Heroes!

Welcome to another Classless Update! Since our last update we’ve seen a surge in melee builds participating in PVE, and hardcasters have become significantly stronger in PvP. As we prepare for the League, these are some new changes that you should know about!

As usual, you’ll find a summary of some of the most noteworthy changes below. The full changelog will be posted on our website and discord soon(™).

wizards, wizards everywhere

With our recent changes to Wind Shear, and Burning Determination, hardcasters have become quite formidable in PVP. This is especially true in Battlegrounds where they are able to dish out considerable damage while keeping a safe distance. In duels, Arenas or smaller group fights however, with a melee player up in their face, they aren't quite as dangerous. Our hope with these changes is for hardcaster builds to be more balanced across different game modes.  

• Many ranged spells will be receiving an increased PvP modifier within Battlegrounds, especially hardcasted spells and hunter abilities.
• The range increase to Fire Mage spells from Flame Throwing has been reduced to 2/4 yards, down from 3/6.
• Increased the baseline range of Fear and Cyclone to 25 yards, up from 20.
• For players with Intellect as their Primary Stat, spells now cost 20% less mana inside Arenas.
• The Burning Determination Capstone buff can now be dispelled.
• [New Legendary Enchant]: Time Warp - After casting Blink your spell damage, spell haste, and spell critical strike chance is increased by 5% for 6 seconds. You will also learn to create a Time Warp, allowing you to return to your original Blink position if cast within 4 seconds.

Our aim here is to increase the amount of counterplay available. As a melee player there isn't much you can do against a 42 yard Fireball taking half your health, so that damage potential has been reduced. At the same time, casters now have more tools to get casts off in arenas and other scenarios where they're otherwise susceptible to being shut down.

back to the roots

On the topic of counterplay, it's true that having an ability to perfectly counter your enemies’ best laid plans can be a great feeling. With root effects especially though, there are so many powerful counters that they have fallen out-of-meta. In order to restore variety, we’re changing one of those counters:

• Moonkin Form now requires your Primary Stat to be Intellect for the movement impairing clear to work.
• Tree of Life now requires your Primary Stat to be Spirit for the movement impairing clear to work.

If you’re playing melee you’ll still have many good ways of breaking roots. But if you’re playing a caster, you won’t have to face as many enemies that are able to escape your every attempt to control them. This change levels the playing field a bit, and we look forward to seeing new inventive plays it will lead to.

A Resilient Problem

On Ascension, the amount of power your character has access to is really high, since you’re allowed to stack and synergize effects from different classes. In order to balance this, all players get a huge chunk of Resilience baseline. This is on your character without you having to worry about it.

That part is important. You shouldn’t be required to know every single detail of how the game works in order to enjoy it. If you want to dive into the nitty-gritty we’ll discuss some of the finer details below. If you prefer to skip this section, that’s fine too. 

Let’s get into specifics. Resilience has three effects: 

(1) It reduces your chance to be critically struck by players. 
(2) it reduces the damage you take from player critical hits. 
(3) it reduces your overall damage taken from players. 

As it currently stands, this creates two systemic issues. Firstly, since resilience reduces your chance to be critically hit by a flat amount (around 7% for max level players), that disproportionately punishes builds who already have a low crit chance, and conversely incentivizes heavy crit investment. A lot of the best builds either invest fully or not at all into crit, which doesn’t leave a lot of room for variety.

Secondly, as we progressively get better gear, our damage potential will increase disproportionately to our resilience. So we solve this by increasing the baseline resilience, every so often. Eventually though, we’ll get to a point where the second effect of resilience: “reduces the damage taken from player critical strikes” will become so high that spell crits will actually do less damage than non-spell hits. Basically, we will eventually hit a point where we can no longer raise Resilience to balance PvP. So we’re proactively avoiding that doomed path! 

So this is how we decided to solve this problem!

• Resilience now no-longer reduces your chance to be critically struck or reduce your damage taken from criticals. Instead, players will now always take 25% less damage from other player’s critical strikes, regardless of current resilience.

This change will help diversify the meta with regards to crit-investment since it will no longer be optimal to either maximize or neglect critical strikes in your build. At the same time it ensures we have the tools we need to balance PvP going forward.

blocking, blocking, blocked

No matter how you build your character, you will have strengths and weaknesses. If you want to become really good at one thing, you have to sacrifice in another area.  These trade-offs are a key ingredient to how the game works.

In the case of Shield tanks, this trade-off equation has been somewhat flawed. As a Shield tank, a lot of your power comes from your ability to block incoming damage. But while blocking 700 damage of a hit from a 5-man Dungeon mob is huge, blocking 700 damage of a hit from a 25-man Heroic Raid Boss isn’t. You should be able to play what you want to play, and make it work for the content you want to do, but Shield tanks have struggled to adapt their builds for Heroic raids. We want to fix that.

• Your successful blocks have a 33/66/100% chance to reduce the damage you take from the hit by 25%.

So for example: If you are hit for 1000 damage (before block) and have a block value of 500, you will take 375 damage (1000 - 500) * (0.75).

This change is the first of a series of changes aimed at giving Shield tanks defensive options that are effective also against hard-hitting enemies. If they choose to build for it, Shield tanks should with these changes be very capable of tanking even the most formidable Heroic Raid Bosses.

new stuff.

It wouldn't be a proper update without some new stuff to get hyped about, right? More is still to come, but here's some to get you started.

[New Capstone]: Taste for Blood - With the final rank of this talent, your Rend ability deals 75% weapon damage to the target.

[New Legendary Enchant]: Felborne - You are infused with fel power. When you deal damage you have a chance to call down a fel meteor to the target area, dealing Chaos damage and increasing your chance to score a critical strike on targets hit by 5% for 8 seconds. [This enchant is obtained as a Feltouched reward]

[New Legendary Enchant]: Time Warp - After casting Blink your spell damage, spell haste, and spell critical strike chance is increased by 5% for 6 seconds. You will also learn to create a Time Warp, allowing you to return to your original Blink position if cast within 4 seconds.

[New Legendary Enchant]: Predator's Wrath - Your Predatory Strikes effect now lets you cast Wrath without leaving Cat Form. Wraths cast this way are unable to miss or crit, restore 30 energy and 15% of your base mana, and cause your auto-attacks to deal additional Nature damage for 6 seconds.

[New Epic Enchant]: Temple Guardian - Using Intervene on a friendly target with Weakened Soul will remove the debuff from them and put it on you instead and reset the cooldown of your Intervene. This effect has a 15 second cooldown and does not work when your soul is weakened. In addition, Inner Fire now increases your block chance by 5%.

[New Epic Enchant]: Unfurling Time - Your Arcane Blast now applies Slow (if known) to the target. This can only occur once every 8 seconds.

[New Epic Enchant]: Critical Cycles - The periodic damage of Insect Swarm and Moonfire spells cast during Solar and Lunar eclipse respectively can now be critical.

[New Epic Enchant]: Fancy Footwork - Teaches you an upgraded version of Feint which works as a finishing move. Feint (Fancy Footwork) lowers your threat on the target by 2% per combo point, increases your physical damage dealt by 1% per combo point and reduces the damage you take from area of effect attacks by 3% per combo point. This effect lasts 10 seconds. This ability does not trigger a global cooldown, and is only useable if your Primary Stat is Agility or Strength.

[New Epic Enchant]: Spirit of the Forest - Your Tree of Life now lasts for 15 seconds and has a 60 second cooldown, but now provides extra bonuses. Rejuvenation provides an instant heal for your target, Wild Growth's cooldown is halved, and Lifebloom's mana cost is halved.

[New Rare Enchant]: Death's Embrace - Increases the Warlock Shadow spell damage increase on targets below 35% from your Death's Embrace talent by 3%.

[New Rare Enchant]: Raw Light - Your Divine Illumination now increases your spell critical strike chance by 4%.

Going forward

We have a lot of stuff in the works that we're really excited for. New Legendaries, Talent reworks, a lot of amazing updates to pets (of every kind imaginable)... The weeks to come will be packed with stuff to get really excited about. We can't wait. 

Until then...

DROP ZORAM!