PTR Development Notes: Blackrock Eruption Event, Tank AoE Changes, & Warrior Dragonslayer Buff

WoW Classic Season of Discovery Phase 4 PTR Development Notes – June 21st, 2024

Build: 55244patch1.15.3

Testing Focus
We’ve made a number of adjustments to classes since our previous release and we are continuing to review feedback. We’d encourage you to test the new changes and continue to provide commentary in this forum. We greatly appreciate all of the feedback we’ve received so far!

This week we’ve also significantly buffed Testwerk’s health and damage to allow the fight to last around twice as long and to put a bit more pressure on healers and tanks for better test data. Please give him a try!

Lastly, we are also enabling the Blackrock Eruption events on PTR to allow players to test that as well. You can find more information about the Blackrock Eruption below. Please note that this content is still a work-in-progress.

Blackrock Eruption

Occurring every 2 hours starting at midnight, the Blackrock Eruption event will occur. While the event is active additional spawns and environmental hazards will occur in Searing Gorge (this will be expanded to Burning Steppes as well in a later update) and players will gain access to new daily quests at Thorium Point. Players will also receive a large bonus to honor gained while inside of Blackrock Mountain. Conversely, players will gain no honor from world PvP while in searing gorge or burning steppes while the event is active.

• Developer’s Note: The intention of this event is an optional activity for players to do each day to earn additional Thorium Brotherhood and Hydraxian Waterlords reputation should they choose to do so, as well as create a flashpoint for World PvP focused on the interior of Blackrock Mountain. We’ve listened to a lot of player feedback around world PvP and these types of events, and while PvP can and should occur on a PvP server, we are going to heavily incentivize you to move your conflicts inside the mountain itself while the event is active with a sizable honor buff inside the mountain. Ultimately, this content is meant to be a lightweight optional activity players can participate in to supplement endgame reputation gain and gain a bit of gold with very modest daily investment of time, as well as to give us a reason to recreate some of the epic battles that we all remember so well inside of Blackrock Mountain (as if we needed a reason!).

General PTR Adjustments
Template Characters

• All class template characters have been updated to account for the changes below.
• Class templates have also been updated to have access to all available flight paths.
• Several classes were missing weapon skills or access to weapons themselves. This has been corrected.
  • Developer’s Note: You will need to re-recrate characters to pick up these fixes.

Vendors

• Vendors have been updated with a few additional consumables.
• Vendors have also been updated to add any new skillbooks that were added since the previous round of PTR (newly created template characters will already have these learned)

Testwerk

• Base damage increased by 50%.
• Hateful strike damage increased by 75%.
• Health doubled.

Class Adjustments

Developer’s Notes on Tanks: We’ve made an adjustment to allow each tank’s primary AoE ability to hit a larger number of targets, in most cases 10 or more. Going into Season of Discovery we hoped to maintain some of the rewarding gameplay and challenge that tanks faced in original wow and keep AoE threat a bit lower relative to newer versions of WoW, but as time has gone by our perspective on this has changed for Season of Discovery as damage dealing classes have gained more AoE tools and damage in general. As a result, we’ve decided to open up each tank classes’ AoE capabilities a bit more. Many groups may find that large pulls in Season of Discovery (with the higher damage that creatures deal, particularly at or near level 60) to be quite deadly, so a good strategy and plan for CC is still recommended in most dungeons. Thank you for all of your feedback on this so far!

Druid

• The Fury of Stormrage rune now states that it allows the use of Wrath while in Tree of Life form.
• Nourish now benefits from the Improved Regrowth talent and benefits from effects that interact with Regrowth.
• Fixed a bug enabling efflorescence ticks from being able to critically hit.
• Elune’s Fires now extends the duration of Moonfire and Sunfire up to its initial duration, but there’s no longer a limit on the number of refreshes per ability.
• Moonkin Form now provides the druid with 2 spellpower per the druid’s character level and allows Insect Swarm, Moonfire, and Sunfire’s damage over time effect to critically hit.
• Dreamstate tooltip updated to reflect that it only triggers from non-periodic critical strikes.
• Improved Swipe now increases the maximum targets on Swipe (Bear) to 10 targets.

Hunter

• The Heart of the Lion aura no longer cancels itself after a few seconds of being active.
• Fixed an issue with the stables preventing hunter pets from being able to be stabled or summoned on the PTR.

Mage

• The Hot Streak rune has been moved to the helm slot.
• The Rewind Time rune has been moved to the wrist slot.

Priest

• Vampiric Touch now gains properly additional benefits from the following talents:
  • Blackout
  • Shadow Affinity
  • Shadow Focus
  • Shadow Reach
  • Darkness
  • Martyrdom
  • Inner Focus
• Pain and Suffering has been adjusted:
  • Mind Blast, Mind Spike, and Mind Flay refresh the duration of your one of your Shadow Word: Pain, Void Plague, or Vampiric Touch abilities on the target back to its maximum duration. The ability with the shortest remaining duration will always be the one refreshed.
• Vampiric Touch now also applies Vampiric Embrace including when it is refreshed by Pain and Suffering
• The curse debuffs cast by Eye of the Void no longer have a cooldown.
• Mind Sear now also damages the primary target.

Paladin

• Divine Light has been moved to the Cloak rune slot.
• The additional damage shield from Divine Light overhealing will now also apply to Beacon of Light targets.
• Fixed an issue causing Holy Shield to deal too much damage.
• Adjusted the tooltip of Hallowed Ground to clarify that damage does not need to be dealt to enemies with consecrate for consecrate to heal allies.
• Fixed an issue allowing the heal over time effect from Fanatacism from being able to crit.
• The Aegis rune now also allows the paladin to gain a 2% chance per talent point in the Reckoning talent learned to trigger the reckoning effect when receiving a melee or ranged attack
• The additional damage over time effect cause by critical strikes with the Righteous Vengeance rune has been increased to 50% of the damage inflicted by the paladin ability that triggered it
• A new spell has been added via spellbook:
  • Divine Steed – Increases the paladin’s movement speed by 100% for 3 seconds. 45 second cooldown.

Rogue

• Fixed an issue preventing more than one rogue’s application of deadly or occult poison from being present on a target.
• Fixed an issue causing Fan of Knives to generate energy from Focused Attacks with off-hand critical strikes.
• The attack power bonus granted from defense skill effect has been moved from Rolling with the Punches to Blade Dance.
• Resolved a bug causing the bonus energy effect from Relentless Strikes to have a chance to proc once per target hit with Crimson Tempest, rather than once per spell cast of Crimson Tempest.
• Poisoned Knife now refunds 5 energy per number of stacks of deadly or occult poison on the target.
• Shuriken Toss now grants 1 combo point per enemy hit and a 30 second cooldown has been added.
• Saber Slash now stacks 3 times instead of 5, granting a 33% damage increase per stack (up from 20%).
  • Developer’s Note: We had an issue in the previous PTR build that the Saber Slash changes that came via hotfix in 1.15.2/phase 3 were missing. This adjustment re-implements those changes into 1.15.4/Phase 4 and improves the usability of Saber Slash as a further adjustment.

Shaman

• While using the Shield Mastery rune, the attack power bonus granted from defense skill is now triggered by the use of Flame Shock
• The attack speed bonus granted by Two-Handed Weapon specialization rune after landing a melee attack on an enemy with a two-handed weapon equipped has been increased to 50%.
• Maelstrom Weapon now has a significantly higher chance to proc with two-handed weapons equipped.
• Molten Blast can now hit up to 10 targets.
• The maximum rank of all weapon imbues now has a 1 hour duration.

Warlock

• The Felguard has gained the Demonic Frenzy ability, causing the Felguard’s melee attacks to grant 5% additional attack power for 10 seconds, stacking up to 10 times.
• Soul Siphon now grants Drain Soul up to 300% increased damage when targets are below 20% health
• Lake of Fire has been redesigned and now causes Rain of Fire to be instant cast with no channeling time but now has an 8 second cooldown.
• Backdraft now increases casting speed for 15 seconds, up from 10.
• Shadow Cleave can now hit up to 10 targets.
• Mark of Chaos has been redesigned:
  • Now causes Curse of Agony and Curse of Doom to apply the Mark of Chaos to the target for their duration, reducing the target’s resistances by up to 75 and increases the targets spell damage taken by up to 10%.

Warrior

• Shield Slam now gains 15% of attack power as additional damage
• Single-Minded Fury has been adjusted:
  • Now grants a Single-Minded buff that stacks up to 5 times, granting 2% attack speed while you continue attacking the same target with auto-attacks. The movement speed effect has reduced back to 10% and the threat reduction component was removed.
  • The threat reduction from Single-Minded Fury has been removed.
• An additional effect has been added to Gladiator Stance to increase rage generation when attacking a target that is not actively attacking the warrior.
• Thunderclap can now hit up to 10 targets.
• A new ability has been added via spellbook: Valor of Azeroth
  • Valor of Azeroth grants all party and raid members 1.5x the Warrior’s level in Attack Power (melee and ranged) and 5% crit chance to all spells and attacks. This is not cumulative with Rallying Cry of the Dragonslayer.

Developer’s Note: We are trying a rather radical new change to essentially allow Warriors to provide themselves and raid members with “Dragonslayer lite” in case they or other raid members don’t have or have unfortunately lost their world buffs. Warriors in particular gain a massive amount of power from World Buffs, and the class can feel a lot less satisfying without them so while this won’t raise a Warrior’s overall maximum throughput, it should help bring the floor up in situations where Warriors have to go without World Buffs. This is an experimental change for the PTR and we may remove or iterate on this change before phase 4 releases. We are hoping that this provides some interesting raid utility for warriors should wipes or deaths occur, allowing them and their party/raid members to get a portion of the power that they gained from world buffs after losing them.