Raider’s Guide to the Warlords Alpha Patch Notes

by JR Cook - 10 years ago     show comments

With the Alpha patch notes released for Warlords of Draenor, it is the first chance that players have really been able to see an overview of all the changes made so far, as well as the many new changes we had not heard about yet. While we have seen some Watercoolers and various blue posts and tweets since BlizzCon, Blizzard has released an immense amount of information, coinciding with their announcement that the Alpha for Warlords of Draenor has gone live.

There are many class specific changes, so it is worth reading up on your particular class to see how things are changing. But if you are a raider, here is the rundown of things that are going to affect your overall raiding experience and the changes made that will have a significant impact on your raid team.

The changes they are bringing about will make for a challenging raiding environment, but while also smoothing out some of the problem areas, such as Horde versus Alliance racials, the role of professions in raiding and the dependence many guilds have on both Warlocks for Healthstones and Druids for Symbiosis.

Raid Size

The change to raid size is obviously the most significant change. We’ve known about this for quite some time, but you can’t really talk about the raiding changes in Warlords of Draenor without talking about the new Mythic raiding, since it has a tremendous impact.

Going from 10M and 25M Heroic raiding to 20M Mythic raiding is going to bring changes to the overall raiding environment, but it also paves the way for Blizzard to challenge raiders with the best possible Mythic fights, when they don’t have to take into account scaling for both world first 25M and 10M raiding.

Racial Traits

Racial traits have been rebalanced so that every race has comparable combat performance. Horde racials have long been considered far superior to Alliance racials, and it was obvious with the vast majority of the top guilds being Horde.  While Blizzard had previously said that there wasn’t a need to rebalance them to encourage more top end of raiding guilds to consider Alliance for their faction, with the changes to hit and expertise, Warlords of Draenor is truly the most optimal time to make the adjustments and balance them out more.

The racial traits are the same as the ones previously announced by Blizzard, except now Orc’s Command only increases pet damage by 1%, down from 2% and Undead can no longer breathe underwater indefinitely. (EDIT: Celestalon has clarified that this was a typo; Undead will now be able to breathe underwater indefinitely.)

Raid Positioning

Blizzard has made some adjustments to some class attacks that alleviates some odd positioning on fights where melee are not able to stand behind the boss, something that was problematic on some fights.

Druid: Shred no longer requires the Druid to be behind the target.

Rogue: Ambush no longer requires the Rogue to be behind the target.

Rogue (Subtlety): Backstab can now be used on either side of the target, in addition to behind the target.

This will help with some of the ground clutter, and offers some flexibility when melee need to spread out in order to watch for ground effects.

Professions

Raiders will have much more flexibility in choosing the professions they want, as Blizzard will no longer attach combat benefit perks to those professions. Top raiding guilds often demanded very specific professions based on the class and role of the player, and raiders with gathering professions were often looked down upon as not having the most viable raid professions.

However, we still could see a profession such as Engineering being superior because of the many “toys” the profession has that are needed for a specific mechanic, such as the EMP Generator on Siegecrafter Blackfuse.  The Alchemy trinket tends to be very powerful at the start of an expansion.

Faster Wipe Recovery

Blizzard has reduced the mana cost for resurrecting players, in an aim to make it quicker for raids to recover from a wipe.

Druid: Revive, Monk: Resuscitate, Paladin: Redemption, and Shaman: Ancestral Spirit now cost 4% of base mana (down from between 10% and 50%).

Could this indicate that Mass Resurrection will be removed as a guild talent? Possibly. We’ve seen Blizzard remove Have Group, Will Travel and other guild perks in the past. (EDIT: Celestalon has clarified that there are currently no plans to remove Mass Resurrection.)

Crowd Control in Raids

If you raided in Cataclysm, you probably remember the amount of CC that was required in the various raid instances and even 5-man dungeons. We haven’t seen as much of it this expansion, and it’s likely we’ll see even less of it going forward, as they reduced the number of crowd controls available to players.

While this change is primarily made for PVP, CCs have been useful in previous raid tiers, such as on Lei Shi in Terrace of Endless Spring, and countless trash mobs and bosses during Cataclysm.

Vengeance

Vengeance has been removed from the game and is being replaced with a passive called Resolve.

Resolve: Increases your healing and absorption done to yourself, based on Stamina and damage taken (before avoidance and mitigation) in the last 10 seconds.

Tanks have also seen their attack power increased by 12% across the board, as they are trying to keep DPS from tanks meaningful. (EDIT: Attack power will also be increased by Mastery for tanks.) Vengeance increased a tank’s damage on high-tank-damage fights, so this is how they chose to replace that.

Healing Changes

While there are significant healing changes that have been made, the one that will be most noticeable for the overall raid will be that healers need to be much more efficient with their healing as well as plan their next heal with greater care. In an expansion where we saw smart heals become more and more overpowered, they are making changes to have some healing spells cost more mana, while others that were seen as being filler spam healing spells that cost minimal mana are being removed.

Many insta-cast “save the raider” type of heals have been changed to a 1.5 second cast time.  This means that healers are going to need to be much more aware of incoming damage to specific players, particularly the tank, and have heals lined up for that damage.  However on the positive side, Blizzard has said that the burst damage we saw previously will be reduced, as burst damage was the only way to really challenge healers, especially this tier.

Healers, and their raid leaders, will also have to bring a different mentality to raid healing in Warlords of Draenor.  Blizzard is planning that the changes to healing will mean that the raid will not always be topped off at 100% health.  For raid leaders who get nervous when they see more than a few people below 90% health, or healers who like to spam heal until every health bar is full, this will take some getting used to.

Mana Changes

There are some pretty significant manner changes that have been made, and will affect those raids who were using Mana Tide Totem as a major source of regen, allowing the other healers to reforge off as much spirit as possible, or rely heavily on Hymn of Hope from all their Priests.

Mana Tide Totem has been given the same treatment that Innervate got previously where it will primarily benefit the Resto Shaman for the full 200% of spirit, while other healers will only see the benefit of 50% of the Shaman’s spirit.

Druid’s Innervate has been removed entirely, so it can no longer be used for a bit of mana for a healer that is resurrected or for a healer who has mismanaged their mana, a change non-healer Druids will probably be happy to hear.

Hymn of Hope, Priest’s mana return spell, has also been removed.

Overall, Blizzard is making changes to healer’s mana so that they must be much more conscientious of the mana they have, the spells they choose, and how they spend that mana.

Cooldowns

Many raid healing or damage reducing cooldowns have been completely removed, or changed to be a healer-only cooldown, as Blizzard wants to put that back in the hands of the healers again.

Raiders have lost some of the offspec healing provided by those in DPS roles.  Healing Tide Totem is now strictly a Resto Shaman spell, and Shadow Priest’s Cascade, Divine Star and Halo will no longer heal.

Devotion Aura has been removed as a Prot Paladin ability, and will now only be available to Retribution and Holy Paladins. (EDIT: Celestalon has clarified that Devotion Aura is Holy only.) Tanks often make extensive use of this ability, so it will fall more on the other Paladin specs for this, especially if we see fights like Thok where every one of those available Devo Auras were useful.

Hand of Salvation has also been removed, meaning those DPS who like to pull early for that extra bit of DPS, or who like to let loose with all their damage cooldowns on the pull will now have to watch their threat more closely.

Warrior’s Demoralizing Banner, which reduces enemy damage within 30 yards by 10% for 15 seconds has been removed.  They are also losing the crit buff cooldown Skull Banner.  Protection Warriors will also lose Rallying Cry, but it is still available to DPS warriors.

Additional individual cooldowns have been removed that benefit a single player, such as Unholy Frenzy.

Raid Buffs

With the change to Haste, we’ve seen many of the raid buffs merged into a single “5% increase to melee, ranged, and spell Haste to all Party and Raid members” from the previous Spell Haste and Attack Speed buffs.

Some of the related hunter pet buffs that are used as raid buffs have also been removed from the game.

Symbiosis Removed

Yes, Symbiosis has been removed from the game, so various classes who were using this as an additional raid cooldown or for utility will no longer have this available.  It wasn’t unusual to see a Priest take Dispersion for a raid mechanic or a Druid tank symbiosis a Paladin for Consecration.

It will also cause less drama in some raid teams, as more than a few arguments have broken out in raids regarding who should get the benefit from Symbiosis.  However, the loss of this utility, especially with a smaller raid team size, will be noticed.

Health Potions and Healthstones

Blizzard was seeing more and more raiders forgoing healing potions in place of stat potions, so they’ve decided to make healing potion and stat potions on a different cooldown . However healing potions and Healthstones will now share a cooldown, and can only be used once per combat, which likely means the 3 charges from Healthstones will change to a single use charge.

Having a Warlock for Healthstones was considered an essential requirement for many guilds fighting for world top 10 and 20 kills, and more than a few times, top end raiding guilds would have a warlock in group 6 whose sole purpose was to drop Healthstones either outside the entrance or just inside the entrance before zoning back out.  This change will make Warlocks less mandatory in that regard, and also give flexibility to those raids without a warlock, especially with raid size dropping down to 20 man for Mythic.

Demonic Gateways

Demonic Gateways have been very popular for dealing with many raid mechanics that required raiders to get from one point to another very quickly. They were used by most 25 man guilds for Heroic Lei Shen as well as for Heroic Garrosh, and were pretty useful in many other fights as well, such as Thok. Fortunately, they aren’t removing the gateways but they are changing how they work.

Now party or raid members can only use the gateway once every 90 seconds and they can only be placed 40 yards apart now, down from the considerable 70 yards.

Overall Perspective

Many of these changes will make for a very interesting raid environment once the changes go live.  Many of the changes were made so that there is a bit more flexibility in terms of what classes and specs every leader can bring to each fight, which makes it slightly more about bring the raider or bring his role, and not so much about bring the Healthstone or bring the Symbiosis.

Of course, this is the first major release of patch notes for Warlords of Draenor, and so we definitely are going to see some changes made in the coming weeks and months as beta testers start playing the Alpha and upcoming Beta.