Raid Lockout Changes, Warrior, Druid & Shaman Tweaks

Greetings,

As mentioned in previous communications, the team has been discussing the topic of Twice-Weekly lockouts coming in Phase 4 of Season of Discovery and we’ve decided not to move forward with this lockout interval for Molten Core. Molten Core will utilize the standard 7-day lockout period, based on your feedback.

We will be keeping the Twice-Weekly lockout in place for Lord Kazzak, Azuregos, and Onyxia, however. We feel that those quicker, single-boss raid encounters feel appropriate for this interval, especially considering that Onyxia herself operated on a 5-day lockout timer throughout Original WoW.

As always, we appreciate your feedback on this topic and will continue to evaluate things and listen as we move through the content phases and make additional adjustments as necessary.

The team is really looking forward to having you join us in Phase 4 in just a few short weeks!

Thank you!
-The WoW Classic Dev Team

We have one last round of changes before the weekend that will go out after the realms finish restarting this afternoon:

Druid

• Survival Instincts: Now also increases healing done by your spells by 20% while active.
  • Developer’s Notes: Pure healing druids have correctly pointed out that they are without a compelling rune option for the Boots slot. Allowing Survival Instincts to act as an on-demand healing cooldown helps fill this gap and provide Druids with another powerful healing tool.

Shaman

• Earth Shield is no longer exclusive with Lightning Shield.
  • Developer’s Notes: Earth Shield has seen its value increase with Shamanistic Rage becoming a baseline ability. While this is a great improvement, tank shamans now often feel like they at a disadvantage when playing with a Restoration Shaman and vice versa, because of how a Tank wants their Lightning Shield active for their wrist rune, which makes them ineligible Earth Shield targets. We’re reducing the friction here by allowing Earth Shield to be active at the same time as Lightning Shield.
• Riptide healing can now trigger the Power Surge rune when used.
  • Developer’s Notes: In the Waist slot, Restoration has typically been taking Power Surge, standing within 20 yards of the boss to Flame Shock, and then look for procs to cast an instant Chain Heal. We think reimagining power surge as a more generalist rune and enabling its usage for Restoration shamans to use using their normal toolkit while also playing at a standard healer range of 30+ yards away is a great way to increase quality of life for healing Shamans that select this rune.
• The chance for Static Shock to trigger when using a two-handed weapon is now 12% and the chance to trigger with one-handed weapons remains 6%.
• The Shield Mastery additional benefit from Defense now triggers off an any shock spell and not just Flame Shock.
• The Shield Mastery Defense benefit changed from Attack Power to Spell Power:
  • Developer’s Note Even with Mental Dexterity in the mix, Spell Power over Attack Power feels like a more thematic conversion for Tank Shamans. Most of a Shaman’s threat is also not in things that benefit from Attack Power directly, so this change helps the shaman tanking kit operate more synergistically.
• The additional threat caused by Way of Earth has been increased to 65% (up from 50%).

In addition to the changes above we will soon be deploying the following changes to the Season of Discovery Phase 4 PTR:

Warrior

• Raging Blow has been adjusted:
  • The damage of Raging Blow increased to 100% of weapon damage.
  • Raging blow cooldown is reduced by 1 second when you use another melee ability while enraged.
    • Developer’s Notes: Warriors have been given more and more ways to become Enraged, but few tools to use once enraged. With Raging Blow being rather weak, Enraged Regeneration competing with Rallying Cry, and Rampage being in competition with other runes we felt it was time to give it a buff and play more into these runes having more depth to them by themselves.
• Consumed by Rage also makes whirlwind strike with with both equipped weapons while Enraged.
  • Developer’s Notes: This additional effect on Consumed by rage helped give it an identity where before it lacked one. Frenzied Assault was already a good two-handed rune that works well for Warriors that want to swing their two-hander more frequently, so having this be a dedicated dual wielding rune made sense.
• Bloodsurge now causes Slam to hit with both equipped melee weapons.
  • Developer’s Note: As with the note above, this change is intended to give Bloodsurge a unique identity since it is so similar to Precise Timing.
• The Endless Rage rune has been moved to the head slot.
  • Developer’s Note: Endless Rage has been on a slot where it competes against a lot of really fun runes which tend to make this have a relatively low selection rate. We feel that moving it to a slot where Fury DPS Warriors have felt they have no option makes a lot of sense. This will increase their ability to press their buttons, and give higher resource generation which is especially welcome for times when world buffs are not available.