Charting the Latest WoW Alpha Updates: Earthen Arrival, Class Overhauls, and Strategic Battleground Insights
Apr 26, 2024Season 4Episode 11
Gabriel
Prepare to forge your legacy in Azeroth as we tackle the freshest slices of the World of Warcraft Alpha Updates, where both nostalgia and innovation collide. The Pig and Whistle Inn is abuzz with chatter on formidable world bosses and the return of the Black Temple Time Walking event. But that's just the beginning. We're suiting up and jumping straight into the strategic trenches of Classic Ashran's 40 vs 40 battleground. And for those hungry for the latest in dungeon-crawling, we've got the lowdown on this week's mythic affixes that will demand every ounce of your cunning and skill.
The Earthen have risen, and with them, a new chapter in the eternal saga of the Alliance and Horde. In this episode, we celebrate their arrival with a detailed look at the Earthen's earth-shattering customizations and racial abilities. We're not just ogling over their impressive gem-encrusted forms; we're also sizing up the impact they'll have across Azeroth. And because change is the only constant in this world, we're also dissecting the impactful shifts for Affliction Warlocks, saluting their new utility-focused talents and contemplating how the alterations might ripple through the PvP arena.
As we stoke the embers of discussion, the Fire Mage overhaul comes into sharp focus, promising to kindle a more dynamic playstyle with simplified rotations and revamped talent trees. But our strategic analysis doesn't end there — we're looking at the exciting talents reshaping the World of Warcraft landscape, from the Monk's path to harmony to the Death Knights' contentious balancing act. Lastly, we're peering into the Warlock's new Pact of Gluttony talent, a change that could redefine combat as we know it. So equip your best gear and join us on this epic adventure; it's an episode teeming with the insights and strategies you need to emerge victorious in Azeroth's ever-evolving battlegrounds.
Hope you all enjoy and hope you relate to any of these stories. And I will speak to you all in the next episode!
Prepare to forge your legacy in Azeroth as we tackle the freshest slices of the World of Warcraft Alpha Updates, where both nostalgia and innovation collide. The Pig and Whistle Inn is abuzz with chatter on formidable world bosses and the return of the Black Temple Time Walking event. But that's just the beginning. We're suiting up and jumping straight into the strategic trenches of Classic Ashran's 40 vs 40 battleground. And for those hungry for the latest in dungeon-crawling, we've got the lowdown on this week's mythic affixes that will demand every ounce of your cunning and skill.
The Earthen have risen, and with them, a new chapter in the eternal saga of the Alliance and Horde. In this episode, we celebrate their arrival with a detailed look at the Earthen's earth-shattering customizations and racial abilities. We're not just ogling over their impressive gem-encrusted forms; we're also sizing up the impact they'll have across Azeroth. And because change is the only constant in this world, we're also dissecting the impactful shifts for Affliction Warlocks, saluting their new utility-focused talents and contemplating how the alterations might ripple through the PvP arena.
As we stoke the embers of discussion, the Fire Mage overhaul comes into sharp focus, promising to kindle a more dynamic playstyle with simplified rotations and revamped talent trees. But our strategic analysis doesn't end there — we're looking at the exciting talents reshaping the World of Warcraft landscape, from the Monk's path to harmony to the Death Knights' contentious balancing act. Lastly, we're peering into the Warlock's new Pact of Gluttony talent, a change that could redefine combat as we know it. So equip your best gear and join us on this epic adventure; it's an episode teeming with the insights and strategies you need to emerge victorious in Azeroth's ever-evolving battlegrounds.
Hope you all enjoy and hope you relate to any of these stories. And I will speak to you all in the next episode!
Thank you, hello and welcome to the Pig and Whistle Tales from Azeroth. As always here at the Pig and Whistle Inn in Stormwind, I go through a variety of subjects with regards to World of Warcraft, so I've got a bottle or a pint. Sit back and enjoy this episode. We'll be looking at the alpha, the updated alpha. What, uh, this means going forward in terms of release dates, what's happening in the next week of world of warcraft, all of these bits and bobs. But as usual, we start off with the weekly news and I have a feeling that I'm not going to be doing the weekly news very soon or the world bosses for this weekly news very soon. I imagine they're going to change, with the War Within looking very close to releasing Closer than you might think, to be honest. But we have Liskanoff, zarkali, elders and Aerostar as your world bosses for the week. They are located in Thaldrassus, zarelaq Caverns and the Emerald Dream Burning Crusade.
Speaker 1:
Time Walking is your bonus event for the week. What you can do in this is experience Black Temple as a max level character, essentially and go through that raid and pick up some items as well as time walking badges that you want, and you can spend these badges on reputation, mount, etc. All of that sort of stuff. Classic Ashran is your brawl for the week. What Ashran is Is a 40 vs 40 PvP experience and this allows people To just experience Ashran as it is. The only way that you can win this Game mode Is via killing the opposing faction's leader. There is no reinforcements, though. This can technically go on for hours and hours, these sort of games. So be prepared for a long-arse Ashram game. Obviously you can just leave, but it's no fun. You want to do as much damage as you can in them sort of games, don't you? Storming, raging and tyrannical are your mythic fixes for the week. Storming uh, essentially there are these small little uh wind clouds that are in the group. You just simply want to move away from them. Raging when a mob gets below 30, it has 100 increased damage. So you want to kite them, push them away from your tanks. You see them, you know all of that sort of stuff. Or just pop a defensive if you're a tank and make sure that you are not taking damage. And tyrannical, what the bosses and the mobs that they spawn have increased health and damage. So make sure you bring a talent build that can accommodate that. But, as per usual, we will start off with the smaller things in world of warcraft this week, but we are looking at the alpha. There is no small things in wow at the moment, considering we are in pre-patch week for cataclysm and the alpha is very much in full effect and getting updates each and every week, which is really, really, really good.
Speaker 1:
We start off at the new allied race, which is the earthen allied race. So these are another dwarven race. So we now have three dwarven races which you can be Not sure if these are neutral. Yeah, they're the first neutral allied race, so you can do this as both alliance and horde. This is the same as pandarans they can be both ally or alliance and horde, which I think that is the second. Yeah, yeah, I'm trying to think no, evokers can. This is the third uh allied race that can be alliance or horde, because evokers can be um, but essentially they are a playable race within the uh war, within alpha now, and uh they simply to make them on the alpha.
Speaker 1:
You go into the character template and the option for earthen will be there. They are there for it's not like because the way that the old sort of character customization screen was was. You had the horde and alliance on the left, but now you just have like and the allied races, um, those that could be horde or alliance, just in the middle of the horde and alliance sort of sections. But now you have them obviously off to one side, each Horde on the right and Alliance on the left, and you have the Earthen option on each side in between the Zandalar Trolls and the Magar Orcs for Horde and the Dalgain Dwarves and the Kul Tiran for Alliance. They really missed out on putting the Dwarves all together there, but it kind of makes sense because dwarves were one of the four original races to choose from.
Speaker 1:
Speaking of actually I'm looking at a picture of, obviously, the character creation screen we have gone from four races each in, like classic World of Warcraftcraft, there's eight races. Okay, you had orc, undead tauren, troll, human dwarf, night elf, gnome eight races. Okay, we now have eight uh, math isn't working 11, 14 on one side and you have 14 on the other side. Now, obviously, some of these are shared uh races. So pandaren, evoker, and now these earthens are shared, so there are technically 11 races. But that is insane. We have gone nearly triple the amount of races since the beginning of world of warcraft's creation and yet there's only been four new specs. I'm trying to do the maths on that. So every three race, no, every two races, we get a spec. Yeah, because you have evoker, death knight, demon hunter and monk that you would get um technically, if you really want to go about it, you get five new specs. Because horde did get paladins in burning crusade and alliance did get shamans, but you know they were already in the game. You know what I mean. But that's just crazy to think, like 20 years down the line from World of Warcraft releasing, which it will be 20 years down the line from the MMO version of World of Warcraft releasing this year, actually in November time yeah, 20 years down the line, we've gotten eight new races, did I say? I can't even remember now I'm absolutely going crazy. Seven more races actually. Yeah, seven more, seven for each faction. But that's crazy. That's absolutely mental um, but let's get back to it.
Speaker 1:
So the customizations on the earthen are really, really cool. I do like them. I do like how crazy they are. I wish they add these customizations to the actual dwarves themselves. But you know, it is what it is. The urbans are more of a rock sort of um dwarf. It's tough to describe them, but essentially they have gemstones coming out of them. The uh, women can have beards, the men can have beards. You, the men, can have beards. You know, they go absolutely crazy with it essentially. And these aren't like small beards, these are glorious things, they are like works of art almost. So I would very much recommend having a look at the earthen. I'm very curious about their racials, though. I'm going to quickly take a look here. So their racial abilities are as a right surge. I think we all have, uh, some concerns about as a right and hearing that.
Speaker 1:
But essentially what this does is draws upon your inner strength, releasing to invoke the power of, as a right, dealing a certain amount of fire damage. Empowering has a following effect deals 113 of your spell power as fire damage. The second empowerment, uh heals allies for 100 of the spell power plus 100 of your attack power. And the third empowerment deals 113 of spell power additionally, um, additional fire damage to highest health enemy. Interesting, but this is a two minute cooldown and the visual of this is not yet implemented according to tooltip.
Speaker 1:
Then you have something called ingest mineral. You are always well fed but cannot consume food. Activate, ingest minerals to consume a gem and change the benefit granted to you by well fed so you can ingest an amber gem and you get stamina emerald for haste, onyx for mastery, ruby for critical strike and sapphire for versatility. Then you have hyper productive uh. Increased finesse by two percent. Finesse increases the chance of gathering additional materials. Titan, water frame, base armor from equipment is increased by 10 percent. This is uh and wide-eyed wonder. When you gain experience for exploring a location, gain 100 additional exploration. That's really cool. None of these are pvp related, so they are not going to be seen in pvp very often, unless the like azurite blast does an insane amount of damage. You are not going to see these in pvp. The well-fed buff is really cool as a sort of um what would you call it? Class fantasy or race fantasy, I guess is the best way to put it um. But essentially these aren't game-breaking uh ratios, to say the least.
Speaker 1:
Next on the list is that we are looking at the affliction warlock. So they are looking at a rework for a couple of classes, affliction warlock being one of them. Um, and here's what they have to say greetings warlocks. Today you have a various core and affliction trees hitting the alpha. We want to take a moment to go back to depth at what the certain changes are made. Why? As a refresher, here are the goals of our core and afflictions that we posted, like core and afflictions that we posted last week, along with some additional goals that we can dig into here. So the class ensure each capstone is interesting and exciting. The capstone is essentially the bottom talent.
Speaker 1:
Reduce the amount of throughput talents to free up utility choices oh god okay. Reduce the number of ranks of talents that don't warrant the multiple ranks of talent. Address the tuning of Malefic Rapture in single target and multi-target situations. Reduce complexity and the amount of active buttons that contribute to it. Erase the need to choose between a single target or multi-target profile by adding more adaptability and flexibility. While we cannot go over every change here, we'd like to get a bit more detailed than last week's update that explains some of the bigger changes into this build.
Speaker 1:
For the class tree throughput. We're removing a lot of the throughput talents from the class tree to allow warlocks to pick up more utility without feeling forced to take mandatory talents to be competitive. These talents aren't compelling options when placed against utility, as they are always, as they will always be the right answer to have. This allows us to that power into the specialization tree and tailor throughput centric talents to be specific to that game specializations gameplay. I think that there should be no damage that comes from the class trees. I think the class trees should be purely for utility. In my honest opinion, that's what they should always be for um, I don't think any damage should come from it or anything that can change your rotation. Damage wise. Uh should come from the class trees. So this is good.
Speaker 1:
Malefic Rapture, in addition to becoming baseline for Affliction Warlocks, which is good, we're introducing new talents that will help Malefic Rapture become the go-to spender for both single target and multi-target situations. This should also shift seeded corruption being a means to apply corruption to multiple targets rather than what you spam in dungeons. In addition, we are redesigning siphon life. Be friendlier to afflictions that rotation and expect that new design will make it easier to optimize malefic rapture. This is good, but from a pvp standpoint, you don't have the soul shards to use malefic rapture. You do sometimes and you get the instant cast malefic raptures, which is always good, but you do not have the soul shards really, um, because you're constantly going to be putting up uh curses to get your damage out and you're going to be constantly looking at using your soul burn to actually kite and, you know, run away and use your hellstone for so you are quite starved in that manner and you don't really get a lot of that out of Malefic Rapture. So I'm hoping there's some PvP changes there for me or for some reason maybe I don't know Affliction's Adaptation.
Speaker 1:
While we want Affliction Warlocks to have a preferred talent setup for single versus multi-target situations, we don't want to feel like they are powerless if they are in the opposite situation by focusing on Malefic Rapture, being Affliction's main spender and removing talents that are only viable in multi-target situations. Soul Flame, soul Swap, doom Blossom, soul Swap is always going to be good. We're hoping that the Affliction tree feels less punishing to fill out. Is this it not at all? We expect to make changes based on feedback and our own playtesting. We want to get the ball rolling on changes we want to make so we can start the discussion early and make adjustments before the War Within launches. Thank you for your continued discussions and we look forward to your feedback.
Speaker 1:
For those that are playing Warlocks, more specifically Affliction Warlocks, take a look at it on the Alpha. If you don't have the Alpha, then find a streamer who has the Alpha, a Warlock player, and see if they're checking it out and see what you think about it and try and hopefully put your thoughts on it. Essentially, both PvE and PvP thoughts are always good in these instances, but Affliction does need changes. Now I'm not sure how it is in PvE, but for PvP you have not changed a single talent for about three seasons straight. It's really not favorable for you to change anything in the Affliction Warlock build for PvP. It's absolutely crazy. If you do, you lose out on a lot of damage or utility or survivability and you can't really chop and change anything in this specialization in pvp. So I'm hoping that these changes are actually somewhat decent um going forward for pvp purposes at the very least.
Speaker 1:
Now, fire mages getting rework. So hello mages that we have a lot of fire mage changes hitting alpha today and we want to take some time to go over what changes that were made and why. As mentioned in our update post last week, we have a few goals that span all mage specializations. These are allow you to acquire each specializations or gameplay with less talent point investment. How does that work. Simplify rotational complexity. Okay, I think part of the mage needs to be its rotational complexity because of how powerful it can be, but we'll see.
Speaker 1:
I suppose if you're looking to introduce new players to the mage class, then it would make a bit more sense. Provide new nodes that can help you adapt your damage profile to better match a given encounter's demands. Provide competitive choice nodes that you opt out of complex gameplay. Since we're talking about fire only we can get a bit more granular Fire's AoE. The biggest issue we are looking to address with the iteration is giving you more ways to adjust your talents and rotation to better suit different profiles, which goes hand in hand with increasing the effectiveness and excitement of flamestrike, phoenix flames and living bomb. We're excited to see what fire mage can cook up with the new talents. Our goals with these changes is to push ignite spreading out of the default play style in higher forms of content, especially above three targets, but retain and add talent support for it. So it is still exciting to utilize when it makes sense.
Speaker 1:
Okay, so I'm guessing for pve, ignite is what it's all about. Essentially, pve like dungeons. Okay, sun, king's blessing, and king's blessing is powerful and exciting capstone that fire mages have been utilizing heavily for quite a while. We like the sun king's blessing slash unleashed inferno capstone choice. No, but recognize that the unleashed inferno still has some gaps to close, particularly in aoe. By increasing the stack requirement of sun king's blessing to 10 and increasing unleashed inferno's effectiveness in aoe, we're hoping that the two talents can better coexist as a meaningful choice when going into an encounter um aoe purposes. I'm pretty sure they're only looking at pve here, so I'm not sure if fire mages use unleashed inferno um, but it's not something that springs to mind. It's like, yeah, this is what is giving mages these damage, like to me in pvp.
Speaker 1:
Maintenance buff. Fire's array of maintenance buffs has been a sore spot in dragonflight and it's something we're looking to address moving forward, especially given the addition of the arabus aberus tier set as a certain talents in the fire tree. Fire mind is our first removal, but we're also being sensitive to the fact that fire mind doesn't require you to play around it very much, so its removal might not be doing much to simplify the landscape of fire's maintenance buff. Maintenance buff oh god, I've been saying that wrong. Essentially, these are buffs that you have to constantly keep up in order to do your best DPS rotations, I'm pretty sure. So it's something that you have to deal with, like internally, which is always kind of annoying sometimes on classes. We're also simplifying improved scorch damage amplification effect to be less punishing when it's dropped, but also allowing it to be opting complexity.
Speaker 1:
Fire mages who don't want increased execute damage without the addition of another maintenance buff should look towards drought down in flames. Do choice node against improved scorch Feel. The burn is on the radar but is output is impactful enough that it serves as a way, as a great way to express skill for fire mages who have mastered its gameplay. New talents along the effect from the frost, fire and sunfire tree, increasing players access fire blast and phoenix flames. So keep so. Keeping fill the burn up should be easier than ever before. That's all for this update. We're excited to read all of your feedback for the fire talents.
Speaker 1:
Okay, I don't know a lot about mages, fire mages especially, but essentially they are looking to increase the ways that you can do aoe damage, from what I gather, and I'm not sure if any of these will be effective, but hopefully For those mage players out there, this will make sense to you, the fire mages. But again, it feels very much. It's based around PvE and it's rough to do so, especially when my expertise is in BG, but let's get into the main part. So this is what is going to be in the alpha and this is covering everything essentially. So this is the alpha build. 2. New zones you have the Ring in Deeps, which is the new zone, that is, the second zone that is underneath the crust of azeroth, essentially is the best way to put it. You have two new dungeons the stone vault and dark flame cleft. You have the new allied race which we just discussed about.
Speaker 1:
The characters um, that you can now make at level 73 and it is a maximum of level 75 you can go up to now. They do incentivize that you make a new character because something might go wrong with the previous one. It might be stuck in a certain instance or you know something like that, to just bug it out because it's technically from an old build that character. So please make a new character template if you're going to do so.
Speaker 1:
Classes there are new hero talents for play testing. For demon hunter you have fell scarred. Fell scarred demon hunters embrace the monster within. Blasts of devastating fell fire are unleashed, while in demon form and activating metamorphosis greatly empowers additional fell themed abilities. The fell scarred endure a pain that bubbles just beneath the surface, guarding increased maximum fury and a portion of their demon form bonuses. At all times, those who stand in their way will inevitably being introduced to that pain by intense fiery abilities and blades that will burn with felt energy. They make the hero talents sound really, really cool.
Speaker 1:
I'm not going to lie, for Monk you have Master of Harmony. Master of Harmony was accessible in like first alpha, but several talents were still being worked on. Essentially, it's now fully playable. So all fear, silence, sleep, stuns and interrupt visual effects have been updated with a new visual. Oh, additionally, all movement speed slowing effects greater than 50 will now display a universal slow visual on the target. What the fuck does that mean? So developers notice our main priority is that this visual update is to help increase the clarity and consistency of messaging for common status effects.
Speaker 1:
Slow the status effect, not the spell, for example, has taken quite a few different visual forms over the years. I mean that is very true. You have ones that are hamstring, which is the original slow, in my opinion. You have slow the spell from the mage. You have crippling poison for uh rogues. You have concussion shot for hunters. You have many different slows and many different icons over the years. So, okay, as far as you can imagine, this particular visual was difficult to notice. Oh, no, wait, I've skipped a line. Sorry, sorry, sorry, uh slow, the satisfaction mostly in the range of multi-colored dust clouds around a target's feet. I noticed that. I don't think I've noticed. As you can imagine, this particular visual was difficult to notice from distance and wasn't easily recognizable. So we did a pass on slow and the other status effects um, listen, to help address those clearly messaging issues, making them easier quickly identify in combat. Okay, I wonder what the visuals like. Okay, that'll be interesting to see.
Speaker 1:
There's a few new changes as well. So some fury mages are also now able to. No, some fury mages sorry were already in the game, but there's a couple of tweaks to them. Number wise spells cast by the arcane phoenix no longer benefit from the caster's secondary stats, spell damage, bonuses or talents. Arcane Phoenix's Arcane Surge damage is reduced by 50%. Reduced the damage of all Arcane Phoenix AoE spells by 50%. Arcane Barrage, flamestrike and Phoenix Flames Activation overlay added for Hypothermia and Arcane Sperage. Flame Strike and Phoenix Flames Activation Overlay added for Hypothermia and Arcane Soul. Memory of Alar. This is your Phoenix that you get. Arcane Soul Buff. Redesign Arcane Barrage costs no mana, grants clear casting and generates four arcane. That's really good, isn't it? That seems really fucking good. Okay, that's really good, isn't it that? That seems really fucking good. Okay, that's not bad. Um, for fire fuel. The fire is now baseline.
Speaker 1:
New talents lit fuse. Consuming hot streak has a small chance to grant lit fuse. Lit fuse makes your next phoenix flames. Apply living bomb up to three targets. Living Bomb explodes after two seconds. Dealing damage up to five nearby enemies. Yeah, yeah, new Talent. Explosive ingenuine oh my God, some of these words just don't resonate with my brain. But essentially, consuming Hot Streak has a higher chance of granting you lit fuse. Living Bomb damage increased by 50%. So these two go hand in hand.
Speaker 1:
New Talent down in flames node with improved scorch. Scorch deals 300 damage. Um to targets below 30 health. Okay, so it's an execute. Uh, new talent. Quick flame uh, flame strike damage increased by 25. New talent focused fury. Living bomb deals more damage the fewer targets it hits up to 300. Oh, fuck me, in pvp that could be crazy. That's actually quite worrying because if you pair that with the explosive ingenuity. Hey, I said the word. That's a 350% damage increase from living bomb. Okay, that's actually going to be kind of worrying. Um, new talent, mark of the fire lord flame, strike and living bomb apply mastery, ignite at 100, increased effectiveness, great. So more living bomb stuff.
Speaker 1:
Spontaneous combustion it's a choice node with improved combust. Lasting combustion refreshes up to three charges of fire blast and three charges, okay, of phoenix flames, charring embers. Phoenix flames applies charring embers to all enemies, increasing their damage taken by five percent. From you ire, when you are not under the effect of combustion, your critical strike chance is increased by 2.5%. When you're under the effects of combustion, your critical strike damage is increased by 2.5%. Okay, oh, my god, this keeps going. Okay, this keeps going for a while. Yeah, okay, that's obviously all the new talents that Fire Mages have, so I'll let the Fire Mages figure that out for themselves.
Speaker 1:
For Monks, you have the Conduit of the Celestials. There's a few new changes. Please note that all below will be available in public. Okay, so, yeah, conduit of the celestial uh, so you opt to include all. Yeah, yeah, uh, just a couple things in terms of like, essentially nerfing and buffing stuff, which is always good they constantly are looking at the numbers, which is always nice to see, I wonder if there's anything for. Okay, yeah, these are all the aflock like changes stuff as well.
Speaker 1:
Uh, strangely enough, I don't see anything about dks, because in my honest opinion, I think dks like, and their horse being eight seconds long like a longer cavalier, is kind of crazy, considering if anyone's cavalier should be that long, it should be the paladins, because DKs also have the death grip as well as the chains of ice. So it kind of makes no sense to have a DK be on a mount for 8 fucking seconds long and can also slow and grip someone to them. It's absolutely ridiculous. I don't know, it's absolutely crazy. Then you obviously have all of the warlock talents at the same time as well.
Speaker 1:
So the main ones, to be honest, are oh, pact of of gluttony, isn't this like? This is a new one. How soon should conjure for yourself? And now, demonic health stones and can be used multiple times in combat. Oh, oh, my god, warlocks are never gonna die in pvp. Oh, that's like a must have a pvp. That's crazy good. Uh, swift artifice, reduce the cost on your soul, stone and crown useless, to be honest. It's not actually useless because if you go through three health zones and you need to create more, you can maybe tp back and create them. You know, kind of like fell. It's actually got a potential use, in my honest opinion.
Speaker 1:
Demonic Tactics increases the melee and spell crit chance of you and your summoned demon by 2% Not bad. Fel Pact is now one rank and has been redesigned. Fel Domination reduced Okay, no one ever used Fel Pact anyway. Remois Synergy has been removed Okay, no one ever used Fel Pact anyway. Grimoire's Synergy has been removed Okay. And then they've obviously done a reshuffle of the talents, because it's like this stuff has been moved to row four. This stuff has been moved to row nine. You know that kind of stuff Affliction, any new talents, new talent, cunning, cruel, cruel team, malefic rapture.
Speaker 1:
Has a has a chance to trick a shadow bolt volley dealing damage to five enemies within 10 yards of your current target okay, new talents. Summoners embrace increases the damage dealt by your spells and your demon by three percent okay, deaths embrace it increases drain life healing by 30 while your health is at or below 35. Damage done by our agony, corruption, unstable affliction, malefic rapture is increased by 5 when your target is at or below 20, okay, so kind of an execute stuff. New talent Relinquish Agony has 1.25 times the normal chance to generate, oh, okay, 1.2. What? Okay, well, you're going to be taking that in PvP, I would imagine.
Speaker 1:
Improved Shadow Bolt. The cast time of Shadow Bolt is reduced and the Shadow Bolt damage increased. Kind of useless, volatile Agony, refreshing Agony with less than 10 seconds remaining. Deals shadow damage to the target and enemies within 10 yards. Interesting, these are more like aoe talents that they're bringing in. Okay, somebody's embracing. Increase the damage dealt by a drain by your cell or life drained by your shadow spells okay. New talent uh, malediction. The periodic strike chance of agony okay, so it can just crit more by 10 percent. Uh, contagion, critical strike damage dealt by these, like by your dots, increased by 20 percent. Whole the week. Malefic rapture deals five percent increased damage to enemies. It hits.
Speaker 1:
New talent, talent empowered. Unstable affliction oh, okay, reduce the cast on your unstable affliction by 20% and reduce the damage dealt by it. Increased by 10%. Oh, no, damage dealt has a chance to generate a soul shard. New talent oblivion Wait, they moved the PvP Talent Oblivion into the fucking baseline like tree or the specialisation tree.
Speaker 1:
Unleash your wicked. Yeah, yeah, they moved Oblivion into the actual talent tree. Okay, siphon Life has been redesigned. Corruption deals 20% increased damage and heals you for 5% of the damage dealt. That's crazy good. That, that is crazily good. That talent, by the way, kindled malice has been redesigned. Malefic rapture damage increased by eight percent. Corruption damage increased 20.
Speaker 1:
Um. Um, redesigned malevolent visionary yeah, increased the damage of your dark glare by 70%. When dark glare extends damage over time effects, it also sears the target for shadow damage. Okay. Um, shadow boy drain life okay, that's just no. Soul swap has been removed. Damn it enjoyed. Soul swap has been removed. Damn it enjoyed soul swap.
Speaker 1:
Oh, I would love to see these talents because that is crazy to see. Um, look, the alpha is going really strong. The alpha is going really, really strong. I think that in two weeks time we'll have a full alpha build and it'll be about tuning numbers, making sure there's no bugs in the questing, in the classes, in the hero talents and stuff like that. But for now I think they're just trying to get everything out there to test, essentially, and they're doing a really good job at it. Uh, to be honest with you. But that is where we will end the episode for today. Thank you all very much for listening, as always. Always do check out all of the socials down below. Constant stuff is happening over there. But thank you all very much once again and go, val, a friend, goodbye all, thank you.