A round of tuning changes has hit WoW’s Plunderstorm battle royale today, with Blizzard immediately targeting the game’s most commonly agreed-upon strongest ability, Fire Whirl, in this round of balance changes.
In a hotfix shipped to Plunderstorm earlier today (first reported by WoW coverage site Wowhead), three spells were altered, with Fire Whirl getting nerfed and two other spells receiving buffs.
Fire Whirl is still going to deal as much damage as it usually does, but the movement speed bonus that you get from the ability is getting cut in half. Instead of granting a 140 percent bonus to your movement speed when casting it, you’ll only receive a 70 percent bonus moving forward. This change should make it so you won’t be able to chase down players who invest a disengagement ability into the process of getting away from Fire Whirl. There was nothing more obnoxious than having Fire Whirl close the gap and deal damage after you blow your entire kit on making an attempt to disengage.
Now, though, Fire Whirl won’t be as strong, but players who mistime their utility skills will continue to have a tough time avoiding its damage.
Some less-popular, struggling abilities were also touched up with some buffs in this round of hotfixes, with Toxic Smackerel getting a reduced cooldown at all ranks and Star Bomb receiving a 0.25 second-faster cast time.
The buff to Star Bomb is exceptionally intriguing as the ability has been extremely easy to counter in the early Plunderstorm meta. Simply walking out of its radius, no matter how large it is, has been an easy enough counterplay strategy. But now that the radius of the spell collapses a quarter-second faster than it previously did, it might require players to invest a utility spell or two into escaping it, depending on how close they are to the center.
These WoW Plunderstorm hotfixes have been deployed on the live servers and are available to play with in the game now.
