The War Within Alpha - Mage Updates
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
Hello Mages!
We have some Arcane Mage changes hitting the War Within Alpha today, and we want to go over them here. As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we have goals that span all mage specializations.
These are:
Today we’re talking about Arcane, so let’s dive into the specifics.
Radiant Spark
Arcane Mage has long had the reputation of being one of the most complicated and skill expressive specializations in World of Warcraft. A large contributing factor to this is the way in which Radiant Spark asks you to optimize your rotation. Radiant Spark’s damage bonus was so substantial and so dramatically punished you for using Arcane Missiles, that you had to go about your big burn in a very scripted fashion. With the introduction of Shifting Power, Arcane Mage gained access to mini-burns that can also utilize Radiant Spark, but to facilitate optimal usage of the spell those also had to be very scripted-- and worse yet-- your mini burn script was different than your big burn script.
All of that to say, we don’t think that the exciting and challenging part of Arcane should be the memorization of a large script. Arcane’s burn gameplay should support and be enhanced by the mechanics and talents you have, not circumvent them. We feel confident that the removal of Radiant Spark in its current fashion is the right path forward to achieve that goal.
The soul of Radiant Spark will live on, however, through a new talent: Magi’s Spark. Magi’s Spark accomplishes a similar goal to Radiant Spark by making Touch of the Magi more of an exciting moment, but it now rewards you for utilizing each of your core rotational Arcane spells.
Opt-In Complexity
We’re interested in preserving Arcane’s legacy as a skill-expressive specialization, but we must also recognize that there is a considerable population of Arcane Mage players who engage with the specialization for its visual identity and fantasy-- less so for the challenging gameplay. As Arcane Mage currently stands, it does not support simpler playstyles and thus, less informed Arcane Mages will produce very middling results.
Similar to other trees across the game, the Arcane Mage tree is getting some choice nodes and supporting talents that are meant to provide meaningful throughput while offsetting some of the specialization’s inherent complexity-- and maybe letting you remove a button or two off of your action bars along the way.
As with Fire Mage, we plan on tuning the more “challenging” talents to be the most competitive choices, but we will be making sure the gap between a complex talent and its simpler alternative is small enough that you don’t feel like you’re making a huge mistake by opting out of the complexity.
Arcane Missiles
Arcane Missile’s damage and excitement was difficult to balance alongside its accessibility. If Arcane Missiles ever became too powerful, it would dominate Arcane’s rotation and become its highest priority in all situations. By restricting access to Arcane Missiles to only be castable when you have Clearcasting, it enables us to increase its damage and expand its range of effects in a more healthy way without compromising the rest of your rotation.
Clearcasting Effects
We’ve observed that there has been some frustration around effects that key into consuming Clearcasting since there can rarely be long streaks where players won’t get a proc. We’re watching the discussion around these effects, and are being sensitive to the frustration these effects might cause. Sunfury and Spellslinger both grant increased access to Clearcasting, which should smooth out the rate at which you receive Clearcasting and quell some of that frustration, but if this still ends up being a large point of frustration, expect us to take action on it.
Complexity
Increasing the approachability of Arcane Mage was a big pillar of this talent tree redesign, and we hope that those of you who have been intimidated by Arcane’s complexity in the past will give the specialization another shot once you have access to these changes.
As we gather feedback and continue to iterate on these changes, keep in mind that our goal moving forward is to move the skill expression of Arcane Mage into lining various buffs and effects up in preparation for your burn. Mastering the new talents and effects, and ensuring you’re managing these in a proper fashion to best utilize them during Touch of the Magi will be the differentiating factor between good and great Arcane Mages. Expect future changes to support this vision.
That’s all for this update. We’re excited to read your feedback on this new iteration of Arcane Mage!
The War Within Alpha - Warlock Updates
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
Greetings Warlocks.
You’re going to see some Demonology changes in the War Within Alpha build today, alongside some additional changes to Affliction, Hellcaller, and Soul Harvester.
Destruction Warlocks – we’re working on changes for you that will become available for testing in a future build.
Here’s some context for the Demonology changes you’ll find in this build. As a refresher, here are the goals we previously stated for Demonology:
Demonic Cores
Over the course of Dragonflight, we’ve wanted to and tried to reduce the number of Demonic Cores available to Demonology warlocks to rein in their mobility, resource generation, and reduce the amount of rotational time spent going back and forth between Hand of Gul’dan and Demonbolt only. In addition, we want Demonbolt to return to being a moment rather than be your primary rotational button.
In lieu of these goals, we are removing Demonic Knowledge to reduce the frequency of Demonic Cores and will make further adjustments down the road if the rate of Demonic Cores remains too high. Over the course of alpha and beta we will be tuning Demonology to compensate for this change.
Doom
This is our first iteration of Doom going into The War Within and will be iterating based off feedback we receive. We wanted to try bringing back a castable version of Doom, rather than a proc, while avoiding making it required to cast Doom multiple times before being able to perform your rotation. At the same time though, we want you to think about how you use Doom and when it is cast rather than bring back an effect like Hand of Doom that makes it largely passive.
Nether Portal
In this alpha build of The War Within, you’ll see that Nether Portal has been removed. While we love the fantasy that Nether Portal provides and that it created a moment that felt different rotationally, its gameplay and performance proved difficult to optimize. Too many major cooldowns can increase the number of peaks and valleys Demonology’s output can experience and how much effect the duration of an encounter can have on its performance.
We’d like to spend some time workshopping a new design for Nether Portal and have it return as a healthier addition to Demonology’s toolkit in the future.
What’s Next?
We’ll continue to read through feedback and the discussions happening across the community. As mentioned last week, these changes are by no means final, and we plan to iterate based off your thoughts and our own playtesting. Thank you for the discussions thus far and we’ll have more updates to share soon!
The War Within Alpha - Warrior Updates
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
There are a few Warrior updates in today’s Alpha build.
After giving Arms and Fury access to both Bladestorm and Ravager, it was clear that Ravager had strong advantages in all situations. We’d like Bladestorm to be a strong pick for burst AOE, so we’re buffing its damage significantly, and reducing Ravager’s damage slightly. This should help make the choice between these abilities more meaningful and let each ability shine in different situations.
Arms
We’ve heard the feedback that the Arms AOE rotation lacks definition, so we’re making adjustments to Cleave to make it the centerpiece of Arms’ AOE rotation in The War Within. We think this will give a unique feel to Arms’ AOE rotation while bringing a classic iconic Warrior ability back to the limelight. We want Overpower to be an important part of Arms’ AOE rotation as well, but Dreadnaught was simply too strong in all situations. We’re reducing the damage from Dreadnaught and buffing Strength of Arms to put the choice between those talents on equal footing. This is not intended to be an overall reduction to Arms’ AOE damage, we simply feel that we’d rather Arms’ damage come from their direct damage abilities hitting harder and the subsequent bleeds and that will be reflected in the ongoing tuning of Arms overall.
Fury
We’ve also heard the feedback that Bloodthirst was not an exciting ability to use and that it felt disconnected from the rest of the Fury kit. To address this, we’re giving Bloodthirst a significant damage boost as well as adjusting several talents to affect Bloodthirst that did not previously, and adding new functionality with Deft Experience causing Bloodthirst to extend your current Enrage and changing Bloodcraze to introduce aa new interaction between Raging Blow and Bloodthirst. Our goal is to continue and extend Bloodthirst’s interaction with Enrage in new ways, as well as it contributing to Fury’s overall damage and survivability.
Protection
Protection Warrior has tools like Spell Reflect and Spell Block to protect it from magic, but its defensive toolkit is weak to ongoing or frequent magic damage. Fight Through the Flames is a new tool to help warriors survive that type of damage. We’ll keep an eye on its tuning. Additionally, we removed the damage penalty from Defensive Stance for Protection Warriors. Fighting defensively is what Protection specializes in, and we want to reduce the pressure on players to forego its defensive benefits for more damage.
The War Within Alpha - Paladin Updates
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
Hello, Retribution Paladins.
This week’s update is about quality of life improvements.
Wake of Ashes
Retribution Paladin relies on Wake of Ashes for both of their Hero Talent trees, and it is core to Retribution’s rotation. With these in mind, we moved Wake of Ashes before the 2nd gate. Additionally, we’ve noticed that aiming Wake of Ashes caused frustrations when strafing and we’ve made changes to make it feel good while strafing as well.
Expurgation and Templar Slash
Blade of Justice and Templar Strikes are deeply connected to the Holy Power economy, and they both have talent and stat interactions that makes you press them more often. The damage over time effects from these abilities were losing value due to being reapplied in a short cadence. Which in return made pressing your core buttons feel worse. We’ve decided to make the damage over time effects roll over their remaining damage value into the next application.
Templar Strikes
We’re increasing the cooldown of Templar Strikes because it requires you to press more buttons than your usual rotation. We’re compensating by increasing its damage. We believe this change will be beneficial to the health of the rotation.
Continue reading...
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
Hello Mages!
We have some Arcane Mage changes hitting the War Within Alpha today, and we want to go over them here. As mentioned a couple of weeks ago, we have goals that span all mage specializations.
These are:
- Allow you to acquire each specialization’s core gameplay with less talent point investment.
- Simplify rotational complexity.
- Provide new nodes that can help you adapt your damage profile to better match a given encounter’s demands.
- Provide competitive choice nodes that let you opt-out of complex gameplay.
Today we’re talking about Arcane, so let’s dive into the specifics.
Radiant Spark
Arcane Mage has long had the reputation of being one of the most complicated and skill expressive specializations in World of Warcraft. A large contributing factor to this is the way in which Radiant Spark asks you to optimize your rotation. Radiant Spark’s damage bonus was so substantial and so dramatically punished you for using Arcane Missiles, that you had to go about your big burn in a very scripted fashion. With the introduction of Shifting Power, Arcane Mage gained access to mini-burns that can also utilize Radiant Spark, but to facilitate optimal usage of the spell those also had to be very scripted-- and worse yet-- your mini burn script was different than your big burn script.
All of that to say, we don’t think that the exciting and challenging part of Arcane should be the memorization of a large script. Arcane’s burn gameplay should support and be enhanced by the mechanics and talents you have, not circumvent them. We feel confident that the removal of Radiant Spark in its current fashion is the right path forward to achieve that goal.
The soul of Radiant Spark will live on, however, through a new talent: Magi’s Spark. Magi’s Spark accomplishes a similar goal to Radiant Spark by making Touch of the Magi more of an exciting moment, but it now rewards you for utilizing each of your core rotational Arcane spells.
Opt-In Complexity
We’re interested in preserving Arcane’s legacy as a skill-expressive specialization, but we must also recognize that there is a considerable population of Arcane Mage players who engage with the specialization for its visual identity and fantasy-- less so for the challenging gameplay. As Arcane Mage currently stands, it does not support simpler playstyles and thus, less informed Arcane Mages will produce very middling results.
Similar to other trees across the game, the Arcane Mage tree is getting some choice nodes and supporting talents that are meant to provide meaningful throughput while offsetting some of the specialization’s inherent complexity-- and maybe letting you remove a button or two off of your action bars along the way.
As with Fire Mage, we plan on tuning the more “challenging” talents to be the most competitive choices, but we will be making sure the gap between a complex talent and its simpler alternative is small enough that you don’t feel like you’re making a huge mistake by opting out of the complexity.
Arcane Missiles
Arcane Missile’s damage and excitement was difficult to balance alongside its accessibility. If Arcane Missiles ever became too powerful, it would dominate Arcane’s rotation and become its highest priority in all situations. By restricting access to Arcane Missiles to only be castable when you have Clearcasting, it enables us to increase its damage and expand its range of effects in a more healthy way without compromising the rest of your rotation.
Clearcasting Effects
We’ve observed that there has been some frustration around effects that key into consuming Clearcasting since there can rarely be long streaks where players won’t get a proc. We’re watching the discussion around these effects, and are being sensitive to the frustration these effects might cause. Sunfury and Spellslinger both grant increased access to Clearcasting, which should smooth out the rate at which you receive Clearcasting and quell some of that frustration, but if this still ends up being a large point of frustration, expect us to take action on it.
Complexity
Increasing the approachability of Arcane Mage was a big pillar of this talent tree redesign, and we hope that those of you who have been intimidated by Arcane’s complexity in the past will give the specialization another shot once you have access to these changes.
As we gather feedback and continue to iterate on these changes, keep in mind that our goal moving forward is to move the skill expression of Arcane Mage into lining various buffs and effects up in preparation for your burn. Mastering the new talents and effects, and ensuring you’re managing these in a proper fashion to best utilize them during Touch of the Magi will be the differentiating factor between good and great Arcane Mages. Expect future changes to support this vision.
That’s all for this update. We’re excited to read your feedback on this new iteration of Arcane Mage!
The War Within Alpha - Warlock Updates
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
Greetings Warlocks.
You’re going to see some Demonology changes in the War Within Alpha build today, alongside some additional changes to Affliction, Hellcaller, and Soul Harvester.
Destruction Warlocks – we’re working on changes for you that will become available for testing in a future build.
Here’s some context for the Demonology changes you’ll find in this build. As a refresher, here are the goals we previously stated for Demonology:
- Reduce the amount of resources Demonology generates.
- Redesign Doom to be an attractive talent choice.
- Reduce the amount of major cooldowns Demonology has access to.
Demonic Cores
Over the course of Dragonflight, we’ve wanted to and tried to reduce the number of Demonic Cores available to Demonology warlocks to rein in their mobility, resource generation, and reduce the amount of rotational time spent going back and forth between Hand of Gul’dan and Demonbolt only. In addition, we want Demonbolt to return to being a moment rather than be your primary rotational button.
In lieu of these goals, we are removing Demonic Knowledge to reduce the frequency of Demonic Cores and will make further adjustments down the road if the rate of Demonic Cores remains too high. Over the course of alpha and beta we will be tuning Demonology to compensate for this change.
Doom
This is our first iteration of Doom going into The War Within and will be iterating based off feedback we receive. We wanted to try bringing back a castable version of Doom, rather than a proc, while avoiding making it required to cast Doom multiple times before being able to perform your rotation. At the same time though, we want you to think about how you use Doom and when it is cast rather than bring back an effect like Hand of Doom that makes it largely passive.
Nether Portal
In this alpha build of The War Within, you’ll see that Nether Portal has been removed. While we love the fantasy that Nether Portal provides and that it created a moment that felt different rotationally, its gameplay and performance proved difficult to optimize. Too many major cooldowns can increase the number of peaks and valleys Demonology’s output can experience and how much effect the duration of an encounter can have on its performance.
We’d like to spend some time workshopping a new design for Nether Portal and have it return as a healthier addition to Demonology’s toolkit in the future.
What’s Next?
We’ll continue to read through feedback and the discussions happening across the community. As mentioned last week, these changes are by no means final, and we plan to iterate based off your thoughts and our own playtesting. Thank you for the discussions thus far and we’ll have more updates to share soon!
The War Within Alpha - Warrior Updates
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
There are a few Warrior updates in today’s Alpha build.
After giving Arms and Fury access to both Bladestorm and Ravager, it was clear that Ravager had strong advantages in all situations. We’d like Bladestorm to be a strong pick for burst AOE, so we’re buffing its damage significantly, and reducing Ravager’s damage slightly. This should help make the choice between these abilities more meaningful and let each ability shine in different situations.
Arms
We’ve heard the feedback that the Arms AOE rotation lacks definition, so we’re making adjustments to Cleave to make it the centerpiece of Arms’ AOE rotation in The War Within. We think this will give a unique feel to Arms’ AOE rotation while bringing a classic iconic Warrior ability back to the limelight. We want Overpower to be an important part of Arms’ AOE rotation as well, but Dreadnaught was simply too strong in all situations. We’re reducing the damage from Dreadnaught and buffing Strength of Arms to put the choice between those talents on equal footing. This is not intended to be an overall reduction to Arms’ AOE damage, we simply feel that we’d rather Arms’ damage come from their direct damage abilities hitting harder and the subsequent bleeds and that will be reflected in the ongoing tuning of Arms overall.
Fury
We’ve also heard the feedback that Bloodthirst was not an exciting ability to use and that it felt disconnected from the rest of the Fury kit. To address this, we’re giving Bloodthirst a significant damage boost as well as adjusting several talents to affect Bloodthirst that did not previously, and adding new functionality with Deft Experience causing Bloodthirst to extend your current Enrage and changing Bloodcraze to introduce aa new interaction between Raging Blow and Bloodthirst. Our goal is to continue and extend Bloodthirst’s interaction with Enrage in new ways, as well as it contributing to Fury’s overall damage and survivability.
Protection
Protection Warrior has tools like Spell Reflect and Spell Block to protect it from magic, but its defensive toolkit is weak to ongoing or frequent magic damage. Fight Through the Flames is a new tool to help warriors survive that type of damage. We’ll keep an eye on its tuning. Additionally, we removed the damage penalty from Defensive Stance for Protection Warriors. Fighting defensively is what Protection specializes in, and we want to reduce the pressure on players to forego its defensive benefits for more damage.
The War Within Alpha - Paladin Updates
Originally Posted by Blizzard (Blue Tracker
/ Official Forums
)
Hello, Retribution Paladins.
This week’s update is about quality of life improvements.
Wake of Ashes
Retribution Paladin relies on Wake of Ashes for both of their Hero Talent trees, and it is core to Retribution’s rotation. With these in mind, we moved Wake of Ashes before the 2nd gate. Additionally, we’ve noticed that aiming Wake of Ashes caused frustrations when strafing and we’ve made changes to make it feel good while strafing as well.
Expurgation and Templar Slash
Blade of Justice and Templar Strikes are deeply connected to the Holy Power economy, and they both have talent and stat interactions that makes you press them more often. The damage over time effects from these abilities were losing value due to being reapplied in a short cadence. Which in return made pressing your core buttons feel worse. We’ve decided to make the damage over time effects roll over their remaining damage value into the next application.
Templar Strikes
We’re increasing the cooldown of Templar Strikes because it requires you to press more buttons than your usual rotation. We’re compensating by increasing its damage. We believe this change will be beneficial to the health of the rotation.
Continue reading...