Hey folks, this is Kelani. Welcome to 2023! What better way to bring in the new year than with a huge round of class changes, including buffs and nerfs? This week, we're talking way more buffs than nerfs. Seriously, so many classes will see some buffs very shortly or see some major buffs as we head into patch 10.0.5. There are very few nerfs in here, which is great in my opinion. I love it when classes are brought up to be in line with the better performing classes instead of the top classes getting knocked down to be on par with the lower classes. Bringing everyone up always feels better. So, we have a lot to talk about. There's one round of class changes coming next week, more class changes planned for 10.0.5, and then even more class changes planned for the future. There are also some smaller things to talk about too, so let's break everything down and see which classes are getting those big 40 damage buffs now. Before we jump in, be sure to hit that like button and subscribe so you never miss another video. Let's kick things off with the class changes. There are two rounds of changes to go through. We have some changes that will come through with the very next weekly reset, so that's going to be Tuesday the 10th or thereabouts, but then there are also some class changes planned to come through with patch 10.0.5, so we'll have to wait a bit longer for those. Let's start with the changes that come through first with a weekly reset. Most of these are going to be relatively simple damage or effectiveness changes with the more involved updates being saved for patch 10.0.5. To start with, demon hunters will see a change to how the hunt works. The damage of the time component no longer deals an additional tick upon application, but the overall damage dealt remains the same. In addition, Vengeance will see some small buffs to their overall defensive capabilities through their thick skin armor bonus, and calcified skin will also last just a little bit longer. So, not too big in the grand scheme of things, but every little bit helps. Moving on to feral druids, you're going to see a three percent buff across the board for all of their abilities. It's not exactly the huge, sweeping change that feral druids have been hoping for, but it's a start But thankfully, they will get some more changes later on. More about that in just a minute. Evokers are up next with quite a list of damage buffs. Fire breath has been bumped up for Devastation evokers, the Lay Waste talent was buffed up to provide a 30 maximum bonus, eternity search saw a 10 damage increase, Firestorm damage has increased by 20%, the Eye of Eternity will now provide you with two Essence, up from one, the extra crit damage talent has also been buffed, and then the damage bonus for Iridescent was also increased. So, lots of damage boosts for some of an evoker's most used spells, which should hopefully help them do a little bit better after next week. Moving on to hunters, survival will see some buffs. There's a two percent damage increase across the board for all abilities. Butchery and Carve damage has increased by 10%, Fury of the Eagle damage is increased by 10, and then Wildfire Bomb damage results are increased by 15%. It's not super crazy by any means, but their AOE and cleave damage should at least be a bit better with these buffs in place. Mages are up next. Fire is going to see a 15 damage increase for Flame Strike and a 25 damage increase for Living Bomb. I guess they just aren't doing enough AOE damage right now. And then Frost is going to see a 20% increase to Frostbolt, a 40% increase to Frost Nova, and a 10% increase to Glacial Spike. All in all, mages should feel pretty good, even if they aren't currently running Arcane. Moving on to monks, brewmaster will see some nice buffs. Stagger will be more effective when dealing with magic damage, and the cooldown of Celestial Brew has been reduced by a quarter. Mist Weaver also made the list, receiving a lot of buffs in a lot of places. To start with, there's a straight five percent healing increase across the board for all abilities, with an additional five percent buff for Vivify. There are also a bunch of damage increases for various abilities, Blackout Kick, Rising Sun Kick, Tiger Palm, as well as Spin and Crane Kick. Awakened Feline was also buffed to transfer more damage from Spinning Crane Kick into healing, so, Mist Weavers should see a pretty significant bump in their overall healing output Buffs all around for the Mist Weavers. then we come to the paladins, who should be quite happy indeed. It's only one round of buffs for paladins so far, but Crusader's Strike damage was increased by 40%, Blade of Justice was increased by 25%, and Final Reckoning was increased by 15%. So, some big damage buffs right there, especially for Crusader's Strike, which will help them be a bit more competitive. In addition to that, Shield of Vengeance had 30 seconds cut off its cooldown to give you access to that minor defensive ability more often. Moving on to priests, they have a handful of interesting changes. To start with, holy priests will see a three percent healing increase across the board. It's not too exciting and not too impactful, but it's better than a nerf at any rate. And then Shadow comes in with a whole bunch of changes. Focused Will was slightly nerfed, but there are quite a few damage increases in here too. Mind Blast, Mind Flay, Mind Spike, Void Torrent, and Devouring Plague will see some very nice damage buffs, 15% across all of those abilities. The goal here is to increase single target damage, apparently, while slightly reducing their survivability in PvP. Rogues are only briefly mentioned this week for the weekly reset, and it's a nerf, I'm afraid. The Precision talent for Outlaw Rogues will be slightly reduced to two percent bonus damage down from three percent per missing target from Blade Flurries max potential. So, this should reduce Outlaw's damage on any encounter or instance where you are fighting more than one monster, but less than eight, which, let's be honest, is the vast majority of the time probably. Thankfully, it's not too bad of a nerf, just one percent per target missing. And then the last class on this week's list are the warlocks. A lot more buffs to go through here. Affliction will see buffs to a lot of their key damaging abilities, up to 20% in some cases, so that should all tally up to be a very nice buff indeed. And then destruction will also see quite a few buffs, up to 20% for some abilities. These though, quite a few of them will not carry over into PvP This is mainly a round of PVE burst to help Destro keep up with demonology, I guess. So, once again, all of these changes will come through with the next weekly reset, so we don't have too much longer to wait for these buffs. But there are even more changes just over the horizon, planned to come through with patch 10.0.5. So, let's go through those next. To start with, Druids are in for another round of big changes. For balance, Astral Communion will also increase your max Astral Power by 20, alongside its other effects. For Guardian, a track above has been added for after Wildfire to help you keep track of when you'll next trigger it. And then for Resto, there are two new talents thrown into the mix, with some node connections moving around to accommodate them. Nourish will also get a tooltip update. For monks, there are a few bug fixes and improvements for Faeline Stomp, which should make it a bit better or at the very least, more reliable as a talent choice. For Mist Weaver specifically, they'll see quite a few buffs to Shalyun's Gift, some Mana cost reductions, and the functionality is changing with how spells interact. Zen Pulse will also trigger your Mastery. For brewmaster, it looks like they'll get some more healing sphere action. Stagger is now a baseline ability for brewmaster, and a lot of talents were taken down to just one rank instead of being two ranked talents. on to paladins, they will get a new track above as well for after image to help keep track when your next trigger will be. And holy has a few buffs thrown in for good measure, some healing increases, but also changes to how abilities work. For priests, there's going to be a new class talent to provide some extra leech. Vampiric Embrace will no longer be on the GCD, so that's a very nice change. The San Lane talent can give you even more leech, and there are changes to how you can trigger Manipulation. On top of all of that, for shadow priests, Psychic Link will now also apply to Vampiric Embrace. So, a lot of changes coming up for priests. Function with more abilities giving you access to more cleave and AOE potential is up next. The Rogue's "Faint" ability will be baseline for all Rogue specs and will be learned at level 12, so it won't be a talent anymore. There are new talents being added and some talents are moving around. Sepsis will get a small buff and there are also some bug fixes thrown in for good measure. For Assassination specifically, "King's Bane" has been moved in the talent tree and there are a few other talent changes that might be of interest to you. For Outlaw, "Killing Spree" will now also give you a 65 damage reduction buff for its duration and "Fan the Hammer" has been nerfed slightly. Subtlety has some changes to "Invigorating Shadow Dust" as well, including a change to how it works in PvP. Shamans have an odd change as well. "Mana Spring Totem" has been renamed to "Mana Spring" and it's just a passive effect. This change is not yet implemented, but it seems that Shamans will lose "Mana Spring" as an actual totem and will always have the effect passively. This is kind of interesting, even if it goes against the totem Shaman fantasy. Moving on to Warlocks, Demonology will see an odd change as well. "Foul Storm", "Guillotine", and "Demonic Strength" will put each other on a short cooldown so you won't be able to use them back to back to back. This is apparently intended to make playing Demonology a bit easier and to make it easier to see when each ability is available to be cast. For Destruction, quite a few passive effects will be buffed up, including extra damage to targets with ML8, extra damage added to "Eradication", and extra damage when you use "Burn to Ashes". More damage is always nice. Lastly, for Warriors, there are quite a few changes for both Arms and Fury. "Improved Sweeping Strikes" will last a bit longer and "Improved Mortal Strike" was removed from the tree entirely. There is a new talent in its place to give "Overpower" some new zip. There are also a few other changes to passives and talents for Fury. We have more buffs to various talents, abilities, and passives, such as a 40 damage increase to "Onslaught" with some added rage on top. Debuffs and passives last longer and some talents were buffed. Overall, it looks like Fury will have more options than before and generally just be a bit more powerful. That's all for this week's round of class changes, but we do have even more to look forward to for Feral Druids specifically. Feral Druids haven't been in a particularly great spot since those first few rounds of heavy nerfs, so hopefully these changes will prop them up a bit more. A few major talent points will be moving around again. "Tear Open Wounds" will be seeing a nice buff, "Taste for Blood" will only be a one point node, and "Sudden Ambush" will also only be a one point node. There are also some buffs coming for "Moonfire" related talents, "Ferocious Bite" talents, "Rip" and "Tear" damage, "Infected Wounds" bonus damage, as well as the "Vein Ripper" bonus that was previously nerfed. Zone buffs across the board almost with some extra changes to the talent tree which might smooth things out a bit more. Most importantly, this is going to give Feral Druids a bit more oomph so they feel a little bit better to play. Now that we're in the new year and the dev team are back to making changes and chugging along, we will probably see a lot more buffs and nerves work their way into patch 10.0.5 specifically. That patch will probably be in our hands towards the end of January or maybe into mid-February, but we won't be waiting too much longer for it. The patch does contain a lot of holiday-related stuff, so it really has to hit before those holidays become available in-game. Right now, things like "Love Is in the Air" are the next big holiday, which has ties to patch 10.0.5 and the new Trading Post. The "Love Is in the Air" holiday kicks off on February 6th, which is a Monday, so February 7th would be a strong contender for the patch release date. Honestly, with how aggressive the 2023 World of Warcraft content roadmap seems to be, six patches over the entire year, we could see things move very, very quickly, which would be great for the overall pacing of the expansion. I'm really excited to see how this year progresses, but yeah, those are the changes we have to look forward to for now. These are all the class changes coming our way very soon. Now, there are some other changes in here not related to classes that are new this week, including a change to how profession specializations will unlock, making them much easier or faster to acquire. In the game currently, if your profession has three specializations, you unlock the first one at skill level 25, the second one at skill level 50, but then you have to wait until skill level 100 to unlock the third and final specialization. If you have four specializations, they unlock at even 25 skill increments, meaning you still have to reach skill level 100 to unlock their fourth and final specialization for your profession. Well, that's changing in patch 10.0.5 and it's going to be quite a bit easier on all fronts. In the next patch, if your profession has three specializations, you will unlock the third one at skill level 75, much earlier than the previous 100 requirement. And then if you have four specializations, you will actually unlock the third one at skill level 60 and then the fourth one at skill level 75. So by the time you get to skill level 75, you will be able to unlock every specialization you have access to, regardless of which profession you actually have. That's a nice quality of life change and will let you play around with different specializations much sooner. It's just a shame that we have to wait until the next patch for these changes to come through. Another interesting point in these development notes is that the Mage Tower is now available for testing on the PTR. If all goes well, we might see the Mage Tower become available again in patch 10.0.5, which will give you something else to do and another challenge to strive for if you haven't yet completed the Mage Tower on any of your characters. It will be interesting to see how different things will be with the huge class overhauls and talentry changes that came through in Dragonflight, but they should still provide you with a decent challenge almost no matter what. To round out this video, there are some updates to the solo queue system coming our way. Most of this seems to be related to punishing leavers more and making it less of a frustrating experience when people leave during your solo queue round. To start with, rating will be calculated per round in games with leavers. This means gains and losses will be calculated based on individual rounds and not the overall match. Scale linearly based on the number of rounds completed, at least that's what the blue post says. The matchmaking value for each player in a match will also be displayed on the scoreboard, so you'll now get to see that previously hidden rating that has more of an impact on who you get paired with for the solo queue rounds. This might help you understand why you get matched with who you do and why everyone's rating changes by different amounts at the end. Then, the last change is a new warning message that clearly lays out the penalties you will receive if you do leave a solo queue match, including a huge rating tank and a desert debuff preventing you from queuing for another match anytime soon. You'll also have a timer to wait out before you can click accept to give you time to actually read what's on your screen, I guess, so you know that leaving will have some consequences. The blue post also added at the bottom that players who excessively leave solo queue matches will be subject to account review and suspensions, so if you leave too much, you can actually get your account banned in the future. So take a moment to think about whether you really gain anything from leaving the match versus just playing the rounds out and seeing how it goes. Now, all of these solo queue changes are currently planned for patch 10.0.5, but the dev team has also said that they're looking at potential options to help incentivize healers to kill into solo queue to help with some of the queue times. But they don't have anything solid to share right now. It's good to know that they're looking to keep updating the solo queue PVP option though, as it's a fun addition to the game and I'm excited to see how it evolves over the course of the expansion. But that's all the big class changes going our way, some extra changes coming in patch 10.0.5, as well as some discussion about when that patch might land in our laps. So that's it for this video. What do you think of the big buffs and changes for those few classes? Do you think there's any class or spec that still needs a lot of attention? And when do you think patch 10.0.5 will go live, based on what we know so far? Leave all your thoughts in the comment section below. A big thank you to all of our supporters over on Patreon and all of our members here on YouTube. You can see the names floating by on screen. Special shoutout at the start of the next video. You can find links in the description over to Patreon or click the join button just below this video if you want to see more videos like this. Make sure to subscribe and ring that notification bell so you never miss another video. Thanks for watching, folks. Good luck and have fun and, as always, I'll see you next time.
