Upcoming AE DPS Changes

Ghostcrawler (Source) announced some new AE changes, but not exactly how you’d think. This isn’t about mages or warlock, on the contrary it’s about rogues, druids, and shaman being given viable AE abilities. Swipe for cats, no-CD fan of knives, and no threat fire nova totems? Ohh la la.

There is definitely a lot of AE (area effect damage) going on in World of Warcraft dungeon runs at the moment. We’re not too worried about it for now – on the contrary it’s nice to see so many people doing the level-up dungeons on the way to level 80. If we find that AE tank + AE damage strategy (with no sheeping, sapping or other crowd control) is the only way people are running heroics and raids, then we’ll probably make some changes, but for now we’re content to just see what happens.

Having said all that, we feel like a few groups are being left out of the AE fun, which makes them of less utility in the 5-player dungeons. We aren’t able to provide a lot of details yet, but here are some upcoming changes we’re making.

Shaman – we are removing the threat component from Fire Nova Totem and Magma Totem and increasing the damage from Magma Totem. This should provide the Elemental shamans in particular with some formidable AE.

Rogue – we are removing the cooldown from Fan of Knives and adjusting the damage calculation slightly to make daggers more useful for this ability.

Druid – we are adding Swipe (Cat) as a baseline ability.

As is the case with most multi-target abilities, these three should be something you want to use when faced with groups, but never against single targets. Fan of Knives and Swipe, for example, don’t grant combo points so they should never be a core part of the rotation against single targets (like most bosses).

These changes will be available in the next minor content update, so keep an eye out for the next PTR push.