S9 Ch.2 Full Features Overview

Heroes!

Welcome to the Season 9 Chapter 2 complete overview article. This article covers everything coming to Chapter 2 in detail.

Chapter 2 will release a bit differently than usual: updates will start rolling out immediately so you can play with them much sooner. Core updates aim to be released by April 28th, with most updates aiming to be live by Chapter 2’s release date of May 3rd.

Improvements to how you roll skills in Wildcard, getting more relevant skills, Manastorm improvements, more loot in deeper Manastorms, a manastorm Affix Overhaul, Prestige Buffs, new levels of Mythic+, new optional Manastorm Battleground, new levels of Raid Trials, the release of Ahn’qiraj and Naxxramas, and so much more all arrive with Chapter 2. These changes work together to improve the way you imagine, create, and improve Wildcard Builds. It’s going to make playing Wildcard as a game mode feel better.

Here’s what’s coming in Chapter 2:

Wildcard Improvements

Boosts to Bad Luck Protection stops you from seeing the same abilities and talents over and over
Enhanced Synergy Rolls improves the impact of your Scrolls of Fortune
Expanded Skill Card Slots gives you more control over how you steer your build with Synergy Rolls
Skill Cards can now be Used at Any Level so you make use those new card slots you just got without prestiging or slot them while leveling
Sealed Card Pack Improvements reduces the amount of time you spend opening cards and more
Reduced the Cost of Guaranteed Talent Card Packs to help to fill out the new skillcard slots
New Abilities and Talents continue to expand your options and introduce new playstyles
New Skill Cards in the Open World so you can adventure in Azeroth and unlock your favorite abilities and talents
Increased Multispec Scrolls from Cases of Fortune help you improve multiple builds at once

Manastorm Improvements

Improved Rewards in deeper Manastorm levels so you get more rewards for diving into deeper Storms
A Map-Based Reward Multiplier so every Manastorm level gives you great rewards regardless of length
Affix Overhaul to remove excessive friction while enhancing strategy and depth
- On-Death Affix Redesign to make them a tool you can use
- Passive Affix Enhancements
- New Affixes
- Boss Affixes
- Affixes Unlock at Specific Levels
- Affix Indicators to make it clear where effects happen
New Special Creatures to add meaningful depth and difficulty where affixes weren’t the best option
Never Seen New Manastorm Maps to start the process of adding new dungeons and custom content to Ascension as a whole, while keeping the manastorms new, fresh, and exciting
New: Manastorm and Creature Progression unlocking new creatures and maps as you progress through the Manastorm to keep it evolving
Modified Raid Maps in Manastorms tons of new creatures and maps to unlock encounters, and bosses for you to challenge
New: Upgradable Manastorm Potions to enhance progress and give you something to spend all those bonzo bolts on
New: Upgradable Hearty Heal that scales with AP and SP to help DPS push into higher levels of the Manstorm. Spend those Bonzo Bolts!!
Chaotic Link Upgrading Boss health to give you a meaningful choice between skipping trash or killing them.
- Bosses linked with mobs in the dungeon
New: 2 Greedy Demon Type Monsters to give you sweet, sweet loot
- Treasure Keeper
- Klepto the Cardnapper
Expanded First-Completion Bonuses to reward you for running manastorm with a variety of group sizes
Manastorm Cache Update to reward you for pushing to the highest level you can

Crazy Experimental Stuff

A new Optional Brawl - Manastorm Brawls introducing an OPTIONAL wild new way for you to enjoy PvP

Even more Updates

Fixing Creature Homogenization to make PvE more interaction enhances depth and strategy.
New Mechanics coming to Vanilla Dungeons to make encounters way more dynamic and engaging
Daily Prestige Improvements to balance out the different ways to prestige and improve the pacing
New Heirlooms for all Item Slots so you can focus on playing and not micromanaging your gear
New Tamable Treants to help you enjoy wood from the morning to the evening
Performance improvements freezing the clouds to make the game smoother and increase FPS so you can enjoy playing
- Raid Specific Graphics Settings
- CLOUDS
Mythic+ Updates to fix things holding this format back and increase engagement

Upcoming Content

Mythic+ levels 25-40 arrive during this chapter so you can get powerful gear right for your unique Hero, and have new 5-man content to challenge
Battleground and PvP Progression bring new PvP gear and Arena Seasons for you to compete in
Raid Trials 7-10 and 10+ bring new levels of difficulty to your favorite raids so you can face the ULTIMATE challenge
Ahn’Qiraj release so you can smash bugs and fight a giant eyeball
Naxxramas releases at the end of the chapter so you can prove that spooky scary skeletons don’t send shivers down your spine

Wildcard Improvements

Wildcard changes aim to improve Wildcard as a game mode: they strive to reduce the total number of rerolls you have to do and eliminate some of the more overly frustrating elements in the mode, while keeping its identity as a ‘random mode.’

Enhanced Bad Luck Protection

Wildcard mode is all about embracing chaos to create something extraordinary and uniquely yours. However, pure randomness can sometimes lead to frustration. Bad Luck Protection is a set of mechanics that helps you wrangle with chaos and ensures that even in the unpredictable world of Wildcard, you're not entirely at the mercy of chance.

Bad Luck Protection prevents you from re-rolling a skill into the exact same skill. With chapter 2 it gets even better:

Ability and Talent Bad Luck Protection Improvements

Ability and Talent Bad Luck protection make sure that when you choose to unlearn an ability or talent, you don’t see it again for a minimum number of rolls. This ensures that you have a bit more control over steering your build when you choose to unlearn things. In chapter 2:

Ability Bad Luck Protection prevents you from seeing any Ability you unlearn for 75 Rolls
Talent Bad Luck Protection prevents you from seeing any Talent you unlearn and the lower ranks of that talent for 300 Rolls

This helps you tweak and steer your build better.

Increased the chance of Talent Upgrades

In Wildcard Mode, you often have incomplete talents: Talent Upgrades are a specific roll that chooses one of your incomplete talents and upgrades it to a higher rank. This helps you get better versions of that talent, and get stronger. In Chapter 2, Talent Upgrades happen more often.

Explaining Wildcard Synergy Rolls

Synergy Rolls work at all levels: they never stop.
You can get synergy rolls while leveling and at level cap!

Synergy rolls have been with the game since launch. These occasional rolls are a Wildcard mechanic that either upgrades one of your talents OR picks one of your abilities and talents and gives you a synergistic talent or ability based on what was picked.

These synergies are based on things that modify or affect a given ability or are modified by an existing talent. These are NOT curated builds made for you by developers.

For example, if you have Pyroblast in your build, you might Synergy Roll Hot Streak or Hot Hands. If you have Improved Sinister Strike, you might roll Sinister Strike, Eclipse Strike, Pistol Shot: the things that scale with Sinister Strike Modifiers and are therefore synergistic with Improved Sinister Strike.

Synergy Rolls can synergize from Abilities to Talents and Talents to Abilities. They don’t go from talents to talents or abilities to abilities.

If you don’t like any of these occasional synergies, unlearn it! You’ll be protected from seeing it again for the next 25 future synergy rolls.

This is different from the weighting that existed in past seasons where you could see the same spell or talent over and over just because you have a related skill, even if you didn’t want it. With Synergy Rolls, that doesn’t happen. You will not see the same abilities or talents over and over as a result of synergies.

These synergies are based on things that modify or affect a given ability or are modified by an existing talent. These are NOT curated builds made for you by developers.

Synergy Rolls create a dynamic where you choose the spells and talents you want to keep, and Wildcard presents you with cool synergies that you may want to use: if you don’t like something, roll it off. If you do, keep them–and Synergy Rolls make sure you get more. Synergy Rolls happened rarely, and the majority of rolls are completely random.

Chapter 2 increases your chance to get synergy rolls and expands the pool of potential synergies just based on things that positively interact with eachother so that your build can web out in new unexpected, but synergistic ways.

Expanded Skill Card Slots

In Chapter 2 you have 2 extra Ability and 2 extra Talent Card Slots for a total of 4 extra Skill Cards. This gives you more agency over the core of your build, and the direction of your Wildcard journey.

More Skill Cards help you control your core build better, and this synergizes (lol) with Synergy Rolls: by having more control over the core of your build, you can set up your spec the way you want. Then Wildcard can play off of your choices and offer new potential paths you might want to play. You’ll have more control over keeping what you want and unlearning what you don’t want, and Wildcard can use what you keep to help you discover new opportunities. It helps keep your build focused in the directions that matter to you.

Skill Cards Usable at Any Level

Chapter 2 introduces a brand new way to use Skill Cards by removing the lvl. 10 and under requirement.

You can now slot Skill Cards at any level. As long as the slot is empty, it doesn’t matter if you’re level 2, level 52, or level 60 you can slot any Skill Card you find. This means you can slot them while leveling, or you can use those two new slots you got at end-game without prestiging
YOU CAN USE SKILLCARDS AT LEVEL 60.
You can remove it as long as you haven’t rolled it yet in case you make a mistake or change your mind!

This introduces a few big new ways to play:

First, it means that if you’re a new Hero who hasn’t got a lot of cards yet, you can use the cards you find at any point in your adventure.

If you discover something that’s useful to your current build, you can slot it immediately instead of having to wait and prestige. This also helps Heroes who may have been working on a build from the start of the season that didn’t have any Skill cards. Once this change drops, you can immediately slot in useful cards!

Second, this change makes sure that if you’ve got some but not all of the Skill Cards you need for a build, you’re not punished for leaving them empty. You can aim for a build, slot the cards you do have, and add more once you find them to continue improving your build.

Third, it means that when Chapter 2 hits and you get those 4 extra Skill Card Slots, you can throw relevant Cards right into any of your current builds without having to prestige.

The change also introduces a new way to use Skill Cards in Wildcard: rather than slotting at the beginning of your adventure, you can Prestige a new build, see what you get, improve it a bit, and then take it to the next level by slotting cards relevant to what you end up getting.

Keep in mind that this change doesn’t let you UNSELECT cards: you can still only slot your 6 total Ability and 8 total Talent Card slots. But now you have flexibility in when you slot them, opening up more ways to play.

Sealed Card Pack Improvements

With extra Skill Card Slots, getting the cards you want in your collection becomes a lot more meaningful. To help you find what you need, Chapter 2 increases your chance to see undiscovered cards from Sealed Packs.

With Chapter 2’s launch, Sealed Card Packs you find have a higher chance to reveal cards you don’t already have. You’ll see more new cards, and less duplicates.

One potential path for Wildcard was to add more stuff like Card Packs and Scrolls of Fortune as rewards so you got more total ways to improve your Hero. However, the consequence of that was a world where you had to stand around and open packs/reroll skills for hours. Rather than doing that, future Wildcard updates will prioritize making EACH Roll or Card Pack you open BETTER, rather than just giving MORE. This way, you’ll need less total rerolls and Card Packs to get a good feeling build, and you won’t have to stand around and reroll as much.

Enhanced Card Reveal

Opening 1000 packs by clicking on each individual card takes too long. Enhanced Card Reveal lets you open your entire stack of card packs at once without revealing duplicate cards. Instead, only cards that are NEW for you OR increase your Talent Card Upgrade Progress appear on-screen to flip.

This keeps the excitement of finding something new, while making it easy and automatic to recycle duplicate cards and get Darkmoon Tickets. After opening your stacks, a statistics page will appear to give you information about the cards you unlocked. It’s the best of both worlds, guaranteeing that opening Sealed Packs is always exciting, while streamlining recycling duplicates.

You should probably at least watch 10:14 of the video lol

Rare, Epic, and Legendary Talent Sealed Card Packs

Chapter 2 reduces the Darkmoon Ticket Cost of trading for guaranteed Talent Card Packs.

Clicking one of those rarity colored + signs in your Skill Cards tab lets you trade Darkmoon Tickets for guaranteed non duplicate Talent Skill Cards. In these specific packs, you will NEVER see a card you already have, and that means you’re always making progress towards completing your collection.

New Abilities and Talents

Brand new Abilities and Talents arrive with Chapter 2: mostly talents, but a few abilities, too! These new spells aim to compliment underused or non-existent playstyles to increase the number of ways you can play. Some archetypes include:

A NINJA spec where you’re a ranged rogue using Shuriken and Glaive Toss
A Spirit-Wolf focused Enhancement Shaman
…and a bunch of other random talents to compliment other playstyles!

These new abilities and talents work solo or together: so if you find one, it’ll be fun to use on its own, and if you pick up several, they’ll compliment each other. It’s one more way of opening up playstyles so you can create your fantasy archetype and play the way you want.

Note all of these new abilities and talents can be found as Skillcard drops in the Open world!

Lots of New Skill Cards Placed in the Open World

These new abilities and talents are available to discover in the open world as Skill Cards. Additionally, dozens of abilities and talents that are in-game but might not have had discoverable Skill Cards now have discoverable skill cards. You can find these skill cards this season by going out into the Open World and discovering them.

Tl;dr - There are now more Skill Cards for more abilities hidden in thematic locations in the open world you can go out and get.

Extra Multispec Scrolls from Case of Fortune

During Chapter 1 Cases of Fortune were upgraded to have a chance to award a scroll to each of your specializations: even ones you haven’t unlocked yet.

One of the goals of Wildcard Mode is to make sure you can improve your build just by playing. Whether you love dungeons, raids, the manastorm, battlegrounds, or even high-risk PvP, you can play how you want and get Cases of Fortune to re-roll stuff you don’t want into stuff you do want.

Chapter 2 makes this even better by giving Cases of Fortune a chance to award a Multispec Scroll. Multispec Scrolls give a scroll to EACH of your specializations–even ones you don’t have unlocked. This adds a ton of value to cases, makes each case you get better, and gives you more chances to improve more builds. It’s also a step in the direction of giving you more incentive to have, improve, and play multiple builds at once.

Manastorm Improvements

With Chapter 2, big changes come to the Manastorm:

Affixes get a redesign to make them more strategic, dynamic, and fun
You get MORE treasure at deeper Manastorm levels, which makes it exciting and rewarding to push into more difficult Storms
Brand new content comes to the Storm to keep it fresh and engaging

Improved Manastorm Rewards

In Chapter 2, you’ll get more rewards at higher Manastorm levels: loot boxes will have better loot, you’ll get more bolts to trade for cosmetic and potion rewards, and of course completing higher levels will award more Scrolls of Fortune. The goal of these changes is to make it rewarding to push to deeper levels of the storm so you don’t feel like you’re forced to run Manastorm 1-50 over and over again.

Manastorm Reward Multiplier

Longer Manastorm maps–maps that are physically bigger, or have more enemies, or otherwise take more time to complete–now have a reward multiplier! This ensures that if you land on a map that takes a bit more time to complete, you’re getting more rewards for it. Now you can enjoy any Manastorm map you land on knowing that no matter what you hit or how long it takes, you’ll be getting great loot.

Additionally, this feature will be coming to Mythic+ as well!

Affix Overhaul

On -Death Affix Changes

On-Death Affixes now affect both heroes AND creatures: allies and enemies. With Chapter 2, affixes like Vortex, Bonestorm, etc. will be just as harmful to creatures as they are to you. This transforms affixes into forces of nature that you can use to your advantage!

Additionally, new affixes like Rune of Power and Aethyric Winds also follow this paradigm of affecting all creatures.

This change transforms affixes into something that rewards you for playing strategically. It puts more control to navigate Manastorms in your hands, and provides more choice to how you move through Storms. Use affixes to your advantage to push deeper into the storm.

Affix Balance

It was just too crazy. There was too much on the screen. It tanked FPS, it wasn’t really all that avoidable. Here are the changes

Reduced Affix Density has been decreased DRAMATICALLY (by like 90% in levels after 150~).
Affix Ranks the smaller amount of remaining affixes will matter more as affixes now rank up and increase in difficulty deeper into the manastorm.

New Affix Indicators

Affixes now have indicators so that it’s a lot more clear where they will affect you. You can better predict when you’re out of danger, or when you need to move.

This makes it clear where strong affixes like Vortex, Bonestorm, and Meteor effects will harm you, allowing you to better maneuver in Manastorms to make sure enemies suffer their effects and you don’t!

Currently, these indicators are only available for affixes in the Manastorm. However, the intention moving forward is to add these to many PvE effects to better indicate when and where you’re in danger. Clarity is key!

That Vortex is about to pull these creatures in and shred them up. (See picture above of 9999 damage)

Now you can tell exactly where that meteor is going to land!

New Passive Affixes

New passive affixes offer boosts to individual creatures that enhance their original design.

One fun aspects of the Manastorm is the crazy creature combinations: you might have to fight a Gurubashi Berserker, a Leper Gnome, and a Scholomance Necromancer all at the same time–something you’d never have to tackle normally. Part of the fun is having to deal with those individual creatures, their mechanics, and how different the fight becomes when they’re together. Previously, some affixes made it so you felt like you were fighting the affix, not the creature. That took away some of the magic of confronting these wacky combinations of foes.

With new passive affixes, you’ll feel like you’re fighting an enhanced version of the creature. Passive affixes like Evasive, Regenerative, Hasty, or Rampaging empower the creatures as they are, rather than changing the creature into something different. This makes sure you feel like you’re still fighting that specific creature–dealing with its strengths, weaknesses, and personal mechanics–but in a new way.

Here’s some examples of passive affixes:

Regenerative
- Regenerates % hp on a timer
Hasty
- Increased haste
Rampaging
- Increased damage increase every second in combat stacking
Evasive
- % bonus chance to dodge
Stalwart
- Reduces damage taken of creatures around them until they’re slain
Formidable
- Health increased

Boss Affixes

BOSSES NOW HAVE AFFIXES in the Manastorm, creating one more way to play and strategize both solo and with friends.

New Manastorm Content

New Special Creatures

Sometimes, however, affixes aren’t the best option to add difficulty. Certain maps or locations now have new special creatures to add challenge to those specific places.

These new creatures aren’t bosses, but they do have unique skins, abilities, and mechanics beyond the range of normal creatures: think of them like champion creatures that will be harder than normal. They’re one more unique way to bring challenge to your Manastorms and make the experience exciting.

Manastorm Progression

Chapter 2 brings brand new maps, creatures, boss battles, and even raid maps to the mix: but it’s more than just dumping new stuff into your pool. The Manastorm has a new Progressive Unlock System: as you do manastorms normally, you’ll unlock new content.

At specific Manastorm levels, you’ll run into a static map: this map always appears at the same specific manastorm level, and has specific creatures and bosses to face down. You MUST complete this map to progress, and when you clear it, you’ll unlock the creatures and map to your manastorm pool. This means that after you clear one of these maps, you’ll have a chance to see all the creatures–and the map itself–at any time during your Manastorm Runs.

This creates a scenario where your manastorms change and evolve as you go. As you push deeper into the Manastorm, you’ll find more unique maps and creatures. As you clear those maps and collect those creatures, you’ll have a wider variety of combinations to see! Collect more unique maps and more unique creatures to make your runs dynamic and exciting every time.

Affixes Now Also Unlock at Specific Levels

Affixes now also spawn on these specific checkpoint levels your first time, so you can learn how they work and overcome them.

The Manastorm has a big difference from typical PvE content: when you die, you’re booted out. This means if you encountered a mechanic you’re unfamiliar with and it kills you, you didn’t get to try again and overcome it.

Now, Affixes like Vortex, Rune of Power, Bonestorm, and Aethyric Winds now appear at specific Manastorm levels. Just like the new maps and creatures, you’ll have to beat the level to progress. If you die and get booted out, you can jump right back in and try again on that specific level.

This makes it so you can see a new affix, engage with it, probably die to it, and jump right back in to challenge it again until you beat it. Once you do, that affix will be added to your pool–and you’ll know how to deal with it when you encounter it again.

These affixes will come in conjunction with the new maps and creatures in a way that is thematic: for example, you’ll encounter the Vortex affix at a windy shipwreck in the Temple of Eternity. This map always spawns at Manastorm Level 16, so you can confront it, master Vortex, and then add the map, creatures, and affix to your pool.

Not only does this allow the Manastorm to expand and get bigger as you progress, but it also helps you learn and master affixes. You can progress through the storm more prepared than ever.

New Manastorm Encounters

Chapter 2 adds new custom bosses, new storms in existing dungeons, and even entirely new maps to the Manastorm. Some of these new places are completely custom, with custom monster layouts and boss mechanics to challenge you solo or with friends. As you face off against these new threats, you’ll find these new challenges are just one more way of keeping the Manastorm fresh and exciting. You can expect the Manastorm to constantly expand and get bigger with new stuff Ascension puts out.

Added Manastorm Encounters

Previously, many bosses that were in the game weren’t in the Manastorm because of complicated or unique issues (i.e. locked behind other bosses). With Chapter 2, many of these have been resolved and introduced to the Manastorm! You can now look forward to bosses like:

Earthcaller Halmgar
Fineous Darkvire
Warder S’tigiss
Chief Urkoz Sandscalp
Ironaya
Lord Hel’nurath
The Seven in Blackrock Depths
Brightwing
Immol’thar
RAGNAROS
Ragglesnout
and bosses in Sunken Temple!

Experimental Raid Maps in Manastorms

Chapter 2 also experiments with Raid Maps in the Manastorm. These not only unlock new raid creatures like Core Hounds or Gurubashi Berserkers to your Storms, but also give you a chance to see new maps, new segments, and face down raid bosses.

Manastorm Potion Upgrades

In Chapter 2, you can upgrade your Manastorm Potions into stronger versions!

You can now use Bonzo Bolts to upgrade your Manastorm Potions into higher ranks: upgraded potions are stronger, have better cooldowns, and are overall more effective. These stronger potions help you push deeper into the Manastorm, which in turn gets you more bolts, which you can use to upgrade potions, and push further into the storm next time.

This creates clear, obvious progression that guarantees that you can reach higher levels of the storm–and get all the great loot that comes with it!

Upgradable “Hearty Heal”

In addition to upgradable potions, you can now upgrade the Heart Containers that drop from monsters in the Manastorm. When upgraded, these heart containers will heal you more based on your Attack or Spell Power. This creates a dynamic where DPS can get bigger heals by killing things faster (because killing things spawns Heart Containers), which helps DPS specs of all types push into deeper levels of the Manastorm.

Chaotic Link

Bosses in the Manastorm are now linked to creatures in the dungeon: bosses have an aura that makes them stronger. As you kill creatures, the aura gets weaker. Kill around half the creatures in the Manastorm, and the aura disappears–making the boss weaker. If you skip the trash, the aura stays and the boss is stronger. You get to choose how you tackle the storm, and if you choose to kill creatures…

Treasure Keeper + Klepto the Cardnapper

Killing creatures in the Manastorm now has a chance to spawn new greedy-demon type monsters.

The Treasure Keeper has a chance to spawn every time you kill trash mobs in the Manastorm. If you find him, you can slay him for additional gear chests AND additional Cases of Fortune. This little guy makes it worth it to slay monsters in the storm, because you might just get your hands on bonus loot. The more creatures you kill and the higher the level, the higher chance the Treasure Keeper will spawn. Additionally, the deeper you go into the manastorm the better the Treasure Keeper’s loot becomes. Every Manastorm Bracket has its own Treasure keeper with its own drops, meaning slaying all those interesting manastorm packs suddenly becomes a lot more valuable. It’s also one more thing to encourage you to dive into deeper levels of the Manastorm.

Klepto the Cardnapper is a monster that has a chance to spawn at random in each Manastorm you visit. If you find him, you can take him down to get multiple Sealed Card Packs, as well as additional Cases of Fortune.

These two creatures make it worth killing creatures in the Manastorm, and is one more way to make sure you get more loot from going deeper.

Expanded First Completion Bonuses

Finally, First Completion Bonuses are an extra reward you receive for completing a Manastorm Level for the first time. With Chapter 2, you can get first completion bonuses more than once for doing runs with every group size:

Solo
Duo
Trio
Group

This encourages you to try the manastorm with tons of different groups and in a variety of different ways, reaping rewards for each group size you do. Grab rewards, improve your hero, and push deeper into the Manastorm!

Manastorm Cache Updates

Previously, Manastorm gear caches were given at the end of every 5 levels in the Manastorm along with a checkpoint.

Manastorm Caches are getting an update to solve the following problems:

There was little incentive to push higher levels of a bracket before
- Every 5 levels gave you one cache at 106 and 200 and the gear was the same.
Now that there are checkpoints on asymmetric levels, this old paradigm would create breakpoints where farming chests would be optimal.

The new system works like this:

You now see your chance to get a cache on the Manastorm UI

This chance stacks up every level until you get a chest.
This chance increases more for higher levels.

This new system ensures you’re always properly rewarded for pushing to the higher level of the bracket, addresses the breakpoint issues, and add a nice bad luck protection on top of the chance to get it. This is a net buff overtime to chest acquisition in the Manastorm.

Crazy Experimental Stuff

Optional Manastorm Brawls

Manastorm Battlegrounds are a new optional way to PvP: you can queue for them like normal and be thrust into your favorite maps like Warsong Gulch, Arathi Basin, and Eye of the Storm.

But they’re not normal Battlegrounds! Every 60 seconds, Millhouse Manastorm will unleash a wacky spell that affects everyone in the storm. These random effects do things like:

Transform you into a random creature like Pandarians, Naga, or Vrykuls
Polymorph everyone into a harmless critter
Give you an entirely new action bar with new, empowered abilities
Knock everyone in the battleground high into the air
Knock everyone in the battleground high into the air while also bladestorming so that you can do damage as an apache attack helicopter
Make everyone cast a spell at the same time (like Vanish or Feign Death)
…and so much more!

This new Brawl type Battleground is designed to be wacky, so dive in with the expectation of having some fun.

Additional Improvements

PvE Paradigm Shift

Restoring difference in stats between creatures

Over time, Ascension has lost a lot of the basic RPG elements that make an MMO dynamic and exciting: when monsters all have the same attack speed, the same health modifiers, the same armor, and the same resistances in the same of standardization and making sure every build could do everything, but it went so far that everything starting being the exact same.

Right now, the Ogre Plate Warrior you’re fighting has the same armor as the Dalaran Mage. There is no difference, and that is lame.

What had been homogenized over time:

Creature Attack Speed
Creature Armor
Creature Health
Creature Damage
Creature Spells
Creature Resistances
- This will be addressed carefully as to not prohibit builds from certain content.

When the world you interact with is static, the choices for your build mean less. When there is no difference between different types of creatures it creates a very rigid binary meta. The only thing that matters ends up being who has the biggest DPS and if they have the highest DPS in 1 fight, they’ll likely have the biggest DPS in every other fight.

It removes so much potential strategy and depth to your gameplay, while simultaneously reducing build variety, and making it hard for new players to find a competitive niche.

As creatures have become homogenized, all the circumstantial strength where different builds could shine in different circumstances has been lost.

A melee’s physical damage didn’t help them against a caster. A caster’s school damage didn’t help them against any variations of creature.

This will be an overtime process to correct, and during Chapter 2 and beyond you can expect a lot of changes that will begin to differentiate creatures so that your choices matter more and you can find your competitive niche.

Making Avoidable Mechanics Matter More

This homogenization was not limited to just base stats, it also found its way into creature spells and mechanics. In the vein of making sure content was approachable at all skill level, many completely avoidable, completely learnable mechanics were nerfed or neglected to the point of irrelevance.

See that fire on the ground? You could stand in it for at least 30 seconds before you die. This had a lot of negative downstream repercussions on the game.

In absence of this type of difficulty, (which was particularly missing in dungeons), the only way to create any sense of difficulty is just to INCREASE ALL THE NUMBERS. That means MORE MOB HEALTH, MORE MOB DAMAGE. This very heavy-handed approach ultimately prevents everyone that isn’t playing that very specific build that does top DPS or HPS from doing higher level content. It is actually more unfriendly to new players and much more boring for veteran players.

You could even see this in the manastorm where because mechanics on creatures mattered so little the only way to create any sense of difficulty was an overt number of affixes and damage and health increases.

When PvE is at its best when you can face a mechanic, figure out how it works, and then act to overcome it: using your personal skill, circumstantial strengths, memorization, and strategy, rather than just having that build that does enough DPS.

Now, In Dungeons and the Manastorm, spells and abilities used by creatures that are 100% avoidable are actually going to do damage.

This includes skills like long channels that explode for big damage that you can run out of range of, special spell mechanics that can be silenced or interrupted, etc. Basically, if you can avoid a mechanic completely by doing something, then it will do a meaningful amount of damage if you choose not to do something about it.

New Mechanics coming to Vanilla Dungeons

In line with the above paradigm, brand new mechanics are coming to Vanilla Dungeons! These will be available at all difficulty levels, and help bring spicy new content to encounter and overcome. These mechanics revolve around memorization and avoidance, so you can encounter, learn, and overcome them regardless of spec, DPS, or any other form of numbers.

Prestige Rewards

Chapter 2 builds on previous Prestige Rewards to make prestiging feel great for Heroes who do it.

First, all prestige daily quests now reward 9,999 Marks of Ascension upon completion, up from 2500.

Second, the experience bonus granted by Daily Prestige Buffs increases from 3% to 10% bonus exp. This stacks with other Experience Gains like Heirlooms and Potions.

New: Heirlooms for all Item Slots

New Heirlooms now exist so that you can fully equip an Heirloom in each item slot! These don’t offer bonus exp, but are a big QoL change so that you don’t have to swap gear sets while prestiging anymore.

You can grab them like normal for Marks of Ascension or Prestige Tokens, and they ensure you can focus on your runs, rather than having to micromanage your gear.

New Tamable Treants

You can now finally tame the hardest wood in Azeroth.

Performance Improvements

Finally, Chapter 2 brings a few performance improvements to the game.

First off, you can now specifically tweak the graphics settings for RAIDS: by going into your video panel, you can set options for how your game looks while raiding, which can increase performance.

Second, you can now adjust your cloud settings–no, not data uploads, the literal clouds in the game–to increase your FPS. Toggling on ‘dynamic clouds’ will make your FPS better. We don’t know why, we’re not cloud scientists. But it does.

New Loading Screens

Loading Screens on Ascension now have new art! This isn’t big, but it’s part of a commitment to making even the small things better to bring polish to Ascension and improving your experience and immersion.

Mythic+ Updates

New Mythic+ Updates come to both Area 52 and Elune!

Mythic Gear Levels of 21-25 are released!
- This release brings adjustments to the Mythic+ Scaling Formula
- All classic dungeon creatures and spells receive an overhaul for consistency in scaling
Added a new way to RANDOMIZE your Mythic Keystone.
- This costs a small amount of gold based on the level of your key and will downgrade it by one level.

Revised Mythic Coin Distribution

Your party is now awarded additional Mythic Coins for completing your Keystone
- 3x Mythic Level
- Regardless if it is a first time completion or not

This means completing a level 10 will reward you and your 130 Mythic Coins instead of 100 and completing a level 30 will reward 190 Mythic Coins instead of 100.

Having 100 static coins for every level didn’t seem intuitive and was commonly reported as a bug. This level based reward provides more of a reason to do Mythic+ levels that aren’t always increasing their keystone level for the first time and also increases the value of doing reruns and higher levels in general, compared to just doing low level repeat keys for coins.

Bonus Coins - The distribution of bonus coins has been upgraded to more accurately reward you and your party based on the levels that the Keystone Holder has completed with their own keystone. Ensuring that you receive coins for each level conquered, rather than the level completed. This sounds a bit confusing, but let’s explain the nitty gritty:

Previously, when completing a keystone and getting three chests, if this level was the highest level the Keystone Holder has ever completed with their own keystone, you were rewarded bonus coins. The bonus coins were calculated by multiplying the reward for that level by the number of chests:

For example, when 3 chesting Mythic Level 30, the formula would reward you with:

( 150 + ( (MythicLevel ^ 2) / 2.15) ) * number of chests.
(150 + ( (30^2) / 2.15) * 3
450 + 1254
1,704 Mythic Coins.

New Method

The updated formula changes this approach by calculating the bonus coins for each level passed up to the new keystone level. In this example, 3 chesting level 30 would advance the keystone to level 33, this now grants you rewards for level 30, 31 and 32 respectively.

150 + ( (30 * 30) / 2.15) = 568
150 + ( (31 * 31) / 2.15) = 596
150 + ( (32 * 32) / 2.15) = 626
(30 * 3) You now also receive a bonus of 3 coins for the level completed, regardless if it was first time completion for the keystone holder or not.
This totals to 1,880 total coins.

Additionally, the following fixes have been implemented for Mythic+:

Fixed a bug with the Bonus Coin Distribution where you could receive coins from levels you have ascended your keystone past, but not completed. If you completed level 1 by 3 chesting it, you would receive a level 4 keystone. You could downgrade this keystone to level 2 to regain bonus coin completion.

You were encouraged to continuously downgrade your key to only one level higher than you just completed to keep gathering the bonus coin completion when scoring higher than 1 chest from the Keystone. Not only was this unfun gameplay downgrading your keystone progression, it was unintuitive, limiting and just took far too much time if you wanted to maximize your Keystone Levels -> Bonus Coin rewards through this bug. This means you can no longer downgrade your keystone level to level 2 to get the bonus rewards if you just 3 chested a level 1. You are rewarded for the amount of levels your keystone ascended.

This comes with a bonus added fix.

Let’s imagine this circumstance, you had stopped pushing your keystone and finally reached level 20 after completing your level 19 key, then went away for a week on vacation and your keystone downgrades back to level 19.

The previous system would NOT reward you any bonus coins regardless of your chest level in this circumstance, so coming back and doing your key and getting no bonus coins 3 chesting it would feel really bad. With the new and updated system, if you had 3 chested your level 19 key and you had never done level 20 before you and your party members will get the rewards for level 20 and 21 and your keystone is now level 22. You can NEVER again miss out on bonus coin rewards that you should have received.

Marks of Ascension

Increased the Marks of Ascension gained from the Marks of Ascension option by 25 per level of the Mythic Cache up to a maximum of 500 gained per chest.

Bonus Chests for Going Past the Gear Level Cap

Every 5 levels over the current gear progression cap you are guaranteed another Mythic+ Chest
- Previously, you could only receive 5 bonus chests from this.
This has been changed so once you reach the previous 5 bonus chest, you can keep getting more bonus chests, but at a slightly reduced rate of every 10 levels.

This means if level 20 is the highest level gear out, and if you complete level 50, you are guaranteed another 5 chests. Right now, the same amount of chests were rewarded for completing level 50 or level 80. This has been changed: if you complete mythic level 80 whenever level 20 is the cap, you get bonus mythic+ chests which can be used for Mythic+ Recycling or even more Marks of Ascension.

Loot Multipliers for Longer Dungeons

Not all dungeons were made with equal length, bosses and even difficulty. Some instances are harder than others and they should be more rewarding.

For that reason, a new Loot Multiplier increases EVERYTHING you receive in the Mythic+ Dungeon by a percentage, including:

Scrolls
Caches
Coins

Additionally, on Elune only, Scroll Rewards for first time completion has been adjusted slightly to be less focused on First Time completions but they still retain a bonus for doing so.

These Classic Dungeons currently have a loot multiplier, based on the completion time data for these dungeons.

Wailing Caverns - 216% rewards

As a hypothetical: if doing wailing caverns before this update at level 100 rewards you with 100 scrolls, 3 caches and 1,000 coins, doing it after the update rewards 216 scrolls. 6 caches with a chance for the 7th and 2,160 coins.

Shadowfang Keep - 202% rewards
Blackfathom Deeps - 191% rewards
Lower Blackrock Spire - 185% rewards
Stratholme - Service Entrance - 177% rewards
Blackrock Depths - Upper City - 175% rewards
Zul’Farrak - 163% rewards
Gnomeregan - 160% rewards
Uldaman - 160% rewards.
Stratholme - Main Gate - 150% rewards
Upper Scholomance - 146% rewards
Deadmines - 145% rewards
Dire Maul - West - 140% rewards
Dire Maul - East - 135% rewards
Razorfen Kraul - 135% rewards
Ragefire Chasm - 125% rewards
Lower Scholomance - 125% rewards

These TBC Dungeons currently have a loot multiplier.

Arcatraz - 154% rewards
Shadow Labyrinth - 152% rewards
The Botanica - 148% rewards
Shattered Halls - 140% rewards
Blood Furnace - 130% rewards
Underbog - 123% rewards

Scroll of Fortune Updates on Elune in Mythic+

Scroll of Fortune drops have been updated for Mythic+ to bring the rewards more in line with other mediums. Here is where you need to know:

Scrolls of Fortune used to have a chance to roll up to a maximum amount of scrolls based on the key level that you completed. However, this meant doing a level 1 and a level 40 could reward you with the same amount of scrolls and that just didn’t make sense.

Chapter 2 brings in a new and overhauled way of rewarding Scrolls of Fortune:

Scrolls of Fortune now have a minimum and a maximum, calculated by Keystone Level

The minimum number of Scrolls of Fortune you can get in a Mythic+ is now calculated by:

Keystone Level
- Even more so if the keystone is past the gear level cap, i.e. going past level 25 at the moment.
First Time Completion
NEW: Loot Multiplier

Gear Swapping

Also, You can now gear swap in Mythic+. With enchants no longer on your gear, the reason for this no longer exists. Swap your gear!

Additional Changes

Added Racials like every man for himself, war stomp, blood fury, berserking, etc. to the list of spells that are reset when killing bosses and no longer just individual spell cooldowns

You can read the original article for these changes here:

Upcoming Content

Mythic+ 25-40

Mythic+ levels from 25 to 40 arrive during Chapter 2.

This presents you with even stronger versions of your favorite vanilla items to outfit your hero. If you love 5 man PvE content, Mythic+ dungeons make sure you’ve got a place to test your mettle.

Battlegrounds and PvP Progression

Scrolls of Fortune drop rates have been buffed in battlegrounds for not only winning the BG, but also participating. Before, only those that won would receive rewards, even if it was a very close match like a1590 vs. 1600 in Arathi Basin.

Now, you receive a smaller amount of rewards when on the losing team in closer matches rather than the chance at nothing.

Resilient Constitution–the PvP passive that helps you survive more–was recently buffed on live. This dramatically reduces the damage you take from other players in PvP.

Season 9 has seen PvP-focused Wildcard Heroes reach new heights of power because of their unique ability to have vastly more Talent Points. Because of this, damage in BG’s is unusually high this season.

Resilient Constitution helps mitigate some of that colossal damage. It’s buffed on live now, and it may continue to get buffed throughout Chapter 2.

Additionally, Chapter 2 brings PvP progression 3, 4 and 5 along with it, giving you a chance to grab new PvP gear and compete in new Arena Seasons.

Raid Trials 7-10 and 10+

In tandem with these balance changes, In chapter 2 Raid trails will get some balance updates. To avoid every single mob 1-shotting while adding more depth and strategy, damage done by creatures will be decreased slightly, and instead healing reduction to the player will be added.

This will create an environment where the difficulty can continue to increase without simply just resulting in every single mechanic 1-shotting.

They retain their difficulty but to simultaneously move away from one-shotty mechanics and more towards a battle of attrition.

This also allows for specific builds to flourish and introduce more specializations through.

Given the changing balance environment more raid trial tuning tweaks will be made as needed to ensure that the primary limiting factor isn’t just your raw DPS in raids. Expect another article going over these changes in more detail soon.
With Season 9 Chapter 2, group members of a Raid Trial will now also have the freedom to leave group, and do whatever content they enjoy, without losing their raid progress, outside of the exact same raid on Ascended.

Levels 7-9 of Raid Trials will released during Chapter 2. These let you take your raids to the next level by putting raid difficulty completely in your hands.

With Raid Trials, you’re not only getting a better challenge: you can also get additional Scrolls of Fortune alongside unique cosmetic rewards.

Raid Trails 10+ will arrive as its own release later on in Chapter 2. Once it unlocks, you’ll have access to practically endless levels of Raid difficulty for you and your allies to challenge.

Additionally, Chapter 2 brings scaling changes to Raid Trials:

As you increase the difficulty of your raid trial, it’s not surprising that the damage of creatures in the raid increases. However, at some point this means that you’d reach a certain level of Raid Trials where the creatures in the raid are just one-shotting you. This isn’t scalable (lol pun intended): if Ascension wants Raid Trials to always be challenging and engaging, but never impossible, then damage increases can’t be the major factor.

For this reason, Raid Trials are leaning more towards healing reduction. With this, each level of difficulty can continue to be challenging without ever reaching a point where you’re getting blasted into oblivion by every pull.

The damage scaling of Raid Trials per level has been adjusted on a case by case basis for the instance of that level to really hone in on the values and move towards the battle of attrition than one-shotty mechanics.
- There was previously a bullet point saying that this was only changed from 17.5% to 15% in the scaling per level, but this is supplementary WITH other raid trial scaling changes that are coming.

The goal of this change is to make sure Raid Trials are difficult and challenging without the system eventually reaching a point where you're just getting 1 shot by unavoidable mechanics. This improves the pacing of Raid Trials, and actually makes them both engaging and doable.

Ahn’Qiraj

Ahn’qiraj releases shortly after chapter 2 goes live, with the Ruins of AQ releasing first, and Temple of AQ shortly after. These will come in tandem with Raid Trials, so look forward to tackling AQ on Normal, Heroic, Mythic, Ascended, and with multiple levels of Raid Trials.

For Heroes interested in AQ Raid Trials, look forward to a unique cosmetic gear set and other rewards as you challenge the Old Gods on their hardest difficulty.

Corrupted Grinning Reaver (AQT Raid Trial 10 Reward)

Naxxramas

Naxxramas releases near the end of Chapter! Gather your allies and prepare to face the terrors of Kel’thuzad, obtain the best gear in the game, and prepare your Wildcard Hero for everything that comes next.

Conclusion

Chapter 2 goes live on May 3rd!

With it, you’ll be able to dive into all the updates:

Wildcard Improvements:
- Enhanced Bad Luck Protection
- Impactful Synergy Rolls
- Expanded Skill Card Slots
- Skill Cards usable at any level
- Sealed Card Pack improvements
- New abilities and talents
- Extra Multispec Scrolls from Cases of Fortune
Manastorm Improvements:
- Improved rewards in deeper levels
- Map-based reward multiplier
- Affix overhaul for enhanced strategy and depth
- New special creatures and raid maps
- Upgradable Manastorm potions and Hearty Heal
- Chaotic Link for boss health scaling
- Treasure Keeper and Klepto the Cardnapper for bonus loot
- Expanded first-completion bonuses and Manastorm Cache updates
Experimental Content:
- Optional Manastorm Battleground brawls
Additional Improvements:
- PvE paradigm shift to differentiate creatures and make avoidable mechanics matter more
- New mechanics in Vanilla dungeons
- Prestige rewards and new heirlooms for all item slots
- Performance improvements and new loading screens
Mythic+ Updates:
- Levels 25-40 arriving during Chapter 2
- Revised Mythic Coin distribution and bonus coins
- Loot multipliers for longer dungeons
Upcoming Content:
- Battleground and PvP progression with new gear and Arena Seasons
- Raid Trials 7-10 and 10+ for endless levels of raid difficulty and unique rewards
- Ahn'Qiraj release with Ruins and Temple of AQ
- Naxxramas release near the end of Chapter 2

Your adventure is just beginning: grab the dice, gather your allies, and set off to seize your destiny.

Welcome to Season 9 Chapter 2!

S9 Ch.2 Q&A Answers

Q&As typically happen after the release of a major content video. The following are the questions and answers that you all asked after the S9 Chapter 2 video:

Q: Is anything coming for PvPers?

A: There are more PvP updates coming that didn't make it for the initial chapter 2 release. There are some battlegrounds and arenas in the works that we’ll post teasers for soon as well.

Q: How noticeable will the Chaotic Link on Manastorm Bosses be related to how much trash you have killed?

A: The aura is a number of stacks and is se tup to be ~50% of the trash between you and the boss. It is about 25%~ health per stack and 10% damage atm, and that will likely change as we see more gameplay.

Q: On PTR there is a built-in Raid UI interface similar to the Compact Raid Frames add-on. Will we see that later in Chapter 2?

A: Gameplan is to get it in for chapter 2. There are several things like this that didn't make it into either the article or the video

Q: Anything about making KOTE easier to build?

A: ALL builds should be easier to build thanks to:

New skillcard slots
Skillcard weighting so you'll see new cards more often
More synergy rolls

Q: Will more abilities and talents than the one listed be coming to Chapter 2?

A: Not for this release! There will be a few other balance changes. The new talents and abilities were all covered.

Q: When will we be able to play with these new abilities/talents?

A: The vast majority of the updates will be live by the 3rd. Monday-Tuesday the core merge will begin to do all the technical stuff, then features will be unlocked from there as they are tested and confirmed working as ascended.

Q: Will Synergy Roll procs be made visible?

A: No plans to do this currently. The majority of your rolls have been and are still going to be 100% random. Synergy Rolls just help steer your build in the right direction.

As noted in the article, these synergy rolls are not devs making builds for you. It is just things that benefit from one another, if a talent benefits from an ability or vice versa it is a synergy.

Q: Any plans to expand the Cases of Fortune you receive for Battlegrounds?

A: Yes! You also get scrolls for losses if the losing team actually participated and had a close match. So you won't walk out of a 1500/1600 Arathi Basin with no rewards.

Q: Will longer Battlegrounds award more Scrolls of Fortune?

A: Battleground Scroll of Fortune rewards have been generally buffed.

Q: Why isn’t the Manastorm available on Area 52?

A: It wasn't where it needed to be. If the feedback on these updates to it are better, then the next iteration of it is adapting it for TBC!

Q: Will cases of fortune stay in your inventory come Chapter 2?

A: Yes!

Q: Which of the updates in this article are coming to Area 52?

Tamable Treants
Trap Launcher
Mythic+ Updates
New raid frame stuff
The new keybinding features we teased
The updates to vanilla dungeon mechanics
All of the talent changes listed in the classless article and the balance article where they are specified
Prestige Rewards (Not as relevant for a52 ofc)

These are all coming with chapter 2 in the same week. The big feature in sight next is the Manastorm for TBC.

Q: Will any of the new spells be added to A52?

A: Yeah! They are mentioned in the article, and more will likely be adapted to enchants overtime too

Q: Where are invasions?

A: There was a test run for invasions, and they were super laggy. This is likely because there was a dozen people with 5000 wild imps each, and this was causing server lag and basically breaking the game. There are some optimizations in the works, and there will be another test drive after the imp pruning balance changes.

Q: How close are you to bringing the new talents and abilities to A52? Os balancing them still something that will be done? Has Elune Chapter 1 given you new insights to how they all fit together?

A: This will likely be tested in a League in the future to try them out before bringing them to Area 52, the idea is to make sure the A52 pop actually wants it and it is a net improvement.

For freepick, the biggest thing that comes to mind that clearly has to change is being able to use multiple of the same ability effected by the same modifiers: i.e. having 3 variations of Corruption in the same build. It basically diminishes the ability to have a bigger variety of builds, and forces you to stack up the same ability.

Your talents for corruption go a lot further when you have 3 corruptions to benefit from them, and that ends up making other things less viable, and there's really no clear, clean path to fix that.

Q: Any idea when the first batch of the new changes will come out?

A: Core merge monday-tuesday for the technical stuff, then expect some updates over the week with the bulk of it being deployed on the 3rd.

Q: How does Chapter 2 differ from Chapter 1?

A: Chapters are larger sets of updates to realms that occur a few times throughout a Season. You'll continue to play on your same character.

Q: Any chance of the new manastorms having puzzle bosses so it isn't a DPS rush?

A: Not exactly puzzles, but there are some bigger maps though that have more mechanics and are more involved.

The goal of manastorm and broader PvE changes was to add more mechanical depth and strategy to the base gamemode rather than just piling up more and more affixes. A lot of spells and mechanics creatures have been retuned to matter a lot more, if they are avoidable, you're going to need to avoid them.

These now have a reward multiplier as well so it doesn't feel bad to get a longer map. You'll get extra rewards for time spent

Q: Will doing Raid Trials above level 10 award additional Scrolls of Fortune?

A: Yes, the UI change just wasn't in for the video.

Q: When will updates to Synergy Rolls be in game so I can use my hoarded Scrolls?

A: An announcement will go out on the Discord when these are live! The goal is to have the vast majority of updates by the 3rd. We’ll know more after Monday maintenance.

Q: Where are the new Arenas?

A: With the arenas, we ran into quality assurance problems. They had too many unforeseen issues that we did not have the talent to fix at the time. There is such little tolerance for mapping quality issues in a competitive arena space.

Recently, the team expanded to bring on some new guys with much more robust mapping skillsets, We’ll have some teasers for this this week.

Q: Are synergy rolls just while leveling?

A: Synergy Rolls are all the time, forever. They never stop happening. They occur both while leveling and at end-game.

Q: Is there a point where a Synergy Rolls becomes a mathematical guarantee?

A: Yes. Every roll you make has a chance to get a Synergy Roll, and they accumulate that chance until you are guaranteed to get one.

Q: Any benefits to restarting at lvl 1 on Manastorm to get rewards or just continue to find the treasure and card guy? So if we have a 1 in 10 (guessing at the number of clones) of getting the fortune or talents drops?

A: The goal with this round of updates was to do more to keep people in their sweet spot for difficulty.

The intent with manastorm is to push to the higher levels that you're capable of doing, so treasure keepers, greedy goblins, scroll amounts, and such have their chance g up the deeper you go into the manastorm to make sure you're not forced to do a gulag 1-50 spam.

Q: Will there be more Seasonal Point Rewards?

A: Yes, there will be a new chapter collection.

Q: Could you please elaborate the changes to Trial Scaling in Ch 2. These scalings are in addition to the base trial 1 debuff? Are there changes enough to make trials less 1 shotty in any meaningful way?

A: The changes featured in the article are definitely not enough and there will be more changes to bring a better balance to raid trials. The goals are:

Unavoidable mechanics can't just 1 shot at higher levels (assuming you are doing what you can to have proper resistances)
Raw DPS is not the main barrier to completion. The spread in Elune for DPS is just going to be too big that it becomes to prohibitive.
- This may mean tweaking enrage timers or lowering health scaling

Q: With the addition of new abilities to make throwing ninjas useful again will we see a change in the level you can get shuriken toss (34 is kinda high) or deadly throw (60 is meaningless for prestige runs)?

A: Shuriken can definitely can have its level requirement reduced, Deadly throw will need ranks made but it can also be reduced eventually.

Q: Is there a rough estimate on how much easier builds are to roll after these changes? Saying drastically increased is incredibly vague. Rolling a build twice as fast as previously I would say is relatively "drastic", but in this context it'll still be a month worth of grinding.

A: There's no realistic, honest way to quantify it. There is too many variables that have changed, and it really depends what you mean by rolling a build.

What I can say is that it felt a lot better to play myself, and it resulted in me not getting stuck without progress for a big stretch of time like before, and things are setup so tweaks can be made a lot faster now, as they are needed.

Q: Can you please remove the restrictions on the "bear attack" enchant? We all have a dream of being a bear tank with a bear pet that could summon a bunch of bears. Please and thank you, bear community.

A: There is some multi-pet stuff prototyped that we'll re-explore in the future. It has some quirks, but it was developed for the COA necromancer and could be refined to let you have you be a bear, with a bear, and spawn a bear army.

Q: Is there an update on the Battle Royale mode and is there an ETA?

A: It is in the running for the next season!

Q: Are there any updates planned to improve the quality of the Southshore BG experience?

A: Nothing in the works currently, but you can DM me ideas or start a feedback discussion.

Q: Will manastorm BGs be a seperate instance from normal BGs.

A: It will be a brawl separate queue, if needed it will just be available at specific times.

Q: Will there be new Race options in Chapter 2?

A: There's something in the works! Not for chapter 2 though.

Q: Are dungeons able to being ported from MoP or later expansions, the same way you port new arenas?

A: Currently, focusing is on completely custom dungeons made from the ground-up instead! There's some teasers of that on the twitter.

Q: Will the stats of the Heirlooms be buffed before Chapter 2 Launch?

A: The stats on heirlooms are being increased with this update! 30%~ buff on most if I recall, some pieces were buffed more.

Q: With changes to the Manastorm, will hero’s maximum Manastorm level be reset?

A: This is still being explored, and I will open a discussion around it before the update.

Right now there are 2 paths:

Letting people opt-in to reset so you can choose to get all those first time completion rewards again (one time).

I am not 100% sure this will even be supported, but it is being explored.

Just resetting it entirely so everyone benefits from the first time completion again and can explore the new progression.

The difficulty curve and expectations have definitely changed, it is harder in some ways but much easier and more manageable than others.

Q: I still think one of the core issues with the season is a lack of incremental progress where running a night of Ascended Raids could yield absolutely nothing for the time investment if you do not roll something you want for your build. The new changes don't seem to help with this and will ultimately result in players feeling like they've wasted a significant amount of time with no progress to show for it. Is this something that is just to be accepted because it's Wildcard, or is there something in the pipeline that would help with this feeling?

A: This was really one of the primary goals of the wildcard update was to improve that incremental progress. The core focuses of the wildcard updates are:

Decrease total time you spend rerolling
Make progress more incremental

This was done through

Where the rerolls are faster
More skillcard slots
where you get the cards you need faster
where the process for opening the packs is improved
Where your skillcards benefit your synergy rolls
And there are more Possible Synergies to roll
With Synergies that happen more often
And Talent Upgrades happening more often

That being said, if you're near the very end of your progression looking for one last thing as a top-end ascended raider the progress still isn't going to be instant, some of it is inherent in the nature of wildcard, but we'll keep looking for opportunities to make the pacing better.

Q: Will Death Knight spells come to Season 9?

A: Death Knight spells will come in a pre-patch to WotLK when the expansion is near release.

Q: Will Grove Ranger be getting any buffs/changes on Area 52? It's been struggling for a while.

A: There is an update for grove ranger coming with chapter 2 that will come to both realms! This was covered in the balance article.

[Grove Medicine] - New effect: Chimera Shot now causes a Medicinal Pulse when cast on a target affected by your Medicinal Sting, healing up to 5 nearby allies within 20 yards, prioritizing the most injured. Giving more an on-demand to the Grove Ranger while also increasing their AoE potency.

Q: Any thoughts on balancing BGs better? In its current state it is really hard for new players to simply not get run over. Will the resilience change fix that or simply help with the curve? What about lopsided teams. Meaning teams with 3 healers or teams with all vet players that sort of thing.

A: The healers are currently balanced between teams, if you ever notice that isn't the case send me a DM with the scoreboard and I can see what can be improved.

There is more to do to balance bgs for veterans vs new players though.

Q: For raid trials, is the -2% healing per trial level INSTEAD OF current -25% healing in all trials or IN ADDITION TO the -25% healing....e.g. will trial 6 be -12% healing or will it be -37%?

A: Yes it works this way currently

i.e. level 1 is 25% and level 2 is 27% and level 3 is 29%, etc.

Q: Any chance to fix the size scaling of tamed pets for Chapter 2?

A: We will get them sized more appropriately. Many are too small right, but they can't be giant

Q: Are there gonna be any changes to the silas scroll quest cap?

A: No plans for this currently, they're just gonna keep releasing. The main goal was improving how good each scroll was rather than just giving more and more scrolls.

Q: How long will this season be kept for? I don't want to spam raids just to vendor all my gear in tbc cause it was moved to area52 after naxx.

A: Timeline for chapter 2 will release sunday! Going into TBC though, there likely won't be a heavy twisting presence debuff this time around. It really isn't needed anymore, so you will be able to use Naxx gear in some capacity into TBC.

Q: With treants coming as elemental pets, is there any chance we'll be able to tame ancients (the big tree dudes, like Tendris Warpwood)?

A: This was originally what we set out to do, but then this ents shook your screen and everyone around you with every step they took, so we benched this for the time being lol. That will be removed from the pets and then those will be added.

Q: Are there plans for a Manastorm Dungeon Finder mechanic?

A: Yes, there are plans for this there's more planned also to encourage more grouping.

Q: With the new synergy added, can I see abilities I can never use like bear or cat form abilities without having the form to use it ?

A: You can see them, but not as synergies you won't get feral form abilities or talents as a synergy without a feral form.

Q: Has anything been done to address the near necessity to design a build specifically and only for Manastorm to reasonably progress solo, or do I need to keep a bear spec still?

A: Several things have been done!

There are upgradable hearty heals (hearts on ground) now that scale based on ap/sp
Raid bosses will throw out hearts to heal every 10%~ HP so dps actually gets inherent healing here
Sustain being used was broadly nerfed and damage was recalculated with that in mind
less damage is passive now and much more of it is mechanic oriented. You can avoid a LOT of damage with proper placement, interrupts, cleanses etc those were made to matter a lot more.
There's a lot less affixes now per map, they have clear indicators, and they have ranks so they scale up and begin to matter a lot more, before sustain builds largely brute-forced these and everyone else couldn't participate.
Potions can be upgraded now to counter these mechanics.

Of course, there will still be upside to having a curated build for the manastorm, but that gap was definitely too big before.

Q: Are you happy with current damage values going into TBC (especially with the 10 extra TE and AE)?

A: Not particularly happy no, ideally DPS would not be so high, but for this season that ship has largely sailed. As you said, raid trials will be there for most challenging content.

Q: Are manastorms still rewarding Marks of Ascension at a similar (or greater) rate to what they are now?

A: They are the same currently, but will be reviewed to make sure that’s a good number.

Q: The current changes to hybrids (at least on elune) have made pure gear and most pure builds, with the exception of nice but hard to roll builds, fall far behind in endgame content. Rolling mq 5/5 with hybrid gear will give you far more damage than pure gear will give you on pure physical builds. Will you be making any changes towards this?

A: This is something on the radar, and we are looking at what can be done. This is really specifically an issue with MQ being a 5/5 talent point that you can get for 1 point that really pushes it over that very finely tuned edge for hybrid balance. I will update you when we have a solution here.

BY Ascension