Season of Discovery Adjustments Coming Soon - Feb 12, 2024

WoW Classic Season of Discovery
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Greetings,

We’ve been playing quite a bit over the weekend and have met to discuss a few issues that we’ve identified since launch. We wanted to take a moment to dive into these issues and what our near and longer term plans are for them.

Quest Creature Availability in the Open World

This is a tricky issue to tackle as it involves a lot of complex data work to identify and potentially alter spawn behavior systemically without creating other adverse effects. We are doing an investigation on this now and hope to find a safe solution soon that will help with player concerns around this.

In the meantime, we have made some minor tweaks to layer population target numbers (essentially the values that determine when new layers spin up) which we hope will help spread players out across more layers and make the world still feel full but not quite so overpopulated in quest areas. Please note that with this change, less populated zones such as lower level zones and cities may feel more sparse than they otherwise would. This isn’t ideal and it’s not a long-term solution, but is a stopgap while we investigate other solutions.

Stranglethorn Vale Blood Moon Event

We’ve been having a lot of fun in this event over the weekend, but we definitely recognize that there are a few rough edges we would like to smooth out. Coming within the next 24-48 hours we will be implementing a few changes:

  • The Blood Moon buff gained during the event will increase player stamina by 30%.
  • The Bloodless effect gained after death is being adjusted and will now last 20 seconds down from 1 minute.
    • Additionally, this effect will now also grant a pacify and invisibility effect so that players can resurrect and then move away from graveyards/chained spirits, mount up, summon pets, and more effectively “reset” after a combat to prepare for the next fight.
  • Zandalari Emissaries are getting a more pronounced visual effect to make them more visible in their spawn locations in Booty Bay, Grom’gol, Northern Stranglethorn, and Yojamba Isle.

Please note that this list of changes is not comprehensive and does not address all issues we’d like to address with the event. These are changes we hope to make rapidly to make the experience smoother in the short term while we observe player behavior and determine the needs for additional adjustments going forward.

We also want to take a moment to recognize that this event is in fact extremely brutal and unforgiving and that this is exepected. This is another wild experiment that we knew could be somewhat devisive and we feel that is okay. While we want to continue to make improvements, due to the nature of PvP and especially Free-For-All PvP, you will encounter frustration at times. The rewards we’ve added for it are also tuned deliberately in such a way that they should be relatively easily obtainable, often requiring just a few events to obtain, but also should not be “mandatory” for anyone. Despite being epic quality, the weapons and accessories are roughly on-par with level 40 blue items and are in most cases inferior to equipment available in Gnomeregan. If you find pvp frustrating, it’s okay to steer clear of this event and pursue other paths for power progression.

Class Adjustments

We intend to follow our once-per-week class adjustment schedule and take the time needed with class adjustments to not make too many changes too hastily, particularly when it comes to power reduction or “nerfs”. You can expect to see the first full round of class adjustments arrive with weekly maintenance in your region during the week of Feb 20th.

That said, there is one major outlier that we intend to tackle before then. We intend to make the following adjustments to Balance druid over the next 24-48 hours.

  • The base damage of Starsurge has been reduced by 30%.
    • Additionally, we’ve identified and fixed a bug in the Starsurge spellpower coefficient and this has now been corrected. Starsurge should be properly gaining 42.9% of spellpower as damage now, as intended.
  • To compensate for this adjustment, we will be adding an additional effect to Starsurge that causes your next Starfire to cause 66% additional damage.

The intent is not to significantly nerf overall druid damage output, merely to reduce the efficiency of Starsurge specifically and shift the damage output of druids further towards their hard cast abilities such as Starfire.

Other Changes are Coming

There are many other adjustments we are hoping to tackle across multiple areas of the game in the coming days but we wanted to focus on these items initially, and get word out to players about our intentions here as soon as possible. We really appreciate all of the feedback we’ve gotten about these and many other items throughout the weekend. We’ll be issuing a number of hotfixes later today for the issues listed above plus many others and those will be viewable in the normal location on our official forums.

Thank you again!

  • The WoW Classic Dev Team
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Lol, they didn’t touch Shadow Word: Death, that one still hits for 1000 dmg and it’s instant cast too. Can’t wait to see people cry about shadow priests for the following weeks.

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Proof that classic developers doesnt play their own game and let the forum jokers do their job for them. Once again cancel culture succeded but then again what would you expect from a company like blizzard? Starsurge nerfed for more than 50% (with the so called coefficient bug) and now will be hitting less than a fire blast which is merely a filler spell in the endless arsenal of mages. Good luck casting a 2 second starfire in a pvp environment with all the talents and rune conditions met, while hitting barely 500 with the upcoming ‘dmg buff’.

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you do realise that these “forum jokers” are players expressing there concerns, that are completely valid, and hitting 500 dmg on a instant cast every 6 seconds is still good right ?

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its great in the hands of a proper class with a complete toolkit. Not so much in the hands of balance druids. Thats what happens when you give all the power of a certain class to a single ability because devs are so lazy to make proper changes. Obviously ppl will target that flashy spell which was OP when you take it out of context and look at it by itself. But a spell is not equal to a class and it shouldnt have been that way in the first place

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You got what you deserve dad

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What are you on about, do you even know what cancel culture refers to? You keep using words without knowing the meaning. Every post you make has to have cancel culture somewhere…

It is heavily compensated though.

Oh so you mean like the rest of the casters. Lava Burst has a 2 second cast time AND 30 yard range AND you have to have flame shock on (that can only be applied in 20 yards) for the spell to hit hard and it was doing similar damage to Starsurge, play me the tiniest violin please. Also you can interrupt Lava Burst, you still can’t do anything to prevent Starsurge.

Also Starfire can be brought down to 1.5 sec cast time so if you can’t manage to find the time to cast that you are terrible at this game and Starsurge was the crutch you leaned on to feel competitive. Good. Riddance.

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Yes I do know what it means, its exactly whats happening here. Certain ppl who can voice their ‘concerns’ more than others for personal gains/reasons and authorities siding with them to keep those certain group in check in order to save face. It wasnt even a complete class balance update literally just starsurge cause its the most used word on the forum. Go figure… I only talked the truths and will be doing the same thing. This nerf and the buff they added to compansate just shows how much dev team is out of touch with their own product. Buffing starfire only works in a pve environment and has practically zero use in pvp. You compare it with lava burst which have 4 times more dmg that starfire (the buffed version).

Starsurge was designed that way in the first place by the devs, its not my problem they chose the lazy path of adding one OP spell to compansate the whole disaster of a spec. I didnt leaned on it, they forced me to lean on it then they took it away because of the forum cries just like the unnecessary hunter nerfs in p1

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You spout nonsense after nonsense.

Their only fault is waiting for so long, and again if you can’t find time to cast Starfire in pvp on the most mobile class out there… it’s on you.

Lava Burst could stand to be toned down a tad as well and I can only DREAM for Shamans to be compensated as well as balance druids have been now, it is more than fair.

What baffles me is you thinking that a 6 second cooldown, INSTANT, NO MANA spell DESERVES to do same damage as Chaos Bolt or Lava Burst… all on top of the druid kit that is so mobile.
Only in a loony world Starsurge was supposed to do similar damage, and you are that loony.

Aww poor you, now THAT is rich. Time to learn to play the druid now chief, it’s a fun class and it will continue to be even if you won’t be able to because you lost your toxic IWIN button.

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so much anger so much hate, who hurt you little man. Taking everything I said on a personal level? I can write an essay here on every so called theory craft you listed but you made your mind prolly weeks if not months ago with this topic.

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Your stupidity.

If you need to theorycraft to see that Starsurge was broken in PvP compared to any other spell of any other caster you have no business doing any theorycrafting.

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Open living flame.

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So, the massive boomie spell damage nerfs is compensated for by this ‘buff’ to Starfire - a spell with a cast time of 3.x seconds that does damn all damage and is easily interrupted? You honestly think boomies actually USE this spell? It’s not even on my spell bar.

Pitiful.

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Wooh!

Let’s ignore this :slight_smile:

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you can get it to 1.5 sec and it will be good with dmg buff

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No one even mentions how mana expensive starfall even is.

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You are acting as if you have a deeper grasp of whats going on but in actuality you are so narrow minded that you cant even see past the spell itself. Never have I argued that starsurge wasnt OP in the first place. Its one of the most OP and lazy designed spells out there and sod dev team intended that way to just carry boomkins to a playable class level. Almost every post of myself clearly states that its the class a whole that is problematic and simply adding a jack of all trades skill doesnt cut it cause it would cause uproar. And it did

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Starsurge was a little too strong all right. What about other classes now?

Here : https ://clips.twitch. tv/SparklyImportantEndiveBudStar-dmMZpKolJLdON0oS

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Please elaborate, with 5 points in Improved Starfire the cast time is reduced to 3 secs, where does the extra 1.5 secs come from?

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It was but taking away the only spell that make a certain class viable in pvp and trying to compansate it with a god awfull outdated boring pve based spell is not the way. Even in pve environment its use is debatable, let alone pvp. Nerf starsurge all you want, I dont like to draw attention to a single spell at all but atleast give the class some pvp oriented compansation so it wouldnt suddenly turn into a train wreck.