New patch notes!

[lemekim]

Clicky

Your dose of WoW fix, provided by thoughfull Blizzard since the servers will be down till Sunday afternoon.

A couple of serious changes off the top:

First Aid now seems even more useless:
Bandaging operates differently than it used to. Bandages now are channel cast and heal over time. If the player bandaging or the player being bandaged is struck in combat, the bandaging effect ends. Either way the target still gets the "recently bandaged" debuff.

On the other hand. alchemy got a nice boost in power, bringing us Arcanite, which anyone who played WC3 was probably wondering about:
Alchemists can now transmute thorium and arcane crystals into arcanite. This is the only way to acquire this rare material.

Tailoring also got nice boost, which should make it one of the most popular tradeskills, due to the advantage it has over other "manufacturing" professions in requiring no additional professions to supply the main materials:
Stats on a number of tailored items have been improved
Tailoring recipes improved or reagents required reduce for many recipes.
Cindercloth robe fixed so it now requires Heart of Fire instead of Essence of Fire

Engineering on the other hand got hurt:
A number of engineering devices did not have the correct bind type set and are now bind on equip or bind on acquire
The Gnomish engineering Net-o-Matic will now fail more often and in a new way as well (albeit this fix was needed)
Additionally, the stun on bombs is now supposedly a sleep type of effect.

An interesting change:
Dwarves can no longer be mages, however all existing Dwarf mages in beta can remain
Although frankly, there are combinations that make just as little sense: gnome warrior, undead priest...

More mounts yeay!
Changes made to what mounts are available at vendors, and faster level-60 mounts have been added. Level-60 mounts are very expensive to purchase however.

And lastly,
You can't Blink through doors. =)

P.S. Almost forgot:
Mana now does not regenerate for the five seconds after you cast a spell
Ouch.

[DeeBye]

UI added to professions to allow making of multiple profession items at once

This one makes me very, very happy.

[Tal]

Your dose of WoW fix, provided by thoughfull Blizzard since the servers will be down till Sunday afternoon.

Well I don't feel so bad now that my own Broadband ISP has taken me offline this weekend forcing me to resort to dial-up. Guess Roane and I will be hitting the Temple some other time. :)

[Minionman]

Although frankly, there are combinations that make just as little sense: gnome warrior, undead priest...

Since from what I've heard priests also get "shadow" or "dark" skills, undead priest makes sense in this case to me. Of course, gnome warrior is pretty strange. They should really be rouges with a good ability at going for lower down weak spots.

[Lissa]

Dwarves can no longer be mages, however all existing Dwarf mages in beta can remain
Although frankly, there are combinations that make just as little sense: gnome warrior, undead priest...

Actually, the Undead Priest does make a lot of sense. Just because you died and came back undead doesn't mean you forget what you knew in life judging by the NPCs and Quests involving the undead (Deliah and the Husband's Revenge comes to mind right off). It also makes sense that there are no undead Paladins because the undead would destroy them as quickly as they could (look at the grave in the Sepulchre for Death Do Us Part).

[MongoJerry]

I must admit that I am proud of two changes that I'd like to think I at least played a role in getting changed:

Items that boost spell damage and healing will now affect each spell to varying degrees.

Items that increase healing have been fixed so that they will actually increase the amount of healing a caster does.

Items that increase damage to all magic schools now increase healing spell effectiveness as well.

I assume here that "varying degrees" means something like a percentage-based bonus. I've also harped on how increase damage to all magic schools should increase healing spell effectiveness in multiple /suggests.

Evergreen Pouches, not Packets of Tharlendris Seeds, are now the device used to make Morrowgrain. Using a pouch creates an Evergreen Herb Casing, which when opened reveals what herb is made.

Evergreen Pouches now require that you have a Packet of Tharlendris Seeds and two Un'Goro Soil samples to use.

Evergreen Pouches have a cooldown time of 10 minutes on usage.

The potential herbs drawn from a Sealed Evergreen Pouch have been modified to include a broader range of herbs. As a result, players will not be getting high-end herbs as often on pouch usages.

Yes! So artisan herbalism will no longer be obsolete! Thank-you!

I also complained about this one a lot in /bug's, but I don't know if I can take much credit for it:

Purple Lotus stacks to 20 now.

Some other items of note:

Bandaging operates differently than it used to. Bandages now are channel cast and heal over time. If the player bandaging or the player being bandaged is struck in combat, the bandaging effect ends. Either way the target still gets the "recently bandaged" debuff.

This is a wierd change. I thought it was fine right up to the point where I read the words "or the player being bandaged is struck...". That basically means you can only first aid someone out of combat. That seems kind of nuts.

Mana and health regeneration gained from spirit has been improved.

Mana now does not regenerate for the five seconds after you cast a spell.

OK... This is a wierd addition. I suppose this would be ok, if the mana regeneration rate has been improved a *lot*. You know, you can fight melee, cast wand shots, etc. while regenning mana. I suppose this makes casting greater heals even better than casting multiple flash heals or something. Well, I'll have to try it out to see.

[Bolty]

I always love the one-liners that give you a double-take when you read them, for they'll have a profound impact on the game in sometimes subtle ways.

Mana now does not regenerate for the five seconds after you cast a spell.

Essentially, mana doesn't regen in combat now, like health. If you're a caster, it's a rare time when you'll stop casting for a whole five seconds plus during a battle. The increased spirit will help with this out of battle, I suppose. This will likely get me killed a few times since I'm used to gaining mana during a fight (allowing me to get spells off after a few seconds when I run out).

With raid groups, Van Cleef is no longer difficult. Grab 10-20 level 18's and go whomp on him. While the VC instance has been made easier and easier as time goes on due to nerfing of the monsters inside, this will finally ice it. The people who play WoW on release will wonder why we early beta testers thought he was such a big deal. :)

Creatures will stop chasing Hunters and Warlocks again.

One word: YAY! ...No more dragging a huge train of monsters behind me across two whole areas of the game due to the almost infinite follow range on pets.

Finally, the biggest change, if it was done right:

Groups of creatures will no longer ambush you on their way back from combat.

No more trains. Finally. No more spending 20 minutes fighting your way to the back of a cave and getting annihilated by a newbie who comes running in dragging a load of mobs in their wake. Woo!

-Bolty

[Lissa]

 
Groups of creatures will no longer ambush you on their way back from combat.

No more trains. Finally. No more spending 20 minutes fighting your way to the back of a cave and getting annihilated by a newbie who comes running in dragging a load of mobs in their wake. Woo!

I think there is another aspect that they are dealing with here too, that of cross faction train griefing. When Ori was in her low 40s, I had an Orc train grief me in Arathi. Basically what he did was grab three stone elemental mobs and then lead them right over the top of me while I was fighting another stone elemental. Once he got far enough away, the mobs went back and guess who gained agro because of it (this was also the time when HW:S was godlike and I simply kept shielding and pounding on the mobs in which I got the original and one other, but eventually had to run from the other two). So, they might be doing this to stop train griefing as well.

[MongoJerry]

Essentially, mana doesn't regen in combat now, like health. If you're a caster, it's a rare time when you'll stop casting for a whole five seconds plus during a battle. The increased spirit will help with this out of battle, I suppose. This will likely get me killed a few times since I'm used to gaining mana during a fight (allowing me to get spells off after a few seconds when I run out).

That's not true for me at all. I use wands and staff attacks frequently, even in instance parties. It'll be interesting to see. If the new spirit regeneration is much much faster than it was, then it could compensate for this change to a large degree. It will affect one's choice of spells and tactics without a doubt, but saying carte blanche that one has to pretend that one has no mana regeneration in combat is foolish. This is a change that we'll have to try out before we can fully appreciate its ramifications.

An example of how this might change group tactics in tough fights: If you have a secondary healer in the group, one's priest can handle the healing for a while and then tell the secondary healer to take over while the priest just uses wands and regenerates mana. Then, when the secondary healer runs low on mana, the priest can take over again. This would only work, of course, if the new mana regeneration rate was very fast.

With raid groups, Van Cleef is no longer difficult. Grab 10-20 level 18's and go whomp on him.

Yeah, but who would want to share all the experience points and loot drops with 10-20 people, when you can do the instance with five good lvl 18-20's people? Again, we'll have to experience how raid groups actually work before we can figure out their ramifications.

[Guest]

"Item sets have been implemented. Wearing more pieces of an item set will convey more bonuses to your character. Only a very small number of item sets have been created for this push but there are more to come."

[Ruvanal]

QUOTE
With raid groups, Van Cleef is no longer difficult. Grab 10-20 level 18's and go whomp on him.


Yeah, but who would want to share all the experience points and loot drops with 10-20 people, when you can do the instance with five good lvl 18-20's people?  Again, we'll have to experience how raid groups actually work before we can figure out their ramifications.

This note should have some bearing n the matter.

Raid groups of six players or more will not receive a group experience bonus.

I do not think that most players had noted that when in a group that the mobs were giving more exerience to players than the 1/n amount that would have been given for soloing that particular mob. I had taken note a few times that the experience that I recieved when partied with 1 other player was greater than 1/2 of what I would have recieved if I had taken out that mob just by myself. This was with both myself and the other player being the same level, so there should not have been issues of one of us getting a larger slice of the experience total or of one of us having some sort of detrimental effect on the experience earned due to a clvl-mlvl difference. The effect also seemed to in place for larger groups, but was more difficult to look at due to rarely having the larger party being of equal levels and having enough information on the base experience that some of the mobs would yield to a single player.

While I never bother to try and work out what types of modifiers were being applied to boost the earned experience in group, it was none the less there. Taking that factor out of raid groups could allow the easy job of finishing a quest like Van Cleef, it may end making the whole run a much lower experience earning event than it would be if the group hold its number to only a 5 max. This is probably why this note was also listed in the patch docs.

Experience gain from instance dungeons has been increased.

This would probably help some when the raid groups are in the range of 6 to 8 players so that experience is not totally cut to nea nothing while still allowing some groups to not have to artifically hold their group size to 5 for doing some the things that they would like to participate in. Consider the time that there were 7 or 8 of the guild that had been wanting to the Van Cleef quest and efforts were having to be made to determine just who could be group for certain encounters to get the quests completed.

[LavCat]

I am not a happy camper. Other than that Blizzard did give us one minute warning before shutting the servers down, which allowed me (and I hope Magicbag) to make it back to the safety of an inn.

What I am upset about is that they apparently are not giving us further chance to complete our trade skill changes. Natural disasters happen, and unlike some I do not blame Blizzard for taking down the servers when they did. I only wish they would give us back the day we lost to rearrange our skills before they make the patch go live.

Worse, the same company seems to have misplaced most of my Diablo characters:




As to the patch changes themselves, I notice elite hunter pets are nerfed, but what is so new about the plaguelands being open?

[Tal]

This would probably help some when the raid groups are in the range of 6 to 8 players so that experience is not totally cut to nea nothing while still allowing some groups to not have to artifically hold their group size to 5 for doing some the things that they would like to participate in.  Consider the time that there were 7 or 8 of the guild that had been wanting to the Van Cleef quest and efforts were having to be made to determine just who could be group for certain encounters to get the quests completed.

I would hope that this means that people are more willing to pick up a second paladin for a run on an Instance rather than turning them away, after all it should be beneficial to have one more person who can heal, cleanse, resurrect, add minor DPS, and seal/aura in the party.

They'll probably just want another Rogue/Warrior/Mage/Priest though :(

[Elegantly]

Judging what I've heard about the Shaman's talents on the General forums, the class will get a major boost. The Shaman is the only reason I would/will play a Horde character in the first place.

[MongoJerry]

What I am upset about is that they apparently are not giving us further chance to complete our trade skill changes.  Natural disasters happen, and unlike some I do not blame Blizzard for taking down the servers when they did.  I only wish they would give us back the day we lost to rearrange our skills before they make the patch go live.

Yeah, I see what you're saying Lav. What they really should've done is post a message on the forums to tell people ahead of time to choose two professions that they want to keep and drop all others and to also tell people to spread the word as much as possible. Then, they should have changed the message of the day to say the same thing so that as many people could see it. Then, they should have posted a second message on the forums warning players that they really should drop those extra professions and then sticky that message to the top of their forums.

Oh, wait...

Sorry, Lav. I know it sounds cruel, but I can't fault Blizzard for lack of communication on this. Personally, I want to see the next patch released as soon as possible, and I like the idea of letting us download it while they're still piecing together the game servers. Worst comes to worst, if you end up with a trade skill you didn't want, you can abandon it and skill up in the trade skill you do want.

[Bolty]

Yeah, but who would want to share all the experience points and loot drops with 10-20 people, when you can do the instance with five good lvl 18-20's people?

You haven't kept in touch with the general WoW populace, have you? The same group of players that will wait until they're level 26 to take on VC because he's "too hard" to do with a group earlier than that. Mark my words - it will be extremely difficult to find a pickup group that wants to limit itself to just 5 players on a VC run. Over time, people will start claiming that "you can't do VC with only 5 players" because nobody will do it anymore.

Remember that the general playing populace will always take the quick, easy kill over a long, drawn-out challenge where you may not get the reward for your efforts (a 3 hour VC run that fails at the very end). Add to that with the fact that in the time it takes for 5 players of appropriate level to do one VC run, a group of 10 could do three!

-Bolty

Edit: oh, and, sorry Lav, but I'm with Mongo - everyone was given plenty of warning to change their tradeskills. Some chose to run the risk anyway and hold out on ditching tradeskills for the last second, and many of them will get burned.

[LavCat]

I did not expect to find much sympathy. I was holding out to try to reach artisan engineer. Of course if they had mentioned that gemology was being dropped before the server shutdown I would have turned in my skill points and had the 600 that I needed for engineering when the subject of the trade skill changes first came up. It was stated in the trade skill deletion topic that survival was being dropped, why did they leave the gemology information till the patch notes when it was a bit too late?

"Server shutdown in 5 minutes" is normally plenty of notice to make it to a trainer. "Server shutdown in 1 minute" is not.

[DeeBye]

This isn't a big deal, really. All you have to do now is just purchase the tradeskill with cash instead of skill points.

[MongoJerry]

Oh, is that all you meant? You just wanted to get enough skill points together to get artisan engineering? You're fine then. It should actually be easier in the next patch, at least in theory. As I understand it, you just have to be level 35 and be able to pay some cash to get artisan engineering. Maybe you have to do some quest or something, too. It doesn't sound like anything to worry about.

[lemekim]

I did not expect to find much sympathy.  I was holding out to try to reach artisan engineer.  Of course if they had mentioned that gemology was being dropped before the server shutdown I would have turned in my skill points and had the 600 that I needed for engineering when the subject of the trade skill changes first came up.  It was stated in the trade skill deletion topic that survival was being dropped, why did they leave the gemology information till the patch notes when it was a bit too late?

"Server shutdown in 5 minutes" is normally plenty of notice to make it to a trainer.  "Server shutdown in 1 minute" is not.

I don't think you can unlearn gemology anyway... So it wouldn't have mattered =\