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wow-classic Forbes Interview with Game Director Ion Hazzikostas on Layering
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By Staff
Blizzard have announced more class tuning coming with this week's reset, as Hunters, Shamans and Warlocks get some adjustments.
Tuning (Source)
With scheduled weekly maintenance (tomorrow, April 30 in this region), we’ll make the following adjustments to classes in Season of Discovery:
Hunter
Raptor Fury now increases the damage done of Raptor strike and Mongoose Bite by 10% per stack (was 15%). The Beast Mastery rune now increases pet damage by 10% (was 20%). Shaman
The Burn rune now also grants a significant bonus to spell power when Flametongue Weapon is imbued on your weapon. Rolling Thunder now has a 50% chance to trigger (was 30%). Fixed a bug causing overload procs to not add a charge to Lightning Shield when the Shaman has the Rolling Thunder rune active. Warlock
Invocation now also applies to Unstable Affliction. Invocation damage can now deal critical strikes if the Warlock also has the Pandemic rune active. -
By Staff
Hunters got some newly added tuning today, as Blizzard detail additional changes added to the already quite significant class tuning!
Hunter (Source)
This morning with scheduled weekly maintenance, in addition to previously-planned adjustments to other classes, we deployed several changes to Hunters in Season of Discovery.
Hunter
Rapid Killing now reduces the cooldown of Rapid Fire by 80% (was a reduction of 2 minutes). Chimera Shot weapon damage percent increased to 135% (was 120%). Explosive Shot base damage before attack power increased by 50%. Sniper Training has an additional new effect: while Sniper Training is at 5 stacks, Aimed Shot is instant. Serpent Spread now causes Multi-shot to apply Serpent Sting to its targets for 12 seconds (was 6 seconds). Steady Shot now deals 100% weapon damage (was 75%). As we previously noted, there are more adjustments coming for Hunters and other classes. In general, we intend to improve the ranged playstyle and diminish the melee playstyle so that the two become more equivalent.
We apologize for the confusion caused by the changes above going live earlier than intended, and we intend to post more about further adjustments soon.
Thank you for your patience and understanding.
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By Staff
This weekend, a global damage reduction aura will be tested in PvP combat in Season of Discovery to balance the increased burst damage observed the latest phase.
(Source)
Hello, Classic PvPers!
This coming weekend, we will test an adjustment to Player versus Player combat in Season of Discovery. We will implement a global damage reduction aura on PvP combat between players (and player controlled pets and other units).
When we started Season of Discovery, we knew that PvP would become significantly more fast paced and bursty, with each class being capable of significantly more damage output, and this quickly proved to be true. We experimented with a damage reduction aura in battlegrounds during Phase 1, but it didn’t work as well as we hoped, mostly because healing was scaling more aggressively than damage at that point, causing healing classes to become significantly more oppressive in battlegrounds than they normally would be. Now that we’re in Phase 3, we’ve made many changes and added more runes, and burst damage has significantly outpaced healing output, so we feel that it’s a good time to try this again.
Damage scaling and its impact on PvP has always been a concern in World of Warcraft, even since original WoW. Various systems have been introduced to counteract this to varying levels of success, but ultimately it always comes down to the fact that player damage outscales player health at a base level, and an adjustment is needed for combat between players to continue to feel satisfying as player power increases. We’ve been hesitant to introduce this as a permanent feature, and we prefer to give it a trial run this weekend to get an idea of how it feels before we take further steps. Please note: this aura will affect all areas of the game world, not just battlegrounds.
We encourage you to get out into the world (or in battlegrounds) and PvP the weekend and let us know how it feels. We’re prepared to do some tuning to make it the most effective, so your feedback will be very helpful.
We currently plan to enable the aura on all Season of Discovery realms on Friday, April 26 at approximately 19:00 CEST, and it will be disabled four days later, during scheduled weekly maintenance in each region.
We look forward to your feedback. Thank you!
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By Staff
Blizzard have announced that there will be realm transfers coming from PvP to PvE realms over the next few weeks. These free transfers will be open for a short time and on multiple occasions. Blizzard also explain why these are opening now and also talk about faction balance, which is the reason the transfers will work in these short bursts on numerous occasions.
Transfers (Source)
Good evening everyone,
When we launched Season of Discovery, we made some bold decisions, one of those was the creation of Enforced Faction Balanced PvP Realms. When we did this, we did our best to communicate some caveats that this may not end up being the experience you want from World of Warcraft, as PvP realms can be an intensely challenging experience at times. While we are very happy with how the faction balance system has worked out, we know from player feedback internally and externally that the reality of a balanced presence of both factions on a single realm, and that individual layers will not always have equal factions, means that some folks have now decided they would instead prefer a PvE ruleset, but have characters locked to these PvP realms.
To that end, we genuinely want everyone to have the best time they can in Season of Discovery, so over the next few weeks, we will be periodically opening Free Character Transfers from PvP realms to PvE realms. These transfer windows will open and close fairly rapidly, and we offer no guarantee that you will be able to transfer. The reasoning for this is simple; we need to ensure that one faction doesn’t disproportionally leave a realm, undoing months of hard work with realm faction balance.
These transfer options will be periodically available starting Tuesday and will open and close throughout the rest of this week.
As always, thank for you joining us in Season of Discovery. We’ve experimented a lot and learned much that will ultimately lead to bigger and better things.
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By Staff
We have some more class tuning coming to Phase 3 of SoD, as Druids, Paladins, Priests, Rogues and Shamans get some solid changes.
Class Tuning (Source)
Tomorrow, during each region’s normal maintenance period, we will apply the following adjustments to classes in Season of Discovery.
Druid
The Natural Weapons talents now increases all damage done by druids in Season of Discovery, instead of just physical damage. The Gale Winds rune now reduces the mana cost of Hurricane by 60%. Swiftmend no longer consumes a Rejuvenation or Regrowth effect on the target when used. Developers’ notes: Please note that it does still require Rejuvenation or Regrowth to be on the target to be used. Paladin
Seal of Righteousness damage can now be critical hits. Sacred Shield’s duration is extended to 60 seconds (was 30 seconds). Crusader Strike has now gained an additional effect: Crusader strike now refreshes all judgement effects active on the target to a 30 second remaining duration. Seal of Martyrdom can now “twist” with other seals, including Seal of Command. Developers’ notes: Seal “twisting” was an interesting emergent effect that became popular during the original Burning Crusade, that utilized the slower server messaging system used in early versions of WoW to slightly extend the duration of the Paladin’s active seal for a short time whenever a second seal was cast. This effectively allowed paladins to momentarily gain the benefit of two seals at once if they timed the application of a new seal to line up perfectly just before their weapon swing. This is something we would have considered a bug at the time, but for many players, it became a popular feature of the class, allowing skilled players to increase their output with precision gameplay.
We recreated this playstyle in Burning Crusade Classic and since then it’s been a popular request in other versions of original WoW, including Season of Discovery. We had concerns about allowing Martyrdom and Command specifically to be twisted together in Season of Discovery for a variety of reasons, including the fact that the playstyle is highly mana inefficient, it largely requires addons such as a weapon swing timer to function properly, and twisting can be unintuitive for less experienced players. As the game matures and we continue to listen to player feedback however, we recognize that for some, this is part of the charm and uniqueness of playing a paladin during those early eras of WoW’s history. We consider this change to be experimental and we will watch the performance and behavior of Retribution closely after this change. Should it prove problematic, we may revert this change or apply additional adjustments later. We greatly appreciate the feedback we’ve received about this thus far.
With this change to allow twisting, we do not expect to see a major change in the “optimal” way to play Retribution right away. Due to the interaction between Art of War, Martyrdom, and Exorcism, we’ll likely need a larger redesign and changes to that interaction to truly add more diversity to the Retribution playstyle. We’re evaluating options here for potential changes we can make either via hotfix during Phase 3 or as part of a larger effort for Phase 4. Priest
Shadowform now increases all shadow damage done by 25% (was 15%). Rogue
Saber Slash bleed now stacks up to 5 times. Saber Slash bleed now also increases the impact damage done by Sinister Strike and Saber Slash by 15% per stack for the rogue who applied the bleed. Saber Slash bleed now deals 3% of the rogue’s Attack Power in damage per tick (was 5%). Shaman
Mental Dexterity now only triggers from dealing damage with Stormstrike and Lava Lash, and it now lasts 30 seconds (was 10 seconds). Burn now increases Flame Shock Damage by 100% and flame shock DoT duration by 6 seconds, and causes Flame Shock to strike up to 5 targets (was 3 targets). Developers’ notes: We’ve received a lot of feedback about the overall usability of mental dexterity, particularly for Elemental Shamans. This ability was not intended to be used by elemental, so the adjustments we’ve made are to help ensure its usage is a bit more enhancement-centric. To compensate, we’ve increased the output and usability of the Burn rune, with a slight quality-of-life improvement in the form of a Flame Shock duration increase which allows two Lava Burst casts to be used within a single Flame Shock duration. This is likely not going to be enough to overall bring elemental up to the level we want, so we intend to continue to make other tactical adjustments in future class adjustment updates as needed. In the Weeks to Come
We’re carefully planning for more adjustments to Hunters, Mages, Shamans, and Warlocks in future updates. We really appreciate the feedback we’ve received since the start of Phase 3 and look forward to sharing more about our next round of adjustments with you soon.
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