The 3.1 Patch is Live (Finally)

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Apr 142009
 

Weool Ok… the servers aren’t up yet (as I write this) but the patch is finally here. Rumor has it that this is the biggest patch Bliz has ever provided.

Naturally there will be a few bugs coming along with the patch, and no, they’re not the ones you’ll kill to earn XP. As an aside, it’s be kinda interesting to be able to code a hack that fixes a game bug and get Bliz to pay you for it.

Anyway, the full patch notes are in the usual place so check them out. Here are my remarks on miscellaneous points:

General Notes

Mounts can now swim.

Trainers, having decided that their trainees can’t read, have done away with the course requirements for books and will now teach those skills directly.

Dual Talents – Now you can have two builds to switch between. For example, one for raiding and one for PvP. The only downside is that it costs 1,000 gold to get the ability.

Glyphs – A bunch of new glyphs are being introduced and a bunch of old glyphs have been changed. You no longer need to be near a lexicon of power to install glyphs.

And the most important, game-changing, change of all: New music can be heard at the Argent Tournament grounds and in Ulduar.

Class Notes

All classes get a couple of pages of changes, except Warriors and Warlocks, who get a few lines each. Guess that means that Warriors and Rogues are nearly perfect. Looks like there are more than a few buffs in the list of changes. A few nerfs, too.  I’m looking forward to Rogues now being in demand for raids. Oh, Ok, I’m awake now… what was I saying?

Enough changes have been made to talents and spells that everyone (except Rogues and Warriors?) will get a free respec and should visit the trainer the get new spells.

Armor Penetration has been buffed. All classes now get 25% more effect from it. The main visible change of this will be to drop PvP survivability in the BGs (at level 80) from 1 second to 0.9 seconds.

The Fear mongers on the house have had a bit of a nerf. The fear (and related abilities) break sooner now.

DKs, Pallies, and Droods, the classes most in need of a buff, now receive 30% more haste from Haste Rating.

Profession Notes

Alchemy – Several Flask changes, introduction of Northrend Mixtures, and secret Alchemist loot caches (from the Bosses) in Uldar.

Blacksmithing – New recipes from Uldar and an upgrade to some recipes in the 1-300 range to make them useful.

Cooking – I’ll pass these on to my wife and she’ll update our cookbooks (Tauren Chef and Wrath of the Kitchen King) appropriately.

Enchanting and Engineering: have some updates and tweaks.

Fishing – You can now catch a mount! It’s pretty rare, though. Also, you can now fish anywhere.

Gathering skills – For some time low-level twinks have been able to get to 450 mining and skinning (for the crit and stam buffs.) No longer, there’s now a level requirement for those skills.

Inscription – More recipes and quite a number of Glyph changes.

Uldar bosses – will, rarely, be dropping recipes for several professions.

Misc Notes

There’s a bunch of interface tweaks

Lots of little item changes, but if you use Glyphs (you are, aren’t you?) you will want to check it out. There have been some significant changes.

Lots of little bug fixes.

So all in all there’s a lot there. Something for everyone and all that.

And in the News Department

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Jan 072009
 

Just a roundup of a few posts I found interersting.

Blizzard to eliminate the Warlock class. On BRK:
We Are So Not Totally Making These Up

The test server has some changes to the materials requirements for certain WotLK enchants and Zuggy has posted the list: Patch 3.0.8 Enchanting Changes. Remember that it’s on the test server, so it might not make it to live as written.

Game balance concerns: WoWriot jots down his thoughts on each class and how they stack up in PvP, especially in the arena, but also mentions a few PvE concerns. Talents, abilities, and how they need to be changed. Join in and add to the 250 comments.
“State of the Game” Class Balance Report

Spoon has some Blue remarks on character transfers:
Blue News for Jan. 7th: Population Balance, Transfers, and Theorycrafting

Twinking is the fine art of making your character far more effective than he should be at his level. AzerothNow has a cool interview with a Master (level 19) twinker, here: 19 Rogue Twink Speaks. Also, on the same site, is the Ultimate Guide to Level 19 Rogue Twinking.

Death Knight Tips and Builds and Stuff

 Death Knight  2 Responses »
Dec 102008
 

The Stoppable Force has a good post for new [tag-tec]Death Knights[/tag-tec]. First on he admits to only being level 63, but by listening to what others are saying saying and doing he’s realized that he has some good stuff to offer.

His posts covers attack rotations for each tree (blood, frost, unholy) and why you want to use them. Good stuff. Some good stuff in the comments, too.

TSF Teaches You How To Start Playing Your Death Knight

Something that will be a great help in building an attack rotation, for your DK or for any character, is your keybindings. Don’t click your powers, bind them to hot keys. All other things being equal a key-binder will always outplay a clicker, because the bindings are so much faster to use.

Here’s a nice tutorial on the How and Why of keybindings, by LockSucks.com. While it’s a Warlock post I think most people will be able to use the info and adapt it to their Death Knights or any other class.

It’s the notorious topic, the eternal struggle between clickers and the rest (let’s call them pressers due to lack of terms). Many articles were published about keybinding, some good some bad, but most of them agree on one thing: binding your keys is the way to excel at this game. Here’s the rest: WoW Keybindings

More death Knight Goodness

Frost isn’t just for tanking. This wag has been doing just fine by going against convention and using a Frost Build for his Death Knight.

Pastor Playz» Blog Archive » Frosty the Deathknight was a jolly … – When the mention of the Death Knight class was introduced by blizzard I was one who . . well . . .I did not care really. To me it sounded dark and foreboding, nothing like any of the characters I like to play. …

A great overview of the Death Knight, what it’s like to play, and so on.

The Death Knight, Azeroth’s Overpowered Hero « Bird’s Sweet Blahg – You also receieve your talent points, so by the end of the quest line, you will be able to fully build your character’s spec. Let’s talk perks. For one, you get an epic riding mount from the get go for free, and it’s a Death Knight …

There be some changes comin’…  Here’s what’s currently on the test server, scroll down to see the list of possible DK changes. Of course, since it’s on the test server any given change may or may not make it to the live servers.

3.0.8 PTR Patch Notes Now Available | DeathKnight.info – PTR Patch notes where released today so I would expect to see them hit the PTR just about any time now. One thing to note, you can now create Death Knight on any server once you hit 55!

And for those of you who think that Death Knights might be underpowered…

World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King | Wrath | Wotlk: Death … – Felblood, the Death Knight who recently soloed Zul’Gurub, sent us news of a new accomplishment: he’s finished off most of AQ20 as well. Kurinaxx’s Mortal Strike-like debuff apparently didn’t affect Death Strike, so he just had to dodge …

Class Talent Changes for the 3.0 (Pe-WotLK) Patch

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Oct 142008
 

The Patch has landed.

1.2 gigs of data, wow. Not so bad if you’ve been playing regularly, the background downloaded already has it. If you’ve taken a break for awhile, well… 🙂

From the new splash screen when you log in to the modified talents and trees to the new Inscription skill, there are a lot of changes here. Check out the Latest Patch Notes for details. Also keep in mind that the patch has probably broken at least some of your addons. I referred to that previously and linked to an addon update list.

So what I’ve put together here is a collection of posts regarding the new talents and builds. I did this previously (Level 80 WoW Talents And Builds) and this new post links to new and, hopefully, updated info.

Dual Talent Builds and What’s Not in This Patch:

Dual Talent Specs – At last — “…And my personal favorite: Dual Talent Specs. This new feature should be added to the game in one of the content patches following the release of Wotlk. Hopefully in Patch 3.1.” What does that mean? It means you’ll be able to save 2 different Talent Specs for your characters, and that you’ll be able to switch between the two as much as you want, any time you want, besides while in combat or in arenas.

Breaking News: Patch 3.0.2 will not contain all major class changes – There were spells and abilities missing, talents not enumerated, and generally the notes looked as if they were lifted from a version of the game done a few weeks ago. Apparently this was intentional. Ghostcrawler made a post moments …

Class Talent Discussions:

Hunters: BigRedKitty: 3.0.2 Hunter talent trees – The major purpose of this column is to give you, the WoW Insider reader, a point of reference. You know our writing, you know our play-style. You should know our limitations and the areas at which we’re not too shabby. …

Warlocks: Patch 3.0.2 primer for Warlocks – In fact, out of all the 11-point talents, Soul Link is the only one that should give us any pause for thought. Considering that for about a month, we can only allocate up to 10 points in another tree if we choose to get a 51-point …

Mages: Mage WotLK Talents & Developer Q & A – She has done a great job already working with many of classes and now she’s finally making it to the mage class, particularly the information regarding the new spell frostfire bolt. Initially I really didn’t understand the purpose of …

Priests: Spiritual Guidance: Patch 3.0.2 – Holy and Disc Priest talent review – This post will cover all of the new Holy and Discipline talents that will be accessible when the patch becomes live. Not only that, I’ve offered up some suggestions on different builds to remain raid viable (at least to the rare few …

Shaman: Going Resto in Three-point-Oh – New Talent: Cleanse Spirit (Requires 5 points in purification and 30 points in Restoration) – 1 point – Cleanse the spirit of a friendly target, removing 1 poison effect, 1 disease effect, and 1 curse effect. Shaman get an all-in-one …

Warriors: The Care and Feeding of Warriors: The Door Swings Open Pt 1 – Honestly, the difficulty here is not in finding good protection talents you can spec into, it’s in picking which ones to talk to you about now. Some of these talents (like Gag Order) only get really good once you have abilities you …

Ferals: 3.0.2 for Feral Druids – In a few hours, when the servers come back up, patch 3.0.2 is going to hit, and WoW will change drastically. Every tree is get revamped to a greater or lesser extent, and extended up to 51-point talents. The Feral tree changes, …

Rogues: Four Seasons of TBC, Rogue 3.0 Specs – However, without prep which mutilate doesn’t get until WOTLK, the spec is severely lacking in outs and terrible at catching mages, one of the most dominant classes in 3.0. For offensive comps, perhaps a prep spec is still worth …

Paladin: Prot Paladin Talent Build – Block hurts them afterall. We’ll see. Lastly no Holy, nothing in the Ret tree beyond the above, and as the levels tick toward 80, they’ll all get spent in the Prot tree. Tagged: build, Paladin, pally, prot, talent.

Tankadin Preparing Your Tankadin for Patch 3.0: Part 3: Changed Tools – 10/8 – Part 3: Changes to Existing Talents and Spells 10/9 – Part 4: New Talents, and suggested Trees 10/10 – Part 5: The New Threat Rotation or 96969 10/11 – Part 6: Threat Stats for Protection Paladins and Tank Gear Reitemization …

That should be enough to chew on for now. Feel free to comment or, if you like the post, use the share buttons below.

PS: Wrath is bringing a lot of changes and Northrend is a pretty good sized place with a lot going on. Take a good look at the Killer Guides’ Wrath of the Lich King guide – It will make your trek to 80 much easier and much more lucrative.

Teamwork in the BattleGrounds

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May 162008
 

Found an interesting post on teamwork in the battlegrounds that I agree with totally. From WoWbasic.com:

One of the things that bothers not only me, but many others is the lack of teamwork within the battlegrounds these days. A good example of this was an Alterac Valley that I was participating in only this morning. While trying to capture the Dun Baldar South Bunker I was fighting a Paladin who had been attacking a Warlock from our team. This in its self is nothing unusual, but what happened during the fight was. While fighting the Paladin the Warlock ran behind a pillar and stopped fighting him. In addition a holy priest came in and stood there while I was being chewed up by the Paladin and the Archers at the same time. Not one heal nor any help with dispensing the Paladin led to my ultimate death right as I killed the Paladin.

Here’s the rest: Teamwork in the battlegrounds – A lost strategy

For myself, I’ll jump in when I can and help out. I like winning these things and teamwork is a big step in that direction. And we do win these things when we can get enough people to participate.

More tips on Battlegrounds PvP and teamwork

Some of these are Alliance specific, but the thoughts apply just as much to Horde.

Teamwork in the battlegrounds – A lost strategy – While there are still a good many of us who play by the rules of good teamwork wins Battlegrounds there are yet more who believe that it is like solo questing where you do not need be helped nor help others. …

Battlegrounds! You Lose! – Alliance: everyone just wants the marks and honor with as little team work as possible. most of them travel alone. Buffs, yeah once in a blue moon before the battle starts. Heals, Ha forget it. Sometimes they will start as a group and …

Taking It to the Horde! Tips for Ret PvP in Battlegrounds – Teamwork is vital to being successful in Warcraft battlegrounds. How does this apply to the Ret Paladin? Well first off the Paladin as a class is group-oriented. Blessings and Auras do not diminish in power as you extend them to more …