With so many players already at the level 85 cap, Blizzard are looking ahead and sketching out changes for the next major patch for World of Warcraft. In their latest blog post they concentrate on some of the class changes they're planning to make, listing a long series of planned tweaks for many of the skills in the game. Read on for details
The patch is still early in development, and the poster, Ghostcrawler, makes it clear that the listed updates are still subject to change, and that many more are due to be added. You'll find the list of class changes repeated below. It looks as though Warriors have the worst of it. For more details on the planned patch, check out the World of Warcraft site.
- Even after we fixed their mastery, Feral druid bleeds still do a lot of damage and are undispellable. We plan to shift some of that damage back to main attacks. They are also a little too hard to control. Given that they are already hard to root, snare, or polymorph, we think the fear immunity from Berserk is too much.
- Arms warrior burst damage might still be too high in PvP, while we don't have a great way to adjust their sustained damage for PvE. The Lambs to the Slaughter talent is a good place to address this. We also might nerf warrior stuns.
- We think Arms and Fury warriors are getting too much damage out of Heroic Strike. We want it to be clear that it's a rage dump and not make it the hardest hitting ability.
- For Holy priests, we're increasing Chakra's duration and changing Surge of Light so it can now from Flash Heal and Greater Heal and can crit.
- We're making some additional buffs, such as Pain Suppression and Barkskin, undispellable.
- We're buffing Wild Mushroom. It's a cool spell that isn't getting enough play.
- Empowered Touch will now benefit from Regrowth as well. We're also buffing the Glyph of Regrowth.
- We are looking at Holy Concentration (after our most recent buff) and Omen of Clarity to make sure they don't account for too much mana savings.
- We are probably going to remove Drain Mana from warlocks. It is incredibly situational in PvE but causes problems in PvP. This might mean we need to evaluate Mana Burn as well.
- Inferno will no longer increase the radius of Hellfire.
- Shadow and Flame can now proc from Incinerate in addition to Shadow Bolt.
- We want to redesign Improved Soulfire.
- Censure will no longer break Repentance.
- As part of the Marks and Beastmaster buffs, we're buffing Aimed Shot, Kill Shot, Chimera Shot, and Kill Command.
- To reduce mage control, we are discussing reducing the duration of Frost Nova and Ring of Frost.
- We want to make it clear that Combat is intended to use fast off-hand weapons. We also want to polish Revealing Strike a bit.
- We want to make sure Enhancement shaman avoid caster weapons.
- We want to make sure Unholy DKs prefer two-handed weapons.
- Necrotic Strike needs to be affected by resilience.
- For Cataclysm, we changed Death Strike almost completely into an ability for Blood DK tanks, which is a bit unfortunate. We want to make sure it is still a useful button for Frost or Unholy DKs who need healing.
- We also want to address DK mobility in PvP.
- We think we overnerfed Every Man for Himself, and are reverting it back to a 2-minute cooldown again. We might evaluate other racials after we've seen more PvP.
While all of the above updates are planned for the future, Blizzard have already been busy releasing hotfixes and mini-patches to quickly correct balance issues. The changes made by the latest hotfix are outlined in another blog post on the World of Warcraft site . Wondering whether to take the plunge and go for level 85? Check out out World of Warcraft: Cataclysm review.
