Hail Warchiefs, Lichs, Commanders, and Keepers,
Happy holidays! We’re thrilled to be back; it’s going to be an exciting year.
BUG FIXES
- Damage mitigated by Hardened Skin will now correctly be reduced to 3 at a minimum, up from 1
- The second pulse from the Taunt ability will no longer fire if the Mountain Giant is dead or affected by ability disabling effects
KNOWN ISSUES
- Potentially fixed Arranged Teams to work with port forwarding (due to technology constraints this can only be tested on Live)
- We are still homing in on the root cause for desyncs. Cached data results in mismatches when switching between game types - like playing a custom game and then playing ladder. Restart the game when switching between game types to lower your risk of disconnects (we’ve also seen the caching issues between some custom maps).
BALANCE UPDATES
Hero Balance Changes
Keeper of the Grove
Entangling Roots
- Cast range decreased from 800 to 600
Developer Notes
Entangling Roots is of high utility to the Keeper’s kit. This change is intended to add a bit more risk to its use without reducing its effectiveness. The spell now has the same range as the Keepers auto attack, which should increase the opportunity for counterplay.
Alchemist
Acid Bomb
- Level 1: Decrease primary damage from 8 to 6 per second (Total damage 120 to 90; Secondary damage 5 to 4 per second)
- Level 2: Decrease primary damage from 13 to 11 per second (Total damage 195 to 165; Secondary damage 8.5 to 7 per second)
- Level 3: Decrease primary damage from 18 to 17 per second (Total damage 270 to 255; Secondary damage 12 to 11 per second)
Developer Notes
Alchemist provides awesome AoE healing, has high hit points, is powerful enough to pick off units, and debuffs opponents effectively. Heroes generally shouldn’t check every box for potential roles… Reducing Acid Bomb’s single target damage better focuses him in a support role - recent tweaks to Healing Spray cemented him as a great alternative healer for any race, and those effects have been positive to gameplay.
Human Balance Changes
Defend
- Piercing damage reduction increased from 50% to 65%. The in game tooltip will show this as 50% damage taken to 35%.
Developer Notes
There has been a drop off in the use of Defend after changes with the 1.30 balance update. This change is intended to restore usage. Its original behavior relied on RNG rather than a flat damage modifier. We anticipate there may need to be adjustments to the percentage, so we will be keeping an active eye on how the new Defend performs.
Night Elf Balance Changes
Mountain Giant
Base Stats
- Food cost increased from 6 to 7
- Cargo size increased from 2 to 4
Developer Notes
Mountain Giants are imposing, disruptive, heavy tanks with great siege potential. That potential becomes absolute in large packs. They were never intended to be a massed unit. Increasing food cost will make adding additional giants past the first few cut more heavily into a player’s army makeup as well as push them into higher upkeep faster. Additionally by increasing cargo size they will match the Siege Engine, a fellow high durability siege damage unit.
Glaive Thrower
Vorpal Glaive
Developer Notes
The Vorpal Glaive upgrade has been bugged for some time:
- The main target of the Glaive Thrower always takes full damage
- The area of effect from the Glaives changes from a circle into a line
- Glaives can kill trees
The main target takes full damage, as if the projectile were a homing shot, but the Glaive doesn’t follow said target. Instead it hits the ground like it missed, and does line damage where it impacts. If we fix Vorpal Glaive to adhere to reduced damage of siege weapons to units, then researching the upgrade feels like a nerf when it exchanges radial damage for line damage.
We want to address these issues by having the projectile correctly track and impact the main target of the Glaive Thrower. This embraces a distinctive behavior from other siege weapons, helping with our goal of pushing each race to have their own identity. We hope to have Glaives tracking their targets and ready for the next balance patch – though the updates are not included in this PTR.
GAME INSTALLATION
- Downloads – Blizzard Entertainment
- Ensure you are logged in, and browse to Classic Games
- Download and run the Reign of Chaos or The Frozen Throne installers
- Enter your legacy keys or login to Battle.net if you own Reforged
