wow Upcoming Survival Hunter, Frost DK BfA Changes - June 6

[Starym 3,800]

 

And we're back with another installment of the class feedback series, where devs talk about plans for significant spec changes on the BfA beta. Today, following the Arms Warrior ones, we have two more specs getting some tuning, starting with Survival Hunters who are getting their old Carve ability back in a new form, supporting the AoE side of things and also getting a QoL change to Hydra's Bite, which will make spreading Serpent's Sting easier.

Then we have the Frost DK side of things, with some much more significant changes - namely a whole lot of talent revamps. There are apparently even more changes coming later, but to start with we have Empower Rune Weapon becoming what Hungering Rune Weapon is on Live now and is on the GCD, Pillar of Frost is gone in its current form and only the name has been kept around with the Obliteration talent stats, and then there's 7 talent row modifications on top of that!

Survival Hunter (source)

Greetings, travelers!

In the next beta build you’re going to see a familiar ability in your spellbook: Carve! The ability is in a pretty raw state at the moment and we’re going to continue to iterate on it if this version doesn’t feel right. We’d love to hear about your experiences on Beta after playing with it.

Carve:
• 30 Focus cost. 6 second cooldown (reduced by Haste).
• A sweeping attack that strikes all enemies in front of you for Physical damage. Reduces the remaining cooldown on Wildfire Bomb by 1.0 sec for each target hit,
up to 5.

Please be aware that Carve doesn’t yet have full talent support. In a future build, things such as Birds of Prey, or Shrapnel Bomb from Wildfire Infusion, will interact with Carve. Butchery will likely be a Carve replacement, and get tuned accordingly.

We want to give Survival a clear path to take when there are many enemies, whether that’s a group of raptor hatchlings, or a double-pull of trolls in Atal’dazar. Serpent Sting and Wildfire Bomb don’t quite fill that space -- applying  Serpent Sting to more than ~3 enemies (without Hydra's Bite) is often more frustrating than it is fun, and Wildfire Bomb 's cooldown prevents it from being “the AoE button”.

Survival has a variety of AoE tools through talents, and Carve should add a better foundation for those talents to build around. By reducing Wildfire Bomb ’s cooldown it gives you enough to do that spreading  Serpent Stings to numerous targets is far less necessary. It also interacts strongly with the Guerilla Tactics talent, so all of the level 30 talents have a similar level of impact on how you AoE. The short cooldown is there so that your AOE rotation becomes weaving in your other buttons –  Serpent Sting, Kill Command, Wildfire Bomb,  etc – in between Carves, instead of just pushing it repeatedly.

Separately, we have a quality-of-life change for Hydra's Bite that will arrive in an upcoming build. With Hydra's Bite talented,  Serpent Sting will prefer to select additional nearby targets that are not already affected by Serpent Sting. This should make it far less frustrating to try to apply  Serpent Sting to a whole pack of mobs.

Again, we’re still iterating on the specifics of Carve, and we greatly appreciate your feedback on how this version plays. Thank you!

 

Frost Death Knight (source)

The next Beta build will include updates to Frost Death Knight. There has been a little more iteration since then (details later), but it will have the bulk of the changes, which are mostly focused on adjustments, rearrangements, or replacements for talents. The baseline spec and core rotation hasn’t changed much – Frost remains a fast-paced, proc-based rotation. The goals for the changes include:

• Consolidate the multiple self-buff cooldowns available
• Add the artifact active ability to the talent tree
• Look for opportunities to update/improve the talent tree

The noteworthy change to the baseline spec is that the self-buff cooldowns have been consolidated:

• Empower Rune Weapon has become what the Hungering Rune Weapon talent is on live (with tuning adjustments), granting 15% Haste and generating 1 Rune and 5 Runic Power instantly and every 5 sec for 20 sec, on a 2 min cooldown (down from 3 min on live). Now that Empower Rune Weapon is on the global cooldown, the full 6 Runes it instantly provided always felt a bit like you were wasting it – shifting it to resources over time to add to a pretty full rotation made sense.
• Pillar of Frost has been removed baseline. Since the knockback immunity portion of it was moved to Death's Advance, Pillar ended up being a pretty bland 20% Strength buff. We’ve renamed the talent Obliteration into Pillar of Frost to keep that name around on the spec.

The next build you’ll see will be just slightly out of date in regards to the Frost talent tree – the most current version is outlined below. Any talents not described are mostly unchanged.

Level 56 row: Inexorable Assault, Icy Talons, Shattering Strikes – primarily single-target/constant value

Inexorable Assault has been redesigned – it now periodically grants a buff (stacks to 5) that causes your next Obliterate to deal additional Frost damage. This additional damage is a flat, separate add to Obliterate’s damage and doesn’t benefit from Killing Machine (you aren’t intended to play around it + Killing Machine). The talent is mostly passive, but with the added bonus of providing some benefit at the start of an encounter or when you’re off-target.

Level 57 row: Runic Attenuation, Murderous Efficiency, Horn of Winter – this row adds resources/speeds up to the rotation

Runic Attenuation now generates 3 Runic Power on a more controllable procs per minute system, instead of generating 1 Runic Power on autoattacks (which didn’t have a good way for us to tune it). It should still feel like pretty consistent resource generation.

Level 58 row: Winter is Coming, Asphyxiate, Blinding Sleet – crowd control

Asphyxiate has replaced Abomination's Might in the talent tree, and now all 3 Death Knight specs have access to this single-target stun cooldown. Abomination's Might wasn’t very reliable and wasn’t even always desirable as a random single-target proc stun.

Level 60 row: Avalanche, Gathering Storm, Glacial Advance – primarily AOE/scales up with #targets

Avalanche has been redesigned to trigger from casting Howling Blast with Rime active, and is intended to be the simple passive option on the row.

Level 75 row: Permafrost, Wraith Walk, Death Pact

Death Pact has replaced the version of Inexorable Assault from live, giving both damage specs access to this survivability talent.

Level 90 row: Freezing Fog, Frostscythe, Frostwyrm’s Fury – primarily AOE/scales up with #targets

Freezing Fog is planned to be unchanged from live. The version you’re going to see soon includes an additional mechanic (which is probably being removed), that was added in order to make it fit better when it was on a different talent row.

Frostwyrm’s Fury is the artifact active, Sindragosa's Fury, with a slightly different name so that it doesn’t sound too similar to Breath of Sindragosa. Its cooldown is 3 min instead of 5 min (like the artifact active) – a shorter cooldown as a talent feels better to be usable more often and allows it to be better tuned against its competitors without requiring a large damage reduction in PvP due to being a huge single damage event.

Level 100 row: Icecap, Pillar of Frost, Breath of Sindragosa – Damage modifiers/works in most situations

Icecap now affects Empower Rune Weapon instead of Pillar of Frost, reducing its cooldown by 3 sec (pending tuning) when it triggers.

Obliteration (the talent on live) has been renamed Pillar of Frost as mentioned earlier, and has the same mechanics on the same 1.5 min cooldown.

Breath of Sindragosa is mostly unchanged. However, worth noting is that its 2 min cooldown lines up better with the new Empower Rune Weapon, which now also has a 2 min cooldown.

Note: Runic Empowerment has been tuned down from 1.8%->1.5%. The spec often just had way too much resources to spend. This is the spec’s primary pacing controller and we’ll continue adjusting it in the future to what feels good.

Thanks for all the continued feedback.

And here are some previous beta feedback posts:

• Arms Warrior
• Affliction Warlock
• Holy Priest
• Fury Warrior (2)
• Marksmanship Hunter
• Fury Warrior (1)
• Discipline Priest (2)
• Protection Paladin
• Discipline Priest (1)
• Balance Druid

[Whisla 76]

Glad to see classes getting some love and actually getting responses from blizz, but man it really hurts that we havent had a single thing about DH yet. Feel they need a really big set of core changes and the longer we go without seeing anything the more I think the class is going to just have to suffer through the beginning of the expansion.

[Suoson 29]

3 hours ago, Whisla said:

Glad to see classes getting some love and actually getting responses from blizz, but man it really hurts that we havent had a single thing about DH yet. Feel they need a really big set of core changes and the longer we go without seeing anything the more I think the class is going to just have to suffer through the beginning of the expansion.

There were some changes already, as far as I know, if not, there are definitely a few planned

[PatrickHenry 293]

9 hours ago, Starym said:

We’ve renamed the talent Obliteration into Pillar of Frost to keep that name around on the spec.

Other than the pointless above, it seems like Frost has some solid changes.  Much more meaningful changes.