Recently, Blizzard has been moving forward pretty intensely in their Esports scene, especially where World of Warcraft is concerned. While the Arena World Championship and Mythic Dungeon International continue on, they’ve even announced the first World of Warcraft: Classic esports event, the Summer Bowl.

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With the exception of the Mythic Dungeon International, these tournaments are heavily based around PvP. In the midst of these tournaments, Blizzard has decided to make a few changes to the PvP scene of World of Warcraft.

That said, none of these changes affect World of Warcraft: Classic, focused entirely on the modern “Retail” version of the title. While seemingly minor, these changes address some heavy balancing issues that much of the community has complained about.

“We’re working on a set of PvP tuning changes that will go live with scheduled weekly maintenance,” Blizzard stated. The weekly maintenance occurred as of this morning, so all of these changes are already live.

In terms of items, there have been two changes, which are as follows:

  • Corrupted Gladiator’s Spite can once again stack when multiple trinkets are used against a single target
  • Void Portal summoned by Corrupted Gladiator’s Breach is now larger and easier to interact with

For corruption and essences, the following three changes have been made:

  • Versatile’s effectiveness has been reduced by 33% when in combat against enemy players
  • Reaping Flames will no longer activate on player-controlled targets (pets, totems, guardians, demons, etc.)
  • Issues with Conflict and Strife solved that prevented the essence from providing additional defense from versatility under some specific stun effects.

Finally, there is a single change in terms of classes, affecting Mistweaver Monks. The Chrysalis PvP talent has been nerfed, now reducing the cooldown of Life Cocoon by 25 seconds instead of 45 seconds.

This set of changes seems minor, but many of these balancing issues have been prevalent for quite some time. Life Cocoon, for example, tends to provide an incredibly powerful survival tool for monks that can make them feel unbalanced against other classes, especially in Arenas.

Of course, the fixes coming to glitches, such as the change being given to Conflict and Strife, are needed regardless of any balancing or power issues. There isn’t much more frustrating than losing a crucial fight in a Battleground because your essence didn’t proc correctly.

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As Blizzard moves forward, it seems that the light shone on PvP by recent esports events might make it so that more PvP balancing patches are put in. Either way, it’s great to see the developers continue to hone and improve as many aspects of the game as possible.