WoW: Season of Discovery hotfixes bring major Priest nerf & Dual-Wield Shaman buff

World of Warcraft: Season of Discovery continues apace, and the developer has rolled out another set of hotfixes, designed to further tune the game’s classes.

Season of Discovery brought with it a lot of changes to the way classes function in Classic WoW. The Rune Engraving system allows players to augment their armor items with new abilities and powers, after discovering (hence the name) the appropriate rune in the wild.

As a result, class tuning has become a decidedly more difficult prospect. The developers behind the game have done an admirable job of balancing, and they continue to roll out fixes regularly to maintain relative parity.

Here’s the latest set of class hotfixes for WoW: Season of Discovery.

Complete list of Season of Discovery class hotfixes

This latest set of fixes presents a couple of major headlines. The first is a pretty huge nerf to Priest ability Shadow Word: Death. When all of the maths is said and done, it amounts to anything from a 33%-40% decrease in damage output.

In better news for some, Dual-Wield Shamans will see a 50% boost to offhand attack damage when using the Dual-Wield Specialization Rune. The full set of hotfixes and class changes are as follows:

Hotfix details:

• Increased the number of crafting materials found in Boxes of Gnomeregan Salvage and slightly increased the drop rate of Grime-Encrusted Salvage throughout Gnomeregan.
• Druid
  • Berserk now also increases the number of targets struck by Lacerate while it is active.
  • Starsurge bonus damage to Starfire increased to 80% (was 66%). Corrected a bug causing this bonus damage to be lower than intended at level 40.
  • Swipe now scales with attack power, gaining 10% of attack power as damage.
  • Threat caused by Swipe greatly increased.
  • Rip duration increased to 16 seconds (was 12 seconds).
• Hunter
  • Raptor Strike damage when the Melee Specialist rune is active is now normalized weapon damage.
• Paladin
  • Fixed an issue where Fiery Weapon enchantment and Seal of Martyrdom were triggering each other. Neither can be triggered by the other any longer.
  • Fixed an issue where Fiery Blaze and Fiery Weapon enchantments could trigger or be triggered by Seal of Martyrdom. Those interactions do not happen anymore.
• Priest
  • Mind Spike damage increased by 10%.
  • Void Plague damage increased by 10%.
  • Shadow Word: Death base damage before modifiers decreased by 40% and spellpower coefficient adusted to 42.9% (was 64.3%).
• Rogue
  • Shuriken Toss bounce range reduced to 10 yards (was 15 yards).
    • Developers’ notes: This should reduce the chance of it bouncing a little too far and pulling extra packs in dungeons. It now matches the range of other chain spells like Chain Lightning and Avenger’s Shield.
• Shaman
  • Fixed an issue where Fire Nova did not benefit properly from Elemental Mastery.
  • The Dual-Wield Specialization rune now provides 50% bonus damage to your offhand weapon swings.
  • Lava Lash now gains 50% increased damage if Flametongue Weapon is imbued on your offhand.
  • The proc chance of Maelstrom Weapon is now roughly 50% higher when your main-hand weapon or your two-hand weapon is imbued with Windfury Weapon.

In any case, there are no surprising changes here. It’s also great to see so many regular adjustments in Season of Discovery. With two more phases to come, there will likely be many more changes before endgame.