wow Block, Marksmanship, Prot, Ret, Brewmaster, Mistweaver Changes - June 9

[Starym 3,779]

 

A whole lot of smaller changes today as there are no huge revamps, but rather a lot of (relatively) smaller tweaks to many specs, with Brewmasters getting the biggest. There's also an announced change which may come in one of the next beta deploys, making block's damage reduction separate from base armor's.

First off we have Marksmanship Hunters get some cast time adjustments for Aimed and Steady Shots as well as some QoL improvements and a few clarifications:

Marksmanship (source)

Marksmanship Hunters,

Hello again, a few notes this morning.

- Aimed Shot should still be a 12 second recharge time before Haste, I'm unsure why some people are reporting it is showing up as 10 seconds for them. Is this still happening after the build that went up yesterday?

- After lots of discussion and reading feedback and many dungeon runs and raid testing and questing, we have decided that we're going to changed Aimed Shot to 2.5 second cast time, and Steady Shot to 1.75 second cast time.

- Regarding Lone Wolf and Pet Utility, if you have your active pet out, the Command Pet button in your spellbook should change into whatever your pet's special ability is, such as Primal Rage. If you dismiss your pet as a Marksmanship Hunter and opt into Lone Wolf, Command Pet should change into Survival of the Fittest as a cooldown you can use that reduces the damage you take by 20%. This looks to have some issues currently, and will be resolved in a future build.

Thanks for the continued feedback on this thread and others.

Then it's on to Paladins with Retribution getting Blade of Wrath's reset as a baseline ability for Blade of Justice and Divine Purpose gets its proc reduced but damage upped. Protection Palas, on the other had, get a change to their mastery and we hear about the overall change to block for all classes:

Retribution (source)

Hey all,

Since the first round of changes to Retribution early on in alpha, we've been letting the spec settle into a steady-state, but have been very much keeping it in mind. Like many have suggested, the spec is almost all the way there, but is missing a little bit baseline.

Blade of Wrath
Blade of Wrath's mechanic is becoming baseline, named Art of War: Your auto attacks have a chance to reset the cooldown of Blade of Justice. Any many correctly pointed out, this is a sort of unpredictability that the spec needed in its baseline rotation.

Blade of Wrath, the talent, will now increase the frequency of Art of War resets and cause its proc to also increase the damage of the next Blade of Justice by 25%. Numbers are pending tuning, but the gameplay is there.

Divine Purpose
Divine Purpose's proc chance has been reduced to 15% (down from 20%), but it now also increases the damage and healing of that free Holy Power spender by 20%.

The entire value of this talent was in the free Holy Power proc, which is a huge swing on button presses and pacing, but which neither of its talent match-ups provide. This change reduces that difference slightly and gives Divine Purpose a little more nuance to its gameplay – now you may consider saving or waiting for that proc to use on a different Holy Power spender from usual.

Thanks for the patience and continued feedback.

 

Protection (source)

We are looking at a change to Block (for all classes), where it would not share DR with your base armor. This won't be in the next build though.

The next build will slightly increase the value of the Consecration effect from mastery. There's a disadvantage to having the mastery split between two effects, where each is weaker than it otherwise would be. But we also want to be careful with making Consecration's damage reduction too strong, where the damage swing in stepping in/out of it might be uncomfortable again.

The it's on to Monks, with Mistweavers getting a second charge on Renewing Mist and have Uplifting Trance removed, while Brewmasters get the biggest change out of the lot today with two new talents, Guard, making Stagger damage deal no damage for a while and Spitfire giving a cooldown reset proc for Breath of Fire to Tiger Palm. There's a 10% overall HP reduction for the spec, as well as changes to a couple of brews and more:

Mistweaver (source)

Next build will try 2 charges on Renewing Mist, and Uplifting Trance removed.

A little background for interest:
We try to be really careful about adding charges to baseline spells, since it's a higher-complexity mechanic than simply having a cooldown. Essentially every spell is slightly more efficient with charges, since you don't get the little bit of slippage when the cooldown comes up each time, and you can better sync it with other effects. So it's always an attractive ask, because adding charges to anything improves spec performance. Renewing Mist is a better case due to bad feeling of every second lost slightly reducing Vivify efficiency for 20s, and this also helps the weirdness of wanting to start ramping it up 20s before any pull.

Uplifting Trance was added in Legion to try to give something that enforced a little more spell variance (pushing Vivify to top priority sometimes and not other times). By now, there are so many more spell interactions contributing to the "weaving" part of Mistweaving (Essence Font buffs other spells, Soothing Mist empowers other spells, Renewing Mist improves Vivify, etc.) that button choice is richer without sticking a proc in there. Since other things control when you want to use Vivify, this just feels like random variance that you can't control.

 

Brewmaster (source)

Various things to expect next build:

New talent: Guard (replacing Elusive Dance on L100). "Guard against future attacks, causing the next X damage you Stagger to instead be prevented." 30s cooldown.
(The Guard Honor Talent will be renamed).

New talent: Spitfire (replacing Gift of the Mists on L45). "Tiger Palm has a 25% chance to reset the cooldown of Breath of Fire."

Part of the value of Black Ox Brew is being moved baseline, by lengthening its cooldown to 2 minutes, and speeding up the baseline recharge time of Brews. This should help the row be more competitive, without losing total Brew charges.

Ironskin Brew's duration will come up to 7, also freeing up more Brew charges.

Blackout Combo no longer buffs Purifying Brew. This usage wound up mostly being a trap, and 4 modes still a good amount of choice for the talent.

Gift of the Ox healing increased about 30%. We expect the overall spawn rate to be lower than Legion, and this helps make up for that.

Balancing is still preliminary, but a few tweaks on that front:
HP reduced for Brewmaster by around 10%. Brewmaster's heavy resistance to killing spikes means they're not a tank that needs as high an HP pool. This does have the side effect of making Ox orbs spawn slightly more often.
Stagger's effectiveness against Magic brought back up to 35%.

And here are some previous beta feedback posts:

• Frost Death Knight
• Survival Hunter
• Arms Warrior
• Affliction Warlock
• Holy Priest
• Fury Warrior (2)
• Marksmanship Hunter
• Fury Warrior (1)
• Discipline Priest (2)
• Protection Paladin
• Discipline Priest (1)
• Balance Druid

[Oceola 4]

I noticed your comments above pertaining to MM hunts, reference "cast time" increases w/ no justification. I also noticed the rationale you use focuses on dungeon and raids w/ no thought/consideration whatsoever on how this will impact PVP content? I play WoW for one reason only... low level RBG's. I could care less about WoW PVE nonsense. I don't know who you are, so I will assume you are employed by blizziod in some capacity. Please let, Ion "blinky" Hazzlkostas know this customer (4) accounts), is on the verge of quitting WoW based on the "crap job" he and his minions did in Legion. Also, I have no plans to purchase BfA, if I can get by w/o it.