Consecration is flickering in the WoW Forever beta: ticks drop to 1-2 damage and tanks lose their threat

Paladin tanks on the World of Warcraft: Forever beta have spent the past few days testing the same thing: their Consecration ticks for 10-11 damage one moment and 1-2 the next, on the same mob, in the same fight. Several testers have now filed bug reports, and the topic has its own threads on the US and EU forums.

What Consecration is supposed to do now

Forever changed the spell. Instead of hitting everything in the circle equally, Consecration deals its full damage to the first four enemies in it and very little to anything beyond that. Player threads have argued about that cap since it appeared. The beta client’s talent data points the same way: the Holy talent Divine Precision gives your Holy spells 10% increased damage “against the first 4 enemies that enter your Consecration”.

That part is the design, and it is in the tooltip. What testers are reporting is separate.

What testers found

On September 20, the Paladin channel DevTanks published a test, I Tested the New Consecration… and Something Is Wrong, pulling a single wolf through the circle on a level 20 Paladin and watching the ticks jump between full damage and almost none. Within a day the video was posted to the US bug forum, where another tester said he had seen the same while tanking Ruins of Lordaeron, and to a second thread asking players to file in-game reports.

A European tester ran a cleaner test and posted the numbers in Paladin Consecration bugged: duelling a friend, he saw 10-11 damage a tick when he dropped the circle on top of him, and 1-2 damage a tick when the same player walked in from the edge, with only that one target inside.

Nobody agrees yet on the cause. In the US thread, one player relays the video’s own guess, that damage falls off toward the outer edge of the circle; commenters there suspect height instead, with mobs standing slightly above or below the circle taking the reduced hits.

What it costs a tank

The beta Paladin covers packs with Consecration and taunts single targets with Judgement. If the circle is doing 1-2 damage a tick, the threat that holds the rest of a pull is mostly gone. Paladin creator Whiter, summarising the tests on September 23, puts the loss at around 80% of a Paladin’s area threat on the low ticks.

It lands on a class that was already arguing about this. The thread Consecration change is hilariously bad has over 100 replies from players who think the four-target cap removes the AoE tank altogether, while others answer that this is the point, and that Swipe and Thunderclap have caps too. Our beta class report has the wider picture of how the classes are landing so far.

Where it stands

Blizzard has not answered any of the Consecration threads at the time of writing, and there is no hotfix note about it. The beta is still running, and launch is November 4, so there is time for a fix.

If you are testing a Paladin, two things help:

• File the in-game bug report. Several threads ask for exactly this, because the reports are what the team counts.
• Drop the circle on top of the pack rather than pulling mobs across it. In every test posted so far, mobs that were already standing in the circle when it landed took full ticks.

We will update this story if Blizzard responds or a build changes the spell. The beta changes list tracks the rest of what is moving.