Belated, I know. But better late than never, right?

Right.

Step by step, let’s go through the changes, and how they affect me personally, and the classes I play.

Combat Log Improvements
The combat log has undergone improvements that allow more robust combat text filtering including the ability to define custom colors for enemies and friends as well as combat text filtering for self and others.

By “improvements”, they obviously mean “I will break all of your addons that read the combat log. MUAHAHAHAHA.”

This affects me negatively at the moment, and I have to wonder if poor WWS is affected as well as my Recap.

General
- The Sunwell Isle is now available for play. This area includes a new quest hub and 5-player and 25-player instances.
New five man instance? Horray!

- The combined forces of Shattrath have launched an attack on the Isle of Quel’Danas, to confront Kael’thas and the Legion at the Sunwell and surrounding areas. Players will now be able to gain reputation with the Shattered Sun Offensive and participate in a new set of daily quests.
Daily quests, and reputation with SSO for new badge rewards and shiny stuff. Sounds like a good deal to me. The daily quests should make the rep grind less painful than…oh…say…grinding that epic hammer for a druid or two that requires exalted with those Cenarian folks in the swamp.

- A representative of the Keepers of Time has been spotted at the World’s End Tavern in Shattrath. Players in good standing with the faction will be granted ease of passage to the Caverns of Time.
Hallelujah! Let me tell you, the trip from Shattrath to Black Morass was long enough for everyone in the group to go have dinner and come back to find themselves still in flight.

- Spell Haste: Spell haste now reduces the global cooldown on spells, down to a minimum of 1 second. This change does not apply to melee and ranged abilities.
How much spell haste is required for this? What am I going to sacrifice in order to see a difference here? I still don’t like spam-casting - I could see this being more for dps than healing, I think.

- Spirit-Based Mana Regeneration: This system has been adjusted so that as your intellect rises, you will regenerate more mana per point of spirit.
WOOOOOO. Awesome. Seriously. Keeps people from just stacking spirit like mad, by making the stat synergistic with your intellect levels. I think this was a VERY intelligent change, and high level priests are going to rejoice. I love it.

*reads through some more stuff…*

Hunters
The Hunter stuff, while neat, really isn’t earth shaking for me. Being able to continue tracking through death is cool, since I’m absentminded and generally distracted at the point of death. My first response is generally a fair distance away from a calm “You know, Nigel, I really ought to recast my tracking spell, wouldn’t you say, old chap?”. No. Usually it’s not repeatable in polite company.

The Mend pet change seems…odd to me. Why up the bottom from 15% to 25%? The cap is still 50%. Will this encourage more hunters to only place a single point in it? Perhaps…but where else would you tuck the point? I’ll experiment with a single point and see what I come up with. Still, seems…odd.

Priests
- Chastise no longer disorients the target, but now is instant cast and roots the target for 2 seconds.
I never did use Chastise - I don’t solo and I don’t pvp. The instant cast seems very nice, but the roots…are those dispellable? Seems like a nerf to the usability, even with the instant cast. What have you guys experienced?

- Mass Dispel now affects a maximum of 10 targets, increased from 5.
Awesome for raiding priests, when AOE debuffs are used. Less impressive…in almost every other situation.

And then some stuff that’s them basically saying “nice try, but you have to follow the rules”.

Professions
Enchanting recipe to shatter a Void Crystal into two Large Prismatic Shards.
Enchanting recipe to increase Defense Rating by 15 for chest armor.
Three jewelcrafting recipes to cut gems with spell haste from Dawnstones, Talasite, and noble Topaz.

New ways to stack spell haste - seems to imply that Blizz wants us to stack it, especially with earlier boosts to its usability. Void crystals => prismatic shards is great, but I’d rather see more stuff I could spend the void crystals on. Heroics mean I’ve got a boatload of them, but lack of raiding means I don’t have anything to spend them on. Nice thinking, there.

Some neat stuff about cooking and food, but nothing I’m particularly interested in, aside from the new bear meat recipe for pre-outlands cooking. Thank goodness. I had to fish out in Azshara on the last toons, and let me tell ya, that ain’t much fun, not when the actual catch rate on usable fish is dismal.

New Fishing Daily Quests! Visit the mysterious old man fishing at Silmyr Lake outside of Shattrath City to discover what treasures he has to offer.
Find Fish now correctly tracks Schools of Tastyfish and Muddy Churning Waters.
Feltail fishing nodes have been changed to Brackish Mixed Schools; they now produce mostly Golden Darters and some Feltail.

Woo fishing quests! I hope they’re as fun as the daily cooking quests are! (yes, I enjoy them. Shush, you). Has anyone found a use for regular feltail yet? *grumps* Bag space wasters. Even my lions got sick of ‘em.

Ancient Lichen now has a chance to drop a Fel Lotus where it used to drop a piece of random green jewelry.
Black Lotus replaced by Fel Lotus in herbalism skinning tables for Outland creatures.
Increased the chance that Felweed, Dreaming Glory, Ragveil, and Flame Caps will contain a Fel Lotus.
Warp Splinter can now be skinned with Herbalism in heroic difficulty.

More Fel Lotus? About frickin time! I went DAYS without seeing a single Fel Lotus. Seriously. Ridiculous drop rate. And yet I needed at least two per weekend in order to do my raiding. A MUCH needed improvement. Expect the cost of flasks to go down a bit with this.

A new jewelcrafting recipe has been added to transform many green quality gems into a single random blue quality gem. This recipe is available from grandmaster jewelcrafting trainers.

Finally! Once you reach a certain point, nobody wants green gems cut. And yet they STILL DROP. It’s maddening.

Raiding
Badges and more money from all bosses, more set tokens from bosses, REMOVAL OF THE KEY REQ FOR KARA, all seem to point at Blizz really wanting more players to experience end-game content before the expansion comes out.

I approve. Although I find myself nervous about the quality of player that NEEDED the removal of the key for Kara - you really ought not to dive right into raiding before you’re capable of doing the five mans.

I can, however, see how it could be difficult to find groups for that sort of thing, and I don’t think it was a mistake on the part of the developers.

I love that we aren’t going to have the situation that we did with Burning Crusade, with so many high level raid dungeons that less than a quarter of the players ever got to experience. And I think the more “hardcore” type guilds, the ones that have been raiding and rightfully deserve the status of “having done it before they made it easy” still get their kudos.

Miscellaneous
Jeebus, am I the only one whose eyes glaze over when they reach this part of the patch notes?

- Critters: Ambient level 1 creatures will no longer be picked as subsequent targets by chaining spells and abilities.
..does this mean multishot will avoid that rat and actually hit a real mob? Dare I ask it? Pretty sure it applies to the paladin’s Captain America Shield ability, too.

Update : confirmed, this was intended to be all multi-target stuff, even cleave. Originally, this was intended to avoid CC’d mobs, too….but it certainly looks like THAT part of the patch notes has mysteriously disappeared.

- A mailbox has been added to the inn in Darnassus
Those silly mail-hating nelfs….

That’s it!

As always, I recommend you Read the Patch Notes for yourself. Just because I didn’t care, doesn’t mean you won’t!

This entry was posted on Friday, March 28th, 2008 and is filed under Patches, ~ Vonya. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.