Patch 3.1 Is More Than Just New Content And Class Changes!

The official PTR patch notes for patch 3.1 have just been updated (as usual the latest PTR patch notes can be found here) and if you sift through the walls of text, you’ll find some nice changes coming to make out gaming experience a lot better. We know about the dual spec feature where we’ll be able to toggle between two specs at the push of a button anytime we’re out of combat. Because of this, changes to the UI have been added that will help the talent switching to be much easier like an equipment manager to help us switch our gear between specs and a new addition to the talent tab so we can play around with our spec like a talent calculator before finally saving it as your real spec.

There’s another pretty cool change to the UI included in the patch notes that will help us when doing heroics and raids.

Players first entering any dungeon that will result in a lock-out timer will be warned if they are going to be saved to the instance. This warning will include an option to port to the nearest graveyard before being saved.

It’s a nice change to help those people who join groups that they thought were fresh runs but in reality are not and end up getting saved to a run they didn’t really want to join. Persoanlly it hasn’t happened to me yet but I’m sure some of you have and I bet you were pissed when it happened.

Another nice change coming isn’t really a big deal but it will help those forgetful types or especially emblems that you have to get off chests so you have to wait for people to finish looting theirs before you can get yours.

Badges and Emblems looted off of any dungeon bosses by a member of the party or raid will automatically be given to all eligible party or raid members. Party or raid members must still be inside the instance to receive Badges or Emblems.

One new feature I’m quite curious about is this one:

A new Color Blind option is available under the Interface panel.

I’m not color blind but it should be quite interesting to see how this would look like to us non color blind people. Of course kudos to Blizzard for finally adding this feature to help all the color blind folk enjoy the game. I’m all for helping everyone with a disability since I actually play with pretty poor vision myself.

So as you can see, the next patch is more than just new content and class changes. As I said in a previous post, patch 3.1 just might be looked back at as one of the great WoW patches. With these changes coming and a whole lot more, all the more I think it will be.