There already were a few other hotfixes announced and most of them involved other things like specific items or certain bugs to certain dungeon encounters. Those can be seen in a post by CM Crygil here. A few more recent hotfixes involving class abilities were announced by Ghostcrawler and probably have taken effect already. Rogues, Death Knights and Warlocks are the classes affected by the changes.

Rogues: Hunger for Blood now increases damage by 10% instead of 15%

Ghostcrawler mentions that they wanted to increase the damage of Assassination rogues but in doing so, they overdid it a bit. Hunger for Blood was the candidate for some nerfing since they buffed it before when they wanted to give the tree a damage boost. But now it’s been changed again to lower the damage to what they want it to be.

Death Knights: The shadow portion of Scourge Strike can no longer crit.

The Unholy talent Scourge Strike has a physical damage portion and shadow damage portion. Only the physical damage portion will be able to crit now. At first they wanted both to crit but that proved to be too bursty for PvP and gives too much sustained damage for raids.

Warlocks: Rolling Corruptions no longer use the initial haste value indefinitely

This problem sounds familiar and I actually thought this would have been fixed by now. This same thing became an issue for Druids rolling lifebloom indefinitely to maintain any buff that was used in the first cast like a healing increase trinket. Apparently it’s sort of the same issue for corruption and haste, leading to some high damage that Blizzard feels just isn’t right. With the hotfix, the hasted corruption should correct itself within a few ticks after it’s refreshed.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

When Daelo talked about raid access progression before, he mentioned that there will be a schedule for when the sections of the Icecrown Citadel raid dungeon would come out. He couldn’t say back then what those dates were since the release date for patch 3.3 was still up in the air. But with patch 3.3 finally out, Daelo announced an update to this progression. Right now, players only have access to the Lower Spire inside the Icecrown Citadel raid. This includes the Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Icecrown Gunship battle and Deathbringer Saurfang encounters. According to Daelo, the next section called the Plagueworks will be out 28 days after the release of patch 3.3. The Plagueworks will see the encounters of Festergut, Rotface and Professor Putricide.

Daelo also mentioned something before about limiting the number of attempts for certain bosses and that this number would go up over time. You’ll have a limited number of attepts to kill the major bosses at the end of each wing. We have 5 attempts right now, 10 when Professor Putricide comes the 15 when the Crimson Halls comes and 20 when Frostwing Halls comes.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

If there’s one silver lining to all this, it’s the fact that the Dungeon Finder has finally been tried on live servers and the results are encouraging. It seems like getting a group using it just takes a snap. I tried queuing up for a random heroic earlier after getting disappointed with the not being able to get in the Forge of Souls instance and it only took me like 2 seconds to get a group. Sadly we couldn’t get in that either today.

All this just gives more credence to what I realized a few days ago about patch 3.3. It hit me a few days ago that there really isn’t anything much to do that’s new with this patch that’s outside the realm of dungeons. When the Crusaders’ Coliseum was built and gave us the ToC 5 man and raid, we still had a lot to do outside that. We had the daily quests to keep us busy. With today’s problem with the instances, there isn’t anything worth checking out if you’re looking for something new. So if you don’t want to insist on trying to get into a dungeon, level an alt or do some dailies or things like that, you might as well just log for the night. Hopefully this problem will be fixed really soon since I really want to see the new dungeon!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

To give more credence to the notion that the patch is indeed coming out, CM Zarhym just posted the patch notes here. Below is a summary of the main features that’s coming out with the patch.

Dungeon Finder

The new Dungeon Finder is a new tool that’s going to help players form groups for dungeons, replacing the old LFG system with a spanking new one. It’s going to allow players to group with other players from other realms on their battlegroup. It also offers groups rewards for using the random dungeon feature, rewarding players with the new Emblems of Frost for the first random level 80 heroic dungeon completed for the day.

Icecrown Citadel: Frozen Halls

Frozen Halls is the new 5 man dungeon that involves an assault into the Icecrown Citadel through an alternate entrance. The heroes accompany either Jaina Proudmoore or Sylvanas Windrunner through the three wings Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection. As the hardest 5 man dungeon for this expansion, it will offer the best rewards you can get from a 5 man dungeon for normal and heroic difficulty.

Icecrown Citadel: Frozen Throne

As the patch name suggests, the Lich King must fall. To do this, the Argent Crusade and the Knights of the Ebon Blade have banded together as the Ashen Verdict to aid the heroes of the Alliance and Horde in taking the battle inside the lair of the Lich King itself, the Icecrown Citadel. But before they can ascend to the Frozen Throne and face the Lich King and his mighty Frostmourne, there are several challenges in the way. Take part in this epic assault in the Icecrown Citadel: Frozen Throne raid dungeon available on both 10 man and 25 man modes.

Quest Tracking

A new feature has been added to the game to help players do their quests with more ease. The new Quest tracking feature gives players more information about their quests such as locations quest objectives whether it’s about killing mobs, talking to npcs, gathering items or the like. This new tracking tool also introduces a new shrunk map feature, minimizing the need to keep opening the map to find objectives.

Starting out gets easier

The introductory experience of World of Warcraft just became better to help new players in getting started. The tutorials just got better with improved tooltips with images. Certain changes have been made to improve the gameplay experience such as rogues automatically getting dual wield at level one and warlocks getting the imp without the need for completing a quest and mana and health regeneration has been increased at lower levels.

So what are you going to check out first when the servers go live and it’s time to explore the new patch?

UPDATE: The Patch is out!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

archmage lan'dalock

Patch 3.3 is most likely coming out already tomorrow, assuming there’s nothing else that has to be dealt with. With the patch is the new dungeon system that’s going to replace our current system of dungeon daily quests. If the patch is indeed coming out tomorrow then today is the last day of the era of dungeon dailies. Those dungeon daily quest givers won’t be rendered useless though since they’ll have the new job of giving out the weekly raid quests when the patch comes out.

It’s not a sad day though since we’re getting rid of something but replacing it with a system that’s ultimately better. It will be easier to form groups for dungeons with the Dungeon Finder, which will allow players to group with other players from other servers in their battlegroup. This new system will also allow players an unlimited potential to do heroics on a given day since using the random dungeon feature will bypass any heroic dungeon lockouts you might have. Speaking of the new dungeon system, Blizzard recently put together a short FAQ about it here.

I hope you enjoy what potentially could be your last day of doing the dungeon dailies! Even if the patch doesn’t come out tomorrow, then we have a bit more time to say goodbye to our current system but keep in mind that its days are numbered. I say bring on the new patch and the new dungeon system already so we can start collecting those nice new Emblems of Frost!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

icecrown citadel

Both the Icecrown raid dungeon and the Frozen Halls 5 man have been in the PTR for quite a while now so anyone who’s managed to get into the it has probably already seen what both look like inside. But for those who haven’t and are itching to have a sneak peek at what lies inside, the guild Vodka has prepared a nice video of the Frozen Halls dungeon that captures how this place could be quite epic even for for a 5 man. If you read about his place before, you’d probably know already that the Frozen Halls is divided into the Forge of Souls, the Pit of Saron and the Halls of Reflection. Each wing has a separate lockout timer on heroic mode and must be done in order and the succeeding wing unlocked to proceed. The Frozen Halls has the heroes accompany either Jaina Proudmoore of Sylvanas Windrunner depending on your faction. The video below shows the Alliance side with Jaina at their side and shows quite a bit of story there, which should be slightly different if you’re Horde with Sylvanas there.

This should get you fired up to take on patch 3.3 when it comes out!

Post from: WOW Obsessed

Ghostcrawler replied to a thread talking about PvP and PvE and how they affect each other in terms of health pools, damage and healing are concerned. The OP of the thread mentioned that the current situation sees us having DPS meant to deal a large amount of damage in a short time, one of the formulas to success in PvP. He also says that PvE situations make it that healers also are able to heal through large amounts of health with little effort, which has could be powerful in a PvP setting. I’m not sure what to say about his assessment since I don’t do PvP that much but Ghostcrawler has the following to say:

Health pools will be much larger in Cataclysm and healing will be lower. That should help address some of the overly binary feel of PvP and PvE encounters.

You’ll still be able to kill people as well as be able to heal them. The pace will just be a little slower and both healing and killing should require more than 1-2 buttons. source

No matter how you look at it, this is a nerf to healing (and dps in a PvP setting) but probably needed to fix the scaling problems people have been talking about throughout this expansion. With this change it certainly looks like things are going to be slower throughout the game. The dps will take a wee bit longer to kill players in PvP because of the bigger health pools and it’s going to take a wee bit longer for the healers to top of players to full health with the weaker heals. I wonder how this change is going to affect a scenario where heals are not part of the equation, like a one on one fight in a battleground between a rogue and a warrior for example. With this change, it should be a lot harder for the rogue to take the warrior down if at all.

We’ll just have to see how this plays out and hope that it will ultimately fix the problem.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

The topic of the thread revolved around the Rogue Subtlety tree and how it’s underwhelming compared to the other trees. But Ghostcrawler’s reply contained something for all pure dps classes to be concerned with. Perhaps it will also be true for other classes that have more than one dps tree too. Here is the interesting reply of Ghostcrawler:

Somewhat related, for the pure dps classes it’s likely that there will always be a spec with the theoretically highest dps. It’s going to be nigh impossible to make multiple talent trees provide identical dps regardless of gear improvement, encounter specifics or group synergies. Our goal instead is just to get things close enough that players are willing to sacrifice a little bit of dps for a playstyle they really enjoy. source

What I understand from this then is that their goal is to design the different pure dps classes so that damage potential is not the deciding factor for their different talent trees but a desired play style. If what I understand is correct, this should be true whether you’re talking about PvE or PvP. We’re seeing this already to a certain degree in the present trees. For example, the Frost tree is usually associated with PvP and AoE farming but steps have been taken to move Frost closer and closer to being competitive to the other specs.

Wouldn’t it be fun to be able to choose your spec because you like how that spec is played and not because it’s the best damage dealer? It’s similar to how a shaman would pick Enhancement because he likes the melee play style and how another would pick Elemental because he likes being ranged DPS. A warlock would pick Destruction because he likes the direct damage while another would pick Demonology because he likes what his minions bring to the table and relies on them more.

I’m not sure exactly how they plan to see this goal through but something tells me that the Mastery talent system coming in the Cataclysm expansion will help. The Mastery system will give players more room to be creative with their talents and not stick to cookie cutter specs. By allowing players more leeway to play around with their specs, this will give them a better opportunity to further customize the trees to fit how they want to play.

Of course this is all just plans and no one knows if we’ll truly get to that “play style rules all” state. But it’s something to look forward to and something to hope for.

Post from: WOW Obsessed

CM Zarhym announced that players with characters in select accounts will be credited with 24 hours of extra playtime for the downtime experienced from November 23 to November 25. He said the credit process should be complete within the next few days. I guess this means as long as you have even a level character on any of the realms listed, you’ll get credit. I see at least two realms where I have low level characters so I guess I’ll get the one day credit.

Below is the list of US realms that have been credited with play time:

Antonidas

Anub’arak

Blackwater Raiders

Bladefist

Borean Tundra

Cairne

Cenarion Circle

Cenarius

Darrowmere

Drak’Tharon

Drenden

Echo Isles

Farstriders

Fenris

Garrosh

Hydraxis

Hyjal

Korialstraaz

Lightbringer

Maiev

Misha

Mok’Nathal

Moon Guard

Nazgrel

Nesingwary

Nordrassil

Quel’dorei

Ravenholdt

Rivendare

Shandris

Shu’halo

Sisters of Elune

The Forgotten Coast

Tortheldrin

Uther

Vashj

Winterhoof

Wyrmrest Accord

Post from: WOW Obsessed

It’s a great thing that Blizzard is reaching out to the Facebook and Twitter communities since it’s a great way to spread information about the games and any important events and promos related to them. It’s also a great way for fans to interact outside more conventional media like forums. Whether it’s talking about new updates, game tips, strategies, or talking about your favorite game topics or simply just hanging out, this is a nice way to do it.

You can see the various Facebook fan pages here:

Blizzard Entertainment http://www.facebook.com/Blizzard

Warcraft http://www.facebook.com/Warcraft

Diablo http://www.facebook.com/Diablo

Starcraft http://www.facebook.com/StarCraft

Post from: WOW Obsessed