Reforged is not dead yet

Lok’Tar everyone!

First, we’d like to give you a quick update on where we are on ranked play, leaderboards, and player profiles. The Warcraft team is committed to delivering you these features, however, due to the nature of the world today, it’s taking longer than we planned. We thank you, our passionate community, for your understanding and continuing to support Warcraft III.

Today we’ve begun publicly testing patch 1.32.10, which addresses a critical bugfix that allowed players to exploit information from the opposing players by using rally points in the fog of war. Thank you to all of the players who reached out to inform us about this issue. Additionally, with the ESL Pro League wrapping up for 2020, we’ve decided to make some balance updates to address some key community feedback about item balance, item pricing, and some pain points for both Human and Undead. We also revisited previous changes.

Once again, thank you to all of the community contributors who continue to put out content and send us great feedback. Please test these changes via the PTR, as we will be monitoring it and calibrating throughout the PTR phase. Please remember these changes are a work in progress and subject to change, so please continue to provide feedback. We hope to release this patch sometime in mid-April, depending on how feedback and testing goes.

— The Warcraft III Team

BALANCE

• HUMAN
  • Improved Lumber tech requirement removed.
  • Advanced Lumber tech requirement changed from Castle to Keep.
    • Developers’ notes: In a Human vs Undead matchup, the Human player is generally expected to lose some peasants throughout the early- to mid-game. The Human player also must invest in a lot of wood for early defense, and use militia quite frequently to defend, which causes them to have gold to wood ration imbalances. This change should help Human players balance their economy and make it slightly easier to transition into the later part of the game and unlock key units against Undead.
  • Knights now have Sundering Blades by default.
    • Developers’ notes: With the addition of the Sundering Blade passive, we’ve really seen a lot more Knight usage and we like that a lot. However, it takes a long time for Knights to come online with their multiple upgrades. We feel that allowing Sundering Blades to be on Knights by default allows them to have an immediate impact when built, while giving them some uniqueness as a heavy late game unit.
  • Priest dispel range increased from 600 to 700.
    • Developers’ notes: Changes to the overall meta have moved players toward favoring range units in certain matchups. We noticed that whenever a priest would try to cast dispel, they would immediately get focused down by piercing damage and be killed immediately. This slight increase in range should improve the usability and quality life for the priest.
  • Scout Tower / Guard Tower / Cannon Tower / Arcane Tower repair rate is now 5 seconds faster.
    • Developers’ notes: This was a change we tested in a previous PTR, but pulled away from to see how the previous patch performed. Since then, we’ve seen players shift to more ranged units, and we feel this change is needed to help Humans defend against certain pushes. Currently, even if a Human reacts immediately to a threat with a handful of peasants, it is still not enough to prevent their towers from going down.
  • Siege Engine tank experience bounty reduced from 85 to 60.
    • Developers’ notes: While we wanted to reduce the overall effectiveness of certain siege engine strategies, we realized that due to the inflexibility of our experience leveling system, setting the bounty at 85 was too high. There has been some ongoing community sentiment that tanks were in a good place previously, so we’ve reduced the experience bounty. We will continue to monitor this and may test additional changes in lieu of this one.

 

• NIGHT ELF
  • Druid of the Claw starting mana increased from 100 to 125.
    
    • Developers’ notes: A small quality of life change that was requested by the community, which also helps master bears have slightly more utility right away.

 

• UNDEAD
  • Acolyte hit point Regeneration while on Blight reduced from 4 to 3 HP per second.
    • Developers’ notes: In a previous patch we saw the regen rate on Blight double. This was to address the vulnerability of the unit being exposed and stationary while mining gold. As the overall spirit of the change was heading in the right direction, we’re reducing the number slightly to allow for more harassment opportunities from the opposing player.
  • Rod of Necromancy cooldown reduced from 26 to 24 seconds.
    • Developers’ notes: Slight calibration of the previous change. We’ve noticed that this change has more effect on UD creeping than intended, so we’re reducing this number slightly.
  • Ritual Dagger gold cost reduced from 125 to 100.
    • Developers’ notes: We’re reducing the cost of the Ritual Dagger to promote its use more and to bring its cost in line with its healing performance.
  • Cryptlord impale Stun Hero duration reduced from 1/2/3 to 1/1.5/2, and Cryptlord damage reduced from 75/120/165 to 60/110/150.
    • Developers’ notes: We’re bringing the overall hero stun duration in line with other hero stun abilities. Please note- its overall stun duration against units remains unchanged. While looking at impale and potentially changing other units in other factions, we noticed that the threat of impale damage is the main reason that certain strategies are not viable against an Undead player that goes Cryptlord first and levels fast.
  • Frost Armor duration is now scaled per level.
    • Level 1: Frost duration 2 seconds.
    • Level 2: Frost duration 4 seconds.
    • Level 3: Frost duration 6 seconds.
    • Developers’ notes: This was something that the community has been requesting for some time, and it addresses the early power spike against melee units, while still allowing the ability to scale up as the Lich levels up. This tuning makes the ability slightly worse at level 1, the same as it is currently at level 2, and better at level 3.
  • Boneyard no longer requires sacrificial pit.
    • Developers’ notes: We currently believe it takes too long for Frost Wyrms to see play. This change should allow players to find strategies to use frost worms and should also help in conjunction to the knight change in this patch.

 

• ITEMS
  • Alleria’s Flute of Accuracy bonus reduced from 0.1 to 0.075.
  • Ancient Janggo of Endurance bonuses reduced from 0.05/0.1 to 0.03/0.075.
  • Khadgar’s Pipe of Insight bonus reduced from 0.75 to 0.5.
  • Legion Doom-Horn bonuses reduced from 0.5 / 1.0 to 0.3 / 0.75.
  • Scourge Bone Chimes bonus reduced from 0.2 to 0.15.
  • Warsong Battle Drums bonus reduced from 0.1 to 0.075.
  • The Lion Horn of Stormwind bonus reduced from 2 to 1.5.
  • All items’ re-sell percentage increased from 50% to 75% of the item’s original cost.
    • Developers’ notes: These are probably the biggest changes in this patch. We’re making some changes to all the Aura items to reduce their effectiveness. We believe that these aura items do have a place in the game but should not have parity in power to the actual hero ability. Also, due to the nature of some items being more impactful than others, we’re increasing the sell rate of items to help mitigate some potential “bad item luck” that players may experience, which can ultimately determine the outcome of some games.

BUGFIX

• Fixed an issue of inconsistent rally flag behavior on Goldmines which could reveal player locations in the Fog of War.