Assassination and Balance Changes on Tuesday

In recent weeks, we’ve seen the rise of a pair of unusual builds for Assassination Rogues and Balance Druids, both of which end up abandoning core abilities like Solar Wrath, Lunar Strike, and Mutilate in favor of Moonfire and Fan of Knives spam. While player ingenuity often devises interesting and unexpected ways of optimizing performance, in this case the resulting gameplay became one-dimensional, and we’ve heard feedback to that effect.

As a result, with the upcoming weekly resets in each region, starting on Tuesday, January 9, we’ll be making some targeted changes to reinforce the core rotational abilities of these two specializations, with only a minimal effect on overall balance:

Druid

• Balance
  • Wax and Wane (Artifact trait) damage bonus per stack reduced to 6% (was 25%).
  • Lunar Strike damage increased by 8%.
  • Solar Wrath damage increased by 8%.

Rogue

• Assassination
  • Mutilate damage increased by 20%.
  • Balanced Blades (Artifact trait) bonus increased to 4% per point (was 2% per point).
  • Poison Knives (Artifact trait) reduced to 3% per point (was 4% per point).
  • Deadly Poison triggered instant damage increased by 15%.

Thank you very much for all of your feedback. I can't overstate how much we appreciate the valuable class discussion taking place here and elsewhere.