WoW Season of Discovery Class Changes for December 12
Shaman, Druid and Priest Buffed in World of Warcraft's Season of Discovery December 12 Balance Patch
- Druid’s Starsurge run ability gets major buff in increased damage, reduced cooldown and reduced mana cost.
- Priest gets a major buff on Homunculi damage, Void Plague damage and Twisted Faith damage.
- Shaman gets several buffs to damage for Lava Lashand Overload.
As more and more players log into the Season of Discovery for World of Warcraft, Blizzard continues to balance and make changes to the new take on the world of Classic of WoW. Several new class tuning chances for Druid, Hunter, Priest, Rogue and Shaman have come through. These changes went live on December 12th following the weekly maintenance for regional realms.
World of Warcraft Season of Discovery
Season of Discovery Class Changes
Among the changes in this World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery balance patch Druid, Priest and Shaman are seeing major damage buffs to some of their abilities while the other classes are seeing minor changes or UI and bug fixes with their abilities.
Druid
- Starsurge rune ability damage increased 182%.
- Starsurge cooldown reduced to 6 seconds (was 10 seconds).
- Starsurge mana cost reduced to 1% of base mana (was 3% of base mana).
Hunter
- Flanking Strike now gains the benefit of weapon enhancements like sharpening stones, is now on global cooldown, and is now properly treated as a melee attack, letting it benefit from attack power and combat modifiers to dodge, parry, block, crit, hit, etc.
- Flanking Strike is now prevented by Pacify.
- Flanking Strike now requires a weapon equipped.
- Flanking Strike pet damage is now properly treated as a melee attack, with the same benefits as listed above for the hunter's damage.
- Additional changes to normalize Hunter pet performance are still to be determined.
Priest
- Priest Homunculi damage increased by 100%.
- Void Plague damage increased by 200%.
- Twisted Faith now increases damage done by Mind Blast and Mind Flay by 50% (was 20%) on targets afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain.
Rogue
- Saber Slash, Shiv, and Main Gauche will now properly consume Remorseless Attacks.
- Saber Slash's tooltip fixed; damage not reduced.
- Saber Slash damage is now properly considered a Bleed and benefits from the Mangle debuff. Note: Bleed-immune creatures will no longer be affected by it.
Shaman
- Lava Lash damage increased to 150% weapon damage (was 100% weapon damage).
- Lava Lash mana cost reduced to 1% of base mana (was 4%).
- Overload now has a 50% chance to trigger (was 33%).
- Dual Wield Specialization now grants 10% increased chance to hit while dual-wielding.
- Boon of Blackfathom world buff adjusted. It now provides 3% spell hit and 25 spell power buff in addition to the other physical damage and movement speed effects (was spell crit).
- Developers notes: Spellcasters in general are struggling a bit in BFD, mostly due to poor scaling without spellpower and a higher requirement of spell hit to reliably hit creatures 2+ levels above the caster. Keep those Chronoboons handy and don't stand in the fire and lose your buff!
Regarding the Hunter pet performance note above, we will let you know as soon as we've finalized this hotfix. We really like hunter pets being able to occasionally do some raid or dungeon tanking, but it was never intended for them to be the best tanks in the game.
