Hey all! Here are today’s hotfixes.
February 3, 2023Wrath of the Lich King Classic
Hey all! Here are today’s hotfixes.
February 3, 2023Dungeons and Raids
Items and Rewards
Professions
Quests
Greetings,
In an upcoming weekly maintenance period within the next few weeks we’ll be implementing the following changes:
The intent of these changes is to provide a small boost to Retribution Paladin damage via Hand of Reckoning, as well as helping with the ramp time needed to apply the vengeance/corruption DoT. The ramp time needed for this could be frustrating, particularly on fights with regular downtime or a lot of target swapping.
Goals
When examining Paladins and determining the approach to take here we had a few goals in mind, which we feel it’s important to elaborate on.
It’s also potentially more important to recognize what are not goals with these changes:
Not a Goal – Make Retribution competitive with the highest output specs and classes in PvE. The utility of all Paladins cannot be overstated here and is absolutely a factor to consider still. With access to critical raid buffs, auras, and raid cooldowns such as Aura Mastery and Divine Guardian, all flavors of Paladins have a vital place in any raid composition, and as we’ve previously stated, we are pleased with their overall representation in raids, as a class. We do not want to start seeing Retribution become stacked in raids. Most raid groups that run Retribution Paladins typically include a single Retribution Paladin, and we feel that 1 or 2 is still a good target number to have in each raid.
Not a Goal – Embark on an effort to provide ongoing balance to all classes phase over phase. We think its very important to WoW Classic that classes behave largely as you’d expect them to throughout the current expansion without constantly worrying about major design changes altering the feel of the class. This includes having them scale mostly as you’d expect them to. Warriors are a great example of this, and in almost every early expansion of WoW, Warriors start weak and scale exceptionally well with gear. This is especially true in Wrath where Armor Penetration becomes more prevalent and available around the midpoint of the expansion, and gear in the later tiers is more tightly optimized to allow Warriors to lean into their strengths and shine. This sort of ebb and flow feels right for classic and we do not want to change this paradigm, and feel that these adjustments will allow Retribution to stay more relevant now without creating a massive new imbalance or placing them well above where we’d expect them to be relative to other classes and specs during this or future phases.
Not a Goal – Bring all of the classes with poor PvE output up similarly. Frost Mages, Subtlety Rogues, Arms Warriors, and Beast Mastery Hunters are all at or below the output of Retribution in PvE and it would be easy to point to this change and say “What about [insert spec here]”. That’s fair, and this very argument was a motivator for us holding off on making changes here. A key argument that swayed us however is that all of those classes have very viable alternatives for PvE DPS, whereas Paladins only have Retribution in this role. All of these specs also have traditionally been viewed as PvP specs, and we are very leery to shift the meta in PvP while chasing a buff to PvE. This is why we went the direction we did for Retribution; as the impact to PvP shouldn’t be large. We’ll continue to evaluate things as time goes by, but we do not have any plans for other similar class adjustments after this one.
As we’ve previously stated, we do not make these changes lightly and we are extremely hesitant to make modifications to the original 3.3.5 designs of classes. We will continue to monitor class representation as we have been, and will make additional adjustments if things start to play out in a way that deviates significantly from how we and other Wrath enthusiasts would expect them to. We also may roll back these changes or make further adjustments if we feel this adjustment went too far. We will continue to be very cautious with changes in general, and will reserve these adjustments for specific situations.
We appreciate all the feedback we’ve gotten on this topic, and the changes we’ve opted to make here were inspired directly by the discussions and suggestions we’ve seen from players. We are thrilled to see how many of you are progressing through Ulduar over the past few weeks, and we hope you are all having as much fun as we are progressing, downing hard modes, and scooping that awesome loot!
Thank you again!
We’ve updated the OP with all tuning adjustments in progress for February 7.
ClassesDeath Knight
Druid
Evoker
Hunter
Monk
Paladin
Priest
Shaman
Warlock
Items
Demon Hunter
Druid
Evoker
Hunter
Monk
Priest
Rogue
Shaman
Warlock
Warrior
With weekly resets the week of February 14, we will remove the caps on the amounts of Conquest and Valor that can be earned and held by players. They will remain uncapped for the rest of Dragonflight Season 1.
As before, we like how in the early season, these caps reduce the feeling of being left behind for many players when it comes to PvP and Mythic+ gear. However, once several weeks have passed, we want to see players feel free to quickly gear up alts or return to the game after an absence and feel as though they can catch up quickly without hitting caps.
Thank you!
With the weekly reset in each region the week of February 14, we will enable cross-realm groups in Mythic difficulty Vault of the Incarnates.
This represents a shift in philosophy that has evolved over the last few raid tiers, where we’ve seen the pace at which the Hall of Fame filled up for both factions become unaligned with the timing that we would have chosen for players at large.
We will still maintain a Hall of Fame for this and future raids. To qualify for it in cross-realm groups, you must simply have at least 16 players from the same guild taking part in the raid.
With future raids, we’re looking into a more-scheduled approach for when cross-realm Mythic difficulty becomes available. We want to keep our options open for the timing to vary, since we yet don’t know the circumstances we might observe in the future, but we intend to provide further announcements like this one to give players time to reorganize.
The Love is in the Air world event is right around the corner, and we’re sharing the love this holiday season.
We’ve heard your feedback on the frustrations with X-45 Heartbreaker’s low drop rate and feeling the pressure of having to farm the mount by cycling through as many alts as possible every day. From now on, the first Heart-Shaped Box you receive each day across your Battle.net account will have a greatly increased chance to contain the X-45 Heartbreaker mount.
Any subsequent Heart-Shaped Boxes you earn on your characters after the first each day will drop the mount at the previous, original rate.
Love is in the Air begins on February 6 at 10:00 a.m. PST in all regions. So spritz on your favorite perfume and head to the Shadowfang Keep event dungeon to defeat Apothecary Hummel for your chance at the fantastic flying fuschia fuselage you’ve fancied far too fervently for what seems like forever.
Good luck adventurers!
Along with the players who reported this, we found a bug causing enemies in Battle for Azeroth dungeons to scale well beyond their intended difficulty.
With scheduled realm maintenance on Tuesday, we will deploy a fix for the bug and the difficulty of the affected dungeons should become very similar to that of Chromie Time leveling dungeons.
To everyone who reported the state of BFA dungeons: thank you very much.
Hey all! Here are today’s hotfixes.
February 2, 2023Wrath of the Lich King Classic
Hey all! Here are today’s hotfixes.
February 2, 2023Classes
Items and Rewards
Player versus Player
Professions
We’ve heard and agree with feedback that players have amassed surplus Primal Chaos on their mains while their alts need all the Primal Chaos they can get. With a hotfix that went live about 12 hours ago, we’ve added a method for transferring Primal Chaos to other characters on your account.
As you can see, some Primal Chaos will be lost in the transaction. This is because we want to make sure that while this is a great way for a main to help an alt, the best way to gear up a character should generally be via actually playing that character.
Nonetheless, this should provide an additional use for your Primal Chaos, as well as a good way to get some powerful gear to your alts quickly.