Warlock

• Demonic Gateway no longer despawns when the caster dies. When the gateway is close to despawning, it begins dissolving out of view to warn the caster and allies that they may wish to replace it.
  • Developers’ notes: We’ve heard feedback that the routine of replacing your Demonic Gateway for each boss attempt can be tedious to the point of irritating. We’ve made a change that allows the gateway to persist through death and we’ll be listening for feedback on this change.

Affliction Warlock

• Unstable Affliction reverted to Limit 1. Spell coefficient reverted to its previous amount.
  • Developers’ notes: Even without picking talents like Siphon Life and Phantom Singularity, Affliction was unable to keep up with their dots being active on more than 3 targets. Unstable Affliction should now be used on your priority target, which causes Malefic Rapture to do increased damage to that target.

Talents

• Haunt now applies Shadow Embrace.

PvP Talents

• Soulshatter grants Soul Shards equal to the number of targets hit, instead of Haste.
• Malignant Affliction is a new PvP talent. Unstable Affliction is no longer limited to 1 target, but deals 10% less damage. If your Unstable Affliction is dispelled, you instantly gain 15% haste for 10s.
  • Developers’ notes: With Unstable Affliction now at limit 1, we want to provide an avenue for a Warlock to be able to protect their dots on multiple targets, particularly in battlegrounds.

Destruction Warlock

• Summon Infernal (Rank 2) is learned at level 52. Infernal Awakening deals 150% increased damage on impact.
• Havoc (Rank 2) is learned at level 54. Havoc duration is increased by 2 sec.
• Rain of Fire (Rank 2) is learned at level 56. Rain of Fire damage is increased by 30%.

Talents

Level 15 Row

• Soulfire is now a 4 second cast. Damage increased from 100% spell power to 300% spell power. 1 minute cooldown. Causes your next Incinerate to be instant cast and generates 1 Soul Shard.
  • Developers’ notes: This spell hadn’t found a niche as an additional short cast time spell. It returns to a 4-second cast time, serving as a pre-pull opener spell to kick-start your damage.

Level 25 Row

• Shadowburn is now a 1 shard spender. Damage increased to 130% spell power (was 60%), with a 12-second cooldown. Has 50% increased critical strike chance on low health targets, and generates 1 Soul Shard if the target dies within 5 seconds.
  • Developers’ notes: Shadowburn as a generator was not exciting enough. Shadowburn now provides an alternative way to spend shards, especially while on the move, and also adds burst damage in an execute window, similar to its historic design.
• Internal Combustion consumes up to 7 seconds of your Immolate (was 5 seconds).

Level 35 Row

• Cataclysm damage decreased to 180% spell power (was 200% spell power).

Level 45 Row

• Grimoire of Supremacy renamed Rain of Chaos. While your initial Infernal is active, every Soul Shard you spend has a 15% chance to summon an additional Infernal that lasts 10 seconds.
  • Developers’ notes: Grimoire of Supremacy was too integral to Destruction’s damage output, even without Vision of Perfection. It also created unhealthy gameplay in PvP. We want this talent to remain powerful and exciting, so instead of ramping Chaos Bolt damage, Warlocks can try to maximize the amounts of Infernals spawned. The goal is to provide the same fun gameplay, without being too reliant on getting a very high modifier on your Chaos Bolt.
• Roaring Blaze redesigned, now causes the target to take 30% increased Fire damage from the Warlock for 6 seconds.
  • Developers’ notes: This does not affect Chaos Bolt – only pure Fire damage spells. We want to try opening up other talent builds that can work with your Fire spells.

Level 50 Row

• Channel Demonfire primary target damage increased by 10%.

Demonology Warlock

• Summon Demonic Tyrant (Rank 2) is learned at level 52: Now generates 5 Soul Shards when cast.
• Call Dreadstalkers (Rank 2) is learned at level 54. Call Dreadstalkers cast time is reduced by 0.5s, and they gain a Pursuit spell to close the gap when their target is greater than 10 yards away.
• Wild Imps now spawn more immediately after Hand of Guldan, and 2-3 imps spawn in faster succession. In addition, if they path fail, they now teleport to the Warlock.
  • Developers’ notes: This should both improve quality of life and help prevent purposely getting your imp stuck somewhere to prevent them from casting.
• Wild Imps Rank 2 is learned at level 56. Imp energy cost on Fel Firebolt decreased by 20%.
  • Developers’ notes: As a result, they can cast one additional Fel Firebolt before despawning.

Talents

• Demonic Consumption no longer sacrifices imps. Now instead drains 15% health of all active demons, empowering itself based on HP consumed.
  • Developers’ notes: This is a fusion between modern Demonic Consumption and Thalkiel’s Consumption from Legion. The goal is to give the Warlock more incentive to care about summoning other demons, and to allow for Implosion and Power Siphon to have their unique flavor be sacrificing imps.
• Power Siphon now also adds 30% damage to your next 2 casts Demonbolt.
• Nether Portal demons summoned attack power increased by 21%.
• Demonic Calling reduces shard cost of Call Dreadstalkers by 2.
• Inner Demons random demons summoned attack power increased by 21%.

Warrior

Hello to all of the seasoned soldiers, raging barbarians, and ironclad commanders of Azeroth! The newest Shadowlands Alpha build has a number of changes for Warriors, primarily focused on talents. We’re happy with the playstyle of each spec, and our philosophy for core abilities is generally “if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it”. That said, there are a number of talents in each tree that could use some love. Some were underutilized in Battle for Azeroth (eg., Collateral Damage for Arms, and Inner Rage for Fury) and haven’t seen changes yet, or their first set of changes in Shadowlands haven’t quite hit the mark (Frothing Berserker for Fury). We’re looking forward to hearing your thoughts and feedback on the new and updated talents!

We’d like to call out that Arms’ Mastery and Deep Wounds have been redesigned. We heard your feedback that Deep Wounds’ overwhelming contribution to the damage breakdown felt unrewarding, and we agree. The new design will be a much smaller proportion of Arms’ direct damage, and should reward skillful target selection more than the previous version.

Single-Minded Fury has returned to Fury Warriors, with an updated design. This means that Fury Warriors can now receive one-handed weapons as item drops, though that may not be implemented in this build.

For Protection, a major topic of discussion has been the status of the Unstoppable Force build that exists in Battle for Azeroth. There are a lot of individual effects contributing to the build: talents, Azerite Traits, and Essences. The core components, however, are the Anger Management and Unstoppable Force talents, which can still be taken together in Shadowlands. In Battle for Azeroth, the multiplicative nature of the other effects is so powerful that Unstoppable Force overshadows any other setup or playstyle. We’d like to leave Protection in a more conservative position until the rest of their potential toolkit is known – additional Rage generation, cooldown reduction, etc. from Conduits and/or Legendaries may quickly have an outsized impact on the strength of Unstoppable Force. We hear your feedback that the playstyle is extremely fun! The intention isn’t to remove it completely, and we’ll be keeping a close eye on how things shape up in the next few months in order to revisit and tweak things before the game launches. Thank you for your patience and ongoing feedback – it’s extremely valuable to us.