#patch 7.1.5

Have a good 7.1.5, hope your class/spec didn't get wrecked!

Ooookaaaay....how about you Overwatch, what’s going on over--:

....how about you Heroes of the Storm?

Lovely. Sup Diablo.

Cool. Well how about Hearthstone?

[NOTE: This story takes place prior to the opening of the Tomb Of Sargeras. For maximum feels, put this on repeat in the background: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btOE7MKSKkA]

"This will get you to where you need to go...more or less."

"Wait, what the f--"

* * *

Anthai of Stormwind, orphan of the First War, last of her family line, was displeased.

Perturbed, perhaps. Out of sorts. "Nettled," as Sumeri would put it. She drifted, bodiless, in a glowing violet ocean of raw arcane magic. How long ago had that reckless, incompetent Withered screwed up what should have been a simple teleportation spell? Days? Months? How the actual fuck had that idiot become a telemancer?

Anthai tried to re-focus on the swirls of arcane power surrounding her. What was the lesson Leigh had tried to teach her years ago in Old Dalaran? Arcane magic was order. Logical patterns, mathematics. Anthai was terrible with math. Probably why she never quite got the hang of the Arcane school. Fire, that was easy. Fire was rage and destruction. Fire had an effect. It consumed and hungered and it was hers.

But even the school of Fire had to be checked. She'd learned that in Pandaria. A beautiful, golden land of balance and tranquility out of necessity. Slow down, the Pandaren had constantly tried to impress upon her. Your rage sustains me! the Sha Of Anger had roared throughout Kun-Lai. The Alliance and Horde had thrown these people into chaos and turmoil by bringing their war to Pandaria's shores, and Anthai had known right then and there that her baggage was absolutely not going to be responsible for harming innocent lives.

Think. Meditate.

Hard to do without a body to control your breathing. Her consciousness was spread throughout the arcane, woven tightly into its patterns. Damned science. Discipline. Focus your anger. Find your balance. Be fire, not fire's slave.

You control you.

And just like that, the answer hit her. She'd been going about this all wrong. She'd been so focused on solving the equations of the magic itself, but all she needed to do was follow the order and patterns inherent to her own corporeal form.

Anthai took a moment to curse - well, everything, really - and drew together the atoms which made up her physical self, herding them into place, feeling (finally feeling!) her skin tingle and warm up, her magic flowing through her alongside her blood, her breath--

* * *

A bluish-white light flared once and winked out of existence, depositing one very, very, very angry mage at the feet of the Greywatch flight master. He jumped back, startled, as the redhead slowly stood up and brushed herself off. Orbs of flame swirled, crackling, around her head, and her eyes blazed with the color of lava.

Advanced Mistweaving Page Updated

[lead]I know it took forever for me to update the Advanced Mistweaving Strategy guide, but in my defense I had no idea what to write until now and didn’t have the time to sit down and figure it out. This is why vacations are awesome! [/lead] This time I expound more on the different styles of healing in Mythic+ vs raiding and how you can improve on both accounts. I also give a more detailed…

Welcome to my Brewmaster Tank guide, If you enjoyed my Monk Mistweaver Healing Guide, this should be right up your ally. Thanks for stopping by. You will see me KontrolStyle talking about how I tank in World of Warcraft this may or may not help you, if you have any questions or pro tips feel free to comment. Thanks for watching! Click here to Be Stylish Too► http://bit.ly/BeStylishToo

Follow me on► https://twitter.com/Kontrol5tyle https://www.twitch.tv/KontrolStyle https://www.facebook.com/KontrolStyle

((directly quoted from the forums))

Thanks for this. Some great feedback here.

Overall, our goal in 7.1.5 is not to nerf Shadow's damage across-the-board, just the extreme cases that can occur with Surrender to Madness. Some of the mechanical changes will likely mean you're weaker or stronger in certain situations, but our intent is not to make Shadow "worse."

To speak more directly to your points:

1) Not sure we agree that capping Mass Hysteria is the right approach. It would feel pretty artificial, and while we'll make those sorts of changes when absolutely necessary, we don't think that's the case here. Also, we don't agree that the change to Insanity drain makes Surrender to Madness more difficult for lower-end players; keep in mind that Insanity drain is actually lower for the first 18 seconds than it used to be.

2) We had several issues with the way Void Bolt fully refreshing DoTs was working out. In multi-target encounters, it required you to constantly switch between targets to refresh (which gets highly APM-intensive during Voidform), and there was a high penalty for accidentally letting DoTs drop off before you could Void Bolt. Changing it to add duration to all nearby DoTs helps resolve both of those issues.

Conversely, in single-target situations, you were able to extend your DoTs pretty much infinitely. We want to move away from that. As a DoT-based class, you should have to re-cast them from time to time.

However, we do agree that you're probably having to re-cast them more than is necessary in the current build. We've increased the duration of Shadow's DoTs for the next build, to reduce how much time you actually have to spend maintaining them.

3) We think it works well as a passive option in that row, and expect its DPS value to go up as a result of some of the other changes in 7.1.5. Depending on how much that is, we can buff it further if necessary.

4) The new Mind Spike is an experimental change that we're not entirely certain is going to work out. We put it out for testing with the knowledge that, worst case, we can pretty easily revert it to how it is in 7.1. We'd ultimately like to rework Mind Spike in some fashion, but the version currently on the PTR might not be it.

5) It's true that multidotting presents some challenges for balancing Shadow, but we don't see that inherently as an issue. We want you to be strong in certain areas (for example, Shadow excels on multiple spread-out targets, such as the majority of the Odyn encounter), which in turn means you'll be weaker in others. As long as the variance between those areas doesn't get too large, we see that as a good thing.

6) We think that hard “drop” is a good thing – it provides a stark contrast between how the spec feels inside and outside of Voidform. When dropping out of Voidform has such a noticeable impact, you get a much more direct sense of just how much you were getting out of it before. That said, we did recognize that some players might disagree, which is why we reworked Lingering Insanity into a talent.