Season of Discovery Class Tuning Incoming - 13 December

The following additional hotfixes have been added to the OP, and will come into effect with maintenance.

• Hunter
  • Hunter pet attack values have been updated to better scale with Hunter attack power.
    • Developers’ notes: Pets that cast spells such as scorpid poison or Lightning Breath were scaling too well and pets using physical abilities were scaling too little. We’ve now normalized the amount of attack power gained, to scale with the focus cost of individual pet abilities. This means that abilities with a higher focus cost, that are cast less often, will receive more benefit from attack power per attack than abilities with a lower focus cost that can generally be used more often. Overall this should level out the damage and reduce situations where some abilities were scaling too much or too little with hunter attack power.
  • Scorpid poison now distributes the additional damage it gains from attack power evenly over each stack of Scorpid Poison on the target.
    • Developers’ notes: Previously, Scorpid poison received most of its benefit from the Hunter’s attack power in the very first stack. Now the additional damage gained from the controlling hunter will not be gained until the full 5 stacks of poison are on the target. This increases the ramp time a bit and makes it less immediately deadly in PvP.
  • Pets now receive a smaller portion of a hunter’s armor and stamina.
    • Developers’ notes: Hunter pets were gaining far too much durability from hunter stats, to the point where some pets could get more than double the health and armor of a well-geared level 25 player. We still want dedicated hunters to have the ability to tank certain dungeon and raid encounters, but pets shouldn’t be so effective that they become the objectively correct choice.
  • Aspect of the Lion has been redesigned and will now function as an Aura.
    • Developers’ notes: This means that it is possible to have Aspect of the Lion up in addition to another aspect, such as Aspect of the Hawk. As an offset to the lower amount of damage that some hunter pets will deal, and to make talents such as Improved Aspect of the Hunter more attractive to Hunters using Aspect of the Lion, we’re shifting Aspect of the Lion into an aura rather than an aspect. This change will go into effect with scheduled weekly maintenance tomorrow, but the tooltip will not yet change. In a later hotfix, we’ll rename relocalize Aspect of the Lion to “Heart of the Lion” and update the tooltip.
• Blackfathom Deeps
  • Elemental Resistances lowered in Blackfathom Deeps to levels more appropriate for a level 25 Raid.
    • Gelihast Shadow Resist lowered to 25 (was 75).
    • Lorgus Jett Nature Resist lowered to 25 (was 75).
    • Twilight Lord Kelris Shadow and Arcane Resist lowered to 25 (was 75).
      • Phantasmal Priestess all Resist lowered to 0 (was 75), so it’s no longer bad news if double casters are sent down to the dream in Phase 1.
    • Invading Nightmare Shadow and Fire Resist lowered to 25 (was 75).
    • Void Elementals Shadow Resist lowered lowered to 25 (was 75).
    • Corrosive Droplets Nature Resist lowered to 25 (was 75), and Frost Resist lowered to 0 (was 25).

Tomorrow, with scheduled weekly maintenance in each region, we’re going to implement some adjustments based on class performance and feedback.

Season of Discovery

• Druid
  • Starsurge rune ability damage increased 182%.
  • Starsurge cooldown reduced to 6 seconds (was 10 seconds).
  • Starsurge mana cost reduced to 1% of base mana (was 3% of base mana).
• Hunter
  • Flanking Strike now gains the benefit of weapon enhancements like sharpening stones, is now on global cooldown, and is now properly treated as a melee attack, letting it benefit from attack power and combat modifiers to dodge, parry, block, crit, hit, etc.
  • Flanking Strike is now prevented by Pacify.
  • Flanking Strike now requires a weapon equipped.
  • Flanking Strike pet damage is now properly treated as a melee attack, with same benefits as listed above for the hunter’s damage.
  • Additional changes to normalize Hunter pet performance are still to be determined.
• Priest
  • Priest Homunculi damage increased by 100%.
  • Void Plague damage increased by 200%.
  • Twisted Faith now increases damage done by Mind Blast and Mind Flay by 50% (was 20%) on targets afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain.
• Rogue
  • Saber Slash, Shiv, and Main Gauche will now properly consume Remorseless Attacks.
  • Saber Slash’s tooltip fixed; damage not reduced.
  • Saber Slash damage is now properly considered a Bleed and benefits from the Mangle debuff. Note: Bleed-immune creatures will no longer be affected by it.
• Shaman
  • Lava Lash damage increased to 150% weapon damage (was 100% weapon damage).
  • Lava Lash mana cost reduced to 1% of base mana (was 4%).
  • Overload now has a 50% chance to trigger (was 33%).
  • Dual Wield Specialization now grants 10% increased chance to hit while dual-wielding.
• Boon of Blackfathom world buff adjusted. It now provides 3% spell hit and 25 spell power buff addition to the other physical damage and movement speed effects (was spell crit).
  • Developers notes: Spellcasters in general are struggling a bit in BFD, mostly due to poor scaling without spellpower and a higher requirement of spell hit to reliably hit creatures 2+ levels above the caster. Keep those Chronoboons handy and don’t stand in the fire and lose your buff!

Regarding the Hunter pet performance note above, we will let you know as soon as we’ve finalized this hotfix. We really like hunter pets being able to occasionally do some raid or dungeon tanking, but it was never intended for them to be the best tanks in the game.