Blizzard Seeks Feedback on Shadow Priest, Survival Hunter, Holy Paladin, Sword Rogue, and Warrior in Season of Discovery

• Author: Luxrah
• Date: April 19, 2024
• Updated: April 19, 2024
• Expansion: WoW Classic

Senior Game Producer Josh Greenfield (AKA Aggrend) has taken to Twitter/X again, this time shedding some light on the team’s thoughts about certain builds in Season of Discovery and asking for player feedback. It seems the team has their eye on a few different builds that are currently in need of attention for one reason or another.

Among them, Shadow Priests, who Aggrend says are due for a damage buff. He also mentions some “new stuff” coming at 60 for Shadow Priest utility and the desire to make Mind Flay have a place in their rotation again.

The team also wants to do something with the Survival tree for Hunters, particularly to make it work with the new melee runes. They’re looking for ideas to make deep Survival more worthwhile.

There’s a mention of Holy Paladins potentially getting a group heal. The devs want Paladin healers to have more choices/options for healing.

The next build mentioned is Sword Rogues, which can apparently expect some adjustments in the next update. Saber Slash is mentioned as a targeted ability that they want to make more worth using. It sounds like that will most likely come in the form as a straight damage buff.

Finally, Aggrend talks about the difficulty in balancing Rage for Warriors at this level and going into 60. The developers are considering normalizing Rage, which would constitute a significant overall nerf to the class’s scaling.

The entire text of the tweet can be read below, and if you continue scrolling you’ll see the original tweet. The developers are asking for feedback, so you’re invited to reply to Aggrend with your ideas.

The team focused on SoD has spent a good chunk of the last few days chewing on a rather large list of class adjustments coming soon (likely actually soon, not “soon tm” soon). As always we want to prime everyone that it’s not going to fix every single thing everyone wanted, but we are continuing to iterate.

We’ve been watching discords and forums for ideas and suggestions as we go, and while that’s fine and good, I figured it might be a fun exercise to probe for a few suggestions here to a few targeted questions.

Disclaimer; there may be an excellent idea in here that you love that we can’t execute on for whatever reason.
Game dev isn’t easy and sometimes you have to pass on a good idea for a myriad of reasons. It’s nothing sinister and its not us being tone deaf. Many things are also too big to hotfix so we have to think about what we do now vs. next phase.

So, feel free to post suggestions or links to media with good suggestions in reply. Please do keep it civil though both towards me/the team and each other. I’ve been increasingly having to mute/block folks with abusive or unhelpful commentary so let’s all be chill humans together.

Lastly, please try and frame your suggestion with both a) the issue to be addressed, and b) your suggestion–phrased as concisely as possible. We likely won’t have time to read super long posts/threads to find the meat of your point, so this will help (he says, while typing a super long post himself).

Anyway, here goes:

1. Shadow DPS – We’d like to increase damage while allowing them to still shine in terms of group utility, particularly because their utility/value is likely to increase even further at 60 with some new stuff coming. One thing we also keep coming back to as well is wanting to restore mind flay to having a place in the toolkit. With that in mind, how would you suggest improving Shadow DPS with those goals in mind?

2. Survival Tree for Hunters – We know a lot of melee hunters really want Survival to be a thing and we agree that it really fits that “RPG ranger” class fantasy. Currently, BM tends to outstrip it in terms of raw output. What do you think could be interesting to zhuzh this up and make a deepish survival investment interesting?

3. Holy Paladins – We did you guys a bit dirty by not giving you interesting buttons to push like every other healing class. Viewed through a level 60 vanilla lens holy is great, but in SoD it leaves a lot to be desired. One thing we’ve been discussing is a group heal or some sort of proactive heal mechanic for Holy, but interested to hear some concise ideas here.

4. Sword Rogues – We have some adjustments coming in the upcoming update but we are open to ideas for how to make Saber Slash and other sword gameplay compelling. Might simply be a “do moar damage” adjustment that fixes this in the end, but we are interested in “feelsy” adjustment ideas too.

5. Warriors – Rage is a problematic mechanic because more damage = more rage = more damage = more rage ad infinitum. This is going to become more problematic at 60 as well. If we had it to do over again, we’d likely have normalized rage (i.e. you don’t get extra rage when you do more damage/crit) at the start of the season and focused on major changes to their gameplay to compensate. The way it works now really hamstrings the design options for Warriors as we have to worry about the historically best dps in the game becoming even better later and forcing us to do an absolutely massive nerf which everyone would hate. To you, what would be a good trade for some form of normalized rage at 60 if we had to do such a thing?

To close us out–at this point, we are always open to novel ideas for any class, including things that don’t just strictly borrow from future expansions. Our philosophy on this has shifted from when we started developing this season and now we’d love to experiment with totally NEW mechanics (that ideally fit somewhat plausibly into the classic ecosystem). Not to say we won’t use future expansion spells, but there’s a willingness to expand our horizons a bit.

Anyway sorry for the length. We’ve had a lot of fun just trawling discords and forums recently but figured I’d just throw this into the maelstrom and see what we get here as well. Thanks!

EDIT: I am not answering questions here, so sorry if you want to ask something. My thoughts are irrelevant to this discussion and we want YOUR ideas.