There already were a few other hotfixes announced and most of them involved other things like specific items or certain bugs to certain dungeon encounters. Those can be seen in a post by CM Crygil here. A few more recent hotfixes involving class abilities were announced by Ghostcrawler and probably have taken effect already. Rogues, Death Knights and Warlocks are the classes affected by the changes.

Rogues: Hunger for Blood now increases damage by 10% instead of 15%

Ghostcrawler mentions that they wanted to increase the damage of Assassination rogues but in doing so, they overdid it a bit. Hunger for Blood was the candidate for some nerfing since they buffed it before when they wanted to give the tree a damage boost. But now it’s been changed again to lower the damage to what they want it to be.

Death Knights: The shadow portion of Scourge Strike can no longer crit.

The Unholy talent Scourge Strike has a physical damage portion and shadow damage portion. Only the physical damage portion will be able to crit now. At first they wanted both to crit but that proved to be too bursty for PvP and gives too much sustained damage for raids.

Warlocks: Rolling Corruptions no longer use the initial haste value indefinitely

This problem sounds familiar and I actually thought this would have been fixed by now. This same thing became an issue for Druids rolling lifebloom indefinitely to maintain any buff that was used in the first cast like a healing increase trinket. Apparently it’s sort of the same issue for corruption and haste, leading to some high damage that Blizzard feels just isn’t right. With the hotfix, the hasted corruption should correct itself within a few ticks after it’s refreshed.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Holy Wrath

Lead Encounter Designer Daelo’s words pretty much provides the context of this change. He mentioned that this change will affect the difficulty of the Anub’arak encounter in the Trial of the Crusader and that he didn’t want 5 paladins with the Holy Wrath glyph to be the “right way” to defeat him. Since Anub’arak was just killed recently, it’s implied that this hotfix is mainly in response to the recent kill.

While it is a creative way to abuse a spell to kill a boss, it certainly doesn’t look right to be able to kill Anab’arak by keeping him stunned with paladins rotating their Holy Wraths on him.

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Living Bomb

and only off Fireball, Fire Blast, Scorch, Living Bomb, or Frostfire Bolt.

Blizzard hit two birds with one stone here, the first being solving the bug concerning the periodic damage from Frostfire Bolt and Fireball being counted towards breaking the Hot Streak. As you know you need two consecutive crits from the spells above to trigeer it. The second is that since Living Bomb can be cast on multiple targets now, the devs thought that the crits from the periodic damage of Living Bomb (Glyph of Living Bomb allows the periodic damage to crit) on multiple targets is overpowered. I guess the only Living Bomb crits that will count towards the Hot Streak is the damage that comes at the end of the spell when it “explodes”.

This change affects both Fire mages and Frostfire mages since they both use Living Bomb and Hot Streak. I’m sure they would rather have the crits from periodic Living Bomb damage count towards the Hot Streak rather than allow Living Bomb to be cast on multiple targets. Well we just have to adapt and move on.

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Midsummer Fire Festival Flame

To make things worse, players who wanted to participate were hampered by the bug that wouldn’t allow players who completed the quests in the past to do them again this year. This is a problem since you need to complete them all to get the achievements. Thankfully, there’s a fix that’s being implemented in today’s restart to address this issue. Unfortunately, CM Bornakk has some bad news for those people who were already working on these quests:

We are in the process of applying an in-game fix that will restart all of the quests associated with the Midsummer Fire Festival event and allow players to complete them once again. If you are in the process of completing an achievement such as Extinguishing Kalimdor, this fix will reset your progress and you will need start over. This fix will require realms to be restarted. source

So if you’re in the process of completing an achievement, the progress will be wiped. but what if you’re already done? Is the fact that all these achievements are all part of the Flame Warden/Flame Keeper meta achievement mean that absolutely everything a player has done so far is all for naught? That’s what I’m not sure about but we’ll just have to find out.

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lightning overload tooltip

One of the latest complains I’ve been seeing was about the damage output of Elemental Shamans especially in Ulduar. Well it looks like Blizzard listened and according to Ghostcrawler, they agree that shaman dps is indeed a bit low. A buff to the Elemental talent Lightning Overload is going to be buffed and the cool thing si that they don’t need to wait for the next patch to get it since it will be hotfixed within the next few days.

This upcoming buff involves increasing the proc rate of Lightning Overload from 7 / 13 / 20% to 11 / 22 / 33%. This means that the half damage, no threat Lightning Bolt or Chain Lightning Elemental shammies get for free from this talent will happen with more regularity and according to Ghostcrawler this should result in roughly a 5% increase in total dps for a raid buffed level 80 shaman. Ghostcrawler also mentions that when the hotfix does come out the tooltip of Lightning Overload will still display the old numbers and will only be updated in a future patch.

This is a pretty spiffy buff they are getting and I sure hope it does the job of making Elemental shaman dps more acceptable.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

replenishment

One of the newest changes made in the hope for more balance concerns the Replenishment effect in the Arena Tournament. Replenishment was changed through a hotfix so that it will only affect the player and not the rest of the group inside Arenas. It will continue to function the same way anywhere else. CM Zarhym mentioned that replenishment remains balanced for bigger groups but not for smaller groups. In my experience, arena matches are supposed to be fast enough that players should not really need replenishment anyway. But making it work for the whole team could really provide make players go all out with the damage and healing without worrying about resources.

Post from: WOW Obsessed