WoW Season of Discovery Patch Notes December 12: Class Buffs & Nerfs

It's been nearly two weeks since the start of Season of Discovery, the brand-new Classic WoW experience that has changed everything you know about the game. With this experimental idea, Blizzard has lowered the level cap, added brand-new class-altering runes, and reworked an old Raid with the idea of a fresh new experience for old and new players alike.

Unfortunately, not all of the new changes have been as balanced as Blizzard hoped for, so on December 12th, they are going to be releasing a substantial patch that is going to take a look at some of the over/underperforming classes in the game. This patch targets the Druid, Hunter, Priest, Rogue, and Shaman.

Here are the full patch notes for the December 12 class tuning in Season of Discovery:

WoW Season of Dicovery December 12 Full Patch Notes

Druid

Starsurge

• Rune ability damage increased 182%.
• Cooldown reduced to 6 seconds (was 10 seconds).
• Mana cost reduced to 1% of base mana (was 3% of base mana).

Hunter

Flanking Strike

• Now gains the benefit of weapon enhancements like sharpening stones, is now on global cooldown, and is now properly treated as a melee attack, letting it benefit from attack power and combat modifiers to dodge, parry, block, crit, hit, etc.
• Is now prevented by Pacify.
• Now requires a weapon equipped.
• Pet damage is now properly treated as a melee attack, with same benefits as listed above for the hunter's damage.

Additional changes to normalize Hunter pet performance are still to be determined.

Priest

• Priest Homunculi damage increased by 100%.

Void Plague

• Damage increased by 200%.

Twisted Faith

• Now increases damage done by  Mind Blast and  Mind Flay by 50% (was 20%) on targets afflicted with Shadow Word: Pain.

Rogue

•  Saber Slash,  Shiv, and  Main Gauche will now properly consume Remorseless Attacks.

Saber Slash

• Tooltip fixed; damage not reduced.
• Damage is now properly considered a Bleed and benefits from the  Mangle debuff.

Note: Bleed-immune creatures will no longer be affected by it.

Shaman

Lava Lash

• Damage increased to 150% weapon damage (was 100% weapon damage).
• Mana cost reduced to 1% of base mana (was 4%).

Overload

• Now has a 50% chance to trigger (was 33%).

•  Dual Wield Specialization now grants 10% increased chance to hit while dual-wielding.

• Boon of Blackfathom world buff adjusted. It now provides 3% spell hit and 25 spell power buff addition to the other physical damage and movement speed effects (was spell crit).

Developers notes: Spellcasters in general are struggling a bit in BFD, mostly due to poor scaling without spellpower and a higher requirement of spell hit to reliably hit creatures 2+ levels above the caster. Keep those Chronoboons handy and don't stand in the fire and lose your buff!

Those were the full patch notes for the December 12 class tuning in World of Warcraft Season of Discovery. The aim of this patch is to fix some unintended interactions and change some classes that are not in a balanced spot. If you are interested in more WoW Season of Discovery content, check out the rest of our website!