World of Warcraft 2.0.3

[TheDragoon]

Most of the bullets on this list are things that people have already known were coming with TBC and many of them are things that should have been in the last patch. But there are a few things that I noticed that were different than I expected and could have some major changes to the way things work in the future:

Druids
In addition to the expected buffs to armor, dodge and life total in bear form, Blizzard apparently decided that instead of buffing warriors for tanking, they would nerf druids.

- "Swipe" has had its threat bonus multiplier removed.
- "Maul" has had its threat bonus multiplier changed to a flat value
similar in threat per time to "Heroic Strike".

I think the change to Maul isn't really that huge a deal since Druids should still have good enough single target threat, but the change to Swipe is going to make multi-target aggro a bit harder than it currently is (The skills used to add +75% aggro in addition to its normal 130-145% depending upon feral instinct so this will cut its threat to ~2/3rds of its old amount). The one wildcard is how Mangle will work. I had heard that it also had the old +75% aggro modifier and the patch notes do not seem to say whether it will retain bonus aggro or not. Regardless, it should still beat out Maul for aggro generation, I imagine.

It is good that Druids will have a hard time running away from warriors in terms of threat, though it is sad that the method for changing this was to nerf Druids rather than buffing Warriors.

In a final random comment on Druids:

- Shapeshifted druids will now be able to speak to npcs while
shapeshifted.

Nice. :)


Rogues

- Each rank of "Weapon Expertise"now provides 5 weapon skill.

If this had been in on the beta server, I had not heard about it until now. I guess this was done to address the fact that weapon skill isn't as good anymore. How does the math on this look, Quark?

- Combo points added to a target should not be reset until you add a combo point to a different target.

Finally. I hated that it didn't used to work this way.


Shamans

- "Earth Shock" no longer causes increased threat.
- "Frost Shock" now causes increased threat.

Interesting. So now shamans have a relatively low threat spell interrupt and a higher threat damage/slow spell. I wonder why this change was made. Perhaps to discourage or even encourage kiting?


Warriors

- "Rampage's" rage cost has been reduced to 20.

It's still not that great of a talent, IMO. :) Rage is too difficult to come by when you are not tanking so a recurring cost of 20 rage every 30 seconds is still going to be obnoxious.

- The bonus threat of "Devastate" on all ranks has been increased.
Bonus threat will no longer decrease as ranks increase.

I really hope they didn't go overboard here. Many people thought Devastate was somewhat lackluster before, though I thought it seemed very useable and effective. My main concern is that this could drastically improve aggro generation for protection warriors, leaving non-protection warriors out in the cold as far as tanking goes. There is already a large gap between prot and dps warriors for tanking, I hope this doesn't widen the gap even more or the hybrid nature of a dps warrior might just go out the window.


Items

- "Wushoolay's Charm of Nature" now provides haste rating instead of reducing "Healing Touch" cast time.

Did they just take a caster item and make it into a melee item or was this merely a poorly-phrased change that meant to say that they changed the trinket so that it has diminishing returns for changing the Healing Touch cast time rather than a flat cast speed reduction?

This would certainly fit with what was done to other items, trying to make sure they don't scale to the point that we'll be farming up random items off of stratholme bosses at level 70 to help with raiding or heroic mode dungeons.

- Blacksmithing/Leatherworking specialization has changed with
specialization providing recipes to make powerful items that only
you can wear. You can now unlearn a blacksmithing or leatherworking
specialization and learn a different one by finding the appropriate
NPC, paying the fee to unlearn your old specialization, and then
find the new specialist to learn a new one. Also, all of the old
blacksmithing/leatherworking recipes that required specialization no
longer require it and can be learned by any blacksmith/leatherworker.

Does this mean that everyone can now go pick up all of the existing item patterns for their class? Everyone will be able to learn all of the weapon patterns, Dark Iron Plate, Lionheart Helm, etc? If so, it sounds like people will be going around farming for this sort of thing in the next week for completeness. :)