Lots of feedback on the first round of changes. Here’s the second iteration:
Pillar of Frost
Previous changes to Pillar of Frost have been reverted. While the ability is quite simple in a vacuum (20% damage increase with no other mechanics), there were clearly a lot of players who were uncomfortable with the idea of removing a core ability that’s been around for so long.
After reading all the feedback and examining the ability’s place on the spec, we think the ability did provide a couple valuable things to the Frost rotation. One is Pillar of Frost is a window to play around – it allowed you to occasionally pool/spend your resources for a gain in a way that otherwise Frost doesn’t really have baseline. Additionally, it was a damage amp that you could/would want to line up cooldowns for – Remorseless Winter, Frostwyrm’s Fury, etc. Straightforward, but felt good to use.
Pillar of Frost is now back, at 45 sec cooldown and 15 sec duration – shorter cooldown but same uptime. Since it’s providing some useful gameplay direction for the rotation, we’re leaning into it more and making it available a little more often. Additionally, to give it just a little more texture and gameplay, its damage bonus now starts at 15% and increases by 1% per Rune spent while it’s active. Pillar usually ends with a 25% damage bonus or more.
Talent Changes
Pillar of Frost
Previous changes to Pillar of Frost have been reverted. While the ability is quite simple in a vacuum (20% damage increase with no other mechanics), there were clearly a lot of players who were uncomfortable with the idea of removing a core ability that’s been around for so long.
After reading all the feedback and examining the ability’s place on the spec, we think the ability did provide a couple valuable things to the Frost rotation. One is Pillar of Frost is a window to play around – it allowed you to occasionally pool/spend your resources for a gain in a way that otherwise Frost doesn’t really have baseline. Additionally, it was a damage amp that you could/would want to line up cooldowns for – Remorseless Winter, Frostwyrm’s Fury, etc. Straightforward, but felt good to use.
Pillar of Frost is now back, at 45 sec cooldown and 15 sec duration – shorter cooldown but same uptime. Since it’s providing some useful gameplay direction for the rotation, we’re leaning into it more and making it available a little more often. Additionally, to give it just a little more texture and gameplay, its damage bonus now starts at 15% and increases by 1% per Rune spent while it’s active. Pillar usually ends with a 25% damage bonus or more.
Talent Changes
- Glacial Advance now costs 30 Runic Power (instead of 1 Rune), has a 6 sec cooldown (down from 15 sec), and also applies Razorice to all enemies hit. Glacial Advance overlapped a lot with Frostscythe in both use and cost, and we’re looking to differentiate it so it can find its own use case.
- Cold Heart has replaced Shattering Strikes. It’s basically the same as the legendary but without the stun, and provides the spec’s talent tree with some single-target burst.
- Obliteration is mostly back to its live design, but it’s now a passive, and triggered while Pillar of Frost is active. With Pillar of Frost being back baseline, we still want to avoid a setup where casing 3 self-buff cooldown consecutively was possible (Pillar of Frost, Empower Rune Weapon, Obliteration, in any order). We're still iterating a bit on Obliteration's cost reduction mechanic - it has some slightly awkward effects on resources which we'd like to make feel better.
- Level 60: Avalanche, Frozen Pulse (now requires fewer than 3 full Runes instead of fewer than 2), Frostscythe
- Level 90: Gathering Storm, Glacial Advance, Frostwyrm’s Fury
- Level 100: Icecap (same as live, affecting Pillar of Frost), Obliteration, Breath of Sindragosa
- Icy Talons now triggers from Breath of Sindragosa, since it’s replacing your Frost Strike for a period of time.
- Icebound Fortitude’s damage reduction was increased to 30% for both Frost/Unholy specs
End of Legion: PVP Feedback
With Legion coming to a close we thought we might try something a little different and collect some specific feedback on things. We've now covered Mythic+, and Mythic Raiding so its time to change it up!
This week's topic is going to be about PVP over the course of Legion. BUT WAIT. While its easy to lump class feedback into the umbrella of PVP that's not what we're looking for here. We're looking for feedback more centered on PVP's functioning systems. This includes things like gearing, Arena and Battleground maps, rewards, rating systems, etc.
Why the clarification to exclude Class Feedback?
This is because if we didn't this feedback post would be almost impossible to read or evaluate. Those types of issues are far better as one offs that we can evaluate within those situational examples.
Where is X topic?
Don't worry as we have a list of topics that we plan on going down and its probably on the list. Every week will be a new topic so just give us a moment and we'll get there.
What Topics have you covered already?
We've now covered Mythic+, and Mythic Raiding.
Also a friendly note that just because you see it here doesn't mean it will be changed or added - and this topic is not an indication of future feature development.
This week's topic is going to be about PVP over the course of Legion. BUT WAIT. While its easy to lump class feedback into the umbrella of PVP that's not what we're looking for here. We're looking for feedback more centered on PVP's functioning systems. This includes things like gearing, Arena and Battleground maps, rewards, rating systems, etc.
Why the clarification to exclude Class Feedback?
This is because if we didn't this feedback post would be almost impossible to read or evaluate. Those types of issues are far better as one offs that we can evaluate within those situational examples.
Where is X topic?
Don't worry as we have a list of topics that we plan on going down and its probably on the list. Every week will be a new topic so just give us a moment and we'll get there.
What Topics have you covered already?
We've now covered Mythic+, and Mythic Raiding.
Also a friendly note that just because you see it here doesn't mean it will be changed or added - and this topic is not an indication of future feature development.
Battle For Azeroth Addon Changes
Thanks for the feedback. While we have to limit the SendLoggedAddonMessage to UTF-8 that is viewable in WoW, we are adding a CHAT_MSG_ADDON_LOGGED event.
https://www.mmo-champion.com/content/76 ... on-Changes
