Monday, February 4, 2008

My thoughts on 2.4

The complete patch notes haven't been released yet, but some interesting stuff has been leaked by the CMs. Here they are with my thoughts in Red.

General
* The summoning restriction in Netherstorm has been lifted - Awesome, at least for now. I just wish it was sooner. I was hoping to get my Kara key before I hit 70 then I learned that I couldn't be summoned to Arc. The down side of this is that their will probably be a lot of people that want to go before they are ready.
* Characters will now retain talented spell ranks so when they retalent they do not have to relearn the spells from trainers. - I am not a respec junky but anything that saves me money is a good thing. Plus nothing slows down a raid more then people respecing for fight but for getting to train spells.
* 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. - This is a very interesting change. I have long tought that Haste was an overrated or expensive stat for casters. How this will change that I don't know. This seems to help holy paladins the most but I don't really know what I am talking about. From a Moonkin perspective it will be interesting to see if this affects the Natures Grace talent for Wrath.

PvP
* Players will now be able to purchase level 70 Superior quality PvP items from reputation vendors in Outland. - This really doesn't seem like much. The only real benifit I can see from this would be to get alts a good starter pvp set, but then it depends on what rep level you need to get the gear. If it is exalted this is almost useless, Revered would be ok but still difficult, honored would be nice.
* Diminishing Returns have been removed from the Honor System. This now means that killing someone worth Honor will reward you with that Honor instantly, rather than each night during Honor calculations. - I like the idea of being able to spend Honor right away.
* A player under Resurrection Sickness is worth no Honor. - Good idea but won't prevent people from being dicks
* A player who has died 50 or more times in a particular Battleground is worth no Honor for the duration of that Battleground match. - This is just exploit prevention.

Druid
* Lacerate will now scale with Attack Power, causing it to deal additional damage. - I don't know much about feral but anything that buffs druids I am a fan of.

Mage
* Players can now only carry 80 Conjured Mana Biscuits at a time. - Anything that prevents people from being dicks I am a fan of.

Paladin
* Items intended for Retribution Paladins have had their stats adjusted. Retribution Paladins should see an increase in dps as a result. - Since I play an off spec it's always nice to see an off spec get some love. Hopefuly they will come to moonkin soon.

Priest
* Fear Ward is now useable while in Shadow Form. - Awesome, Fear Ward was just way to mana expensive for Shadow Priests otherwise.

Warlock
* Ritual of Summoning can now be used to summon players into instances. Provided the player meets all entry requirements, they can be summoned in from anywhere in the game world. - I love this change. It will save so much time for raiders. Think of the possibilities. 1. Waiting list people wont have to sit outside an instance anymore. You can actually do something productive while you wait. 2. If the raid leader or someone forgot that robot in the bank, they can get it and be back in less than a minute. Even better, if you don't have an engineer in raid you can summon one in really quickly. This in my opinion is proably the best change in the patch so far.

Professions
Enchanting
* Added a recipe to convert a void crystal into two large prismatic shards, it can only be used once every 24 hours. - I am a fan of lowing the cost of Large Prismatic shards.

Fishing
* 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. - More daily quests arn't a bad thing but I will hold my judgement until I see the reward. If it is something good enough to encourage me to fish then I am a fan, otherwise I will probably ignore it.

Dungeons and Raids
* All 25- player raid bosses that drop set tokens will now drop an additional token! - Anything helps me and my guild get Teir gear quicker is good.
* Gems obtained through Heroic difficulty instances are no longer Unique-equipped. - I always thought that these being Unique-equip was a little stupid. It was basically having an epic item giving you only a 1 or 2 point stat buff. This will now give me a reason to start running mech again to get some of those +hit and +dam gems.
* Loot dropped by Doomlord Kazzak and Doomwalker has been changed to Bind on Equip. In addition, the cash dropped by these bosses has been significantly increased. - Lets face it, this is pretty much a gold give away to the higher level raiding guilds. I will admit that I was annoyed by hearing Kazzak yell for hours in HFP. However, the guilds that could really use the loot won't get a lot of it since the guild that can one shot it will, and then sell the gear for hundreds of gold.
* Scale of the Sands reputation will now be awarded in Hyjal at a much higher rate. - I am a fan of anything that make rep grinds shorter.
* Gold rewards from 25-player raid bosses have been increased. - Who isn't a fan of more gold?

User Interface
* GM messages now appear with a Blizzard icon near their name. - I didn't realize that identifing GMs was a problem, but I can see the potential for fraud without this icon.
* When looting Bind on Pickup items, the confirmation dialogue now lists the name of the item in the dialogue. You can now verify that you are picking up the correct bind on pickup item. - My guilds tend to not use master looter, so this will hopefully releave a little stress when picking up Items off a boss.
* Bind on Pickup items that only you can pick up (Heroic Badges for instance) will no longer bring up a confirmation dialogue. - I don't know about you guys but everytime I go to loot my badges I get a little worried that I am looting the wrong item. This is a smart and over due change.
* The profession UI search field has been improved and now allows for searching of more types of things. For instance you can search for items by socket color, by effect ("Critical Strike" for instance) or search gems by their effect ("Strength" for instance). In addition, the searching of items by level has been made more intuitive. You can now search for items by level with "15-20" to search for items that you can make that have a minimum level required of 15 to 20. - The Profession seems to be screwed up as it is. When I try and do some of the BC enchants on my Priest I can't find them unless I actually search the name. I wonder how this fix will change all that. However, I am a big fan of anything that will allow me to ignore all the low level pots and elixirs Graylo can make. You know know how much I hate scrolling through all that stuff.

Guild Update:
I am still swinging on the pendulum. As I said to a friend over the weekend, it seems like everytime I make a choice something happens to throw my thoughts for a loop. Here are the examples.

1. The guild as a whole desides to go to Musa. Right after someone steps up to run and rebuild WA. Plus raiding with Musa doesn't go all that well. Really long pull times, really early raid time, and a general clash of personalities made Musa less than ideal.

2. So, I leave Musa to go back to WA and help rebuild. I also hope that my leaving will encourage other old WA people to come back. Right after I return to WA the new GM starts to show up a lot less. Last time I checked he hasn't logged on in 3 days. Also, I was the last person to come back from Musa. One old officer says that he is staying so that he can continue to play with his brother. Others just want to raid and don't know what to do. WA trys to put some raids together with the new people but have a hard time even getting a Kara group together. Plus, Musa downs Solarion, so they are making a little progress.

Here is the update:
3. So, I deside that WA is pretty much done and I app to Legacy. I realized my app to Legacy was a long shot but I figured if nothing else worked out I could go back to Musa. As soon as I long in after the App I see that most of the WA people still in Musa have come back to WA. Even the guy that wanted to play with his brother came back. Apparently the personality clashes at Musa where getting worse. There two main tanks left the guild and from the last I heard hadn't gone back. Plus, two of my old WA and FoC friends are talking about coming back from Avarice (*See Below*).

So what do I do now? WA starts to look up a little but now I have this app hanging out there for everyone to see. I don't want to drive anyone away because they think I am leaving, but I also want to give Legacy a shot if I get the opportunity. So far, I have not gotten any response from my app either in game or on their forums, but they did turn down another application from a well geared applicant. I could take no response as a good sign since they responded to another applicant telling him no. I could take it as a bad sign since there hasn't been a response after 3 days. I think I will give my app another day or two and see what happens. If nothing comes of it then I will ask for it to be deleted and stick with WA a little longer.

(*Avarice is the guild that formed out of WA by Mem. I hadn't posted the name before because wanted to be fair and not look like I was bad mouthing them. However, time has passed and I doubt any of my few readers are crazy enough to go and harass them. Plus, given all of the Armory issues lately it would be easy to figure out which guild it was. If you do fell like harassing them please don't. Also, If you don't know what Avarice means click the link above. I got a little chuckle out of that.*)

Toon Update:
Graylo - Just farming. I ran part of Kara to help the guild out but didn't get any loot.
Graypal - He is now 3 bars from 70. I ran a few instances including SL to get the first key fragment. He will be 70 in no time. Now I just need to get all the cloth for his craftable epics.
Grayfel - Sitting there doing nothing.
Graytom - Did a little bit, but not much. I did give him some Netherweave bags though because I was tired of not having any space.

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