wow Druid Changes and Explanations in the War Within Alpha: May 29th

[Staff 1,488]

The Druid of the Claw Hero tree is in focus this week, with defensive values specifically targeted so Guardian benefits a little more. Feral and Restoration also get changes, with Resto getting changes to Tranquility's effectiveness for fewer targets. 

Druid (Source)

This week is mostly a suite of effect tuning for Druid of the Claw. Several Druid of the Claw bonuses provided uneven value to different abilities or specs, and we’ve adjusted the bonuses granted to various abilities to give them more comparable value.

We also adjusted the defensive value that the tree gives Feral and Guardian Druids. Tank specs should generally get more defensive value than DPS specs from their shared trees so that the tree doesn’t become a lock-in choice for DPS players in hard content, and Feral Druids of the Claw were getting a lot of defensive value.

Our intention for the Empowered Shapeshifting / Wildpower Surge node is for it to offer mostly defensive value for Feral and a mix of offensive and defensive power for Guardian, with a passive and more active shapeshifting option. Wildpower Surge should offer meaningful damage for Guardians who use it regularly (as well as granting them the defensive bonuses of effects like Ursine Vigor and Wildshape Mastery). We don’t intend for Wildshape Mastery’s damage bonus for Feral Druids to be so strong that they use it every time it’s available, as that’s a significant complexity increase to their rotation. Instead, it’s intended to ease the damage cost of entering Bear Form as a defensive.

Thank you for continued testing and feedback!

And here are all the exact changes from the development notes:

Tuning (Source)

• Druid of the Claw
  • Ravage and Dreadful Wound damage increased by 10%.
  • Dreadful Wound now reduces damage dealt to you by 4% for Feral and 10% for Guardian.
  • Feral’s Aggravate Wounds now triggers from any ability that costs Energy.
  • Empowered Shapeshifting increases the damage of Mangle by 10% (was 5%) and the damage of Swipe and Shred by 3% (was 5%).
  • Strike for the Heart now increases ability critical strike chance and critical strike damage by 6% (was 8%).
  • Strike for the Heart now causes Mangle to heal Guardian Druids for 1% of their maximum health.
  • Feral’s Wildpower Surge now increases damage of your next Swipe by 50% (was 100%) or your next Mangle by 200% (was 100%).
  • Guardian’s Wildpower Surge now increases the damage of your next Ferocious Bite or Rip by 100% (was 50%).
  • Wildshape Mastery’s retention of Bear Form stats in Cat Form also retains Bear Form’s resistance to being critically struck or parried.
• Feral
  • Primal Wrath range increased to 10 yards (was 8).
  • Added a connector between Primal Wrath and Pouncing Strikes in the talent tree.
  • Rampant Ferocity’s damage increased by up to 50% when the player spends extra Energy on Ferocious Bite.
  • Thrashing Claws now requires players to know Thrash in order to apply the bleed from Thrash.
• Restoration
  • Developer’s note: We are making some changes to raid healing cooldowns in The War Within to increase their effectiveness in content with less than 20 players. Our goal is to make these spells feel powerful in all forms of content, particularly smaller dungeon, PvP, or raid groups. The healing of these cooldowns will remain equal when healing 20 injured allies as they previously did and only take into account injured allies as contributing to their splash cap. This will be a slight reduction in effectiveness when healing more than 20 players, but this tradeoff has seemed reasonable to us as the availability and strength goes up as group sizes increase.
  • Tranquility initial healing increased by 400%.
  • Tranquility’s initial heal now decreases its healing beyond 5 targets.
  • Tranquility’s heal over time effect is no longer increased while out of a raid environment.