Blizzard Adds Shadowlands Beta to Launcher, Notes Changes to Druid and Paladin Covenant Abilities

A host of new updates from Blizzard provide us some additional information about World of Warcraft’s imminent expansion, Shadowlands.

First up, it appears that the Shadowlands launcher has been updated to reflect “Beta” instead of “Alpha.” As Blizzard notes quite succinctly, “The Shadowlands Alpha is now the Shadowlands Beta.” Additionally, Blizzard pointed several changes coming to Kindred Spirits,

• Visual effects have been updated.
• Kindred Spirits now casts a solo version of each buff when bonded with yourself, called Lone Empowerment (Balance and Feral), Lone Meditation (Restoration), or Lone Protector (Guardian). These effects are weaker than when you pair with an ally, and grant simple buffs to damage, healing, or mitigation.
• Kindred Empowerment (the “damager” buff) no longer gives ramping primary stat to your partner. Instead, 30% of all damage dealt grants the partner a pool of Kindred Empowerment, which gets expended to increase their damage, healing, and mitigation until it runs out.

Finally, Blizzard notes that Blessing of the Seasons is being reworked to be a single-target buff now, whereas it was previously party-based. They note this is to be consistent with modern “Blessings” abilities while simply removing some potential problems from alpha,

“For example, the damaging Blessings will now be more effective when used solo, not only in group play. All four of the effects have their values increased to go along with this change (caveat that tuning is still quite preliminary). The changes mentioned last week—where multiple Paladins in a group are locked together, and give a hidden increase in strength to the Blessings—are no longer necessary and are reverted.”