PTR 7.3 – Nuova Build e aggiornamenti per Mago Frost, Feral Druid e Frost DK
Nuova enorme build per il PTR della 7.3 che aggiunge una nuova area di questing per Argus, un dungeon da 5 e la nuova feature della patch , il Netherlight Crucible che ci permetterà di upgradare le Reliquie dell’Artifact.
Oltre a questo, dei piccoli fix al funzionamento del Mago Frost, una modifica interessante al Feral (Thrash genera sempre un 1cp e il costo di Thrash e Swipe è stato ridotto di 5 Energy!).
Il Dk Frost subisce ulteriori cambiamenti con un redesign della sua row di mobility con alcune scelte molto interessanti e un balancing dei buff che vi avevamo mostrato in precedenza
We’ve added a heap of new content to the 7.3 PTR in this build, including:
- The Seat of the Triumvirate 5-player dungeon
- The third (and final) area of Argus, including World Quests
- The Frost Death Knight updates we mentioned a few days ago
- A few new updates, quests, and World Quests for Professions
- The Netherlight Crucible
The Netherlight Crucible (accessible from the Vindicaar after completing the quest “An Offering of Shadow”) is a new way to upgrade new and existing Artifact Relics by adding additional effects and item levels. As your Artifact grows in power, the system will expand to allow more and more customization. We’d love your feedback on this system, including on the pacing of the upgrades as well as the upgraded effects themselves, so please let us know what you think!
At this stage, most of 7.3’s content is now available for testing on the PTR (with the raid being a notable exception). From this point, we’ll be focusing primarily on fixing bugs and tightening up the new content based largely on your feedback, so if you haven’t checked out the PTR yet, now’s a great time. Thanks, and happy testing!
Frost Mage Changes
–Frozen Orb should be affected by Shatter
–Ice Time should be included in the spec passive (0% anyway).
–Ebonbolt damage can proc procs (rarely matters much since most procs are RPPM)
–Ebonbolt and Flurry damage no longer log a second cast entry
edit: –Freezing Rain last 12 seconds, unmodified by haste. This didn’t match its tooltip anyway, so I changed the tooltip, and I don’t see any reason it needed to be affected by haste.Quick comment:
It’s generally right that Frost’s mastery is very narrow (scaling-wise, essentially a % buff to Frostbolt with a few quirks). The narrower a mastery is, the more potential problems with needing to attach very high numbers to it for stat balance, that risk interfering with the rotation priority somehow. It’s become more of an issue in Legion, since the large number of added effects on the class (as with every class) means that Frostbolt is a much lower % of damage done as it used to be. I’m not sure there’s a short-term fix, but ideally Frostbolt would be a more substantial portion of damage in the future in the first place.
Feral Druid Changes
Short update for some changes in the next PTR build:
Thrash will generate 1 combo point baseline – as an energy-spending non-finishing move attack, it feels like it should. The Tier 19 2pc bonus which previously had this effect has been changed to a 15% damage increase to Thrash. With these changes, Thrash is still intended to not be used in the baseline single-target rotation (not counting the effects of sets/legendaries).
Additionally, to help out Feral AOE a bit more, the energy costs of Thrash and Swipe are being reduced by 5. (to 45 Energy and 40 Energy, respectively).
Moment of Clarity will, as an additional feature of the talent, allow Omen of Clarity’s clearcasting proc to stack up to 2 times (and is now tooltipped). This should be sufficient with how the clearcasting procs are better spaced out in 7.3.
Frost Death Knight Changes
I believe a few more updates actually made their way into the next PTR (some potentially still in progress):
–Obliteration now causes Howling Blast to grant Killing Machine, as well as Frost Strike. This should help with feeling like you can use Rime procs without interfering with Obliteration.
–The overall damage buff is 21%, not 27%. Just a new estimate of what’s correct to roughly account for all the talent changes. Rest assured the goal is to find the accurate amount by which the talent changes would hurt total DPS and correct for that, even before looking into possible further adjustments for class balance.
Finally, the L75 row is generally redesigned. The overall situation seemed to be that Permafrost did a rather low amount of shielding, but was usually taken because the other options had so little use. Some of this might be a little preliminary, but the ideas on PTR are:
–Permafrost shields for 75% of autoattack damage (from 30%).
–White Walker redesigned to: “Wraith Walk cools down 100% more quickly anytime no enemy is within 10 yards.”
–New talent Inexorable Assault (replacing Volatile Shielding): “For every 2 seconds spent in combat without melee attacking, you gain a stack of Inexorable Assault. Each stack causes your next autoattack to deal additional Frost damage.”
(PTR numbers might vary slightly from the above)
Both of the new talents are going in a direction we want to better explore on slow melee specs like Frost: helping to address time off target, without power-creeping general movement capability. Overall, sprints and gap closers are very prevalent on melee specs (likely too much so across the game), and it’s been increasingly hard to deliver on slower, heavy-hitter melee archetypes. Most of that discussion is much longer-term, but I wanted to give some context for trying to resist the direction of having every melee spec use a short-cooldown sprint/charge, and try to branch out into more class-appropriate ways of dealing with the problem.
