HUGE Nerfs to Leveling, Big Class Changes Coming & The NEW Best in Slot Gear

[00:02] huge class changes to go over this week, including some long overdue tank tuning that might actually solve the tank imbalance problem. There are some huge nerfs to leveling to make everything much faster. The raid loot from the new

[00:16] Sporefall raid just got a huge item level bump to make it the best gear in the game. We have our first look at the new heroic world tier coming for the new zones in patch 1207. And as if this content train wasn't moving fast enough

[00:29] already, we have our first hints of patch 12.1. Now, before we jump in, be subscribe so you never miss another video. Let's kick things off with this week's round of balance tuning changes. Starting with the blood death knights.

[00:44] Dancing rune weapon now grants 25% parry, up from 20%. Blood fortification now grants 40% stamina, up from 35%. Improved Death Strike healing was increased up to 15% from 5% which is a pretty big jump. Dance of midnight

[00:59] grants dancing rune weapon for 8 seconds up from six and its chance to proc was increased up to 12.5%. So you'll have more dancing rune weapons up. They'll grant you more parry. You'll have more health baseline and death

[01:11] strike heals for more. What's not to like? Demon hunters are up next and vengeance has a bunch of buffs as well. Demonic Ward now reduces damage taken by 12% up from 8%. Thick skin now grants 55% increased stamina up from 50%. The

[01:27] effectiveness of mastery fell blood was increased by 20%. Void reaver now causes frailty to reduce damage taken by 5% up from 4%. And then I guess noting it once just wasn't enough. So demonic wards and thick skin are listed twice just for

[01:42] good measure. So you'll have more health and you'll take less damage from all sources. Protection Paladins are up next. Blessing of Dusk reduces damage taken by up to 20%, increasing as your health

[01:55] decreases, up from 10%. Sanctified plates increases stamina by 7 and 15%, up from 5 and 10%. Ardent defender duration was increased up to 12 seconds from eight, which is a huge 50% increase. And Odent defender now reduces

[02:11] damage taken by 30% up from 20%. So, it's better and it lasts longer. And then sentinel duration was increased up to 20 seconds as well. So paladins will take less damage, have more health, and more access to their shorter cooldown

[02:26] defensive abilities. So they're looking pretty good with these changes in play. the warriors. Fight through the flames reduces magic damage taken by 6% up from 4%. Falank reduces damage enemies deal to you by 8% up from 5%. and ignore pain

[02:43] effectiveness was increased by 8%. So all-around buffs for almost every tank. Now there are no changes to guardian druid or brew master monk on the table just yet, but I would expect druid to be on the chopping block sooner or later.

[02:59] The latest round of changes kind of broke them in a hilarious way, and now they're all thrashing their way to victory once more. So good for them. We'll see how long it lasts. Some of these plan changes are amazing, if long

[03:13] overdue, and it should balance things out much better when compared to the start of season 1. Fingers crossed we don't have the same kind of problems at the start of season 2. And if we do, let's hope they get addressed a wee bit

[03:26] scheduled to go live with the next weekly reset, so you don't have very long to wait at all for these tank buffs to come through. Now, moving on. Patch 1207 has received a lot of updates on the PTR. Starting

[03:40] with some huge changes to experience gains that should make it much faster to level up to 90. This PTR build significantly increased the amount of experience earned from completing firsttime delve quests, midnight dungeon

[03:53] quests, prey, and weekly renown activities. And they're not embellishing at all here when they say significantly. A Delvis's Call quest in the current patch rewards about 85,000 experience baseline at level 80, increasing as you

[04:09] level up. On the PTR, that quest at level 80 is now worth 141,000 experience, which is almost double. An extra 60,000 experience per Delve quest

[04:21] means you're going to get an extra 600,000 experience if you complete all 10 Delve quests and hand them in and even more if you wait until you're a higher level. That's essentially just a free level's worth of experience. So,

[04:34] you can probably hand your delve quests in at 86 and hit level 90 much faster. If you're curious about some of the other numbers, dungeon quests used to reward you with 28,000 experience, and that's been bumped up to 56,000 on the

[04:50] PTR, so you can grab some extra experience if you like to dungeon spam your way to 90. Prey hunts were increased from 21,000 experience for normal hunts up to 105,000. So, if you wanted to clear those while

[05:03] now. And then the weekly renown activities like Southrel Suaree used to reward about 14,000 experience and they'll now be worth over 100,000 in they'll now be worth over 100,000 in 12072. Similarly, the weekly quest Hope

[05:18] weekly quest available while you're leveling up, that's been increased from 17,000 to 105,000. So, these activities are actually worth doing while leveling now, offering you a way to skip over a good chunk of the

[05:33] leveling process. So, all in all, leveling should be much faster in 1207 going to get some huge experience rewards for a lot of different activities, which should hopefully help change things up a bit.

[05:47] Something else that's in a huge change is the loot from the new Sporefall raid coming in 1207. These items are no longer warbound, so we won't see myth track warbound gear after all, but that might be for the best. Instead, all of

[06:02] this gear will have item levels that are nine higher than fully upgraded gear on the same track. So, myth gear will be item level 298, heroic will be 285, item level 298, heroic will be 285, normal is 272, and LFR will be dropping

[06:16] 259. Curiously, that's on par with items that have been empowered using the ascendant void cores, which we'll gain access to next week. But those void cores are limited to just weapons and trinkets. So, for any piece of gear from

[06:29] this raid that isn't a weapon or trinket, there's actually no other way to get an item with that high of an item level for those slots. So, this gear is basically going to come in as best in slot for every single class and spec

[06:43] that can use them in the game, and it will make those cantrip items significantly stronger as well. That also means the very best gear for the end of season 1 will only be available to raiders. But with it being the end of

[06:56] season 1, I guess it doesn't matter quite as much as if it was at the beginning. Now, the loot options are not entirely equal among armor classes. Cloth wearers can pick up a chest or boots. Leather

[07:09] has a headpiece and a belt. Male gets legs and boots, and plate wearers get a chest and a belt. So, each armor class gets one tier set slot piece and one offset piece. But with each item having a different stat budget, some classes

[07:23] might come out slightly ahead when compared to the others. Unfortunately, all of the gear does still have completely randomized stats. So, these items could have your best stat combo or your worst stat combo. And ultimately,

[07:37] boss a bunch of times if you want to get the perfect item, which could end up entirely sure how that's going to work with bonus rolls either. I don't think we've seen random loot like this from raids in a long time, and I will be

[07:51] interested to see how it plays out, but I honestly don't think it's going to go I honestly don't think it's going to go down too well. Thankfully, this won't matter for some items. For any tier set gear slot, you can just plop it in the

[08:03] catalyst and get your tier gear, which has set stats no matter what, and then you'll have your tier gear at those crazy high item levels. So, that's going to be nice. If your catalyst results have good stats for you for the offset

[08:15] pieces, you can also use charges to convert them as well. So, this is going to depend a little bit on you what stats you get and what stats are on your converted items, but there's a little bit of a silver lining there. You are

[08:28] going to be fully relying on RNG for the rings or necklaces, though. I guess part of this puzzle is how difficult this boss ends up being. If it's a bit of a pushover, maybe it just becomes a gear catchup farm for a lot of players. The

[08:41] dev team are also triing a flexible mythic difficulty option for this new boss. So you can jump into mythic with 15 to 25 players and the fight will adjust to your group size just like any other raid. So it should be a bit easier

[08:55] to puck or at least a bit easier for heroic guilds who haven't been able to hold a steady roster of 20 players to try their hand at mythic. That changes to mythic raids or raid

[09:08] difficulty in general. And I'm honestly really happy to see another raid introduced towards the end of the season. It helps keep things interesting and I've really been enjoying the smaller raid setup. So all in all, I am

[09:20] quite excited to see how this all plays out. This week also gave us our first look at the new heroic world tier coming in patch 1207. Now, this is only available for the new mini zones of Val and

[09:33] Nightwal. So, it's not a blanket difficulty bump for the open world, but it's definitely a start. And if this goes well, I can see the dev team expanding this idea a bit further in future patches. To unlock the heroic

[09:46] just need to kill one of the new world bosses to earn the achievement heroic tendencies, which is part of the initial quest lines anyway. So, basically, everyone will get this done very early on. You can enable heroic world tiers

[10:01] when you interact with the portal to the new zones in voidtorm. And when we swap it over, we can see some immediate changes. All of the rewards on the right hand side go from blue to purple. Ooh, shiny. And then we also get these three

[10:14] nodes in the middle. Creature affixes says creatures may spawn with additional abilities, which we can see on a few rares and elites. Most of them just seem to boost stats or add in some random damage, which will make dealing with

[10:28] monsters a bit trickier on hero world tier. Elite overseers adds more elites into the world, which might be a good thing if you can farm them for rewards. annoying or more difficult to get around. And then elite presence

[10:42] warriders adds in elite patrols, which seem to stick to the major roads, attacking anyone they come across. Those elites will definitely create some interesting situations and if they get you from behind, you're going to have a

[10:55] bad day. So, the zones are going to be far more dangerous on heroic mode, as you would expect, but the rewards are actually quite a lot better, too. All of the field accolade rewards are increased on heroic mode. So, treasures

[11:09] instead of five. Killing rares will give you 60 field accolades, up from 30 on normal mode. And then each world quest rewards you with 30 accolades up from 10. So you'll be able to farm field accolades insanely quickly on heroic

[11:24] mode to help you gear up any alts that you haven't gotten around to yet. That's not all though. The warbound gear that can drop from rares is also increased up to veteran from adventurer. Though both of those gear tracks are kind of

[11:37] worthless when you can farm field accolades that quickly. But the other important reward increase comes from the world bosses of these new zones. On normal mode, they drop warbound champion gear just like the other world bosses.

[11:50] But on heroic mode, they drop warbound hero gear. That's another piece of hero gear you can get at least every week depending on how these zones cycle and how often you can get the loot. So, heroic mode will add some difficulty to

[12:03] these new zones and reward you for the effort involved. Is this what you were openw world activities would have difficulty options? And what kind of changes would you like to see added for heroic or mythic world tiers? Let me

[12:18] section below. Now, this latest PTR build also included some changes to the housing feature, namely the exterior decor limit. In 1207, the exterior decor limit for houses at level five and six has been

[12:33] increased up to 300. And for houses at level 7 has been increased up to 350. That should give you a good chunk more exterior decor budget to work with. Whether you're wanting to try and make a treehouse for free or just light up your

[12:47] entire plot like a Christmas tree. Whatever design you're going for, you'll have a bit more budget to work with when the next patch goes live. And then to round out this video, we have our first sightings of patch 12.1. The first PTR

[13:01] build popped up this week on an encrypted vendor server, which means no data mining or anything like that just yet, and it's not available for any signals that the dev team are getting ready to start testing the patch within

[13:14] the next few weeks. If you're feeling like things have been a bit rushed so far in midnight, I bet this news probably doesn't help. But seeing the patch hit PTR servers earlier should actually help to mitigate the kind of

[13:27] bugs that plagued patch 1205. It also wouldn't be entirely out of the question to see patch 12.1 start its testing before 1207 goes live. We've had

[13:39] parallel before and that would give the dev team a lot more actual testing time for what would be an incredibly important patch. If you're curious when these upcoming patches might hit live servers, we have

[13:53] a pretty good idea of potential release dates. On the 1207 PTR, the in-game calendar shows that the Turbulent Timeways event is scheduled to start up on June 16th. That lines up perfectly with the expected 8week gap between

[14:07] patch 1205 and what could be 1207's release date. So, that's looking quite likely. Now, if you follow the 8week rule past 1207 and into 12.1, that brings us to August 11th. So, that's when we might see the first major

[14:21] content update for midnight. But, there are some hints that it might actually be a bit later than that. The turbulent time race event is being expanded yet again, and this time, the Dragonflight expansion will be included. That brings

[14:35] us to 10 expansions that have time events tied to them if you include event usually goes through every available expansion. So that's 10 weeks of time walking shenanigans. That does seem to be the plan this time around as

[14:49] the in-game calendar has the turbulent timeways ending on August 25th, which is 10 weeks after it begins. But launching a major patch and starting a whole new season with the turbulent times event active would clash a bit, especially

[15:04] when you consider how easy these events make it to gear up. So, if the dev team waits for the turbulent time waves to run its course before launching 12.1, that could push the patch back to August 25th, which would put it two weeks after

[15:17] the usual 8week patch cadence, which honestly might not be a bad thing. Giving the next major patch a bit more time to cook could help stave off another bug riddled patch week, which I am sure most folks would prefer. So, we

[15:32] could be looking at patch 12.1 on August 25th with season 2 starting up a week 25th with season 2 starting up a week after on September 1st. That does cut things pretty close for BlizzCon though, which will be held on September 12th and

[15:45] 13th. And that's supposed to be a pretty big deal this year. So, I imagine we'll get a lot of information about 12.2, the minor patches that will follow, and how the Last Titan is shaping up. With these dates being on the PTR, everything is

[15:59] still subject to change, but these dates do line up with the expected patch cadence quite well. But that's all the updates we have so far. So that's it for this week's WoW news video. How do you feel about heroic world tiers being

[16:13] introduced with the new zones in 1207? And would you prefer slower, more polished patches, or do you think the current pace has been fine for the most part? Leave all your thoughts in the comment section below. A big thank you

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[16:38] that notification bell so you're always kept up to date. Thanks for watching folks. Good luck and have fun. And as always, I will see you next time.