Weekly Reset Patch Notes: No Love for Beast Mastery
World of Warcraft: The War Within launched with most specs in a relatively solid place, but with a handful that were not in the best of spots. You can only learn so much from beta testing and that means sometimes it takes until the masses get ahold of certain things before any glaring or subtle issues pop up.
With the reset for the week of September 24, Blizzard is pushing out changes for a handful specs across a few different classes. The classes being effected are:
- Death Knight
- Druid
- Hunter
- Mage
- Priest
Let's take a better look at what exactly is being changed and how that will effect them moving forward.
Related Article: What is the Best Class in The War Within
1. Death Knight
Admittedly, not all class changes are built equally. Death Knight is one of five classes being tweaked in this patch, but the changes are extremely minor. Rider of the Apocalypse: Trollbane’s Icy Fury now only slows targets by 40% (was 70%).
This is an extremely minor borderline useless nerf to one of Unholy and Frost DK's hero talent trees. All three Death Knight specs are in a strong spot and considering this doesn't influence Blood at all, I don't think any DK players are really going to be losing any sleep over this. It could potentially be impactful in PvP, though.
2. Druid
Druid is seeing a change to Feral and a buff to Restoration. First off, Feral is having Rampant Ferocity changed so that it now damages enemies within 8 yards of the Druid when using Ferocious Bite, instead of enemies within 8 yards of the target. The developers state that this change is intended to give the player more control over who is getting hit and to prevent an issue where hitting large bosses would prevent nearby enemies from getting hit.
Restoration is simply getting a 4% to ALL of its healing. This is not applied to PvP content. A 4% healing buff isn't the biggest buff in the world, but it should help Restoration players catch up to the stronger healers in this season a little bit.
3. Hunter
Hunter is seeing some minor buffs given to Beast Mastery's cleave damage. Beast Cleave and Kill Cleave are both being buffed to 90% damage from 80%. BM Hunter is complete and utter garbage. It is straight up unplayable in any sort of content that is remotely hard.
This will not change that. BM should still be avoided like the plague.
4. Mage
Arcane mage is currently incredibly strong and Frost mage is quite good, while Fire mage remains just as terrible as BM hunter. Arcane is not being touched in these changes, but Frost and Fire are both getting some buffs.
Fire is having its Flamestrike damage increased by 15%,
Phoenix Flames damage increased by 20%, and Living Bomb damage increased by 10%. It's hard to imagine these will be a big enough increase to bring it anywhere near Arcane or Frost, but maybe it'll help make it more playable in lower-end content.
Frost is having its Glacial Spike damage increased by 20%. This does not apply to PvP combat.
Ray of Frost damage is also being increased by 15%. Frost doesn't really need to be buffed. It was already in a good healthy place. I'm sure Frost mages won't be complaining, though.
5. Priest
Priest is in a terrible spot. Priest is probably in a worse spot than any other class in the game. Holy and Discipline are the two worst healers in the game and Shadow is a bad DPS. Naturally, Blizzard ignored two of the three and only gave a slight buff to the third.
Shadow is seeing all of its damage given a flat 4% buff. That's not a terrible start and should allow Shadow to feel a little better for whoever has stuck with playing it. This is still a massive L for Priest players with both healers being ignored while in such a comically weak state.
If it wasn't for Power Word; Fortitude being as broken as it is as a raid buff, there wouldn't even be a Priest in any high-end raid compositions and there'd be literally zero reasons to bring one in a mythic plus run.
BEN FITZSIMMONS