Hey folks, this is Kalani. Patch 10.1 is bringing a lot of changes to the game, including some huge class changes - buffs and nerfs. We have another spec rework to go through, and there might even be some new specializations being added in for certain classes, which would definitely make this one of the most surprising patches we've seen in a while. Then, there are also new class-specific trinkets and some interesting changes to how interrupts and crowd control are going to work in the new patch too. There's a lot to talk about, so let's break it all down and see how classes are changing in Patch 10.1. Now, before we jump in, be sure to hit up that like button and subscribe so you never miss another video.
There are a lot of class changes in this first 10.1 build, so let's talk about those first, starting with the Druids. Both Balance and Feral Druids will see some significant changes in 10.1, and they both have feedback threads that go into more detail. For Balance Druids, there seem to be three main goals or problems to address:
Stellar Flare and its interactions are too strong, and multi-dotting with it is annoying. Eclipse and effects that trigger on Eclipse are so strong that it incentivizes only using Lunar Eclipse because it's faster to trigger. There are enough bonuses to start Fire Splash damage that is optimal to target something next to your focus target. So, let's see what changes are being made with those problems in place. Shooting Stars will no longer be triggered by Stellar Flare. There's a new talent that is a choice node alongside Stellar Flare that enhances your Starfire and Wrath filler spells. Astral power generation was increased for many abilities, including Wrath and Starfire. Moonfire and Sunfire, Stella Flare, and Nature's Balance Star Surge and Starfall damage have been increased by 20%. Some talents have been buffed slightly, some have been nerfed slightly, and the four-set bonus from our current raid set is going to get nerfed quite heavily. Instead of your next Star Surge or Starfall being free and dealing 35% increased damage, now it will just reduce the cost of whichever spell you use by 5 astral power and increase its damage done by 20%. So, a pretty big nerf on both the astral power cost-saving side but also on the increased damage. Soul of the Forest has been changed quite considerably. Power of Goldrinn damage was increased by 75, Denizen of the Dream has been buffed as well, Friend of the Fey had its damage boost doubled for a shorter duration, Elune's Guidance was buffed slightly, Radiant Moonlight was also buffed, and then Radiant Moonlight also increases the damage of Full Moon and its variants. So, a lot of back and forth for Balance Druids, and remember that these changes are for 10.1, so the tier set nerf shouldn't be too impactful in the long run because we should be replacing it with the new tier set as soon as possible. It is going to make the early days of season 2 a bit rocky though.
For the Feral Druids, Berserk is being redesigned. There's a new talent that lets you apply Thrash dots with other abilities, Shred damage was increased, Thrash damage was increased, and Relentless Predator was nerfed down to a 20 cost reduction for Ferocious Bite. There's a quick little change for Resto at the very end - Incarn and Cenarion Ward can now properly override each other on your action bar when swapping talents.
Seconds, if you have Essence burst, and then causality was also redesigned while channeling disintegrate fire breath an eternity surge cooldown 100 faster so you wouldn't get a benefit from recasting disintegrate over and over. With these changes in place, Dragon race duration was also extended up to 18 seconds baseline, and a Master T duration was slightly reduced. Engulfing Blaze was nerfed in terms of both casting speed reduction and damage increase of living flame. Imminent destruction was redesigned to give deep breath more interactions with Empower spells, and there's a new talent that increases the radius of Firestorm and gives Pyre a nice damage boost to the target in your Firestorm. So there are new AOE options at the end there.
The hunters are up next, and it looks like all three specs will see at least some changes in this first build. The dev notes say that their main focus is on updating active abilities that don't feel impactful and replacing some talents that didn't work out too well to start with. Aurora's sacrifice will be a talent in the core Hunter tree for Beast Mastery. Aspect of the Wild now causes Cobra shot to hit one additional target.
Master Handler cooldown reduction was doubled, snakebite damage bonus was increased to 75%, up from 30%, and then bloody frenzy has been redesigned. While called The Wild is active, your pets have the Beast cleave effect, and Cobra shot also applies serpent sting to any target hit. So they want to give Cobra shot and The Wild talents some more power by the looks of things. For Marksmanship, bombardment has been redesigned. Kill shot now grants you trick shots, kind of interesting but a bit of a weird interaction.
Legacy of the Windrunners has been slightly redesigned. Every aim shot now always shoots the wind arrows, and every 24 Wind arrows fired generates a charge of aim shot and 30 Focus. That's definitely more reliable and helps you keep those aim shots rolling, but of course, the wind arrows have been nerfed quite drastically.
Their damage was reduced by 66%, so we'll see how that works out in terms of numbers as the patch progresses. Lethal shots has been replaced with the new talent that grants you haste when you fully channel rapid fire, and Bullseye is now a one-ranked talent instead of two ranks. Then survival has a couple of changes too.
Ruthless order is now a two-ranked talent, and lunge will also help reduce the cooldown of wildfire bomb with melee attacks. Up next are the monks, where Mistweaver will see a lot of changes. Song of Chiji is moving into the class tree, and it looks like the dev team isn't altogether too happy with how Ancient Teachings currently works, so they're going to try and make it more reliable. So Ancient Teachings has been redesigned. After casting Essence font or feline stomp, your next Tiger Palm, Blackout Kick, and Rising Sun Kick heal up to 5 injured allies for a hundred percent of the damage done split evenly. Burst of Life no longer interacts with live cocoon, but the healing was increased.
There's a new choice talent to reduce the cooldown of Life Cocoon. Verify primary healing was increased, invigorating Mist healing was reduced. Some talents have been removed, and several talent choices will now properly override each other on your action bar when you swap them. And then we come to the priests. There's not too much going on for Holy or Disc just yet. Divine star and Halo should swap properly when changing talent, and the bounce radius of Prayer of Mending was increased by 10 yards.
Changes also have knock-on effects for PVP because they won't have access to as many instant cast spells, so their damage in PVP might be brought back up. As for actual changes, Mindseer, Dark Void, Coalescing Shadows, Puppet Master, Harnessed Shadows, Pain of Death, Surge of Darkness, and Damnation have all been removed. They're gone.
Shadowy Insight has been changed to no longer provide charges of Mind Blast, and Psychic Link now affects Devouring Plague. It's a one-point talent, moved to Mindseer's location in a talent tree, and reworded. Forty percent of single target damage is also dealt to targets that have their Empyrean Touch. It does not apply to Shadow Word: Pain or Vampiric Touch, so it should cover most types of damage as long as it's single target.
Some Insanity generation, which reduced several talents, have been buffed or nerfed slightly, but a big change is Shadow Crash no longer applying Vampiric Touch, though that effect is added in later as a new talent. There are a lot of changes to Idol of C'thun, which seem to increase his AOE potential. Mind Spike is replacing Mind Flay as the baseline filler, and its damage is being increased.
There are also a lot of new talents coming in, and talents are being moved around, so a lot of Shadow changes here, which is why they're calling it a rework. If you play Shadow Priest, I would definitely recommend you hop onto the PTR, test out the new kit and how it all feels – the new rotation, the new fillers, the new talents, all of that stuff – and give your feedback in the appropriate places. That is the main way you can make sure this rework ends up as good as possible and leaves Shadow Priest in a great spot instead of a bad one.
The last class in this first round of changes is the Shamans. The devs say their main goal here is to reduce the frequency and number of keybinds that Enhancement uses and needs and change a few different builds for more options.
Windfury Weapon damage would increase by 50 percent, Forceful Winds' damage per stack was cut in half, Static Accumulation gives you a chance to refund Maelstrom Weapon charges, Thorium's Invocations now also increase the damage of Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning, Elemental Weapons increases your Elemental damage dealt by 2.5 percent per active weapon in view, and Fire Nova deals both fire and physical spell school damage.
Remember, if your class or spec was not in this list for this video, that doesn't mean it's been completely ignored, and that just means it was not included in the build that we just went over. We already have a huge amount of class changes, and this is just the very first Patch 10.1 PTR build. We haven't even gotten to play around with the 10.07 class changes coming through yet, and we already have some big reworks lined up.
I do love that we're getting more developer insight and Dev notes to get a glimpse into the whys of these changes and what problems they're trying to address. That is incredibly important, I think, and it helps give some context for why spells and abilities are being changed or removed.
I'm also very surprised to see some classes that have already been given a lot of attention, they're getting even more. It looks like Druids will see a lot of changes in Tanaan, and Shadow Priests are definitely going to be one of the most changed classes in this patch, if these notes are anything to go by.
By asking you to return to the Forbidden Reach, Embethal needs your help to uncover the mystery that was discovered in 1007. Although not required for this quest, it is about to unfold, and she needs your help to talk Abyssian down from a course of action she sees as folly. The paragraph has two parts.
First, there is going to be a new specialization, and the word "specialization" seems very specific. They could have used many different words, but they chose this one. This could relate to something besides an actual specialization. Maybe something linked to 1007 in the story. We don't know yet because we don't know the story yet.
But it could also be a third Avoca specialization. They only started with two, so there is definitely room to expand. Their entire basis is using the power and magic of the five different Dragon flights to do cool stuff. You can mix and match those different dragon flight powers in different ways to come up with some pretty cool spells and abilities.
So, whether it's a new range DPS spec, another healing option, or maybe something in between, the potential is definitely there with evokers. In a later quest, the text reads as, "The energies release, adamantia is coming too, and is driven mad by torture of ages. Helped by Abyssian, time to subdue her magically, boss fight, boost/slash heal Abyssian and Embethal most efficiently or throw damage on adamant." Here, high flavor fight and lots of banter.
Now the post that WoW had put out about this did point out something a bit odd here. The best way to progress in this fight is to heal or boost your allies. While healing makes sense, evokers don't really have any way to boost or buff allies.
Unless this language is specific to the encounter and you get an item or a spell or something, that wording does seem a bit off. The conclusion in the Wowhead post is that a third evoker spec could end up being a support who kind of aids your allies by buffing or boosting them in that style of gameplay.
The potential is definitely there, and it would be an interesting mechanic that hasn't really been explored in WoW before. Now we do have a little bit of info from an interview that Towley did that might be relevant here. Towley asked if evokers will get a tank spec in 10.1. The response was a little odd. The dev said that they've never added a spec into the game like that, and while tanking evokers were definitely considered in the early days, they probably wouldn't put an evoker into melee either as a DPS or a tank.
But he technically didn't say that a new spec wasn't on the table, just that they probably won't get to tank. So, it's a little wishy-washy right now, and we definitely need more information before we start drawing conclusions about what this could actually be. But I'll be very interested to see how this progresses on the 10.1 PTR if a new spec can be added into the game for evokers in a major content patch. If so, that opens up a whole new kind of game update to explore.
Moving on, there are some very interesting blanket changes to certain kinds of spells in 10.1 as well. To start with, a lot of interrupts will lock spell schools for less time overall.
All of these interrupts have had one second shaved off their lockout duration. This is going to be far more impactful for PvP players, but it does actually apply to PvE as well, just to a lesser extent. Being able to use your spells again faster after being interrupted lets you get back into the fight faster.
I've had to deal with class-locked gear a few times already this expansion, most notably the Evocus staff, and I guess the Hunter bow counts as well, seeing as no one else is going to use a bow. But this time, everyone will have something fun to look forward to because these class-specific items are trinkets. Instead of it just being one class, each trinket is shared among quite a few classes, which will also make it much easier to acquire them. You'll be able to trade them around when duplicates start to drop.
First up, the Idol of Chaotic Arrogance is available for Warriors, Paladins, Mages, Demon Hunters, and Evokers. It's a crit trinket that gives your AOE abilities a chance to grant you a big chunk of primary stat. But during the trinket effect, your damage taken is increased by five percent.
The Idol of Debilitating Arrogance is available for Rogues, Priests, Death Knights, and Druids. It's a versatility trinket that gives your harmful debuffs, dots, or abilities a chance to grant you the same primary stat as the first trinket. But during this time, you bleed for nature damage. The dot itself doesn't seem to be too high right now, but obviously, that could change with balance and number tuning.
Then the Idol of Domineering Arrogance is available for Hunters, Shamans, Warlocks, and Monks. It's a haste string kit that gives your summons' attacks a chance to grant you way more primary stat for 12 seconds. But during this time, you are slowed by 10. It's kind of interesting to have a curse effect on a trinket, but I do worry that some of these might not be as reliable as others or even useful for certain specs.
For example, the Hunter trinket relies on summons to deal damage to trigger it by the looks of things, which means their pet, but Marksmanship Hunters prefer not to use a pet, so that's a bit weird. Having a slow effect is also more annoying than a damage-taken increase, and having a simple bleed effect is also less impactful than both of the other flat negative effects too.
Obviously, if they're good enough, people will equip them without caring too much about the negative effect. We also saw how people took to corruption, but you could still get killed in certain types of content if you aren't careful. All of these are marked as very rare in the Dungeon Journal, so expect to see them about as often as other very rare items from the Vaults of the Incarnate. I'll be very curious to see how powerful these trinkets end up being when compared with everything else on offer in season 2 of Dragonflight.
That's all the class changes in Patch 10.1's first PTR build and a few other interesting additions coming with the patch. What do you think of the Shadow Priest rework? Are there any other classes or specs you think need a big rework with a lot of changes? And how do you feel about the possibility of new specializations being added to the game? Leave all your thoughts in the comments section below.
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