At the end of last month we gave an update from the team letting you know the current state of development and what we needed to do. Since then we’ve been working hard on a lot of big picture issues and working in close collaboration with the QA & Bug Triage team. While we still stand on a “When it’s cooked.” stance we wanted to give you yet another update.

General State

When we last gave an update we stated we had 4,442 issues still open across a broad spectrum of the game. As of this post this now stands at 3,109. Meaning that the QA & Bug Triage team alongside our developers have been able to close 1,333 issues. Many of these being simply duplicates closing and merging into a singular issue, but also a meaningful amount of actual fixes. We’ve been updating the internal realm with new fixes and improvements on a weekly basis and are happy with the amount of progress that has been made in that time.

The Walkers of Lore

In Beta 3 we included a sample of our reworked Loremaster system that focuses on key storylines within a zone rather than an overall quest count for a continent. This involved first going through every major blizzard quest and deciding what to include. As many of you noticed in beta 3 we had intentionally left out much of our custom content from the system. This was with the aim of simply not building something that might get reworked.

We are extremely happy with the response to this new Loremaster system so during this month we have gone through our more than a thousand quests and assigned them to their correct Loremaster achievement. This should not only make it easier for people to know they may have missed something new but also provide concrete and regular feedback that you’re done and can move on. We look forward to you using this to see some of the best Project Epoch custom content.

Azshara Antics

One key bit of feedback we received in Beta 3 was focused around Azshara. While we have expanded it in many ways visually and location wise this wasn’t quite matched with a wealth of content to do in those locations. Our designers have revisted this zone and added more than 50 new quests across both factions for you to enjoy.

Mayday! Mayday! A trio of Gnome aircraft have gone down in the ocean along Azshara’s southern coast. Alliance characters will need to locate the survivors at the brand new settlement of Wobble Hollow, where they can assist the Wobblesmith clan in surviving this harsh new land. Clear out naga, giant, and dragon threats, and search for supplies to earn the gnomes’ gratitude (and your own profession rewards.)

Horde characters are given orders to report to Valormok to enact the will of the Warchief! Assist in establishing the foothold at Valormok by ensuring the settlement’s supply lines, defeating nearby enemies, and scouting distant beaches. Crafting enthusiasts will find profession-specific quest chains that assist various NPCs in the area. You may uncover some of the secrets of Azshara along the way.

Characters of both factions will be asked for assistance by High Chief Ungarl at Blackmaw Village. Defeat the tribe’s enemies to establish trust, and assist the tribe’s allies to become a true friend of the Blackmaw. Goblins, butter, and dancing may be involved…

Class is in session…

Following beta 3 there were of course many, many class related bugs that needed triaging and fixing. This process has been ongoing for all classes however in the process we’ve decided to take the opportunity to do some rebalancing, add new functionality and tidy up as many of the gameplay issues / complaints that were discovered. Classes are of course a never ending process however we feel we’re getting far closer to our intended goal.

Below are some examples

Druid

Druids are easily one of the easiest classes to come up with new fancy ideas for, they have such a strong thematic identity. It has many quirks in Burning Crusade, and there have been so many suggestions on how to improve it.

The changes below are changes that have occurred after Beta 3. For previous Druid changes, see the pinned message in the #Druid channel in Discord and our october developer log.

The changes below do not include bug fixes.

• Tranquility is now a raid-wide spell that heals up to 5 players in your raid every tick, prioritizing the most injured players.
• Celestial Focus (Talent) now also reduces spell pushback on Starfire.
• Moonkin Form now has a new passive effect tied to it called Wildkin Frenzy. This effect can trigger when you take direct damage, and it will increase your spell damage done by 5%, your attack power by 10%, and make you immune to spell pushback for 8 seconds.
• Druids can now undertake a new questline in Moonglade to receive a new spell, Flight Form. This spell allows you to take on the form of a bird when you take a flight path from a flight master, instead of mounting a flying mount. This reduces the cost of the flight path by 50%.

Developer’s note: You cannot freely fly with Flight Form. This replaces the visual of you riding a mount when you take a Flight Path. This ability can be toggled on and off in your spellbook at no cost.

• The duration of Tiger’s Fury has been increased to 18 seconds, and Tiger’s Fury has an additional effect: Bleed damage dealt during Tiger’s Fury causes the damage granted from the effect to increase, up to 10 times.

Developer’s note: These changes are aimed at making Tiger’s Fury a new way for non-powershifting builds to compete with powershifting builds. Tiger’s Fury is lost when you exit cat form, meaning you have to stay in cat form and use bleeds to gain these stacks.

• Omen of Clarity is now passive, this spell is otherwise unchanged.
• Sharpened Claws (Talent) now also works in Moonkin Form.
• Balance of Power (Talent) now also increases melee hit chance.
• Restoration Druids have received a new talent on the third row, next to Omen of Clarity. Overgrowth. This spell reduces the Global Cooldown incurred from Rejuvenation by 1 second for your next 5 Rejuvenation casts. 1 minute cooldown, this cooldown begins after your 5 charges are spent. This ability is also on a reduced global cooldown, and has no mana cost.

Developer’s note: A large issue that has been brought up is that Restoration Druids struggle to heal group wide damage in dungeons. The intention behind this ability is to give Restoration Druids a new tool for healing the group back up more often, without giving them extreme AoE healing tools that they have in future expansions.

• Moonglow (Talent) now also reduces the cost of Hurricane.
• Barkskin is no longer on the global cooldown.
• Idol of Ferocity now reduces the energy cost of Rake and Tiger’s Fury by 5.

Developer’s note: While this is technically not a class change, it felt important to mention here.

• Force of Nature’s summons now give you a pet bar so you can better control them, and they now have 90% Avoidance like other pets.
• Fixed an issue where weapons under above item level 64 with DPS below 54.8 would not have Feral Attack Power.

Below you will find the Dungeon Set 2 (Tier 0.5) boots for Feral, Healing, and DPS druids. Featherheart received a new 8pc effect, with the old 8pc being moved down to 6pc, old 6pc being moved to 4pc, and old 4pc being removed. Healer 4pc and 6pc received slight buffs. Feral 4pc, 6pc, and 8pc all received changes.

Paladin

Paladins are known for having a very active Discord channel wherever they exist. The overwhelming opinion is that Paladin is cool, but it can be better. Holy suffers from a confusing identity in Burning Crusade, and solving that is our goal right now.

The changes below are changes that have occurred after Beta 3. For previous Paladin changes, see our october developer log.

The changes below do not include bug fixes.

• When Judgement of Light attempts to heal a player that is already at full health, that player instead receives a buff that increases their healing taken from Judgement of Light by 5% until it successfully heals them. This stacks up to 20 times.
• Ardent Defender now also reduces the damage taken from an attack that brings you under 35% health.
• Holy Shock now has a 40 yard range when used on allies, and a 20 yard range when used on enemies.
• The cooldown of Holy Shock has been reduced by 5 seconds.
• Blessed Life (Talent) now also gives you 4/8/12 to all resistances, based on the rank of the talent.
• Sanctified Light (Talent) now also increases the critical effect chance of Seal of Light and Judgement of Light. Additionally, it now reduces the threat generated by Judgement of Light by 33%/66%/100%, based on the rank of the talent.
• Purifying Power (Talent) now also causes Exorcism and Holy Wrath to give your next healing spell a 30%/60% increased chance to critically heal when they hit a target, based on the rank of the talent.
• Illumination (Talent) now restores mana equal to 75% of the base cost of the spell, up from 60%.
• Holy Light’s mana cost has been reduced by roughly 27% depending on the rank of the spell.
• Divine Illumination no longer reduces the mana cost of your spells, instead it increases the casting time of all Paladin spells by 50% for 15 seconds. This now also triggers Forebearance.

Developer’s note: The goal with these changes is to give Holy a more passive mana sustain, along with giving them a more flexible emergency button to go along with the rest of their toolkit. Holy Paladins should be marathon runners that can sustain healing for a long period of time compared to other healers, at the cost of having less powerful healing tools. These changes are a step in that direction.

• A new talent has been added to the Holy talent tree on Row 4: Overwhelming Light. When your Holy Light, Flash of Light, or Holy Shock spells heal a target to full health, 3 nearby injured allies will be healed by an amount equal to 10%/20% of the healing effect.

Developer’s note: Holy Paladin struggles with healing multiple targets, and this isn’t meant to completely solve that. I believe Paladins should excel at single target healing in a way that allows them to still keep multiple targets up by simply casting multiple large heals. This talent, along with some of these other changes, should help, especially in dungeon situations where you have to handle AoE damage. Overwhelming Light is based off of the total healing done, including overhealing.

• The backgrounds of the Paladin talent trees have been restored to their pre-TBC appearance.
• The talents “Anticipation” and “Improved Concentration Aura” in the Protection tree have swapped places.

Developer’s note: With the changes above creating more worthwhile Holy talents, the popular Improved Concentration Aura felt painfully out of reach in comparison. This brings it just a little closer, so you have some free talent points to spend elsewhere.

Below you will find the Dungeon Set 2 (Tier 0.5) boots for Tanking, Healing and, DPS paladins. All 3 sets have seen stat adjustments. The 6pc and 8pc DPS set effects have changed. The 8pc Tank set effect has seen a minor change to make it more effective on single target.

Priest

Priests are a class known for their incredible healing output and their shadowy methods of providing mana to their party. But it has room for improvements, especially in the Discipline talent tree. In addition, people have suggested for a long time that Holy Damage should be an aspect of priests that gets further explored.

The changes below are changes that have occurred after Beta 3. For previous Priest changes, see our october developer log.

The changes below do not include bug fixes.

• Penance has been removed.

Developer’s note: While we have gone through many ideas for this spell, it just doesn’t fit in with the TBC gameplay of any specialization of priest and only caused bloat and design balancing issues.

• Lightwell Renew has been restored to its TBC state, before these other changes.
• Lightwell now has 15 charges, up from 5, but each player can only use each Lightwell once.
• Lightwell’s healing over time effect now also ticks immediately when it is applied, and it is now only cancelled from direct damage instead of any damage.

Developer’s note: Lightwell is a somewhat divisive ability, a very common suggestion is to make it heal passively, instead of requiring a click, effectively making it a totem. But then it would no longer be unique or interesting. It is well understood that nobody will click the Lightwell. But please, do try to click it!

• Divine Spirit has been made baseline and is no longer a Discipline talent. Rank 1 can now be learned from trainers at level 30, and the cost of training each rank has been adjusted.
• The effect of Divine Spirit has been reduced by 25%.
• Improved Divine Spirit (Talent) now also increases the effectiveness of Divine Spirit by 18%/36%.

Developer’s note: This talent brings Divine Spirit back to the values it originally had.

• Priests have received a new spell, Bless Water. This spell allows you to transform a Refreshing Spring Water into a Holy Water item, with multiple ranks ranging from Weak Holy Water at level 12 to Blessed Holy Water at level 52. Holy Water is considered a Conjured Item and can be traded to other players, but will disappear after 15 minutes of being offline. Holy Water deals damage to Undead at the targeted location.

Developer’s note: This is a mostly flavor spell that gives Priests a unique tool against Undead, especially if you take some time to pass them out to your party. It is tuned to be slightly weaker than Stratholme Holy Water. This item shares a cooldown with many similar items, such as dynamite or crystal charges.

• Focused Power (Talent) now affects all damaging holy spells, instead of only Smite.
• Pain Suppression has moved to the talent row that used to house Divine Spirit. This talent now requires 2/2 Martyrdom.
• Improved Divine Spirit and Improved Mana Burn were slightly moved to accomodate the change above, this has no effect on gameplay but does make the talent tree look different.
• Discipline Priests have received a new capstone talent, Power Word: Barrier. This spell creates a large absorption shield around you, protecting all party and raid members from harm up for 10 seconds or until the shield breaks with damage. This is a channeled ability that lasts 10 seconds and cannot be dispelled, but can be interrupted. 3 minute cooldown.

Developer’s note: In raid groups this shield will increase in strength, gaining absorption amount based on the number of nearby alive players in your raid group, increasing after 5 players by 17.5% per player up to 25 players. This is a powerful cooldown spell intended to give Discipline Priests a unique asset to bring to groups, as they are not bringing Circle of Healing.

• Searing Light (Talent) has moved up from row 4 to row 3.
• Inspiration (Talent) and Improved Healing (Talent) have swapped places in the Holy talent tree.

Developer’s note: These two changes are intended to allow “Smite Priest” style builds to more easily reach the talents they require without wasting points in talents they do not want.

• Holy Reach (Talent) has moved to over to where Searing Light was. This has no effect on gameplay, just cleans a gap in the talent tree.
• The tauren priest racial An’she’s Protection has been reworked and now increases your resistance to all schools of magic by an amount equal to your current level for 14 seconds.
• Holy Fire’s base damage has been increased by 10%, and its damage over time has been increased by 40%. Additionally, Holy Fire’s damage over time has had its spell coefficient increased from 3.3% to 14.3%, and its duration has been increased from 10 seconds to 16 seconds.

Developer’s note: This buff might look extreme, because it is, Holy Fire was a really bad ability.

• Improved Inner Fire now also increases the amount of charges Inner Fire has by 10/20/30.

Below you will find the Dungeon Set 2 (Tier 0.5) boots for Healing and DPS priests. The only change from Beta 2.5 is a buff to the 4pc Healing effect.

Rogue

The Rogue class is generally in a good state in Burning Crusade, however this is mostly only true for the Combat specialization and using swords as a weapon type. Our goals on Epoch are to allow Rogue to be able to use daggers and poisons effectively, competing with the damage dealt by Combat rogues.

The changes below are changes that have occurred after Beta 3. For previous Rogue changes, see the pinned message in the #Rogue channel in Discord and our october developer log.

The changes below do not include bug fixes.

• The recipe for Blinding Powder now creates 6 of the item, up from 3.

Developer’s note: Blind did not require a reagent in The Burning Crusade, and this has been commonly reported as a bug. However it was decided that we’ll keep this, as it fits well with having a Classic world. It was likely removed because Fadeleaf was no longer an herb that was relevant in Outland. The Fadeleaf requirement however is quite steep compared to other class reagents, so reducing the amount of this valuable herb Rogues will need should help.

• Envenom now also increases your chance of applying all poisons by 10% for 1 second per dose consumed.
• Axe Specialization’s bleed has been increased from 50% Weapon Damage to 100% Weapon Damage.

Developer’s note: Additionally, a bug was causing Axe Specialization to do even less damage than the tooltip suggested, which has since been fixed.

• Expose Armor now always applies an armor reduction equal to what used to be a 5 Combo Point Expose Armor. Combo points spent now increase the duration of Expose Armor. 1 Combo Point lasts 8 seconds, and each additional combo point adds 8 seconds to the duration, up to 40 seconds at 5 Combo Points.
• Expose Armor being cast on a target that already has Expose Armor will now increase its duration by 8 seconds per combo point spent, up to 60 seconds.

Developer’s note: These Expose Armor changes are highly experimental and still being tested internally, but they are included here today to spark more conversation about this ability, and whether the ability itself should even exist at all.

• Increased the base damage of Deadly Poison by 5%.

Developer’s note: This buff is aimed at Envenom. There have been suggestions to give Envenom base damage before adding Deadly Poison’s damage to the mix, but I believe increasing the damage of the poison itself is more effective, because it has to compete with Windfury Totem.

• Slice and Dice’s duration is now increased by 1 second each time you deal Bleed damage. This can be any source of Bleed damage, including from armor and weapons.
• The tooltip of Slice and Dice has been updated to now display the correct values when you’ve taken the Improved Slice and Dice talent.
• Redirect can now also be used while in Stealth.
• Opportunity (Talent) no longer benefits Mutilate when attacking the front of an enemy.

Developer’s note: With Mutilate no longer having a back-facing requirement on Epoch, this talent no longer made sense. While it could have been reworded to make sense, the theming of the talent and its position in the Subtlety tree means that it should continue to only benefit backwards-facing attacks.

Below you will find the Dungeon Set 2 (Tier 0.5) boots for rogues. There have been no changes to this set since Beta 2.5

Warrior

Warrior is always a solid class that scales extremely well as you get more powerful gear. Because of this, they don’t really need much beyond minor adjustments and polishing.

The changes below are changes that have occurred after Beta 3. For previous Warrior changes, see the pinned message in the #Warrior channel in Discord and our october developer log.

The changes below do not include bug fixes.

• Rampage has received a new visual effect so players can better track when Rampage is active without add-ons.
• The cooldown of Bladestorm has been increased by 30 seconds.
• Bladestorm no longer makes you immune to movement speed reducing effects, it now makes you unable to be reduced below 60% run speed.

Developer’s log: Bladestorm was previously in its stock 3.3.5 state, and it proved to be slightly too strong in some cases. These two adjustments should bring the ability down closer to the power level it should have in this environment.

• Warrior Dungeon Set 2 (Tier 0.5) Tank set now has some Agility added to various pieces.

Developer’s note: The image below does not have agility, but to give an example: Helm of Heroism now has 19 Strength, 14 Agility, 25 Stamina, 1 Hit, 4 Parry/Dodge Reduction. It used to have 30 Stamina, 25 Strength, 1 Hit, 4 Parry/Dodge Reduction.

Below you will find the Dungeon Set 2 (Tier 0.5) boots for Tank and DPS warriors. The DPS 8pc effect has been changed.

What About Other Classes?

Each class is being thoroughly looked through one at a time, and this includes fixing every gameplay important bug before moving on to the next class. Some bugs of course take much longer than others. But I know how disappointing it is to not have your class featured in this developer log (I am looking at you, Warlocks), so we will be giving small previews for the other classes. Please note that these are even more subject to change than the class changes listed above, because of this they will be vague.

Mage

Pyroclastic Flow will be a new Fire Mage talent that increases the damage dealt by Pyroblast after you critically hit with your spells, stacking up to a few times.

Mages can undertake new quests to obtain Teleport: Stonard (Horde) / Teleport: Theramore (Alliance) and Portal: Stonard (Horde) / Portal: Theramore (Alliance).

Hunter

Wasps will have their Wrath ability, Sting, return with some changes to the amount of armor it reduces by.

Shaman

Sentry Totem will grant nearby allies minor stealth detection, granting you more stealth detection when you look through its vision.

Warlock

Seed of Corruption’s soul shard cost will be removed.

I know this is not enough information, Warlock has been the most difficult class design-wise. I truly wish I could share more of what I am cooking at this time.

Remote Code Execution

Boy it has been a busy week for the modding scene. As many of you already know full public details of a remote code execution exploit within the 3.3.5 client has been discovered. While this is not all that relevant to us at Epoch we still felt the community would want some update so here it is in its simplest form. We’ve already patched the WoW exe to prevent this. You’re safe.

Core Upgrades

A lot of the time that Kaytotes has had free this month has been mostly dedicated to researching, understanding and rewriting key core components to overall improve the quality of Project Epoch across the board. While we appreciate for many these might be less interesting than new custom additions we still wanted to highlight some key ones.

Creature Spell Damage Calculations

Throughout the betas we’ve had reports of the spells that creatures cast being in some cases drastically underpowered. As many of you may known Blizzard has a baked in spell scaling system that uses the creatures level to dictate the final strength of the spell. This was simply implemented wrong and has now been rewritten so that spells will now correctly scale. Considering the literal thousands of spells this impacts we felt this was a big step forward and has made the world feel noticably more dangerous than it was in the past.

Fishing Skill Rework

Considering it only impacts one profession this is very niche but gave us a rare chance to dig into some very old theorycrafting posts. Up to now fishing has essentially functioned as it does in 3.3.5 and with stock TrinityCore.

The chance of obtaining fish from fishing and the chance of receiving a skillup when successfully catching a fish have been reverted to 1.12 chances. The speed in which you catch fish has been kept in its 3.3.5 state, and so has junk fishing loot. Fishing from a pool of fish no longer guarantees a catch regardless of your fishing skill, as that was a change made in patch 3.3.0.

It’s our belief that TrinityCore actually has a better implementation than vMangos, so its been kept mostly intact. TrinityCore uses a system called “fishing steps” which is the amount of times you have to catch a fish before your next skillup. vMangos uses pure chance.

It’s well theorized by many sources, such as El’s Anglin’, that it’s likely WoW uses a Fishing Steps-like system. However it’s supposed to be an average number of catches, not a set number. Due to that it was changed so that we still use fishingsteps but when you reach the required number of steps each cast now has a 75% chance of skilling you up. It’s not perfectly blizzlike, but its close enough, especially since the whole system is speculation regardless. The values used are estimated using El’s Anglin’ archives and Vanilla / Classic Wowhead comments.

Stealth Detection

Across every beta our shady rogue allies have raised complaints that the stealth detection felt unfair to the point of it must be bugged. We decided to spend some time looking into this and it has received a rewrite bringing its behaviour far closer to vMangos, who by proxy did an incredible amount of research during Classic.

Corpse Decay Extensions

Corpse decay is a very simple concept, it is the time it takes for a creatures body to disappear. Up to now this has essentially been hard coded to be handled purely by a creatures rank. A normal mobs body may remain for 5 minutes after death, a rare might linger for 10 minutes much like an elite, etc.

The key to this however is its extremely broad. During betas we have received a lot of feedback where due to our increased dungeon difficulty people have wiped while successfully killing a boss in a dungeon eg from ticking debuffs and it finally kills the last man. Even with the increased death run speeds that 3.3.5 provides it was entirely possible to have the boss despawn in the time it takes to run back.

We have instead changed this to be configurable per creature in the database. Following that we’ve tuned it based on where the creature resides eg dungeon denizens should take far far longer to despawn. Once they have had their loot cleared this rate of despawn rapidly accelerates to offset the performance cost of extra corpses lingering.

This should mean that in almost all cases we can think of the only way to not get loot from a body you’ve killed recently is to actively not pick it up.

Instance ID Shenanigans

This is arguably one of our top 3 most critical issues to resolve. For those who don’t know essentially in betas its been possible for instances to seemingly reset out of nowhere from your perspective. This was caused by the generation and re-use of instance id’s alongside a few other problems. However, the steps to reproduce it reliably weren’t well known.

Thanks to the QA team spending many many hours isolating these issues we’ve been able to fix as many issues as we’ve found. While we won’t say this is “fixed” without a larger test this is a large confidence boost for the team that we’ll be able to hit that sooner rather than later.

Dynamic Respawns

Oh boy what a fun topic… Essentially the dynamic respawn system in TrinityCore is zone based. Get the number of players in the whole zone, use that to build a negative multiplier, apply to the spawn time of a creature when this dies. We’ve done everything we could to tune this with the available configuration and it was fundamentally impossible.

Using a zone like Elwynn it is possible for there to be 30 people in Northshire trying to clear their 1-5 journey and 5 people over in the Fargodeep mine and as far as the system is concerned that’s 35 people to consider. This does not mesh with reality.

We’ve rebuilt this system to have a much greater degree of control by us on the fly as well as be more tightly constrained to relevant players. For Game Objects such as profession nodes, chests, etc this is still zone based just because things like node pools are already structured to factor in a zone.

However for creatures this is much more comprehensive. Firstly it checks how many players are within X yards of the creature when it dies. We can control minimum respawns by whether the mob is outdoors or indoors to make caves less of a living hell without impacting the outside world. We can now tweak this by rank eg letting normal mobs hyper spawn but restraining elites or rares to standard respawn and so on.

This is extremely awkward to test on our internal realm so we are definitely going to need a dynamic spawns focused stress test pre launch.

NPC Movement Improvements

Over this month we’ve made drastic strides rewriting NPC movement and have briefly demoed a work in progress build within a long form stream performed by Kaytotes. This includes techniques such as unit prediction where creatures may not just chase / follow where you are but where you are going to be. This is still receiving active development, play testing and tuning however we intend to release a more concrete before and after video the closer we get to our next public test, which is TBD.

Please know though that the feedback we received in betas that this was not of an acceptable quality have been taken sincerely to heart.

Blizzard Loot Reworks

The delay we’ve taken has impacted the team in many ways but one of the positives is that it has allowed some of our designers to dedicate even more time to tinkering with end game loot in the form of re-itemizing, upgrading or nerfing many existing Blizzard items. This meant taking a ground up look and deciding if we wanted to retune or remake an item.

While we still intend to keep the majority of brand new loot secret until launch we thought this was a unique exception to that rule since they’re not new items but instead remade items. So, here is an example of some of the reworked loot you will find within Stratholme.

We’re proud to say that across Stratholme, Blackrock Depths and Lower Blackrock Spire alone you will find more than 130 brand new items to loot, theorycraft and enjoy.

Closing Statement

With the majority of the team focused on polishing and bug fixing this month has been a very stark quality improvement across the board for Project Epoch. We know you’re itching to hop back in game and frankly we need to test at scale some of the above fundamental changes particularly with the core.

With that in mind we are contemplating a short form test in the not too distant future that while not a full beta should give us critical information we need to push towards launch. Stay tuned for new information!