With the World of Warcraft: Shadowlands expansion fast approaching, there’s always some last-minute fine-tuning going on in the Beta. This is especially true with the multiple systems planned for Shadowlands, bringing plenty to balance.
The high volume of polish and balance needed has even recently led to Blizzard choosing to delay the release of Shadowlands by an unknown amount of time. Making the announcement yesterday, Blizzard hasn’t yet given a new release date.
Still, we can at least surmise that the expansion will be coming out in 2020 given the fact that executive producer John Hight announced such himself. With prepatch beginning on the 13th, we may still see the expansion rather soon.
To that end, what can those of us not yet on the Beta expect to see once we’re able to hop into the expansion properly? Blizzard went ahead and made some fine-tuning against plenty of things with their extra delay time, with particular attention paid to the Night Fae Covenant ability.
“We’ve seen some questions recently about inconsistencies with abilities that cancel Soulshape and abilities that are usable during Soulshape without canceling it,” the developers wrote in a blue post on their forums. “This is a work in progress.”
Blizzard has clarified some mechanics for the Night Fae Covenant ability Soulshape.#Shadowlands#Warcrafthttps://t.co/ada0zfhXTD pic.twitter.com/JOHIIiMfBb
— Wowhead💙 (@Wowhead) October 2, 2020
Those last six words are the most important – the changes that we see here are not final. Blizzard is still adding plenty of tweaks and tuning to the abilities and powers that are coming in Shadowlands, and there’s plenty for them to look into.
The developers go on to discuss the intention behind the design for the ability. They seem set on having it behave similarly to abilities such as the Ghost Wolf ability available to the Shaman class, or a Druid’s travel form.
By this logic, they say, all activated abilities should cancel Soulshape, with a handful of exceptions. The vast majority of offensive abilities and generally anything that needs to be activated is meant to cancel the Soulshape form. Seemingly, if it would kick you off your mount, it should kick you out of Soulshape.
“As of this latest build of the Shadowlands Beta, Death Knight, Demon Hunter, and Druid abilities are set up appropriately, with the exception of some PvP talents,” they write. “We’ll make this behavior consistent across the remaining classes in future builds.”
A specific example given is the Death Knight ability Howling Blast failing to cancel the Soulshape ability. The developers are insistent that this is a bug, and that it will be fixed as soon as possible, among other bugs that are apparent for the Death Knight class.