We’ve now opened a very early version of Naxxramas on the Season of Discovery PTR.

While this version of Naxxramas is still in development and is not fully complete, we want to give this a few rounds of PTR testing and get it into your hands as early as possible before the holidays. The only difficulties available in Naxx are the default, 2, 3, 4 and 5. Difficulties above 5 are not available on PTR. Tuning is largely placeholder. Confirming the difficulty via a ritual currently only requires one player. This will require more on release. Expect trash and bosses to have inconsistent health and damage values. These are not indicative of final numbers, coming later. Loot drops are not yet implemented.

We’ll close the raid for testing on Monday, December 23.

Today, we’re working to update the game with a hotfix that will make all of the Singing Citrines available on Siren Isle, allowing players to acquire all of them in the current week.

The system was originally designed to have different Citrines be associated with different enemy cultures as they invaded Siren Isle on a rotating basis, but having to wait for a specific invasion type in order to obtain your Citrine of choice has felt like it’s creating more frustration than anticipation.

The gems belonging to the goblins, Arathi, and Earthen should come from doing events on the isle that are started at the Siren Isle Command Map. After getting them once, you’ll be able to buy them and store them in your Warbank for your alts as usual.

The gems that belong to enemy factions should now be purchasable from Taljori, the Tortollan vendor sitting on the large rock behind Bargus.

Happy holidays!

Today, we’re working to update the game with a hotfix that will make all of the Singing Citrines available on Siren Isle, allowing players to acquire all of them in the current week.

The system was originally designed to have different Citrines be associated with different enemy cultures as they invaded Siren Isle on a rotating basis, but having to wait for a specific invasion type in order to obtain your Citrine of choice has felt like it’s creating more frustration than anticipation.

The gems belonging to the goblins, Arathi, and Earthen should come from doing events on the isle that are started at the Siren Isle Command Map. After getting them once, you’ll be able to buy them and store them in your Warbank for your alts as usual.

The gems that belong to enemy factions should now be purchasable from Taljori, the Tortollan vendor sitting on the large rock behind Bargus.

Happy holidays!

Catch up on the latest World of Warcraft news!

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Time is on your side and steam-powered wonders await when you visit the Trading Post in January. This month, gear up with the Arsenal: Green Clockwork Contraptions Collection.

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Time is on your side and steam-powered wonders await when you visit the Trading Post in January. This month, gear up with the Arsenal: Green Clockwork Contraptions Collection.

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Greetings, Hunters!

In Undermine(d), Pack Leader is receiving a complete rework, and we thought we’d take this opportunity to explain some of our decisions, thought-process, and goals with this update.

Pack Leader Fantasy
When reassessing what the fantasy of a Pack Leader is, we took inspiration from the iconic Hunter Rexxar. Rexxar doesn’t cleanly fall into any Hunter specialization, but he mostly closely aligns with Survival, with a splash of Beast Mastery given his repertoire of pets. As such, Rexxar seemed like a fantastic throughline to help guide our hand when designing Pack Leader’s second iteration.

Beast Mastery summons many random beasts with Dire Beast, and has even dipped its toes into summoning iconic beasts with talents like Huntmaster’s Call summoning Hati and Fenryr, so having a pool of special Beast summons made a lot of sense. However, summoning beasts is a largely unexplored territory for Survival Hunter. For Pack Leader, we wanted to ensure that you were summoning Beasts from a specific pool, and that each pet felt unique, like your Hunter and their Pack had a special bond. This direction felt more in-line with Survival’s fantasy of having a uniquely strong bond with a smaller suite of pets.

Three is a Crowd
While its fun to summon creatures, they can create a lot of noise in the game space, especially in melee. When designing Pack Leader, we wanted to ensure that the new summons we were designing were not sitting in melee and adding more visual noise, blocking sightlines, and taking up game space. This goal pushed our designs into less traditional territory. While the Pack Leader Bear behaves like a very traditional summoned creature, leaping into battle, using abilities, and auto attacking its target, the Boar and the Wyvern are a bit more unique in their behaviors.

In the Shadow of the Wyvern
The Wyvern’s visuals are likely the most unique of the bunch. When you summon your Wyvern via Howl of the Pack Leader, it swoops in, lets out a roar, and proceeds to circle the battlefield for the duration of its buff. Looking up and seeing your Wyvern circle the skies felt like a uniquely Pack Leader moment, and we’re happy with how we were able to package this effect.

Charging Ahead
When summoned, Pack Leader’s Boar performs a series of 3 charges from off-screen, crashing into your enemies with explosive force.Given the lower complexity of the other two summons, we felt that the Boar could have some more advanced interactions with a follow up talent “Hogstrider”. Hogstrider causes your Cobra Shot or Mongoose Bite to strike more targets and deal more damage, and this effect stacks the more enemies are damaged by your Boar. The gameplay we’re looking for is following up your Boar’s hits with your own when it rotationally makes sense, while also pushing you to not overcap on Hogstrider stacks. This “moment” also feels uniquely Pack Leader, and we’re hoping that when players are spec’ing in to Pack Leader, they’re looking forward to cool moments like this.

Defense and Utility
Given the gameplay and summons this Hero Talent tree is introducing, we wanted to keep the complexity low on Pack Leader’s defensive and utility talents, while still preserving some of the Pack Leader fantasy.

Pack Leader’s defensive talent “Shell Cover” features an adorable pet turtle that will come to your aid (atop your head) , providing some damage resistance when you are dropped below 40% health. This defensive is fully passive, and while you’ll notice it when it procs, it shouldn’t require any tracking or playing around to get full use.

Pack Leader’s utility comes on a choice node, with two talents: Slicked Shoes and Horsehair Tether. Part of the Pack Leader fantasy is an adaptive, quick-thinking, and seasoned Hunter, so a Pack Leader having some unique utility made a lot of sense. Pack Leaders are hard to slow down, and Slicked Shoes will give them more frequent access to Disengage should they get assailed by snares, slows, and other debilitations. Horsehair Tether is a very unique utility node for Pack Leaders that causes anyone stunned by Binding Shot to be dragged to Binding Shot’s center similar to spells like Ursol’s Vortex. Our goal with this talent is to help make Pack Leader’s utility immediately identifiable in function while also helping you to feel scrappy and clever with a new addition to one of Hunter’s suite of traps, snares, and stuns.

There’s still plenty to discover with this revision to Pack Leader, and we’re excited for you all to get your hands on it. Thanks for playing!

Greetings, Hunters!

In Undermine(d), Pack Leader is receiving a complete rework, and we thought we’d take this opportunity to explain some of our decisions, thought-process, and goals with this update.

Pack Leader Fantasy
When reassessing what the fantasy of a Pack Leader is, we took inspiration from the iconic Hunter Rexxar. Rexxar doesn’t cleanly fall into any Hunter specialization, but he mostly closely aligns with Survival, with a splash of Beast Mastery given his repertoire of pets. As such, Rexxar seemed like a fantastic throughline to help guide our hand when designing Pack Leader’s second iteration.

Beast Mastery summons many random beasts with Dire Beast, and has even dipped its toes into summoning iconic beasts with talents like Huntmaster’s Call summoning Hati and Fenryr, so having a pool of special Beast summons made a lot of sense. However, summoning beasts is a largely unexplored territory for Survival Hunter. For Pack Leader, we wanted to ensure that you were summoning Beasts from a specific pool, and that each pet felt unique, like your Hunter and their Pack had a special bond. This direction felt more in-line with Survival’s fantasy of having a uniquely strong bond with a smaller suite of pets.

Three is a Crowd
While its fun to summon creatures, they can create a lot of noise in the game space, especially in melee. When designing Pack Leader, we wanted to ensure that the new summons we were designing were not sitting in melee and adding more visual noise, blocking sightlines, and taking up game space. This goal pushed our designs into less traditional territory. While the Pack Leader Bear behaves like a very traditional summoned creature, leaping into battle, using abilities, and auto attacking its target, the Boar and the Wyvern are a bit more unique in their behaviors.

In the Shadow of the Wyvern
The Wyvern’s visuals are likely the most unique of the bunch. When you summon your Wyvern via Howl of the Pack Leader, it swoops in, lets out a roar, and proceeds to circle the battlefield for the duration of its buff. Looking up and seeing your Wyvern circle the skies felt like a uniquely Pack Leader moment, and we’re happy with how we were able to package this effect.

Charging Ahead
When summoned, Pack Leader’s Boar performs a series of 3 charges from off-screen, crashing into your enemies with explosive force.Given the lower complexity of the other two summons, we felt that the Boar could have some more advanced interactions with a follow up talent “Hogstrider”. Hogstrider causes your Cobra Shot or Mongoose Bite to strike more targets and deal more damage, and this effect stacks the more enemies are damaged by your Boar. The gameplay we’re looking for is following up your Boar’s hits with your own when it rotationally makes sense, while also pushing you to not overcap on Hogstrider stacks. This “moment” also feels uniquely Pack Leader, and we’re hoping that when players are spec’ing in to Pack Leader, they’re looking forward to cool moments like this.

Defense and Utility
Given the gameplay and summons this Hero Talent tree is introducing, we wanted to keep the complexity low on Pack Leader’s defensive and utility talents, while still preserving some of the Pack Leader fantasy.

Pack Leader’s defensive talent “Shell Cover” features an adorable pet turtle that will come to your aid (atop your head) , providing some damage resistance when you are dropped below 40% health. This defensive is fully passive, and while you’ll notice it when it procs, it shouldn’t require any tracking or playing around to get full use.

Pack Leader’s utility comes on a choice node, with two talents: Slicked Shoes and Horsehair Tether. Part of the Pack Leader fantasy is an adaptive, quick-thinking, and seasoned Hunter, so a Pack Leader having some unique utility made a lot of sense. Pack Leaders are hard to slow down, and Slicked Shoes will give them more frequent access to Disengage should they get assailed by snares, slows, and other debilitations. Horsehair Tether is a very unique utility node for Pack Leaders that causes anyone stunned by Binding Shot to be dragged to Binding Shot’s center similar to spells like Ursol’s Vortex. Our goal with this talent is to help make Pack Leader’s utility immediately identifiable in function while also helping you to feel scrappy and clever with a new addition to one of Hunter’s suite of traps, snares, and stuns.

There’s still plenty to discover with this revision to Pack Leader, and we’re excited for you all to get your hands on it. Thanks for playing!

Greetings, Druids.

There are several updates to the Druid Class Tree coming in Season 2. We’d like to share some of the design thinking behind these changes. Overall, our hope for this tree design is that you are able to painlessly take the core abilities and defensives you need for your spec, and that you have some interesting choices you can make with the remaining points, especially in the middle and bottom gates.

Nodes that Don’t Benefit Your Current Specialization
The top feedback we heard on the Druid class tree is that it’s frustrating to take nodes for abilities you never use, or that provide bonuses that don’t benefit you. We have rearranged and redesigned talents so that druids never have to take more than one node that doesn’t benefit them in the normal course of play of their spec, and most druids won’t take any.

As part of making these changes, we’ve changed a number of damage nodes like Instincts of the Claw and added some new ones. We’ve adjusted the balance of several spells and abilities to account for these changes. Overall you shouldn’t see big changes to your spell damage or damage composition in appropriate builds for your spec (with the exception of Restoration - see below).

Utility and Interrupts
We wanted to make it easier for Druids to access important class utility. We’ve made Remove Corruption easier to access for all specs, and moved Skull Bash to make it less expensive for Restoration Druids to reach. Balance Druids can no longer take Skull Bash - instead, Light of the Sun has been moved from their spec tree to Skull Bash’s location in the Class Tree. Fluid Form now also affects Skull Bash, shifting the druid into Cat Form if necessary when they cast it.

Restoration Druid Damage
There are a couple of aspects of Restoration Druid damage that we’re not happy with:

• It’s demanding to play, requiring Druids maintain magic DoTs and shift in and out of Cat Form while healing.
• When Restoration Druids take all possible damage talents, they don’t have enough points to invest in defensive talents or useful utility.

We have made some changes in the tree to encourage Restoration Druids to specialize in either physical or magic damage (if they choose to deal damage at all), but not both. The Circle of the Wild / Circle of the Heavens choice node gives a massive 25% bonus to the damage type of their choice. We hope this change frees players up to take more defensive talents and makes the spec easier to learn and pilot for players who are interested in playing it.

Greetings, Druids.

There are several updates to the Druid Class Tree coming in Season 2. We’d like to share some of the design thinking behind these changes. Overall, our hope for this tree design is that you are able to painlessly take the core abilities and defensives you need for your spec, and that you have some interesting choices you can make with the remaining points, especially in the middle and bottom gates.

Nodes that Don’t Benefit Your Current Specialization
The top feedback we heard on the Druid class tree is that it’s frustrating to take nodes for abilities you never use, or that provide bonuses that don’t benefit you. We have rearranged and redesigned talents so that druids never have to take more than one node that doesn’t benefit them in the normal course of play of their spec, and most druids won’t take any.

As part of making these changes, we’ve changed a number of damage nodes like Instincts of the Claw and added some new ones. We’ve adjusted the balance of several spells and abilities to account for these changes. Overall you shouldn’t see big changes to your spell damage or damage composition in appropriate builds for your spec (with the exception of Restoration - see below).

Utility and Interrupts
We wanted to make it easier for Druids to access important class utility. We’ve made Remove Corruption easier to access for all specs, and moved Skull Bash to make it less expensive for Restoration Druids to reach. Balance Druids can no longer take Skull Bash - instead, Light of the Sun has been moved from their spec tree to Skull Bash’s location in the Class Tree. Fluid Form now also affects Skull Bash, shifting the druid into Cat Form if necessary when they cast it.

Restoration Druid Damage
There are a couple of aspects of Restoration Druid damage that we’re not happy with:

• It’s demanding to play, requiring Druids maintain magic DoTs and shift in and out of Cat Form while healing.
• When Restoration Druids take all possible damage talents, they don’t have enough points to invest in defensive talents or useful utility.

We have made some changes in the tree to encourage Restoration Druids to specialize in either physical or magic damage (if they choose to deal damage at all), but not both. The Circle of the Wild / Circle of the Heavens choice node gives a massive 25% bonus to the damage type of their choice. We hope this change frees players up to take more defensive talents and makes the spec easier to learn and pilot for players who are interested in playing it.