Blizzard applied a round of World of Warcraft hotfixes late on August 24 that cut the damage scaling on Vashnik the Malignant for Normal and Heroic raiders, landing the change before the weekly reset. Wowhead reported the tuning as going live at around 9 p.m. Pacific.
All three of the encounter's Infusion effects were adjusted the same way. Blood Infusion now increases the damage of Hemo Expulsion by 100 percent, down from 200 percent; Shadow Infusion applies the same 100 percent figure to Gloom Expulsion; and Flame Infusion does likewise for Conflagrating Expulsion. Each change applies on Normal and Heroic difficulty only.
That brings the two lower difficulties in line with Mythic, where the per-stack amplification was already 100 percent. Wowhead described the previous 200 percent figure on Normal and Heroic as an oddity, given that the hardest version of the fight had been using the smaller number all along.
What it changes for raid groups
The practical effect is on how far a group has to travel during the encounter. Only two things scale when a raid runs back-to-back segments: the explosion damage Vashnik deals when he casts Imbibe, and the health of the adds. Both the purple and orange adds can be crowd controlled, so the extra health adds little, and cooldowns and personal defensives can cover the explosion damage.
That makes staying inside one section more attractive than rotating through all three. Wowhead noted that groups should no longer need to cross to the Blood section, which is the farthest away, carries an add that cannot be crowd controlled, and applies the Infection that forces players to stack.
The Imbibe explosion still ramps steeply across a single run of segments. Wowhead listed the damage per cast as:
- Imbibe 1: 186,000
- Imbibe 2: 372,000
- Imbibe 3: 558,000
- Imbibe 4: 744,000
- Imbibe 5: 930,000
The single-element approach was already proven at the top of the ladder. Method used a Fire and Shadow only strategy on their world first kill of Vashnik, and Wowhead expects the reduced amplification to make that route more appealing on Heroic for the groups working through the encounter this week.