Wildfire Bomb Periodic Buff and a Feral Fix: October 1 Hotfixes

What changed

Blizzard's October 1 hotfixes are three entries across two areas, and two of them are class fixes that reach rated play. Survival Hunter gets a 20% increase to the periodic half of Wildfire Bomb, which Blizzard's own note ties back to the tuning pass from the week of September 22. Feral Druid gets a correction to how Rampant Ferocity behaves against a single target. The third entry is a raid fix on the Ula'tek encounter.

Classes

Neither class entry carries Blizzard's Player versus Player scope marker, so both apply wherever the specialisation is played: rated arena, Solo Shuffle and rated battlegrounds included.

Druid

Feral

• Fixed an issue that could cause Rampant Ferocity to trigger incorrectly against a single target.

Hunter

Survival

Developers' notes: "The tuning hotfix from the week of September 22 did not properly increase the periodic damage of an untalented variant of Wildfire Bomb. This hotfix corrects that issue."

• Wildfire Bomb's periodic damage increased by 20%.

Dungeons and Raids

The Venomous Abyss

Ula'tek

• Fixed an issue where the Venomous Heart would sometimes melee a player.

Blizzard files this one under Ula'tek, and the Venomous Heart is an elite Beast inside The Venomous Abyss. An add that was never meant to swing at anyone is the sort of thing that quietly kills a melee player standing in the wrong place, so a group that had been losing people for no visible reason has its explanation. It is a raid fix and it stops at the raid.

Survival Hunter's bomb finally lands the September 22 buff in full

The September 22 tuning pass raised Wildfire Bomb's damage by 20% as part of a much wider batch. Blizzard now says that increase never reached the periodic damage of an untalented variant of the bomb, and this hotfix delivers it.

That matters more in rated play than a flat 20% on a single ability usually would, because of which half of the bomb it touches. Wildfire Bomb explodes once on impact and then scorches everything it hit for six seconds afterwards, on an 18 second cooldown and a 40 yard throw. The explosion is the part a healer sees coming and can pre-empt; the six seconds of burn is the part that keeps arriving while the Hunter is being peeled, kited or kicked off a target. Raising it is pressure that does not depend on the Hunter still being in position.

It also narrows a talent gap. Blizzard scopes the miss to an untalented variant of the bomb, so the September 22 increase is only now reaching that version of it, and the two versions are no longer separated by a tuning error.

Whether that is enough to move Survival's standing is a question for the ladder rather than for a patch note. The current 3v3 spec ranking is the place to watch it:

Solo Shuffle is the faster read of the two. A six-round lobby puts the same Hunter in front of three different healer and partner combinations inside one queue, so a damage change shows up in win rate there before a 3v3 team has finished re-queuing. The same ranking for that bracket:

For the spec on its own, the Survival Hunter pages carry rating distribution and representation per region: EU Survival Hunter and US Survival Hunter.

Feral's Ferocious Bite needs a fresh look on a single target

Rampant Ferocity is the talent that makes Ferocious Bite spill damage onto nearby enemies, scaled to the combo points spent and reduced past five targets. Blizzard's entry is about what it did when there was only one enemy to hit, and Blizzard publishes no number with it.

A rated arena game is mostly that case. Most of a 3v3 or a Solo Shuffle round is spent pouring combo points into one kill target with the other two players out of range of a splash, so the single-target behaviour is the behaviour a Feral Druid lives in. The practical move is to check your own Ferocious Bite numbers against a lone target this week rather than assume last week's are still current, and to compare them against where Feral sits regionally: EU Feral Druid and US Feral Druid.

What to do now

Survival Hunters playing without the talented bomb should expect more of the bomb's damage to arrive during its six second burn than on the impact itself. Feral Druids should re-measure a single-target Ferocious Bite before trusting an older benchmark. Raid groups on Ula'tek get one fewer unexplained death.

These three entries are the last hotfixes before the next content update: Midnight's 12.1.5 notes are published and the update arrives on October 13, which is when class tuning of any size becomes likely again. Blizzard's rolling hotfix article carries every dated section: Hotfixes: October 1, 2026.