Heroes!
We have added several new Mystic Enchantments, tweaked spells and talents and fixed a lot of bugs. For the full changelog, click here. Here are a few notes on some of the changes.
PvE-oriented Melee buffs
As we progress through The Burning Crusade, we are keeping a close eye on which types of builds are performing well and which aren’t. As we’ve previously touched upon, playing melee in PvE isn’t always easy - especially not if the build you want to play doesn’t have enough support. These changes are aimed at beefing up some of the more rarely seen melee builds, giving them a better chance to contend for those hard-earned top DPS spots.
New Legendary Enchant: Double Down - Your Sinister Strike now hits with both weapons, but no longer generates combo points. Does not work with Titan's Grip.
New Epic Enchant: Tides of Battle - When used above 90% energy, your Sinister Strikes increases your physical damage by 2% but drains 3% of your energy per second for 5 seconds. When used below 90% energy, your Sinister Strikes increase your energy generation by 10% but reduce your attack speed by 3% for 5 seconds. Both these effects stack up to 5 times, but can not be active at the same time.
Updated Rush of Blood, it now increases the critical strike chance of your Hemorrhage by 7% and makes your Hemorrhage criticals allow your next Ambush to be usable out of stealth and costs 20 less energy.
Backstab now deals 195% weapon damage, from 185%
Surprise Attacks now also increases the damage of Ambush.
Hemorrhage now deal 175% weapon damage when used with Daggers, from 140%.
New Legendary Enchant: Heavyweight - Dealing weapon damage with any Warrior attack reduces your attack speed by 5% but increases your physical damage by 2%, stacking up to 5 times. Normal auto-attacks reset this effect. If you reach five stacks, your next auto-attack will crush targets in front of you, dealing 125% unnormalized weapon damage. This damage is tripled and always crits against non-players, but can't crit against players.
New Epic Enchant: Master of Arms - Consuming your Strength of Arms buff will increase your Armor Penetration rating by 10% of your Strength for 12 seconds.
The Sudden Death enchant now reduces the internal cooldown of Sudden Death by 1.5 seconds, from 1 second.
Shadow and Flame
Shadow Bolt and Soulfire builds have been performing quite well in PvE recently, propped up by a bug with Shadow and Flame. That bug has now been fixed, which will result in slightly (3-5%) reduced damage with Shadow Bolt and Soulfire for players who had the Shadow and Flame talent (but slightly increased damage for those who didn’t). Also, there’s new stuff:
New Legendary Enchant: Pure Shadow - Your Shadow Bolt casts draw power from your enemies, increasing the critical strike chance of your Shadow spells by 1%, stacking up to 10 times. When fully stacked, your Shadowfury will send pure Shadow crashing down at the target area, dealing massive Shadow damage spread between affected enemies.
Backdraft now also triggers off Shadowfury.
New Epic Enchant - Unstable Void: Your Backdraft no longer reduces cast time, but instead increases your critical strike chance with Destruction spells by 15%. Requires the final rank of the talent.
New healer stuff
Some of the less popular healing builds got some love too. Check it out:
New Legendary Enchant: Overflow - Your Healing Touch now jumps to an additional nearby friendly target, healing them for 30% of the original amount. In addition, Healing Touch can now trigger Living Seed also on non-criticals.
New Capstone: With the final rank of the Revitalize talent, healing a target to full health with Healing Touch will restore 30% of its mana cost.
Holy Radiance now also transfers overhealing, similar to how Beacon of Light works, instead of only working for effective healing. Tooltips have been updated accordingly.
Evergreen now also makes your Healing Touch refresh the duration of your Lifebloom on the target.
Low Tide now increases the critical effect chance of Healing Wave by 10% on targets of your Riptide. The Riptide spread effect now only works with Healing Wave.
Healing Garden is now Epic quality.
Rat-a-tat-tat
So yeah, Hunter builds have been going pretty wild recently. Most notably due to the burst potential from Focused Burst combined with Multi-Multi Shot. These changes tame some of that wildness, but without really removing too much of their power. You should not feel safe.
Fixed an issue where Thrill of the Hunt didn't work properly together with Multi-Shot.
Focused Burst now has a lower damage penalty of 20%, from 35%, but now reduces the damage of subsequent hit by 10%. This will result in lowered damage potential when combined with the Multi-Multi Shot enchant.
Reduced the attack power scaling of Explosive Shot from 8% to 7.5% per tick.
Expunge now also reduces the cooldown of your Chimera Shot by 2 seconds.
Coming up
In the next couple of weeks we’ll be releasing new Enchants and Capstones more frequently than in the past. You can expect to see lots of new exciting spells and mechanics to explore, along changes to improve build variety and improve PvP balance. Stay tuned!
