I’ll give you the short version (my interpretation) right here.
Death Knights are getting some love in PVP with Unholy making a major push for the lead spec with PVP since many talents cater to less static and more reactionary moves. There are many different weaknesses with the Death Knight that can brutally cripple them in PVP such as the very high susceptibility to kiting and up until the new Blood Plague and Plague Strike changes, healers.
Bear druids apparently need more armor. But a lot of the gear doesn’t really lend to that idea. So to compensate Blizzard is adding stuff to their feral tree and I hope they look over it very closely so we don’t have melee DPS killing machines that can suddenly tank anything in the game.
Shaman are bugged lol.
Warlocks with Demon form are going to have scaling issues for now.
Death Knight
Death Knight DPS
We aren’t going to make a big dps pass on classes until talents have stabilized a bit and most of the bugs are knocked out. Last time we did one, DK damage was too high, but I couldn’t honestly tell you if that was from a few bugs, a few OP abilities, talents stacking too well or something across the board.
If we had spent a lot of effort balancing say the old Frost Rune Frost Strike, that would have been wasted effort in retrospect. It’s more important for the abilities to gel first then hit the numbers. (src)
Unholy tree and Death Runes generation
We will probably add an Unholy talent to reliably generate Death Runes. That has proven to be a pretty fun mechanic. At the moment it would probably really only benefit a DK with Bone Shield and / or Corpse Explosion. (src)
Scourge Strike
The idea of having Scourge Strike be an Obliterate upgrade has come up a few times, and it does have some benefits (especially if you do something like have Scourge Strike not remove diseases). It does turn Unholy into a rotation a little like Frost though, with the double FU ability on every other rotation.
I have had trouble figuring out how Scourge Strike as BU would work. It would be nice on times when you had Death Runes, but with a normal rotation, I’m concerned you’d see something like:
Icy Touch -> Plague Strike -> Scourge Strike -> Blood Strike… er Icy Touch again?
You’d have a similar problem with the proposal to have Scourge Strike renew Frost Fever. Freeing up a Frost Rune doesn’t help you that much unless you want to Chains of Ice.
There is also an idea to make Scourge Strike FU but apply both diseases. Then you could do Scourge Strike -> Blood Strike -> Blood Strike -> Obliterate, at least when in melee.
But… Heart Strike is pretty fun as a pure replacement for Blood Strike, so there is also a pretty decent reason to leave Scourge Strike as is. (src)
Black Ice
Black Ice affects all Frost and Shadow damage and will continue to do so. We’ll change the tooltip. (src)
Blood Plague & HoT removal
The Blood Plague change would be in addition the current hot removal of Plague / Scourge Strike. It did seem strange to spam Plague Strike just to keep a healer from reapplying the hot just after your hit. That is why we went with a random chance on Blood Plague — it will probably remove a hot on its own, but if you really want to make sure, go ahead and use Plague Strike again. (src)
Druid
Armor and Bears #2
Bears need to be compensated for less bonus armor on leather and lack of parry and block. Period. We haven’t added those talents or bonuses or whatever they are going to end up being yet because the game isn’t in a state where we could say e.g. what amount of armor a L80 tank needs to handle Patchwerk. Pointing out where you think bears (or any class) fall short in mitigation (or any aspect of tanking) is helpful. This is a beta though, and there is going to be a lot of iteration until we’re happy with everything. (src)
Shaman
Ancestral Awakening healing the person with the lowest total base health
We are aware of this bug. (src)
Mana Tide currently restores 0 mana
Bugged, will be fixed soon. (src)
Warlock
Demon Form scaling
There won’t be new ranks, the spells should scale with level indefinitely. This is a bit hard to do for spells like the Shadow Bolt, because of the way Shadow Bolt scales in the game (it isn’t very linear). Note that some/most of the spells right now do not scale correctly, and some are place holder. (src)
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