Season 8 In-Depth Overview

knowledge UNLEASHED!

Heroes!

This Friday, October 28th, 18:00 Server Time - Season 8 is UNLEASHED! See the countdown on the homepage!

Everything you love about Ascension is expanding: from new spells and abilities to Worldforged Enchantments, new tamable pets, new spells, mechanics, raid difficulties, and High Risk improvements, this is the season of MORE! Prepare to dive into Draft unleashed.

This article covers the entire season in depth with no nonsense. Welcome to the in-depth overview of Season 8.

Season 8 General Overview

Draft Realm: Thrall

The new Season 8 realm, Thrall, is an Unleashed Draft Realm: which means it’s Draft but with all of the Season 8 updates and improvements. You can dive into what those improvements are in the Draft Unleashed section of this article.

Area 52

Additionally, Area 52 will receive many of the updates brought to Thrall. These updates will be rolled out in sequence, and this is the currently planned sequence for rollout to Area 52:

1. Transmog Overhaul
2. Mythic Difficulty Raiding (10-25 Flex)
3. Talent Changes
4. New Wardrobe (New Transmog UI)
5. Realm-wide Friendlist
6. Realm-wide Achievements
7. Realm-wide Reputations
8. Common Abilities from Thrall
9. Tamable Elementals
10. Worldforged Enchants

Season 8 Progression

Season 8 is a progressive realm: it will begin in Vanilla, unlock more content as the season goes on, and progresses into TBC. After launch, you can view the Season 8 timeline on the website to see when content unlocks, how the realm progresses, and when you should plan for big changes.

Chapters

Chapters are blocks of time within Season 8. At the beginning of a chapter, big changes will shake up the season. Then, for the duration of the chapter, there will be no radical balance shifts: so you can count on your time, progress, and investments being meaningful. This will last until the next Chapter Update, where big gamechanging improvements will shake up the season again!

Chapters ensure that Season 8 gets the big, sweeping content changes that revitalize the world, switch up powerful builds and archetypes, and bring Heroes surging back to Azeroth to try out the dynamic new changes– all while making sure to do it at a clear window that Heroes can plan for. This gives you the best of both worlds: both big improvements that revitalize he season, and blocks of time where your progress and investment is secure.

Season 8 features 4 chapters, and each one comes with a Video Overview to ensure all the updates are available for everyone.

Seasonal Achievements and Collection

Season 8 re-introduces Seasonal Achievements and the Seasonal Collection. Seasonal Achievements are milestones that you can complete during each chapter to earn Season Points: which you can spend to snag chapter-specific transmog gear, pets, mounts, and other rewards. 

Each week of Season 8, a new node in the Season panel will become available: along with achievements to complete. If you complete a node, you’ll gain Season Points that you can spend on that chapter’s cosmetics. Once all 7 nodes unlock, you’ll have some  time before the next chapter hits to catch up on completing achievements–so even if you start the chapter a bit late, you still have a chance to get all its rewards. Finally, when the next chapter begins, the nodes reset and new rewards are introduced. 

Complete achievements, earn points, and reap the rewards!

Seasonal Points are unique to each chapter; once that chapter is over, the seasonal points are gone–so grab them while you can! When a new chapter hits, it brings with it new achievements and new rewards to claim, making each chapter a chance to jump back in and dominate the season.

Vanity Sync Bundles

In Season 8, you’ll be able to bring your entire Area 52 vanity collection with you to the new realm with the Vanity Sync!

This brand new item syncs your Area 52 vanity collection to the new Season 8 realm, meaning you can access all of your cosmetic and convenience vanity items on Season 8. You can get the Vanity Sync in the following ways:

• The Vanity Sync is a part of in the 50dp and 100dp Season 8 Bundles
• You can grab the Sync with Bazaar Tokens in-game
• You can buy the Sync with in-game gold on the Auction House

This Sync is a bidirectional sync that will continue to sync your collection between the realms once a day until the end of the season.

The Vanity Sync makes sure you have access to your whole collection on Season 8, letting you unleash yourself with transmogs, mounts, and more!

The Vanity sync will not sync skill cards, and some pets whistles may not be usable until they become available in game.

Malik the Courier

Malik the Courier is an ethereal NPC located next to the Bazaar. This interesting ethereal allows you to transfer unbound vanity items to your characters on the Season 8 realm. These items become soulbound immediately once they’re on the new realm and unlock in your collection, meaning you can use your characters on Area 52 to get sweet, sweet cosmetics over to your new Seasonal characters.

Malik is just one more way to keep your hero looking f r e s h as they leap into a new season!

Blood Elf and Draenei Available at Launch

Yep, that’s a thing. Play your favorite race, Heroes. Be the light you wish to see in the world.

To circumvent some issues with expansions, Blood Elves and Draenei will start in other races' starting zones.

New Ways to Play

Draft Unleashed

Forget everything you knew about Draft Mode: Draft Unleashed has wild new mechanics that will change the way you think, build, and realize your Draft Hero. This is a new Draft experience, and if you want to succeed, you’ll need to ditch the old way of building and embrace the new. On Season 8, Draft Mode receives big updates that improve gameplay substantially to unleash its potential.

Card Swaps

Card Swaps are a brand new BONUS feature that have a chance to happen at random every time you draft an ability in ADDITION to the draft: either by leveling up, or using a Hand of Fate. Card Swaps are an additional mechanic: they’re pure value added, and do not replace or cost a Hand of Fate: it’s just more! When a Card Swap happens, you’ll be offered the chance to swap out a spell you have for a new spell of that rarity. 

You’ll always see the new spell first, so if you don’t like it, you can always decline it. But if you do like it, you can click it to see which of your existing spells you’ll have to swap for it. Which spell you’ll give up is decided at random, so if you don’t want to lose that spell, you can always decline it.

Card Swaps have a higher chance to happen the more of that given rarity you have: basically, if you have a lot of Epic Spells, you’ll have a high chance to discover Epic Card Swaps. This means that it’s beneficial to choose rare spells, because you’ll have a higher chance to swap them out later. The goal of this system is to make sure that you’re able to pick the shiniest card, even if it’s not a perfect fit for your build. This means you can have fun leveling with Light’s Hammer even if it isn’t the perfect spell for your shadow build. When you don’t need them anymore, you can swap them out!

Sealed Card Improvements

• Lucky Sealed Cards and Normal Sealed cards are now awarded separately: you can get the right Card Pack for the cards you want to see. Additionally, Lucky and Normal Skill Cards can no longer be drafted together.
  • You’ll never get an unlucky draft where BOTH of them come up, and you have to choose between them.

• Hands of Fate will release gradually throughout the season:
  • 10 quests each rewarding 3 Hands of Fate will be available on day 1, with 1 releasing each day after that. This is in addition to Hands of Fate available at every 10 levels.
  • Each time you complete a Hand of Fate quest, you’ll receive the following:
    • 3 Hands of Fate
    • 5 Sealed Cards
    • 5 Lucky Sealed Cards

• Golden Sealed Packs now award both 5 Golden Sealed Cards and 5 Lucky Sealed Cards
  • So you don’t have to worry about Lucky cards getting in the way of your guaranteed cards

Additionally, Professor Thaddeus Paleo has an updated Skill Card Recycling service! You can turn in 5 Skill Cards to recycle them for Sealed Packs! What’s more, the higher quality of skill cards you recycle, the more sealed card packs you receive! Recycle higher quality skill cards to see the sealed cards roll in!

Recycle a skill card you needed? Have no fear: the professor also has an easily accessible Buyback menu so that you can grab cards you may have accidentally recycled.

Darkmoon Tickets

Darkmoon Tickets have been revamped for Season 8 in a way that reflects the discovery and spirit of Draft. The old darkmoon ticket system focused on accumulating tickets rather than the thrill of discovery. Silas now offers each Hero a personal, account-wide curation of skill cards whose stock changes every day.

 The vendor will have a random assortment of normal and golden skill cards:

• Normal Cards require Darkmoon Tickets
• Golden Cards require Golden Darkmoon Tickets 

But what he has will be random. This tempers the Darkmoon Ticket system with the idea of discovery and exploration that is the soul of draft mode, rather than the old system many criticized devolved into freepick with extra steps.

With the new system, checking the Ticket Vendor will reveal random new cards that you can buy for Darkmoon Tickets. You never know what you’ll see, but if you discover something you like, you can buy that card for Golden or Normal Darkmoon Tickets. The vendor changes every day, and since it’s account wide, each and every player will see a unique set of Skill Cards from their personal vendor. This ensures that every Hero discovers new things throughout the season, and since it’s account wide, you won’t have to make a bunch of alts to cycle through different vendors.

This new system returns Darkmoon Tickets to Draft Mode’s roots: discovering great spells, and never knowing exactly what you’ll find. It brings discovery and excitement back into focus, with a bit of random chance thrown to make sure every day is a new adventure.

Finally, Skill Cards undergo a change in response to how powerful Card Swaps are. 

Heroes can now only slot 

• 2 Guaranteed Rare Skill Cards
• 2 Guaranteed Epic Skill Cards
• 1 Guaranteed Legendary at a time. 

This opens up room to slot new combinations and discover new builds along the way. Along the same lines, Masteries also add new strategies to stacking your deck. Now, you can pick Feral Mastery at Level 1 and be reasonably sure you will see Cat Form in your Drafts of Hands of Fate. With Card Swaps, that chance is increased: so you’re free to use Skill Cards to get other essential skills. 

These new Draft Changes switch up the way that Heroes will draft, tweak, and unleash their builds this season! With the changes to Skill Cards, as well as Darkmoon Tickets and Card Swaps, Heroes who have played Draft in the past will have to completely change how they think about drafting. You can’t game it the same way as before: there’s an entirely new way to interact with forging your Hero thanks to Card Swaps and Masteries. In Season 8, Draft will be more engaging and allow Heroes access to more builds than ever before.

Masteries

Masteries are buckets or categories of spells that allow you to get more spells in that category without using up additional rarity slots. For example, if you get Paladin Seal Mastery, it will lower you chance to see other rares, but all additional Rare Seals you pick after that won’t. This lets you flesh out your character with different spells for different occasions: you can grab all the Hunter Aspects, Mage Armors, or Warrior Stances WITHOUT taking up several additional rare slots, so that you can use each when it’s relevant.

Masteries let you pick up entire kits of spells to deal with situations as they arise. They provide the flexibility to take multiple spells in the same category, such as Auras, Totems, Wards, etc. This expands the ways that you can deal with new situations and opens up class fantasy, rather than having to approach everything the same way.

There are all kinds of Masteries: Aspect Mastery, Aura Mastery, Totem Mastery, Trap Mastery, Demon Mastery, Stance Mastery, Seal Mastery, and many more.

Masteries let you pick up a category of spells so you can get ALL the spells in that category, so that you have options on how to tackle any situation as they arise. If you choose a mastery, you’ll have a high chance to see other spells in that mastery, and these rolls won’t clog up the other rare rolls you see!

Worldforged Enchantments

Worldforged Enchantments are hidden Mystic Enchants scattered throughout Azeroth: and ‘hidden’ is the key word. You have to find, and the key to their discovery rests in your adventurer’s spirit. 

Worldforged Enchantments can be hidden anywhere: maybe there’s a chest that spawns beneath a ray of light at a certain time: maybe you’ll need to defeat a boss, then backtrack through a dungeon to find that a demonic portal has opened up that you can pass through to fight a powerful enemy. Perhaps hidden amongst a dungeon or in the world there is a lockbox with an enchantment tucked away inside. Maybe you must slay 100 sheep. It is for you to discover!

Worldforged Enchantments evoke the nostalgia of old school MMOs where exploration yielded powerful, unique rewards that you can use to craft your identity. You never know what you’ll discover, but no matter what you find, you’ll be able to use it to stand out as a unique Hero with power few others wield.

Worldforged Enchantments bring back that feeling of discovery. You might charge through a Fire Elemental to find you’ve unlocked “Flaming Charge”: a Worldforged Mystic Enc that augments your Charge ability leaving behind a trail of flames. Likewise, you become initiated in Shadowfang Keep and become Arugal’s Disciple, unlocking a fascinating new archetype. There are dozens of secret ways to discover Mystic Enchants: from using certain combinations of spells to finding hidden portals and chests.

Worldforged Enchantments can even let you learn Boss Spells from Dungeon and Raid Bosses.

These Worldforged Enchants function like Epics and Legendary Enchants and follow the stacking rules of existing Epics and Legendaries. 

• 3 Epics
• 1 Legendary 

You will receive these items as a Worldforged Scroll that can be used to imbue your items with these powerful enchants. Once imbued, these enchants will be permanently unlocked in your Enchants Collection and can be applied to future gear you collect or by any of your alts.

Worldforged enchantments ensure that Season 8 is filled with adventure: you never know what power is waiting to be unleashed. There will literally be hundreds of them coming in Season 8, so venture out into Azeroth and find the ones you love!

New Abilities

Season 8 continues to add new abilities into the game. When the season hits, you’ll be able to draft all of the following spells:

• Ring of Frost
• Siegebreaker
• Soul Swap
• Demoralizing Banner
• Light’s Hammer
• Halo
• Healing Rain
• Execution Sentence
• Arcane Orb
• Starsurge
• Glaive Toss
• Bloodbath
• Raging Blow
• Ascendance Air
• Elemental Blast
• Crimson Tempest
• Burning Rush
• Shuriken Toss
• Kill Shot
• Lava Burst
• Mind Sear
• Shadowflame

With new spells, you can not only empower your favorite builds with new power, but also unlock entirely new archetypes and combinations to make yourself truly unique.

Tamable Elementals + Pet Update

In Season 8, you can tame the various elementals roaming throughout Azeroth. This functions like Tame Dragon, Dominate Undead, and Enslave Demon. Each elemental family has its own abilities that you can use to augment your Hero, so choose the pet that’s right for you!

In addition, new support arrives for pets on Season 8. This includes new talents, modifications to existing talents to let them empower the new tamable pets, and even new Legendary  that offer pet support! Now, no matter what companion you choose, you’ll have options to make them stronger: so they can truly be a part of your class fantasy!

Here are some of the changes in Season 8:

• Unleashed Fury now affects all tamable pet types, including tamable elemental
• Demonic Resilience now affects Enslaved Demons
• Endurance Training now affects all tamable pet types.
• Health Funnel can now be used on
  • Dragonkin
  • Undead
  • Enslaved Demons
  • Tamed Beasts
• Elemental Warding now also reduces the damage taken of your tamed elemental too.
• Master Demonologist now supports your Enslaved Demons
• Kindred Spirit now also affects tamable elemental and dragonkin
• New Legendary Enchant: Elemental Lord

There are 40 new families of elementals to tame: and you can get everything from standard Air, Earth, Fire, and Water elementals to even more unique Entropic, Mojo, Steam, Revenant, Phoenix, Lasher, Golem, and Bog Beast elementals!

Feral Weapon Damage Overhaul

Heroes who enjoy Feral and Shapeshifting-focused builds know that these specs have a weird power curve: they’re weak early on, and then get a HUGE power boost once the game moves into TBC and they get access to Feral Attack Power. This new damage overhaul smooths out that curve so that Feral and Shapeshifting builds feel good to play all the time, not just in certain expansions.

• Feral Bonus AP on Weapons has been replaced with a similar scaling system. Weapons that previously gave Feral Attack Power will now give weapon damage in place. This means abilities like Mangle, Shred and Swipe are slightly buffed. For every 14 Feral AP a weapon would have had, it now grants 1 extra weapon damage (2.5 for bear).
• An overhaul to improve the scaling and ensure feral can be balanced and viable across every tier and expansion.

• Savage Defense now scales with 8% of your Attack Power from 6%.
• Bloodthirst no longer deals reduced damage versus monsters in Bear Form / Cat Form.
• Bloodthirst now scales with 55% of your AP from 58% but the damage is now increased by 8% from any bleed you have applied to the target up to a maximum of 40%.
• Increased the AP coefficient applied to Claw from Razor Claws to 25%.
• Increased the Weapon Damage contribution of Swipe (Cat) by 20%.
• Increased the AP coefficient of Swipe (Bear) by 25%.
• Increased the AP coefficient of Faerie Fire (Feral) by 25%.
• Increased the AP coefficient of Tainted Wound by approximately 25%
• Increased the AP coefficient of Corrupted Paw from the Corrupted Bear Form legendary enchant by approximately 20%
• Increased the AP coefficient of Corrupted Hunger from the Corrupted Bear Form legendary enchant by approximately 25%
• Increased the AP coefficient of Infected Blood from the Plague Bearer legendary enchant by approximately 25%
• Increased the AP coefficient of the Direct Damage from Charred Bite (Lucifur) by 33% and the SP coefficient by 20%.
• Increased the AP coefficient by approximately 25% of the DoT from Charred Bite (Lucifur) and the SP coefficient by approximately 6%.
• Increased the AP coefficient of Devil's Claw by 40% and the SP coefficient by 15%. This targets buffs to the underperforming version of the specialization while those who used mostly spell caster gear will still receive a similar but not as powerful buff.
• Ferocious Bite attack power scaling has been increased by 25%.
• Rip attack power scaling has been increased by 25%.
• Rake attack power scaling has been increased by 25%
• Increased the AP coefficient of Predator's Wrath (extra nature damage done by your cat form abilities after casting wrath in cat form) by 25%.
• Predator's wrath AP coefficient applied to "Wrath" has been increased to 25% from 12%.
• Increased the damage of Instant Poison and Deadly Poison by 15% while in Cat or Bear Form.
• Increased the attack power scaling of Carnage Incarnate and Rend (Carnage) by 25%.

Feral attack power from weapons has been replaced with flat weapon DPS while in form. This means that you will no longer need to keep track of the 15 different modifiers the moment you enter form just due to the skewed AP abilities that Ferals were given. This drastically limited the design space available in these forms and interactions in the classless environment. Overtime, it is now possible to increase the interactions available within Feral Forms. 

Additionally, this fixes a balance issue in their scaling where cats and bear forms are significantly under performant at lower gear levels due to the high reliance on Feral Attack Power for a majority of their damage with low AP scaling on these abilities in turn. Please denote that this is not the last iteration of scaling we will see for the Feral Forms and that further iteration will certainly come.

Quality of Life

Realm Wide Updates

Season 8 makes three important systems completely realm-wide:

• Achievements
• Reputations
• Friends Lists

Realm Wide Achievements mean that you’ll have access to your achievements across ALL characters on that realm: so that if you unlock something like a title on your main, you can show it off on all of your alts. These achievements will merge into your core Achievement Collection on core realms, so if you, for example, grab a ton of Realm Firsts, you’ll be able to show off all of those years from now on your main: letting everyone know that on Season 8, YOU were the FIRST person to kill Hogger!

Similarly, Realm Wide Reputations allow reputations to be shared across all alts you make on a realm. That means if you get Exalted with a faction, you’ll be exalted across all of your Heroes! This makes it more worthwhile than ever to get reputation, and removes needless friction from something like getting Exalted with Hydraxian Waterlords on your main, but not being able to raid MC on an alt because your team needs you to extinguish fire. It also makes sure that if you, say, grab Exalted with the Zandalari Trolls, you’ll be able to access their gear and enchantments across ALL of your alts. You can even use it to get Exalted with different members of your faction, allowing your Night Elf to ride that Mechanostrider you’ve always wanted. Realm Wide Reputations make reputation more meaningful to gain than ever before, respecting your time and investment.

Finally, a Realm-Wide Friends List makes it easy to find your friends even when you jump on an a different character. In the past, it was easy to lose friends if either you or they jumped on another character, switched mains, or even just deleted an old hero. Now, the friends you make are YOURS, not your characters. You can see if your allies are online and invite them to play no matter what character you’re on.

UI Overhauls

Transmog UI

The new Transmog UI brings brand new functionality to the transmog system, and removes that terrible old menu.

First, any item you equip is now automatically added to your transmog collection, so you can mix and match outfits without having items clog up your bank.

Second, the new menu allows you to transmog items just by clicking on them, meaning you can change your look faster and customize your Hero more than ever before.

This new UI gives you more control over how you look, meaning you’ll have the ability to define your Hero and your identity.

Crafting UI

The new Crafting UI modernizes the old crafting window, bringing new updates to how you engage in professions. With the new Crafting UI, you can:

• Search and filter crafted items more easily
• Queue items to be crafted one after the other
• Find hints to the location of other recipes

Tab Targeting

Tab Targeting receives its own customization options, so you can change it to your liking. You can now customize tab targeting to prioritize:

• Enemies you’re facing
• Enemies you’re in combat with
• Max target range
• Max target angle

You can find these options by pressing Escape > Interface > Controls

Talent Loadouts

Talent Loadouts allow you to quickly swap between talent configurations within a single build. This means you can have several different talent configurations for the same Draft Build, letting you use your favorite spec in tons of different scenarios. Using Talent Loadouts, you can swap between customizations for Dungeons, Raids, Battlegrounds, Arena, and anything else you can think of–all while using the same Draft Build, and keeping your identity.

Addressing High Ramp up Times on Builds

Certain builds and archetypes on Ascension had high ramp up times, and would deal drastically less DPS if anything interrupted that ramp up. Season 8 features huge QoL improvements to Legendary Mystic Enchants and builds that had egregious ramp up times:

• Damage either increased or ramping reduced
• Many buffs changed from on target hit to on cast to make the spec “flow” better.

Specific Legendary Mystic Enchants

Lucifur

• Activating Berserk with Lucifur equipped now allows you to trigger Devils Claw for 15 seconds. Allowing for instant on-demand burst damage.
• Casting Scorch 5 times, will cause your Cat Form to have a significantly reduced global cooldown.
• Increased the attack power and spell power coefficients and base damage of Charred Bite by 40%. However, the maximum amount of Stacks has been reduced to 3, down from 5. With the significant ramp time, it was far too punishing to drop stacks with an even longer time to get them back up to max stacks. This change should ultimately decrease the ramp with more focus on other aspects of the build resulting in a significant damage increase for most and increasing viability on fights with movement.

Arcane Gunslinger:

• Fixed an issue where Secrets of the Farstrider was providing too low of an increase to Gunslinger Barrage. The base damage of Gunslinger Barrage has been reduced by 30%. This should still result in a slight increase in damage.
• Increased the attack power and spell damage coefficient of Arcane Bullet to 33% from 22%.
• Increased the damage contribution to Arcane Barrage from the Arcane Gunslinger stacks to 20% from 15%. The maximum amount of stacks has been reduced to 4, down from 5.
• The chance to trigger Missile Barrage from the Arcane Gunslinger stacks have been increased to 25% per stack from 20% per stack. The maximum amount of stacks has been reduced to 4 stacks, down from 5.
• Arcane Shelling now increases the damage taken from Arcane Barrage by 20%, up from 15% per stack, and 85% from Arcane Bullet up from 50%. The maximum amount of stacks has been reduced to 3, down from 5.
• Arcane Shelling and Arcane Gunslinger buffs now last for 20 seconds up from 12. These changes aim to reduce the egregious ramp of the spec while also improving the performance of the build overall.

Buffs!

Buffs? Buffs. Big buffs, small buffs, some the size of your head. Everyone loves buffs. Lots of underperforming builds buffed:

• Shock and Awe Rare Mystic Enchantment has been deprecated (will be removed in-game sometime after this changelog goes live). Shamanistic Focus (talent) capstone bonus has been replaced with: Your Shaman Shock spells gain up to 20% of your attack power as bonus damage and your Flame Shock periodic damage gains up to 6% of your attack power as bonus damage. This capstone effect is equal to having 3 Shock and Awe enchantment.
• Stormborn damage now deals 20% more damage at level 60 to monsters, and 40% more damage at level 70 to monsters, but hits to each additional target above 3 now deals reduced damage. This means that on 3 targets you deal 3 times the damage of a single target, but on 4 targets you deal a total of 3.5 times the damage of a single target. This allows the damage to stay strong for a single target and cleave, while not being overpowered in mob groups.
• The attack power scaling added to Lightning Shield from Stormborn has been increased to 20%, up from 10%.
• Avatar of Lightning now no longer works while you have Stormborn equipped.
• Stormborn now also causes you to reduce the cooldown of Elemental Mastery by 3 seconds when dealing damage with Lightning Shield. In addition, casting Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning while at 3 or more stacks of Maelstrom Weapon further reduces the cooldown of Elemental Mastery by 3 seconds. These effects require the final rank of Shamanism.
• Fixed an issue where Stormstrike and Lava Lash would extend the duration of Pack Alpha by 5 seconds instead of the intended 2.5 seconds. In addition, removed the internal cooldown of Pack Alpha.
• Improved Feral Spirits capstone now applies the “Storm Charged’ buff to both of your feral spirits, instead of to a singular Feral Spirit. Additionally, the damage of the Improved Feral Spirits capstone has been increased by 50% and can now critically strike.
• The base damage and scaling of Ice Prism Shatter have been increased by 33%.
• Ice Prism damage over time effect from Snowblind can now spread to nearby targets when hit with Cone of Cold or Frostbolt. As a reminder, there is still an ICD on the Ice Prism Shatter proc, meaning you will not be able to shatter all 5 at once, but this will drastically improve target swapping, rarely needing to recast Ice Prism on a target after killing a nearby target.
• Razor Claws has been slightly reworked, the enchantment now reads: Increases the damage of your Rip and Rake by 15% and your Claw ability now costs 10 less energy, and gains additional damage equal to 20% of your attack power. In addition, your Claw and Bloodthirst extends the duration of your Rake by 6 seconds and Rip by 2 seconds. Using Claw also sharpens your claws, increasing your physical damage by 2% and the damage of your Bloodthirst by 8%. This effect stacks up to 3 times. Casting Bloodthirst while at 3 stacks grants a combo point on the target.
• Bloodthirst damage done while in Cat Form now deals 10% more damage against monsters. Damage against players is unchanged.
• New Capstone: Chilled to the Bone - Your Frostbolts and Ice Lances reduce the cooldown of your Deep Freeze by 2 seconds (1 against players), and dealing damage with Deep Freeze grants you a lesser Ice Barrier.
• Shattered Barrier: Now gives 1/2/3% Frost damage baseline and an additional 2/4/6% while Ice Barrier is active. Capstone bonus: now also gives you 6% spell haste for 8 seconds after activating Ice Barrier.
• Ice Barrier now has a Global cooldown of 1 second down from 1.5 seconds.
• Cold as Ice also reduces the global cooldown of Ice Barrier by 0.25/0.5 seconds.
• Fixed an issue where the capstone bonus would sometimes not increase damage against frozen targets by 8%. This effect also works while under the effect of Fingers of Frost.
• Stay Frosty has been reworked. It still increases the chance to proc Fingers of Frost, however it no longer gives you a 3rd charge of Fingers of Frost. It now increases all spell damage by 6% for 1.5 seconds after gaining Fingers of Frost.
• New Capstone: Arctic Reach - Your Fingers of Frost will now grant an extra charge.
• Frost Bomb Legendary Mystic Enchant now also causes your Water Elemental to deal 200% increased damage to monsters for 10 seconds after spawning. In addition, when your Water Elemental deals damage with Freeze, it will trigger Fingers of Frost on you.
• Ice Barrage has been reworked, it now reads: When you damage enemies with Frostbolt, you gain an Icicle for 30 sec. Up to 5 Icicles can be stored at once. Dealing damage with Ice Lance causes any Icicles to begin launching at the target, dealing Frost damage. Transforms your Flame Shock to Frostflame Shock, a 2 second cast time damage over time effect on the target and 2 nearby enemies lasting 12 seconds dealing Frostfire damage its periodic damage can trigger your Fingers of Frost talent. This ability benefits from the effects of Brain Freeze, and causes Brain Freeze to also increase the damage of your Frostbolt and Ice Lance against targets affected by Frostflame Shock by 9%.Since Frostflame Shock deals frostfire damage, it will be able to trigger both the Fire damage and the Frost damage capstone bonuses from Booming Echoes.
• Conductor from Hydromancer Mystic Enchant now increases the damage of your next Electrocute against monsters by 50% per stack up from 25% per stack. Damage against players remains the same.
• Touch of Death from the Mystic Enchant Fingers of Death now increases the damage of your next Vampiric Touch by 100% per stack, up from 75% per stack.
• Fixed an issue where you could gain Splintered Chaos from an unintended interaction with Frozen Chaos.
• The Frozen Chaos buff from the Mystic Enchant Frozen Chaos now increases the damage of your Chaos Bolt by 25%, up from 15%
• Templar of Flame now also reduces the cooldown of Blast Wave and Dragons Breath by 2 seconds (1 versus players) on dealing damage with Flamestrike for 6 seconds after using Judgement. This effect can only trigger once every second.
• Templar of Flame judgment damage on the main target has been increased. In addition, fixed an issue causing the Judgment instant damage and damage over time effect to have a lower spell power and attack power scaling than intended.
• The debuffs from Plague Bearer now proliferate the current duration of Rabies and Infected Blood, instead of reapplying them on all targets.
• In addition, Rabies from Plague Bearer now increases your critical strike chance against the target by 10%.
• The damage of Festering Strike from Plague Bearer is now increased on bleeding targets.
• Increased level scaling of Infected Blood from Plague Bearer at level 70. Level 60 damage is unchanged.

• Berserker Stance - reworked - Theme of becoming an actual berserker.
  • Improved Berserker Stance has been reworked to the following: Berserker Stance now also increases your damage against targets below 35% health by 3/6/9%. This effect is doubled while Enrage is active.
  • [New Capstone]: Improved Berserker Stance - With the final rank of this talent, Raging Blow increases the duration of your Recklessness by 1 second.
  • Berserker Stance no longer increases damage taken.
  • Recklessness now has unlimited charges when used against monsters.  It now increases your damage taken by 10%, up from 5%, but also increases your melee attack speed by 30% while active.
  • The Recklessness Epic enchant has been reworked and now reads as follows: Recklessness now increases your movement speed by 50% for its duration. Killing an enemy while Recklessness is active increases its duration by 3 seconds. This effect can only occur every 3 seconds.

PvE

Leveling Improvements

Season 8 offers a few epic leveling improvements to make your adventure smoother!

Opening up Exciting Talents for Leveling

Playing your favorite archetypes and builds is fun: especially while leveling. However, certain archetypes like Hybrids require late-game talents like Maelstrom Weapon to function, and that means you can’t enjoy them while leveling. These essential talents are having their level requirements reduced so that you can have more fun with more build variety while leveling. This change also allows Heroes to make use of certain Legendary Mystic Enchants while leveling, to make the adventure exciting, engaging, new, and fun.

(Note: In some cases other talents are moved up in level requirement to replace the spot of the proc talents that were moved down)

• Eclipse moved from 50 to 35.
• Missile Barrage moved from 50 to 35.
• Maelstrom Weapon moved from 55 to 30.
• Brain Freeze moved from  50 to 40.
• Fingers of Frost moved from 45 to 35.
• Sudden Death moved from 50 to 35.
• King of the Jungle moved from 50 to 35.
• Improved Steady Shot moved from 50 to 35.
• Borrowed Time moved from 55 to 35.
• Judgements of the Pure moved from 50 to 40.
• Cobra Strikes moved from 50 to 40.
• Combat Potency moved from 45 to 30.
• Art of War moved from 40 to 30.
• Infusion of Light moved from 55 to 40.
• Critical Block moved from 50 to 40.
• Improved Defensive Stance moved from 40 to 35.
• Redoubt moved from 45 to 35.
• Living Seed moved from 45 to 35.
• Serendipity moved from 45 to 30.
• Tidal Waves moved from 55 to 35.
• Cut to the Chase moved from 55 to 45.

Sectioned Dungeons

Longer dungeons–namely Wailing Caverns, Gnomeregan, and Uldaman–have been split into multiple parts and separate Dungeon Finder Queues. This lets Heroes tackle each separately, and jump into the Dungeon Finder knowing that all Dungeons will take roughly the same amount of time. In Season 8, you won’t randomly get stuck in an extra long run just because you RNG’d a bigger dungeon. Now you can queue up with confidence!

Hotspots Return

Hotspots return in Season 8! 

Hotspots are event areas in zones that happen at random, granting bonus experience to slaying creatures in that zone. You can open the map to check for a hotspot near you! Look for the green + sign.

This is just the beginning of further leveling updates planned during Season 8!

New PvE Abilities

Certain abilities are critical in PvE, and your raid is gonna’ get wrecked without them. Things like dispels and interrupts can mean the difference between life and death in certain content. That’s why in Season 8, you have access to some PvE Only Spells that you can draft without affecting your chances to see spells of that quality.

PvE Only Spells are Epics that don’t lower your chance to pick up other epic skills. They only work in PvE, but since they don’t lower your chance to see more epics, you can pick them up to augment your build and make sure you and your group can make it through. There are currently three available PvE Only Spells:

• Rebuke
  • A New PvE melee interrupt in Retribution Paladin
• Fizzle
  • New PvE Ranged interrupt in Arcane mage
• Purify
  • A spell that was never used in the past has been converted to PvE Only
  • Now dispels magic, too. 

New PvE Only spells may get added over time, but for now, you can use the three above to bring some utility to your group without lowering your chance to get more rares, epics, or legendaries!

Mythic Raiding 

In past seasons, the gap between Heroic and Ascended raids was so large that guilds fell apart trying to bridge it.

In Season 8, Mythic Raids arrive as a new raid difficulty between Heroic and Ascended, designed to bridge the gap between these difficulties. Mythic Raids allow the difficulty curve to increase in a steady incline, rather than a brick wall. Mythic Raids will be flexible between 10 and 25 players, so that you can tackle them with however many guild mates you have.

Mythic Raids will have the mechanic complexity of Ascended with tuning that falls cleanly between heroic and ascended

Ascended Changes

In addition, past released Ascended difficulty raids are now flexible between 10 and 25 players, allowing you to raid at ALL difficulties with however many allies you’ve got! However, realm first achievements will still require guilds to compete a new raid at either 10 or 25 man players, just like before, to qualify for Realm First. This keeps the integrity of this essential competition.

As Heroes move into new Flex Mode Raiding on the difficulty they chose, it’s important to be aware that breakpoints don’t exist like some heroes might fear they do in Flex Difficulties. You’re able to bring as many allies as you want into any raid or difficulty, and the challenge of that raid will increase in proportion to each individual member, not at certain number thresholds: going from 16 to 18 allies isn’t going to suddenly jump the difficulty curve up a level. With Flex Raiding, the difficulty of the raid, and the loot it provides, is adjusted based on each individual ally you bring–not when you reach a certain number of raiders.

Mythic Vanilla PvE Reworks

Vanilla dungeons and raids are iconic, but their mechanics are outdated. Throughout Season 8, Vanilla Dungeons and Raids receive updates to their mechanics to make them more fun, engaging, and modern. These include new spells with interesting ways to engage with, so that you’re not just mashing one button and standing in one spot for 5 minutes each time a boss happens. Many dungeons already had some updates, and as Season 8 goes on, even more Vanilla Dungeons will be brought up to speed.

These updates will apply in Mythic 0 and Mythic+ Difficulties! Additionally, you can find some of these new boss spells as Worldforged Enchantments, allowing you to harness the power of bosses you slay.

PvP

3v3 Solo Queue

3v3 Solo queue comes to Season 8!

3v3 Solo Queue allows heroes to individually group up, join a team, and leap into intense 3v3 combat! This opens up the chance for everyone to dive into a more dynamic Arena experience, and allows different builds to be viable in arena even if you’re by yourself! With solo queue, you can queue up and get placed with 2 other Heroes around your rating, and the three of you can charge in to do battle against three other solo queue Heroes. 

3v3 Solo Queue will award the most arena points of any bracket offering you:

• Wins
  • 70 Arena Points
  • 50 Marks of Ascension
  • 3 Mystic Orbs
  • 3 Mystic Runes
• Losses
  • 35 Arena Points per loss
  • 30 Marks of Ascension
  • 2 Mystic Orbs
  • 2 Mystic Runes

High Risk Updates

Season 8 unleashes brand new High Risk updates that help open up High Risk to ANY player that wants to try it out. There are a LOT of updates, and the main ones are right here:

Tier Zones

Tier Zones are High Risk Zones that have different risks associated with them. These different risk zones allow every hero to find the risk that they’re comfortable with, if they’re interested in High Risk PvP.

In Tier 1 Zones, Heroes only drop items from their bags. You’ll never drop gear, and that means you can empty your bags, jump out into the open world to search for High Risk materials and Bloodforged gear, and know that you’ll never lose more than what you found in that session. Tier 1 zones are a GREAT way to dip your feet into High Risk, and allow any and all Heroes looking to PvP a place to fight.

Tier 2 zones are the next step up: you’ll drop gear if you die, but you can protect what you’re wearing with Fel Commutation. Tier 2 zones are most comparable to current high risk: you can use gold to protect your gear, discover potent High Risk materials used in Crafting recipes, and get your hands on Bloodforged Gear to power up.

Tier 3 zones are where you’ll feel the wrath of Ascension’s Sweatkings. Felcom doesn’t work, and you’re guaranteed to get gear from people you slaughter. The most ball busting battles take place in tier 3 zones, so only go there if you’re ready for the sweatiest encounters imaginable. It’s also the only place you’ll find Heroic Bloodforged Gear. 

Each tier zone has both a 1v1 Honorable Combat version, and a Group PvP version, so that you can go where you want with the friends you’ve got.

Tier 1 

• 1v1: Ungoro Crater
• Group PvP: Azshara, Burning Steppes

Tier 2

• 1v1: Western Plaguelands
• Group PvP: Eastern Plaguelands

Tier 3

• 1v1: Winterspring
• Group PvP: Silithus

Bloodbound Chests

Hidden Caches and Monster Nests are now a fun mini-game. When you find one, you’ll get a Bloodbound Chest. These chests contain loot, and even Heroic Bloodforged Gear in Tier 3 zones, but to open them you’ll need to escape the zone and return to a Sanguine Altar, located in major cities. You’ll also need a Bloody Essence: a consumable found off monsters in Tier 3 Zones.

Bloodbound Chests introduce a game of cat and mouse to PvP zones, imbuing a rush of adrenaline into your High Risk experience. When you find a Bloodbound Chest, you’ll need to escape with it back to a major city to unlock the gear inside. It’s not easy, though! While holding a Bloodbound Chest, you’ll be afflicted with No Retreat: a spell that makes teleporting and hearthstone effects impossible. Run your ass back to major cities to unlock the chest and get sick loot.

Bloodbound Chests and Material events will both become active with Zul’Gurub.

Good luck in Season 8, Heroes!