed damage every 3 seconds until the target dies or leaves combat. Refunds a stack when the target dies. Generates 1 combo point plus 1 additional per active bone spike. Serrated Bone Spike initial damage reduced by 24% and damage over time damage reduced by 9%. Improved Garrote effect duration increased to 6 seconds (was 3 seconds). Indiscriminate Carnage effect duration reduced to 6 seconds (was 10 seconds). Kingsbane damage bonus per poison application now has a stated cap at 1000% from 50 stacks (was 1980% at 99 stacks). Kingsbane base damage over time increased by 6%. Developer’s note: Kingsbane was originally intended to be uncapped, but abilities and talents introduced in the Dragonflight expansion allowed players to reach its previously-unreachable hidden cap. Increasing or removing the cap in the current environment would reinforce poor gameplay outcomes and continue to constrain talent options, so a lower cap is being introduced with the intention of having Kingsbane remain a valuable component of any build that includes it, but not by being required as every build’s all-important main character. Sepsis has been removed. Outlaw Ace Up Your Sleeve now grants 4 combo points when triggered (was 5). Mastery: Main Gauche damage increased by 24%. Adrenaline Rush has been updated: No longer increases global cooldown recovery rate by 25% while active. Now increases global cooldown recovery rate equal to your Haste while active, up to 25%. Now increases Energy regeneration by 50% (was 60%). Count the Odds effect now has base chance 10% (was 8%) and duration 8 seconds (was 5 seconds), but no longer doubled while Stealthed. Underhanded Upper Hand no longer affects Slice and Dice duration and no longer grants 3 seconds of Subterfuge duration (Stealth ability use). Crackshot’s Dispatch effectiveness reduced to 50% (was 75%). Thief’s Versatility now increases Versatility by 3% (was 4%). Some talents have moved locations. Sepsis has been removed. Subtlety Premeditation has been redesigned – After entering Stealth, your next combo point generating ability generates full combo points. Invigorating Shadowdust now reduces cooldowns by 10/20 seconds (was 15/30 seconds). Shadow Dance moved from the Class talent tree to Subtlety talent tree. Shadow Focus now reduces costs by 5%. Some talents have moved locations.

This week's War Within Alpha Build adds a void airship mount. Check it out! This mount is a Full Transformation for the plane mount from the Delves, taught through Airship: Void. Here is the mount model from all perspectives.

Blizzard have detailed everything about the new limited time event coming on May 16th! From the zones and raids for each level bracket to the new ability gems, upgradable cloak, transmogs, mounts, details on the Bronze currency system and more, check out all the exciting new content coming soon! MoP Remix (Source) Relive epic adventures with an all-new event— World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria. Experience the wonders of Pandaria anew, but with fresh new loot— and (almost) unlimited power. What is World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria? World of Warcraft Remix is a time-limited event which allows players to re-experience the entirety of the Mists of Pandaria expansion at an accelerated rate from level 10 through 70. All loot has been completely overhauled and has powerful new effects allowing players to shape their experience, power up, and power on. Features include: Accelerated Leveling and Content allowing you to take on nearly every quest, scenario, dungeon and raid. Create a new World of Warcraft Remix character starting at level 10 to adventure through the event up to level 70. A mountain of loot: Get powerful items from everywhere— quests, chests, creatures, bosses. Customizable items allowing you to power up as far as you can go to take on tougher content. Convert unwanted items into Bronze which can be used to upgrade items or purchase cosmetics. Keep what you collect: Take your collection of transmogs with you later when The War Within™  goes live. Available to Everyone No expansion purchase is needed, but a World of Warcraft Subscription or Game Time is required to begin this fast-paced adventure through Pandaria. This means that Classic players can also participate in a plethora of pandamonium by simply installing the modern (live) World of Warcraft client. WoW Trial Accounts will also be able to experience this World of Warcraft Remix without a subscription or Game Time through level 20. Purchase a subscription or Game Time to continue beyond level 20. Accelerated Leveling and Content With World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria there will be no slowing you down and you’ll be able to take on nearly every quest, scenario, dungeon, and raid right out of the gate with accelerated leveling from 10-70. View the chart below for the availability of each type of content. Level Range       Zones     Scenarios Dungeons Raids 10-70 Jade Forest Greenstone Village Brewing Storm Theramore’s Fall Temple of the Jade Serpent Scarlet Halls Scarlet Monastery Scholomance   20-70 Valley of the Four Winds Krasarang Wilds 5.1 Landfall Campaign Unga Ingoo Domination Point Lion’s Landing A Little Patience |Dagger in the Dark Stormstout Brewery   25-70 Kun-Lai Summit   Arena of Annihilation Brewmoon Festival Crypt of Forgotten Kings Shado-Pan Monastery   Mogu’shan Vaults 30-70 Townlong Steppes Assault on Zan’vess Siege of Niuzao Temple   35-70 Dread Wastes     Heart of Fear   40-70 Vale of Eternal Blossoms   Battle on the High Seas Blood in the Snow Dark Heart of Pandaria Secrets of Ragefire Mogu’shan Palace Gate of the Setting Sun   Terrace of Endless Spring 45-70 Isle of Giants Timeless Isle       50-70 Isle of Thunder     Throne of Thunder 60-70       Siege of Orgrimmar 70       Heroic Raids Creating Your New Identity Create a new modern World of Warcraft character to undertake your adventures in Pandaria, collect a variety of powerful new items and transmogs, then take your transmogs with you when you continue your adventures in World of Warcraft®:The War Within™. All Remix characters created during the event will convert to a standard character to play within modern World of Warcraft at the end of the event. From the realm Character Selection screen, players will be given the option to create a new World of Warcraft Remix character, beginning at level 10, which will only be able to play with characters taking part in the event. Characters in the selection screen which are only available to play in the World of Warcraft Remix event will have an icon next to the character name so they can easily be identified when choosing which mode of World of Warcraft you intend to play through. Once you’ve created your character, you’ll begin your new journey in the Timeless Isle and meet up with the infinite dragonflight and Eternus who will set you on your path. New Loot, New You In World of Warcraft Remix, players have the opportunity to collect a variety of items from just about anywhere: quests, chests, creatures, bosses, and more. New customizable items will be yours for the taking and each item slot has their own unique identity with spell gem sockets. These sockets come with exciting turbo-charged new effects similar to trinkets. Each time you loot new items, you’ll have the chance for powerful new upgrades allowing you to push the limits further and faster than ever before with uncapped progression. As you progress, you’ll gradually become more and more powerful as items also grant increased permanent stats. Don’t worry if you slot a gem into a slot and want to remove it, you’ll be able to add and remove gems easily. You’ll also be able to use Unraveling Sands to transform unwanted items to bronze. You’ll find a few different types of gems to slot into your gear as you adventure through Pandaria including Meta Gems, Tinker Gems, and Cogwheel Gems. Here are a few examples of what you could find: Cloak of Infinite Potential You’ll also be able to earn an Artifact cloak that gains permanent power increases as you play when you loot various threads of time. Infinite Power achievements you earn on your strongest character will grant alternate characters a more powerful starting cloak — making leveling even faster!   Earn titles, a variety of transmogs, previously unreleased color variants of older mounts, and more simply by completing World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria specific achievements during the Remix event. These achievements will become Feats of Strength when the event ends. August Phoenix Astral Emperor's Serpent Players will also be able to ride their dragonriding mounts throughout Pandaria and if you haven’t learned this skill yet, don’t worry, trainers are standing by. Welcome to a New Bronze Age There’s no such thing as a bad drop and any drop you get can be converted into a new currency— Bronze. You’ll be able to use this currency to purchase upgrades and World of Warcraft account-bound cosmetics. Head to a bazaar in any zone to purchase everything from class transmogs, to Mists of Pandaria mounts, toys, and more. This allows players to purchase items that were previously unable to obtain or difficult to obtain as random drops by simply spending this new currency to add them to their account’s collection. Inifnite bazaars can be found at the following locations:   Location Zone Tian Monastery Jade Forest Halfhill Market Valley of the Four Winds Temple of the White Tiger Kun’Lai Summit Niuzao Temple Townlong Steppes Kor’vess Dread Waste Star’s Bazaar (Alliance) Shrine of the Seven Stars Golden Terrace (Horde) Shrine of the Two Moons     Players won’t be able to use the Auction House in World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria. World of Warcraft Remix: Mists of Pandaria goes live May 16 at 10:00 am PDT worldwide. We’ll see you in Pandaria!

Today's War Within Alpha build focuses on the overhaul of the Destruction Warlock tree, aimed at simplifying talent choice and improving underutilized abiltiies. The developers wanted to reduce fluctuation in power, enhance underutilized talents, and simplify decision-making within the talent trees with the latest Destruction tree update. Some highlights: Chaos Bolt is now baseline for Destruction Warlocks. Avatar of Destruction has been removed. Decimating Bolt is reintroduced to boost the power of your rotational spells. Underutilized talents like Soulfire and Cataclysm have been improved to increase their viability. (Source) Today’s Alpha update focuses primarily on Destruction. The Path Ahead Before we dive in, we want to acknowledge that our work with each specialization tree is not complete. We’ve seen the recent discussions regarding how bloated the Demonology and Destruction tree are in terms of available talents and ranks, as well as thoughts on the pathing of the Affliction tree. In the near future, you will see that the Demonology tree is being restructured and condensed. Both the Destruction tree and the Affliction tree will also undergo a restructuring in the near future. In this context, a restructuring means that: the amount of 2-rank talent nodes will be reduced, talents may be removed, talents may be added, new pathing will be added, and talent nodes may be moved. Destruction Update Here are our stated goals, with the addition of a new goal, for Destruction moving into the War Within: Reduce the fluctuation in throughput in relation to the number of targets in combat. Improve underused talents such as Soulfire and Cataclysm. Condense the number of talents and talent ranks available. Beginning with our general changes, we are moving Chaos Bolt to be baseline. This is mainly to provide a Soul Shard spender once your specialization is chosen. We are also removing Chaosbringer but plan to provide additional tuning to Chaos Bolt, Rain of Fire, and Shadowburn baseline to ensure their power remains relatively the same. Avatar of Destruction We are removing Avatar of Destruction for a couple of reasons. First and foremost, we want to highlight Summon Infernal as a powerful moment and Avatar of Destruction lessens that by increasing the cadence in which an Infernal is present. Secondly, Avatar of Destruction provides Destruction warlocks with a powerful, multi-target stun on a frequent basis. We could remove the stun, but we want to stay in line with our philosophy that when a player sees a demon there’s an understanding of what function that demon provides. To replace Avatar of Destruction, we want to try bringing back Decimating Bolt as it fits the fantasy of a Destruction warlock well and provides more power to your rotational spells. We plan to iterate on this decision based on feedback we see from the community. Inferno We have redesigned Inferno to reduce how much throughput fluctuates based on the number of enemies present during an encounter. This will allow us to tune Destruction in all situations, regardless of the number of targets available. Additionally, this allows us to tune this talent to be a competitive option against Cataclysm rather than have it remain the correct choice. Soulfire, Shadowburn, Channel Demonfire We want to make each of these spells more appealing. In this build, you’ll see a redesign of Decimation as an experiment to accomplish this for Soulfire however we plan to expand more on this as well as Shadowburn and Channel Demonfire with the restructuring of the Destruction tree, mentioned earlier in this post. Stay tuned for future updates as we work to address this goal. Thank you for the discussions thus far. We appreciate the continued feedback! You will find all the changes that went live for Warlocks this week linked below. (Source) WARLOCK Hellcaller Seeds of Their Demise has been redesigned – Blackened Soul damage increased by 30%. When Blackened Soul deals damage, you have a chance to gain Ritual of Ruin/Tormented Crescendo. Malevolence, Wither, and Seeds of Their Demise icons have been updated. Demonology You now have a 35% chance (was 100% chance) to generate a Demonic Core from your summoned Dreadstalkers when they fade. Destruction New Talent: Devastation – Increases the Critical Strike chance of your Destruction spells by 5%. New Talent: Emberstorm – Increases the damage done by your Fire spells by 2/4% and reduces the cast time of your Incinerate spell by 10/20%. New Talent: Decimating Bolt – Hurl bolts of decimating magic at your target, dealing Shadow damage and increase the damage of your next 3 Incinerates by 40%. Decimating Bolt’s damage, and the bonus to Incinerate both increase as your target’s health decreases. New Talent: Summoner’s Embrace – Increases the damage dealt by your spells and your demon by 3%. Ruin has been redesigned – Increases the Critical Strike damage of your Destruction spells by 5/10%. Inferno has been redesigned – Rain of Fire damage is increased by 20% and its Soul Shard cost is reduced by 1. Decimation has been redesigned – Your Incinerate and Conflagrate casts on targets that have 35% or less health reduces the cooldown of Soulfire by 5 seconds and reduce its cast time by 40% for 10 seconds. Chaos Incarnate has been redesigned – Chaos Bolt, Rain of Fire, and Shadowburn always gain 70% of the maximum benefit from your Mastery: Chaotic Energies. Chaos Bolt has been removed from the Destruction specialization tree and is now baseline. Conflagrate has been moved to row 1. Backdraft has been moved to row 2. Roaring Blaze and Improved Conflagrate have been moved to row 3. Ruin has been moved to row 9. The following talents have been removed: Avatar of Destruction Chaosbringer

I'm very interested in what they're doing with Unholy, my favorite fantasy archetype is the necromancer and UH hasn't really felt like a necromancer since they only have 3 abilities that summon undead and they're all CDs. Having sudden doom death coils summon a magus of the dead fixes that slightly, although I really wish one of the hero talent trees was more focused on that aspect of a death knight.

Feral is getting some attention in this build and future builds, as Blizzard detail the changes in future Alpha builds. The changes are focused around Feral's AoE capability and rotation flow/clarity. Feral (Source) We’ve been playtesting, and iterating, and reading your feedback about Feral. We hear that you’re sad to lose the combo of getting AOE value out of Ferocious Bites cast with Apex Predator, and we do want Apex Predator to be an appealing AOE talent. Since we also want to bring significance back to maximizing Tiger’s Fury windows, we’re also not happy with compelling you to overwrite Rips benefitting from Tiger’s Fury with Primal Wrath in AOE to deal damage with Tear Open Wounds. So we’re trying a different version of AOE gameplay by restoring Rampant Ferocity and removing Tear Open Wounds. This retains the rotational clarity that’s a priority for us - in AOE you’ll maintain Rips with Primal Fury and spend additional combo points and Apex Predator procs on Ferocious Bite. The bonus to Rip and Rake damage from Predator will remain single target, as we don’t want this to feel like a maintenance buff in AOE and would prefer to keep its role funneling damage into your priority target. One side effect of this change is that Ferocious Bite and Rampant Ferocity will become a higher percentage of your damage dealt in AOE. We know that part of feeling like a bleed-focused spec is seeing your bleeds being a big component of your damage dealt, and this change will reduce that. We’re still committed to bleeds and DoTs remaining a critical component of your gameplay and rotation. ______ Please note that the updates described above will be coming in future Alpha builds.