About the Mineral Node change...

[NiteFox]

Monsters will now attack players who are mining mineral nodes near to them, even if they didn't notice them previously.

This was a change introduced in 2.1.0, for some undisclosed reason (other than killing people, naturally:)). Being a Skinner, I never really noticed nor cared about this change.

Until the Midsummer Fire Festival. In a fit of some sort of obsession, I decided that I would clear every flame across Azeroth, be it Alliance or Horde or in the bowels of some instance I didn't even have the key for (I'm looking at you, Scholomance...). Did it all solo too, aside from briefly partying to get out of Stratholme, but that's another story.

Being solo, I became pretty acutely aware of my aggro radius. East and West Dire Maul taught me that the difference of a few mlvls can reduce my radius by about five or so crucial yards.

The above change only mentions that mineral nodes were changed, but I noticed in my sneaking about that this seems to apply to pretty much everything that can be "used". For example, the Festival Flame in Dire Maul - There's a nearby ogre pack at the top of the ramp opposite the flame that happily let me squeeze by unmolested, but went into full "squash cow-man" mode the second I activated the flame. In the Ruins of Andorhal I came across a chest with a nearby ghoul that I decided to loot, ghoul happily stood by while I approached the chest, then tripped when I used it. Same for the Viewing Room Door in Scholo: I set my pet to distract one pack on the side of the door, run up close to it, started opening... And then the ghouls that weren't affected by my pet's Growl turned and attacked, as well as the group on the other side of the door.

About the only things that didn't behave in this way were the various gates in Scholo. Maybe because there isn't a cast bar attached to this.

So, basically... Anyone else found other incidents like this?

[ima_nerd]

I noticed this with the memory test relics in BEM for the Ogri'la quests. Standing on the relic I didn't aggro the guys in the center but once I started the quest they came for me.

[Taelas]

The chest thing has been there for quite a while. You can even aggro neutral monsters with it (which is how I found out; aggroed a neutral Silithid in a bug-cave when I opened a chest over a year ago).

[Arshes]

The Fire Festival pits were always like that as well. I went around last year doing what you described. Some of the pits when standing near them to use them weren't close enough to aggro anything through proximity. But as soon as you started using them it would call over the closest pack.