With the first week of World of Warcraft 12.1 in the books, Blizzard has revealed a round of class tuning balance changes ahead of the WoW Midnight Season 2 launch date. The developer is targeting its biggest outliers on both high and low ends of the MMORPG, and in particular has “identified several tier sets that would greatly overperform our expected targets” that will be nerfed in the upcoming update. Among the affected are Devourer DH, Arcane Mage, Discipline Priest, and Fury Warrior. However, in order to ensure that these specs aren’t hit too hard, most get some buffs to their baseline abilities to even things out.
These new World of Warcraft Midnight patch notes don’t actually start with set alterations, however; instead, we’ve got a straight-up Blood DK nerf for San’layn specs. Visceral Strength now gives 6% strength instead of 10%, while Transfusion’s bonus to Dancing Rune Weapon has been halved to just 5%. Blizzard notes that the tooltips won’t initially reflect these new values, with changes coming “at a later date,” so be sure to keep them in mind. Frost DK gets a big 9% boost to all ability damage, but the two-piece bonus from the Venomous Abyss set, Baleful Grave-Knight’s Crucible, is halved.
For Devourer Demon Hunters, Blizzard says its four-piece set bonus “is performing significantly above expectations.” It’ll now generate just two soul fragments (instead of eight) and boost Reap damage by 10% (rather than 20%). To compensate, all ability damage has been increased by 14% in PvE combat, although Reap, Cull, and Eradicate are lowered slightly to balance things out.
Restoration Druids will be happy, with a 4% buff to all healing and 20% to all damage in PvE. BM Hunters get a slight boost to their recently overhauled four-piece set bonus, with Blizzard remarking that it “isn’t quite as strong as we would like it to be,” although the effects might not be enough to satisfy those maligned by the previous nerf. Another underperformer, Mistweaver Monk gets an 8% buff increase to all PvE healing, and its four-piece set bonus will activate 33% more often.
Arcane Mages suffer notable nerfs to their Primal Leywarden’s set bonuses: the two-piece damage boost for Arcane Missiles is cut from 20% down to just 5%, while the four-piece now applies just a 3% Cumulative Power bonus per stack (instead of 5%). Blizzard says “the amount we need to reduce its value by would be a greater impact than intended to Arcane’s overall damage,” so as compensation it’s lifting the spec’s ability damage by 3% across the board.
Discipline Priest has been overperforming in the damage stakes, so it’s having its entire output cut by a whopping 30% in PvE. To make sure their healing remains intact, Atonement’s damage transfer is buffed from 32% to 46%, while a 20% damage increase on Entropic Rift will help preserve dungeon viability. Holy Priest, meanwhile, gets a boost to mana regen from Enlightenment (25% instead of 10%), while the healing benefits of Oracle are being improved “so that it can serve as a competitive option against Archon.”
For Rogues, Assassination benefits from a spec-wide 4% increase to damage. Subtlety gains an even bigger boost at 6%, but that’s because its four-piece set bonus has been dropped from 100% effectiveness to just 60%. Also in need of some help are Enhancement Shamans, who have been handed a 5% buff to all damage, and Demonology Warlocks, who sees their two-piece set bonus improved to bring its performance closer to other specs.
Last but not least is Fury Warrior. Blizzard notes that “Fury’s four-piece set bonus is currently overperforming, but Fury is in a good place overall and we don’t want to disrupt that, so we’re moving some of the value out of the four-piece bonus and into Fury’s baseline.” The result of this is that all Fury Warrior’s damage is increased by 6%, while the critical strike benefit from that set bonus is now a 3% to 6% increase (down from 5% to 10%).
That’s all for the PvE side of things, although Blizzard has made some additional changes on the PvP side of Curse of Ula’Tek in preparation for Season 2. Among this is a boost to the PvP trinket set bonus for damage dealers and tanks. The developer notes, “We’ve felt the pace of PvP combat has been slower than intended, so we’re increasing the primary stat of non-healer specializations to increase overall outgoing damage.”
This round of World of Warcraft class tuning will go live on Tuesday August 18, alongside WoW Midnight Season 2. That gives you a couple of days to decide whether you need to reconsider your build, and which classes you’re planning to focus on when the update arrives. I’m sure we can expect additional tweaks to be made as patch 12.1 rolls on and the meta develops further, however.