Even newer patch is here.

[Guest]

Durability
Item durability is now in the game. Item durability is an important aspect of World of Warcraft that will work to stabilize the economy, decrease inflation specifically in the high end game, and in general keep prices of player sold items lower than normally would occur without such a feature. Durability should also add additional depth to the game since players will have more variety in their items and more abilities will be added over time to interact with durability. Item durability is different from item decay in that players will never lose items through item durability.

Durability key points

* All armor and weapons have durability, but not trinkets, cloaks, shirts, guild tabards, necklaces and rings.

* Items remain at full effectiveness until they have no durability. Their power does not degrade.

* Items cannot permanently break.

* All armor/weapon vendors can repair durability in exchange for cash.

* When an item reaches zero durability, it no longer gives the player any benefit; it acts as though it does not exist until repaired.

* Professions cannot repair durability, but we will discuss ways for the professions to interact with them in the future.

Raid Groups
Raid groups will no longer receive quest bounties and collections. In the future, we plan to have raid-specific quests that will be possible to complete in raid groups.

General

* If you log out while in flight, you will continue flying when you log back in.

* All enemy targeted spells should now require the target to be in front of the caster.

* Starting characters will now have hearthstones automatically located in their inventory.

* Swimming has been tweaked. To dive, you have to tilt your direction downwards a certain amount with the right mouse button.

* Spirit no longer affects item proc percentage. Item proc percentages are now independent of stat attributes.

* The camera will now stay above or below water depending on which side you are on.

* Your camera view angle and distance are now saved when you exit the game.

* You won't accidentally skip gossip text if you double-click the NPC responses.

* You should no longer be able to breath at the bottom of lakes and ponds.

* Pets swim underwater now, although not all pets have swimming animations.

* Pets no longer use combat abilities while in passive mode.

* Your corpse shows up underwater after you release, however it decomposes when you revive.

* Starting NPCs show their horde or alliance crest.

* Locked boxes show the word "Locked" in the appropriate color for their difficulty.

* Scarlet Sentinels will use their Overpower ability in combat.

* Looting range is now the same as melee range.

PVP

* Goblin guards will attack players who are fighting each other and not dueling - it's bad for business.

* Goblin guards no longer flag you for PvP and they may not be healed or buffed.

* When you finish a duel, debuffs applied during the duel will be removed.

* Resurrecting a PvP-enabled player corpse will flag you for PvP.

* Area effect spells and totems now work correctly in duels.

* Town guards will no longer follow dueling players.

Zones

* Scholomance, a level 57-60 instanced dungeon in Western Plaguelands is now open.

* Ashenvale has gotten a facelift to include more points of interest, and significant changes were made to make it easier to navigate.

* Ragefire Chasm, a low level instance dungeon in Orgrimmar, is now available.

* Deadmines: The Miners in the Deadmines are no longer elite monsters.

* Blackfathom Deeps has been moved to the Zoram Strand in Ashenvale forest near the border of Darkshore.

* More quests have been added for Eastern and Western Plaguelands.

Professions

* Runecloth added to the world as the high end cloth.

* Tailoring now complete with recipes up to skill 300 available.

* The herbs needed to support high end alchemy have been added to the world.

* Rich Thorium Nodes will now drop Arcanite.

Talents

* All warlock talents are now available.

* Many talents for all classes have changed location in their tree or had their effects modified.

Druid

* Travel Form is now only useable outdoors.

* Cower, Growl and Challenging Roar are now useable against targets that are immune to physical attacks.

* New Spell: Hibernate (Level 18).

* Shapeshifting now breaks roots, snares, and freeze effects.

* All Shapeshift forms now include an immunity to polymorph effects.

* Bear Form - HP gain increased.

* Dire Bear Form - HP gain increased.

Hunter

* Cower, Growl and Disengage are now useable against targets that are immune to physical attacks.

Mage

* Polymorph no longer affects Dragonkin or Giants.

* Blink now counters stun effects. Cooldown timer has decreased, and mana cost now scales with level.

Paladin

* Resurrection and Redemption range has been reduced.

* New Spell: Seal of Freedom (Level 20)

Priest

* Holy Smite renamed to Smite.

* Holy Word: Fortitude renamed Power Word: Fortitude.

* Holy Word: Shield renamed Power Word: Shield.

* Resurrection and Combat Resurrection range reduced.

Rogue

* Kidney Shot is now subject to diminishing returns.

* Vanish now breaks root and snare effects.

Shaman

* Stoneclaw Totem is now useable against targets that are immune to nature attacks.

* Rebirth range reduced.

* Ghost Wolf is now only useable outdoors.

* Earthbind Totem movement slow effect has been reduced.

Warlock

* Soothing Kiss, Suffering and Torment are now useable against targets that are immune to shadow attacks.

* Seduction now only works against Humanoids. Banish now works against Demons and lementals only. Cooldown timer and reagent removed, duration increased, replacement added. Curse of Agony - Now deals its damage in three stages, damage increased, mana cost slightly increased.

* Enslave Demon - Soul Shard cost removed, duration reduced.

* Life Tap no longer interrupts mana regeneration.

* Sacrifice now grants the Warlock damage absorption, rather than full immunity. Duration has been increased.

* Soulstones have been changed to now resurrect the soulstone holder automatically 5 seconds after death.

Warrior

* Taunt and Challenging Shout are now useable against targets that are immune to physical attacks.

* Hamstring - Movement slow effect reduced.

* New Spell: Berserker Rage (Level 30)

Mac:

* The Mac OS X client has all shader-based features disabled for this patch. The GUI for those preferences will be grayed out. A number of GPU driver issues are being addressed by Apple, ATI and NVIDIA - when these fixes have been completed and made available to the public we will re-enable these features in the game.

Bug Fixes:

* You should no longer drown in the air while in certain caverns.

* Firegut Brute will use his Torch abililty.

* Fishing catches fish again, provides skillups, and doesn't leave bobbers around.

* Yorus Barleybrew no longer cheers for himself when you complete The Rethban Gauntlet.

* Colonel Kurzen won't engage you in melee combat at a distance after using a smoke bomb.

* You can access your user interface again while in flight.

[lemekim]

"Soulstones have been changed to now resurrect the soulstone holder automatically 5 seconds after death."

You know, the real reason I thought they took out the soulstones last push was because Blizz thought they were overpowered and was in the process of reworking them (and it seems so). The question remains whether the dying and resurrecting in such manner drops all aggro (which apparently was problem last patch).

A lot of minor changes, except durability of course, I think a lot of warriors/rogues/paladins will be upset, as it seemingly favors casters (Diablo 2 anyone?).

Of course, the most ambiguous and potentially gamebreaking change boils down to one comment:

"Many talents for all classes have changed location in their tree or had their effects modified."

Since talents currently make or break classes, all other changes to a class could become moot with just one talent change.

[MongoJerry]

With the caveat that all we have to go on at this point is what's stated in the patch notes, this patch looks suspiciously like a patch filled with a lot of "finishing touches" tweaks and bug fixes rather than filled with new features and/or content. Still, there are some tweaks mentioned that are making me sing, "Hallelujah!"

Goblin guards will attack players who are fighting each other and not dueling - it's bad for business.

YES! YES! YES! Lemekin knows how much I've been complaining about this. Those of you who have spent little or no time on the PvP server can only imagine the war zone/slaughterfest that Booty Bay, Ratchet, Gadgetzan, and Everlook were. Booty Bay, especially, was covered with the skeletal remains of the ganked 24/7. I find the comment "it's bad for business" interesting, because of the number of /suggests and posts I've made on the official forums where I've included the line, "The constant fighting in goblin towns is bad for business, and the one thing goblins care about is goblin business!" I'd like to think I had some influence. Ah, heck, I'll take credit even if I had no real effect. Self-deprecation has never been my strong suit.

Raid groups will no longer receive quest bounties and collections. In the future, we plan to have raid-specific quests that will be possible to complete in raid groups.

Neat! So the five-man instance group may make a resurgence. I always refused to join any raid groups that didn't involve the highest level instances (Stratholm and Blackrock Spire).

All enemy targeted spells should now require the target to be in front of the caster.

Ouch! This'll hurt priests more than people may appreciate. SW: Pain and Mind Blast didn't require facing one's target and this was a very convenient feature in many occations. I assume this note means these spells require targeting now.

Spirit no longer affects item proc percentage. Item proc percentages are now independent of stat attributes.

Sounds fine to me, despite my always having a lot of spirit. The whole Spirit affecting proc rates thing always seemed strange. I hope this means that items will show their proc rates directly now.

Looting range is now the same as melee range.

Ah, nice. So a little bigger radius now. This should fix an "argh" factor.

Blackfathom Deeps has been moved to the Zoram Strand in Ashenvale forest near the border of Darkshore.

Very nice. I sent in a lot of /suggests on Darkshore and Ashenvale and posted a few ideas on the official forums. They're kind of pet areas for me. Still, I didn't think of this one, and I give props to whoever thought of that and to the design team for implementing it. It just didn't make sense to have this mid-20's level instance sitting in the middle of a mid-teen's level zone. It made it very difficult to organize a BFD group, since chances were that people of the right level weren't in the zone. If Ashenvale, a 20-30's level zone, has indeed gotten a good makeover that will encourage people to stick around, then moving BFD there makes a lot of sense. I hope this means many more people will get to experience BFD. It's a good instance.

(Hmmm... this also moves it closer to Horde territory and into a technically contested zone. I wonder if the Horde will have some BFD quests to do now).

The herbs needed to support high end alchemy have been added to the world.

Yay!

(Lots of changes to skills to break stuns, roots, snares, etc...)

Interesting stuff. This should have a massive effect on PvP. The devil's in the details with this sort of thing, so it's too early to say what's a good idea and what's not.

Resurrection and Combat Resurrection range reduced.

Unless there were significant changes made to the talent tree, priests got no love in this patch. Still, from a balance point of view, I can understand this change. Looking at it objectively, the range on resurrection was a little ridiculous.

Soulstones have been changed to now resurrect the soulstone holder automatically 5 seconds after death.

Wierd change, and 5 seconds seems really short. I suppose I should experience this in action before making too many comments, but I would think that a 10 second timer would accomplish whatever balance changes Blizzard wants and yet allow the soulstone to be more useful. With 5 seconds, I'm not sure a priest with combat resurrection (which has no resurrection sickness) could react in time to rez a group's tank before the tank's soulstone kicked in. Oh, well, we'll see. Heck, there might be a new warlock talent to extend the time for all we know.

Fishing catches fish again, provides skillups, and doesn't leave bobbers around.

Woohoo!

[Lissa]

God I hope they fixed the Holy tree...it's in need of so much work right now. More likely though, they'll have nerfed Druid and Shaman healing abilities instead of fixing Holy... <_<

[lemekim]

YES! YES! YES! Lemekin knows how much I've been complaining about this. Those of you who have spent little or no time on the PvP server can only imagine the war zone/slaughterfest that Booty Bay, Ratchet, Gadgetzan, and Everlook were. Booty Bay, especially, was covered with the skeletal remains of the ganked 24/7. I find the comment "it's bad for business" interesting, because of the number of /suggests and posts I've made on the official forums where I've included the line, "The constant fighting in goblin towns is bad for business, and the one thing goblins care about is goblin business!" I'd like to think I had some influence. Ah, heck, I'll take credit even if I had no real effect. Self-deprecation has never been my strong suit.

Yes indeed you have been most vocal about that =) An good change, one I feel will require a new guard system for those cities, where the guards would spawn at the place of the fight, of appropriate level (60 or more). We can just expect those puny lvl 30 guards in Ratchet to prevent anything (if they would happen to be in the aggro range at all). Btw you should just call me lem or leme as you usually do, to avoid any possible misspellings :P

[MongoJerry]

God I hope they fixed the Holy tree...it's in need of so much work right now.  More likely though, they'll have nerfed Druid and Shaman healing abilities instead of fixing Holy...

I'm still downloading the patch, so I don't have much hard information for you. However, some people on the official priest forum have finished their downloads. The complainers always post first, before they ever get a chance to actually play with the changes, so it's hard to get a real handle on how significant any changes actually are. But reading between the lines, I get that basically there were only minor tweaks made to priest talents. I guess there's a new holy skill to reduce the cast time on Smite, and some things in the Discipline tree got some minor tweaks. But it looks like priests didn't get a lot of attention this patch.

[lemekim]

It seems durability issues have already surfaced. A quote from lvl 60 warrior after killing some mobs:

"I've killed MAYBE 30 mobs and my shoulders are at 75/80 durability already. This is from about 10-15 minutes of killing. Having to repair my items every 2-3 hours at this rate? Uhh no thanks."

While in solo play that is not too bad, how in the world a main tank in instances supposed to tank for 3-5+ hours straight, with several instead of 1 mob pounding on him, especially when instances are getting longer and longer. Ouch.

On the other hand, I too might have a feeling that I will need 2 sets of daggers for my rogue to last through the entire instance session. :o


Oh and it seems stealth can be seen through now by mobs 30 levels below you:

"At 45, a level 15 mob can see through my stealth...
Please, oh please, tell me this is a bug. I reported it as such. "

"Also so far I have had two level 14 elites from Ragefire chasm(or w/e new horde instance is) see through my stealth =\ From about 1 foot away. rank 5 MoD too"

Oops.

We shall see how much is true when I log in =\

[Lissa]

I'm still downloading the patch, so I don't have much hard information for you.  However, some people on the official priest forum have finished their downloads. &nbsp; The complainers always post first, before they ever get a chance to actually play with the changes, so it's hard to get a real handle on how significant any changes actually are.  But reading between the lines, I get that basically there were only minor tweaks made to priest talents.  I guess there's a new holy skill to reduce the cast time on Smite, and some things in the Discipline tree got some minor tweaks.  But it looks like priests didn't get a lot of attention this patch.
[right][snapback]57481[/snapback][/right]

I'm in and all I can say is...the Talent Devs are either blind or stupid when it comes to implementing the suggestions of Priests. We've been complaining for several patches now that talents with critical effects should not be forced on Priests, either make it so the talents have useful effects or we can avoid them. So what do the Talent devs do, they make it so we HAVE to take a critical effect talent at Tier 2 in the Holy tree to get deeper, IDIOTS! :angry: :angry: :angry:

Guess I stick with Shadow for longer until they pull their collective heads out. <_<

And now that I look at it more, they lowered the affect on Mental Agility in the Discipline tree...I swear, Blizzard wants to drive people away from playing priests... <_<

[apandapion]

A lot of minor changes, except durability of course, I think a lot of warriors/rogues/paladins will be upset, as it seemingly favors casters (Diablo 2 anyone?).

They could make spellcasting damage int/spi gear, but I doubt they did.

[Brother Laz]

[Anti]christ, the warlock changes suck.

Demonic Sacrifice is the stupidest talent in the game. It disables your pet but gives a damage/hitpoint/whatever bonus based on which pet you sacrificed. Summon another pet, the bonus goes away.

Cool talent, aside from being only useful in PvP, but at least it is a well thought out and creative talent, eh?

Thing is, it is a Demonology spell, so you need to invest points in talents that make your minions stronger to get a talent spell that allows you to run around without minions to get a buff.

Um, yeah.

Am I the only one having flashbacks of D2 1.10 and the Shout synergy to Berserk?

......

Pyroclasm, known as 'the talent that added AoE stun to Hellfire and rendered it totally overpowered' has been improved. Don't worry, Sacrifice has been nerfed. The spell that was only good with Hellfire and Pyroclasm has been nerfed so much it is good with nothing now.

I'm having flashbacks of D2 Nova, which was only good on the cow level, so they nerfed ['rebalanced'] Nova in 1.10.

[Bun-Bun]

Druid

&nbsp; &nbsp; * Travel Form is now only useable outdoors.

[right][snapback]57460[/snapback][/right]

Some nerfage for druids, Travel From drops in buildings. Inconvenient, but not a dealbreaker. Omen of Clarity proc happens a _lot_ now, compensating for a reduced mana pool. Mark of the Wild's resist bonus dropped to about half of what it was.

Talent rearrangement allows getting the two gems of the talent tree, Omen of Clarity and Nature's Swiftness much sooner.

[LavCat]

Some nerfage for druids,

But they fixed the paladin!

I'm not speaking of the one new level 20 seal. However I am ecstatic that the warhorse tail no longer hits me in the face!

As to durability I do not see the point to it, and I confess I can't figure out how to effect the actual repair. I get an icon sort of like from Charsi, but it does not seem to do anything. Right click, left click, drag, whatever. The repair all does not do anything for me at all. Thanks, Blizzard.

[Tal]

As to durability I do not see the point to it, and I confess I can't figure out how to effect the actual repair.&nbsp; I get an icon sort of like from Charsi, but it does not seem to do anything.&nbsp; Right click, left click, drag, whatever.&nbsp; The repair all does not do anything for me at all.&nbsp; Thanks, Blizzard.
[right][snapback]57520[/snapback][/right]

I was able to repair all of my equipment at the armor merchant next to the bank in IF without difficulty. Clicked on the repair all button, got charged 15 silver and was raring to go. I'm dreading the repairs Sharanna will need eventually as I am perennially poor with her. Guess I'll need to run Temple and actually venture into BRD to get her cash flow up.

[LavCat]

I was able to repair all of my equipment at the armor merchant next to the bank in IF without difficulty.

Yes, the merchant next to the bank in Ironforge kindly repaired my stuff, as did the armor vendor in Darkshire. None of several weapon and armor merchants in Stormwind were so polite.