Greetings,

We’ve been playing quite a bit over the weekend and have met to discuss a few issues that we’ve identified since launch. We wanted to take a moment to dive into these issues and what our near and longer term plans are for them.

Quest Creature Availability in the Open World

This is a tricky issue to tackle as it involves a lot of complex data work to identify and potentially alter spawn behavior systemically without creating other adverse effects. We are doing an investigation on this now and hope to find a safe solution soon that will help with player concerns around this.

In the meantime, we have made some minor tweaks to layer population target numbers (essentially the values that determine when new layers spin up) which we hope will help spread players out across more layers and make the world still feel full but not quite so overpopulated in quest areas. Please note that with this change, less populated zones such as lower level zones and cities may feel more sparse than they otherwise would. This isn’t ideal and it’s not a long-term solution, but is a stopgap while we investigate other solutions.

Stranglethorn Vale Blood Moon Event

We’ve been having a lot of fun in this event over the weekend, but we definitely recognize that there are a few rough edges we would like to smooth out. Coming within the next 24-48 hours we will be implementing a few changes:

• The Blood Moon buff gained during the event will increase player stamina by 30%.
• The Bloodless effect gained after death is being adjusted and will now last 20 seconds down from 1 minute.
  • Additionally, this effect will now also grant a pacify and invisibility effect so that players can resurrect and then move away from graveyards/chained spirits, mount up, summon pets, and more effectively “reset” after a combat to prepare for the next fight.
• Zandalari Emissaries are getting a more pronounced visual effect to make them more visible in their spawn locations in Booty Bay, Grom’gol, Northern Stranglethorn, and Yojamba Isle.

Please note that this list of changes is not comprehensive and does not address all issues we’d like to address with the event. These are changes we hope to make rapidly to make the experience smoother in the short term while we observe player behavior and determine the needs for additional adjustments going forward.

We also want to take a moment to recognize that this event is in fact extremely brutal and unforgiving and that this is exepected. This is another wild experiment that we knew could be somewhat devisive and we feel that is okay. While we want to continue to make improvements, due to the nature of PvP and especially Free-For-All PvP, you will encounter frustration at times. The rewards we’ve added for it are also tuned deliberately in such a way that they should be relatively easily obtainable, often requiring just a few events to obtain, but also should not be “mandatory” for anyone. Despite being epic quality, the weapons and accessories are roughly on-par with level 40 blue items and are in most cases inferior to equipment available in Gnomeregan. If you find pvp frustrating, it’s okay to steer clear of this event and pursue other paths for power progression.

Class Adjustments

We intend to follow our once-per-week class adjustment schedule and take the time needed with class adjustments to not make too many changes too hastily, particularly when it comes to power reduction or “nerfs”. You can expect to see the first full round of class adjustments arrive with weekly maintenance in your region during the week of Feb 20th.

That said, there is one major outlier that we intend to tackle before then. We intend to make the following adjustments to Balance druid over the next 24-48 hours.

• The base damage of Starsurge has been reduced by 30%.
  • Additionally, we’ve identified and fixed a bug in the Starsurge spellpower coefficient and this has now been corrected. Starsurge should be properly gaining 42.9% of spellpower as damage now, as intended.
• To compensate for this adjustment, we will be adding an additional effect to Starsurge that causes your next Starfire to cause 66% additional damage.

The intent is not to significantly nerf overall druid damage output, merely to reduce the efficiency of Starsurge specifically and shift the damage output of druids further towards their hard cast abilities such as Starfire.

Other Changes are Coming

There are many other adjustments we are hoping to tackle across multiple areas of the game in the coming days but we wanted to focus on these items initially, and get word out to players about our intentions here as soon as possible. We really appreciate all of the feedback we’ve gotten about these and many other items throughout the weekend. We’ll be issuing a number of hotfixes later today for the issues listed above plus many others and those will be viewable in the normal location on our official forums.

Thank you again!

• The WoW Classic Dev Team