Durability changes in WoW patch 12.0.7 will help players save gold on repairs — especially Protection Warriors

One of the discussions around the current state of affairs in World of Warcraft centers around repair costs — namely, how expensive they’re getting. They’re nothing new, of course; repair bills for armor have existed since vanilla, both as a gold sink and as a roleplaying feature. It’s oddly hard to find concrete info about how they work, for something that’s been around so long, and while for so many years players just accepted them as a fact of life — as well as the fact that they tend to go up each expansion — there is a lot of discussion now about how they’re becoming exceedingly expensive. Protection Warriors have it especially bad, due to their reliance on Shield Block causing them to effectively take double durability damage from both using abilities and blocking, penalizing them monetarily for the thing they’re meant to do (a feature derogatorily referred to as the “Block Tax“).

Blizzard seems to have decided to take some level of pity on us; while we haven’t seen a blue post about it yet, testers on the patch 12.0.7 PTR have noted that weapons and shields don’t take durability damage from combat. Normally what happens is that just being in combat or taking damage has a small chance to reduce durability on armor by one point, dealing damage or casting spells has a chance to reduce durability on weapons by one point, and blocking has a chance to reduce durability on shields by one point. Blocking also causes an increased chance of durability loss because it also counts as taking damage. Furthermore, when you die, all your armor and weapons lose a set amount of durability, as well as if you are forced to resurrect at a Spirit Healer and take Resurrection Sickness for some reason.

On the PTR, however, the automatic durability loss for being in combat, as well as all the other conditions for taking durability damage, no longer cause your weapon or shield to lose durability; they essentially only lose durability now if you die. The result of this is that across the same period of time in combat, on the PTR players are taking a lot less durability damage. While it’s only two slots, this PTR change is still a welcome relief for players who engage in combat a lot and are feeling the squeeze on their wallet — especially raiders, who can die a lot during progression and easily rack up thousands of gold in repair bills.

This change should bring down the expansion’s worst repair bills when WoW patch 12.0.7 goes live (likely in mid-June), but don’t expect repair bills themselves to go anywhere any time soon.