WoW Forever: weaker PvP critical strikes are a bug, report says

Players on the WoW Forever beta have noticed that critical strikes against other players do less damage than they did in the original game. According to a report published on 29 September, Blizzard has confirmed that this is a bug rather than an intended change, and critical strikes will be back to normal in a future build once it is fixed. The report quotes the confirmation from a Blizzard post on social media, but does not link to it. We could not open that post ourselves and found no such statement on Blizzard's forums, so for now the confirmation comes from this one report.

The problem was raised on Blizzard's US forums on 26 September, in a thread flagged as a bug which says that critical damage against players is cut by half. The figures in it come from players' own tests. One player wrote that, by their own tests and those of other players and streamers, melee critical strikes against players are only 50% stronger than a normal hit, and spell critical strikes only 25% stronger; testing on a hunter with Auto Shot and Arcane Shot, the player got 50% extra damage instead of 100%. Another player wrote that it happens with every ability against every target they met in PvP, in Redridge Mountains, the Barrens, Elwynn Forest and Westfall, and that duels are the most reliable way to check it: auto attacks hit for 45 to 60 damage, and critical strikes for 70 to 90 instead of 90 to 120.

Not everyone in the thread wanted a fix. Some players welcomed weaker critical strikes as good for PvP, and one pointed out that damage-over-time spells can now critically strike, so full critical damage on them could make Affliction warlocks and Shadow priests too strong. Others said the change hurts classes that win fights with a few big hits, such as rogues, warriors and hunters, which have many talents built around critical strikes, while classes that wear enemies down slowly would do better. No Blizzard employee replied in the thread. Its last post, on 29 September, came from a player who wrote that Blizzard had called it a bug to be fixed in a later build.

Critical strikes against players matter most on the PvP ruleset, where Blizzard says players face open-world conflict whenever they enter contested territory, but players also report the problem in duels. The beta runs until 21 October, and WoW Forever launches at 23:00 UK time on 4 November, which is midnight on 5 November in Central Europe. The report does not say when the fix will arrive or whether it will reach the beta before it ends.