Blizzard has been extremely active recently on the World of Warcraft: Shadowlands beta. After having to delay the expansion as a result of the production hit that COVID-19 caused on the team behind the development, Blizzard has a lot of work on their hands.
They’ve certainly been hard at work to make up for that loss of development, though. In a recent developer update, they helped to improve transparency by discussing what their primary targets are at the moment.
In that update, they discussed the Maw, class/covenant balancing issues, and the conduit system, each of which are their biggest targets. However, they’ve also been adding plenty of changes to the beta.
Multiple classes were given a few improvements, reworks, nerfs, and changes on the beta. While individually some of these changes may seem small, they can make a massive difference, especially when added up.
For example, hunters have had a notable change to their hunter’s mark ability. The 5% bonus damage of the ability has been removed, which is a powerful nerf to the ability. It also will remain on the Global Cooldown, and will still provide vision on stealthed targets.
Druids saw a few changes as well, such as to their talents. Soul of the Forest now increases Wrath’s Astral power generation by 50%, twice what it was before, and Starfire’s AoE damage by 150% instead of 100%
Warlocks had their Rain of Chaos talent changed, reducing the Infernal summoning chance to 15% instead of 20%. The Infernal will also last 8 seconds now instead of 10. The Roaring Blaze talent’s damage bonus has been lowered from 30% to 25%.
On the Shaman side of things, the Surge of Earth ability has had its allies affected reduced from 6 to 3. However, it’s now been heavily buffed, increasing the spell power modifier to 250% instead of 100%.
Priests have seen changes to the Mindbender and Searing nightmare talents. The former now generates 5 insanity instead of 6 from Mindbender attacks, and the latter has had its damage reduced to be 43% of spell power instead of 51%.
Monks had their Fortifying Brew cooldown reduced as well! It’s a sizeable change, the cooldown now being reduced from 5 minutes down to 4 minutes.
This is by no means an extensive list – Blizzard is hard at work making plenty of changes to the classes and trying to bring everything into balance. It’s hard to say when we’re going to see the expansion, and at this rate, we’re mostly just hoping to see it before 2020 ends. But whenever it comes out, with any luck, Blizzard’s work to make sure everything is balanced will have paid off.
