As the second weekend of League 3 draws to a close you have provided a huge collection of feedback and data on the new Legendary Mystic Enchants. We have a batch of changes and adjustments based on your feedback and two new Legendary Mystic Enchants to play with.

New Legendary: Beast and Blade

Transform your pet into your primary weapon. Focus your combat skills on empowering your pet and creating openings for your pet to deal devastating damage to your enemies. Beast and Blade opens up new synergies between Beast Masters and Rogues. 

Your combo point generating rogue abilities grant your pet a stack of Blade Beast, granting your pet 5% of your attack power and agility, increasing your pet’s damage by 10% and reducing their damage taken by 5%. Stacks up to 5.

Hemorrhage grants Blood Focus. Causing you to gain 5 energy when your pet deals damage with a special attack.

Your damaging rogue finisher moves have a 20% chance per combo point to cause your pet’s next 2 special attacks to deal 50% more damage. Additionally, you have a 20% chance per combo point to grant a stack of Plan of Attack. Stacks up to 3. 

Dispatch consumes all stacks of Plan of Attack to increase your pets special attack damage by 80% per stack consumed for 5 seconds.

New Legendary: Disciple of the Tide

The power of the tides can only be harnessed with the greatest discipline. Shield your tank from powerful blows and store tidal power to unleash bursts of healing to allies or hammer your enemies. Disciple of the Tides opens up new synergies between Discipline and Restoration Shamans.

Chain Heal no longer consumes your Riptide.

Your Shaman Critical Heals reduce the active cooldown of your penance by 1 second and grant you a stack of Disciple of the Tides. Disciple of the Tides increases the damage or healing of your next Penance by 5% of your healing power per stack. Stacks up to 5.

Your Penance strikes grant you a charge of Tidal Swell. You can store 5 charges of Tidal Swell at a time.

Lesser Healing Wave also teaches you Tidal Shield. Tidal Shield heals your target and applies an absorb shield for 5 seconds for 50% of the healing done(10% for full overheal). Additional casts will increase the absorb effect up to 35% of your targets max health. Requires a charge of Tidal Swell to cast.

Astral Bomber

The consistent feedback around Astral Bomber has focused on the frustration around the ramp up time and maintaining stacks between pulls in dungeons. The most effective way to play Astral Bomber required confusing and difficult juggling of Haste buffs and cooldowns, resulting in a lot of work for not enough payoff. These changes will improve the overall feel of the enchant and allow for more diversity in how you choose to build it.

Solar Bomber and Lunar Bomber no longer have a duration, but will still expire when their respective Lunar Cycle ends. What this means is that you will retain the ramp up from your previous Lunar Cycle, even if your healer needs a moment to resurrect a fallen ally or regain mana.

Solar Bomber and Lunar Bomber now stack up to 5, instead of 20, and the damage increase has been increased to 3% per stack, increased from 1%. Building around haste will remain an effective way to play, but will no longer be mandatory to maximize your damage output. This will result in a significant boost to damage for most Astral Bombers, as you now gain the same power from reaching 5 stacks as previously reaching 15(which didn’t happen often).

• Removed the duration from Solar Bomber and Lunar Bomber
• Solar Bomber and Lunar Bomber now grant 3% per stack, but now only stack up to 5.

Wind Rager

We are really excited to see so many people enjoying Wind Rager and we have some further improvements to ensure that remains the case. 

Some of you have expressed that it felt weird to lose your damage buff to Wind Strike when you triggered Rampant Tornado. Rampant Tornado will now increase your Wind Strike damage by 20% for the duration. Additionally, we have corrected a tooltip issue where Rampant Tornado incorrectly stated it granted 40% attack speed. We have fixed the tooltip to correctly state it gives 30% attack speed. The amount of attack speed granted is unchanged.

Upon testing our upcoming changes we discovered a bug that was preventing Rising Winds from increasing the damage of Wind Strike. We have corrected the bug, and after testing the enchant with the bug fixes we lowered the intended increased damage from 5% to 2%. You will still effectively see +2% damage compared to before.

• Fixed a visual only error where Rampant Tornado stated it gave 40% attack speed instead of 30%.
• Rampant Tornado now increases Wind Strike damage by 20%.
• Fixed a bug where Rising Winds was not properly increasing Wind Strike Damage. Lowered the intended value to 2%. This will still result in gaining an additional 2% per stack.

Tree of Wrath

This change was simple but saw the gameplay massively improved. Many of you asked for additional ways to deal damage, and less gaps between being able to do so. The cooldown reduction on Living Lightning previously could only trigger once per cast. Now Chain Heal will reduce the cooldown by 4 seconds for each target you critically heal. Living Lightning can also reduce its own cooldown when critically healing! That makes it possible for a full crit Chain Heal or Living Lightning to reduce the cooldown to only 3 seconds, or completely reset it when combined with Transcendental Embrace.

• Living Lightning cooldown reduction can now trigger for each target critically healed by Chain Heal or Living Lightning.

Dark Surgeon

This was a hard one, as the feedback has been largely positive, but as the new paint starts to fade the flaws will start to surface, and we wanted to get in front of those changes to ensure Dark Surgeon remains a fun, competitive hybrid healer now and in the future. 

The consistent feedback around Dark Surgeon centered around the ramp up time, mana issues, range and a lack of emergency heal for those moments your tank needed a little more than field surgery.

Ramp up time on a healer can be really scary, especially when the enemies you are fighting generally don’t ramp up their damage. To address this we have made Hippocratic Oath a permanent effect, now increasing your healing by 20% of your attack power, but reducing your healing received by 30%.

With Hippocratic Oath no longer empowering Dark Transfusion, but also always gaining the 20% increased healing from attack power, we have lowered the base and scaling of the heal effect to ensure proccing Lesser Circle of Healing with your rogue finishers is not redundant. We have increased the scaling of Dark Transfusion’s damage, and cut the mana cost in half to alleviate mana concerns and account for it being a more normal part of your rotation during aoe fights.

Lesser Circle of Healing had a habit of leaving your ranged allies a bit out of range. The range has been increased to 30 yards from 15 yards to increase the value (and quality of life) Dark Surgeon’s bring to raids.

To wrap up the mana issues and provide an oh shit emergency heal, your rogue finishers now have a 20% chance per combo point to grant you a stack of Trauma Care, reducing the mana cost of Greater Heal and Flash Heal by 15%. Greater Heal consumes all stacks to reduce the cast time by 33% and deal 15% increased Healing. Stacks up to 3.

• Hippocratic Oath is now a permanent buff, increasing your healing power by 20% of your attack power, but reduces healing received by 30%.
• Increased the scaling of Dark Transfusion’s damage, but reduced the base healing to account for it always benefitting from Hippocratic Oath.
• Reduced the mana cost of Dark Transfusion by 50%.
• Increased the range of Lesser Circle of Healing to 30 yards, increased from 15 yards.
• NEW: Your damaging rogue finishers have a 20% chance per combo point to grant you Trauma Care, reducing the mana cost of Greater Heal and Flash by 15%. Greater Heal consumes all stacks to reduce the cast time by 33% and deal 15% increased Healing. Stacks up to 3.

Ruthlessness Rare Mystic Enchant

This Mystic Enchant proved to be highly problematic, to the point that we were designing entire Legendary Mystic Enchants around its existence. It was a severely limiting factor that resulted in the recent adjustments you saw to Winds of Winter and Charred Bite (and would have resulted in more to come). This Mystic Enchant stacked with the talent of the same name, as well as many other combo point generating effects, resulted in us having to choose between two different options:  1) We could balance our current and upcoming Legendary Enchants using finishing moves around the Ruthlessness Rare Enchant, leaving builds that did not know, or did not use it, left behind. 2) We could adjust the Rare Mystic Enchant.

We added a 6 second internal cooldown to the Ruthlessless Rare Mystic Enchant. The talent remains unchanged. This allows for powerful interactions, without effectively turning finisher moves into one button builds.

Hoplite

As a direct result of the change to the Ruthlessless Rare enchant, we are now able to remove the Cooldown on Shield Strike. The previous issue allowed for casting Shield Strike and immediately having 3+ combo points to immediately recast it with no GCDs inbetween.

• Shield Strike no longer has a cooldown.

What’s Next? 

We will continue making daily improvements to these Legendary Enchants, so keep your eyes on the changelog and be sure to join the conversation and share your feedback in our Discord! https://discord.gg/mmo

Improving Ascension is a never ending journey. There are always more improvements we want to make than hours in the day, but tomorrow has more hours! Here’s some of what we have immediately planned for those hours:

• Reworking some mechanics and major improvements to Cauterizing Fire.
• Adjustments to improve the flow and rotation of Elemental Destruction.
• Buffs to Thunder Slam to restore power lost as a result of an emergency bug fix.
• Dark Penance: Unlock new synergy between Discipline Priest, Demonology and Shadow casting!
• Elemental Assassin: Unlock new synergy between Elemental and Assassination