Additional Sanctified System and Seal of the Dawn Adjustments in Season of Discovery Phase 7

Greetings Again,

We wanted to take a quick moment and note an additional adjustment we’ve made to the Sanctified System since we posted the update above.

Seal of the Dawn Item Adjustments

• The Seal of the Dawn trinket is no longer an equippable trinket. It is instead an item with an on-use effect that you can keep in your inventory and use as desired.
• Using the item gives you a buff that will confer the benefits of your Seal of the Dawn, e.g. granting you the power bonus based on the number of Sanctified items you have equipped, and allows you to gather scourgestones.
• The buff on your buff bar will have a numerical representation of what “rank” of the Seal of the Dawn buff you have active.
• The buff you get when using this item persists through death so you should not need to re-enable the buff every time your character dies.
• Different ranks of the Seal of the Dawn buff do not stack with each other, so you should only ever need to hold onto the highest rank Seal of the Dawn item you’ve earned and the older ones can safely be deleted from your inventory.
  • You are also welcome to keep the lower ranked items and use a lower rank of the buff should you choose to do so for whatever reason.
• Lastly, once you have obtained a new rank of your current seal of the dawn, you can obtain the other variants (Tank, Healer, etc.) for free. No need to level those up in the same way.

We’ve seen quite a bit of feedback that it felt like a bit of a bummer to lose a coveted trinket slot to this item. This adjustment feels a lot better to still grant the benefit but not take up a trinket slot. We may make additional iterative adjustments between now and when the raid launches and we really appreciate the feedback we’ve gotten so far.

Seal of the Dawn Buff Limits

Additionally, after a lot of discussion, we are going to be introducing an adjustment that will cap the effectiveness of the Seal of the Dawn buff depending on the number of wings of Naxxramas that are empowered.

Examples (final values TBD):

• If you have zero quarters empowered, your Seal of the Dawn buff may only grant additional sanctified power up to rank 2
• If you have two quarters empowered, your Seal of the Dawn buff may only grant additional sanctified power up to rank 4
• Etc.

The main concerns we are hoping to address is the case where a raid group takes a full 40 players that all have the maximum rank Seal of the Dawn and they do not empower any quarters to keep the raid at the lowest difficulty setting. In this scenario a boss could die incredibly quickly (in under 10 seconds, in some cases), leading to an unsatisfying raid experience, and potentially even causing bugs in the encounter if scripted actions are bypassed or break. This level of power could also enable very small groups of 5 Players or less to take on bosses by themselves, which is not intended behavior.

Ultimately, the intent of the system is to allow you to progress your power upward and enable you to take on increasingly difficult (and rewarding!) challenges that come as you empower more quarters of Naxxramas as the weeks go by. After some time has passed you will gain the power needed to be able to take on a fully empowered Sapphiron and Kel’thuzad with additional mechanics.

Progressing your Seal of the Dawn should still make you feel much more powerful in the content you are already comfortably clearing, but we are simply putting a limit on how much extra power can be utilized in the lesser difficulties from the Seal of the Dawn buff itself.

This Week’s PTR

We hope to have both of these adjustments testable on when Naxxramas goes live again on PTR later this week. We also plan to add the Tier 3 sets to vendors so that you can test the new set bonuses as well. We’ll provide a post in the Season of Discovery Phase 7 PTR forums with full update notes around the time that Naxxramas unlocks on PTR.

Thank you!