2.3 PTR patch notes

[Concillian]

World of Warcraft Test Patch 2.3.0

The latest patch notes can always be found at
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/...patchnotes.html

I removed all the quoted notes because they had changed so much it wasn't worth putting them here. Head to the www link for accurate notes.

[Treesh]

The Chess Event chess in Karazhan now has a tap list so it can only
be looted by players who were involved in the chess event.

No more avoiding void crystals by bringing in alts to get that stuff that would otherwise just get DE'd.

[bonemage]

No more avoiding void crystals by bringing in alts to get that stuff that would otherwise just get DE'd.

"Not until 2.3, so we can still be slow on the melting because that change is not live," says the guy who still has a desired drop out of the Chess event.

[Quark]

I'll just note that beyond the "these notes are incomplete, don't panic!" words ended up meaning nothing as everything substantial was already said, the Dirty Deeds change mentioned and Hemo change promised are certainly not on that list.

[Taelas]

Neither is the HotW change.

[Treesh]

"Not until 2.3, so we can still be slow on the melting because that change is not live," says the guy who still has a desired drop out of the Chess event.

Same with Marn and his boots. ;)

[Lissa]

Can't say as I understand the change to hellfire and no change to any other AoE spell. Why should other pulsing AoE spells cause spell knockback and keep people from capping while hellfire does not?

[Concillian]

Hortus is editing his posts at an alarming rate. Warrior notes now read (changes in bold):

Warrior
- Charge will work more often when targets are up against unpathable
areas like walls and poles.
- Defiance (Protection) now also grants 2/4/6 weapon expertise.
- Devastate (Protection) now combines the effects of Sunder Armor into
its effect. It is also now affected by all talents and items that
affect Sunder Armor.
- Disarm is now subject to diminishing returns in PvP.
- Improved Berserker Stance (Fury) now also reduces all threat caused
while in Berserker Stance by 2/4/6/8/10%
- Improved Intercept and Weapon Mastery have swapped locations in the
talent trees.
- Intervene will no longer place you in combat.
- Hamstring now has a 10 second duration when used on PvP targets.
- Mace Specialization (Arms) now has a reduced chance to occur but
generates 7 rage instead of 6.
- Pummel: Interrupting a channeled spell with this ability will now
always properly prevent casting spells from the same spell school
for 4 sec.
- Shield Bash: Interrupting a channeled spell with this ability will
now always properly prevent casting spells from the same spell school
for 6 sec.
- Shield Slam (Protection) now always tries to dispel one Magic effect
on the target.
- Tactical Mastery: This talent also now grants greatly increased
threat from Mortal Strike and Bloodthirst when in Defensive Stance.
- Weapon Mastery (Arms) now reduces duration of Disarm effects against
you by 25/50% rather than giving you a 50% chance to avoid or full
immunity to Disarm effects.
- Whirlwind: This ability now strikes with both weapons when a Warrior
is dual-wielding.

[vor_lord]

Lots of good changes -- but where is the rogue love?

"Oh sweet, reduced threat on my shadowstep move!!"

All raiding rogues with shadowstep rejoice! Anyone?

[vor_lord]

It's there now. As Concillian has mentioned, the post is being edited a lot.

[Taelas]

Hortus is editing his posts at an alarming rate. Warrior notes now read (changes in bold):

He's not doing a very good job of it, either... Right now, a couple Hunter changes are listed as Druid changes.

Druids
- Barkskin: It is no longer possible to cast this spell while Cycloned.
- Cure Poison and Abolish Poison are now usable in Tree of Life Form.
- Cure Poison, Abolish Poison and Remove Curse range increased to 40
yards.
- Entangling Roots: It is no longer possible for multiple Druids to
have Entangling Roots on the same target. In addition, it will now
always be removed correctly if multiple Druids overwrite each other’s
Entangling Roots.
- Feral Attack Power: Items that granted bonus attack power in Cat,
Bear, Dire Bear, and Moonkin forms have been re-evaluated. In almost
all cases, the attack power on the item has been increased. This
change corrects an issue where feral weapon damage was not keeping up
with other classes in its rate of increase.
- Force of Nature: This ability will no longer automatically break
stealth on victims in its casting area. Nearby stealthed characters
may still be attacked if they are too close to the summoned Treants.
- Heart of the Wild: This talent no longer provides 4/8/12/16/20% bonus
Strength in Cat Form. Instead it provides 2/4/6/8/10% bonus attack
power.
- Hibernate: This spell will now always be removed correctly if
multiple Druids overwrite each other’s Hibernate.
- Intensity (Restoration) increased to 10/20/30% mana regeneration.
- Misdirection: This spell will now always be removed correctly if
multiple Hunters overwrite each other’s Hunter’s Mark.
- Readiness: This talent now finishes the cooldown on Kill Command.
- Primal Fury: This talent will now be learned correctly even if
purchased while the Druid is dead.
- Rebirth cooldown reduced to 20 minutes, from 30 minutes.
- Remove Curse is now usable in Moonkin Form.
- Shapeshifting Spells: Some of these spells were causing additional
unintended threat. That additional unintended threat has been removed.
- Soothe Animal: This spell now properly consumes Nature’s Swiftness.
- Tranquility now gains additional benefit from spell damage and
healing bonuses.

Oh well, at least he added the HotW changes.

[Concillian]

It's there now. As Concillian has mentioned, the post is being edited a lot.

I think the website link is a better source than the posts. The web link seems to have the most readable form of the notes and doesn't have Hunter notes in the Druid section, etc...

[Concillian]

Hortus is editing his posts at an alarming rate. Warrior notes now read (changes in bold):

Holy crap there's more:

# Sweeping Strikes and Deathwish have swapped locations in the talent trees.
# Sweeping Strikes (Fury) now lasts 10 seconds and affects your next 10 swings.

Bornakk has added a bit in the warrior forum:
With Sweeping Strikes moving position, it will only be usable in Berserker Stance too.

This pulls deathwish out of the realm of possibility for a Fury build, which makes it a significant nerf for Fury (Whirlwind buff for DW will be about a 1% gain or so, losing Deathwish is probably a 3-5% loss)

[Taelas]

Damn. A *lot* of changes they never even hinted at.

[Icebird]

The changes to Sweeping Strikes and Death Wish stood out for me as the... "interesting" un-foreshadowed change. I anticipate howls of protest.

Overall though I am really looking forward to testing some of the changes out. Since my main is a priest now, the addition of spell damage to healing gear is probably the biggest single change. My biggest issues when trying to solo grind have been mana efficiency and spell pushback. My healing gear has a lot more mana regen than my DPS set, and my Power Word: Shield should stay up longer as well. I might actually be tempted to do activities that involve, you know, killing stuff again.

The changes to vendor discounts are a pleasant suprise although it could lead to strange results for some of us ("and that's how I ended up going to Telaar every time I wanted to repair...").

I approve of more dailies, but I'm curious about how many there will be and what we'll be asked to do. Maybe it will make finding a PUG for rep grinding easier.

Chris

[Concillian]

I approve of more dailies, but I'm curious about how many there will be and what we'll be asked to do. Maybe it will make finding a PUG for rep grinding easier.

Chris

I'm pretty sure this change was made so that PUGs would tend towards a single dungeon each day. As the playerbase has moved towards raiding, they have moved away from 5 mans, which significantly depletes the players available for 5 mans. Too much of this and you end up with 3 people for each instance all LFM.

This will tend to consolidate people on specific instances each day, I think.

[Taelas]

It's an odd change, and an odd ploy from Blizzard to make deep Arms more viable. Though SS only lasting 10 seconds (even with double charges) is a rather significant nerf for 2-handers speccing into Fury.

If they truly want to make Arms a proper PvP tree (as these changes seem to suggest), they need to unattach Enrage from Flurry (perhaps switch it with DW Spec) and banish it to Arms.

[oldmandennis]

Man, there's 15min of my life wasted. I'm gonna give it a couple of days to settle down before reading them again.

[Kevin]

Warrior

* Charge will work more often when targets are up against unpathable areas like walls and poles.
* Defiance (Protection) now also grants 2/4/6 weapon expertise.
* Devastate (Protection) now combines the effects of Sunder Armor into its effect. It is also now affected by all talents and items that affect Sunder Armor.
* Disarm is now subject to diminishing returns in PvP.
* Improved Berserker Stance (Fury) now also reduces all threat caused while in Berserker Stance by 2/4/6/8/10%
* Improved Intercept and Weapon Mastery have swapped locations in the talent trees.
* Intervene will no longer place you in combat.
* Hamstring now has a 10 second duration when used on PvP targets.
* Mace Specialization (Arms) now has a reduced chance to occur but generates 7 rage instead of 6.
* Pummel: Interrupting a channeled spell with this ability will now always properly prevent casting spells from the same spell school for 4 sec.
* Shield Bash: Interrupting a channeled spell with this ability will now always properly prevent casting spells from the same spell school for 6 sec.
* Shield Slam (Protection) now always tries to dispel one Magic effect on the target.
* Sweeping Strikes and Deathwish have swapped locations in the talent trees.
* Sweeping Strikes (Fury) now lasts 10 seconds and affects your next 10 swings.
* Tactical Mastery: This talent also now grants greatly increased threat from Mortal Strike and Bloodthirst when in Defensive Stance.
* Weapon Mastery (Arms) now reduces duration of Disarm effects against you by 25/50% rather than giving you a 50% chance to avoid or full immunity to Disarm effects.
* Whirlwind: This ability now strikes with both weapons when a Warrior is dual-wielding.

OK so I'm looking at this in terms of prot.

6 weapon expertise on defiance is 1.5% reduction in parry and dodge from the mob you are tanking. That looks like a nice threat buff.

Devastate merged with sunder. 1 less hotkey for me, a bit more threat while putting up the sunder stack (from the extra damage from devastate). The other question is does this mean a single devestate is now the threat of a sunder + damage + extra threat from base devestate? If that is the case this is a pretty big threat increase since I think it was 200 damage from a devestate to have it doing more threat than a sunder. Then you add in that you can do a devastate for 9 rage and this is also a slight DPS increase for prot warriors when not tanking.

Shield Slam now always has a chance to remove a debuff. Not sure how valuable that really is for PvP, I guess your dispellers will just get a nothing to dispell a bit more now. The threat on shield slam is too good to try and "save" it as a dispell you smack it every time you can.

Whirlwind hitting with both weapons. Does that put WW as something a prot warrior wants to use when they are doing DPS? Devastate is still going to be very good damage per rage and prot warriors still probably don't have slow offhands (I actually do have a 2.6 speed 71 DPS offhand blue right now). I haven't done the math but I wonder.

So it looks like prot warriors have less hotkey management, more threat and a bit more DPS. I like that.


The other thing I wonder about in general though is:

* Weapon Mastery (Arms) now reduces duration of Disarm effects against you by 25/50% rather than giving you a 50% chance to avoid or full immunity to Disarm effects.
* A new world drop recipe for an Adamantite Weapon Chain has been added. This new weapon chain both reduces disarm duration and increases parry rating.

I haven't really dug in the WoW forums but those two together along with the diminishing returns on disarm in PvP has me thinking that the entire disarm mechanic has changed a bit. Like when they changed everything that used to give a chance to prevent interrupt to cutting the time. I'm betting that the old steel weapon chain and the various gloves the prevent disarm are all changed to cut the duration of disarm now. That you can no longer be immune to disarm at all.

I'm wondering about the impacts of this assuming it's a bit more sweeping than just the listed changes.

[Concillian]

I haven't really dug in the WoW forums but those two together along with the diminishing returns on disarm in PvP has me thinking that the entire disarm mechanic has changed a bit. Like when they changed everything that used to give a chance to prevent interrupt to cutting the time. I'm betting that the old steel weapon chain and the various gloves the prevent disarm are all changed to cut the duration of disarm now. That you can no longer be immune to disarm at all.

I'm wondering about the impacts of this assuming it's a bit more sweeping than just the listed changes.

Yeah they stated on the forums that all disarm immunities are changing to the same kind of non-stacking 50% duration maximum.

This includes weapon chains, gloves previously offering disarm immunity, etc...