Recently in Patches Category

Monday night, shortly after the All Things Azeroth live recording of episode 102 finished up, the Public Test Realms for patch 3.1.0 launched, and we got our first official glimpses of the first content patch of the Wrath era of WoW. As we have known since Blizzcon 2008, this patch contains the Ulduar raid instance, but now that at least part of it is on the PTRs, we know now that there will be a lot more. Dual specs, swimming mounts, the Argent Tournament, and much more will be coming with 3.1.

I have spent a bit of time on the PTRs, and I stress a little due to a bug that is crash looping my client, and while I have a lot of stuff to bring up, I do want to stress that this is all stuff from the PTRs and virtually anything from the PTRs can change from one day to the next at the drop of a moonkin /dance. That said, let's start with the big things on the PTR right now: Dual Spec and Gear Manager.

Dual Spec
The dual spec system will allow players, at least mildly wealthy ones, to maintain two different specs. The costs as of this writing is 1,000 gold, and requires at least level 40. It also currently does not require any reagent, nor does it have a cooldown. I personally suspect the price might drop a bit, but I am pretty sure the level, reagent, and cooldown will change once the feature is done testing for major bugs. The pre PTR Q&A that was done had stated that there would be a 'confirm talents' type feature similar to those available in mods like Talent Planner, but this also has not shown up on the PTR as yet. I think this is an awesome feature, with great potential and a lot of room to improve the game if it is done right.

Gear Manager
Much like the mods Outfitter, Item Rack, and others, the gear manager allows you to create sets of gear or armor which can be changed easily. You put the gear on, make the set, and then every time you choose to you can simply equip the items just like you set it up the first time. I wasn't able to test this very thoroughly, but I am pretty sure you will be able to changte and edit a set, movign gear in and out as you get replacements, and I will be sure to report more when the PTR realm I am on, Broxigar, is usable. So far, though, I am very impressed with the 3.1 PTR, and I look foward to further testing as the testing continues.

The air has grown chilled, the waters stilled. The signs point to the event that has been anticipated with bated breath. Prepare yourselves, for... 3.0.3 is nearly upon us. The downtime is extended right about the same length of a usual patch maintenance, and people are preparing. While it is hard to know what the patch will actually hold, since even WoW Insider is only quoting the PTR notes, which could have changed in the 3 week or so run that the PTRs had.

We know that many Ret changes were hot fixed, which Siha points out were done without PTR testing, and other changes are so small, like the Hallowed Be Thy Name change, that they are unlikely to not make the patch. The Druid talent reset is pretty much a given, along with many of the changes to their talents. Other than that? Well, anything could happen. WoW Insider got something right, though, that Patch 3.0.3 is most likely going to happen, even if we haven't seen the typical 'thanks for testing' message on the PTR forums. 

Note: WoW Insider is using guesses and labeling Test Realm info as confirmed patch info. This should be noted, but isn't. PTR notes at launch can differ wildly from live patch notes.

I wrote yesterday about the mods I sadly had to abandon from my post 3.0.2 world, well today I will talk about the mods that I have found since patch day and have fallen in mod-whore love with. Enjoy this list, and look forward tomorrow to the next in my impromptu series on mods; the mods which never went bad.

As I mentioned yesterday, Skillet is my new mod for crafting my items, be they gems, armor, or potions. Combine that mod, which allows me to search and craft based on a number of parameters, with TradeTabs, which puts a tab for every crafting profession that you know. This is a really simply, very useful way to keep all of my professions easily accessible and usable. I do not know if either of these are, or need to be updated for Inscription, however comments are down below if you want to test them out.

I fell in love, or back in love with TrainerSkills in the beta. I used to use this, or a mod like this, ages ago. It basically tells you when you can learn something and what that is. Whether it be a new class skill on ding, or a new profession item on reaching a certain point, these things are all clearly pointed out to you in the chat window of your choice. A long lost mod, come back and just as awesome as before!

Since I am trying to avoid the crutch of CT Mod, I have been forced to go elsewhere for a few things I loved about the package. TipTop takes care of the tooltip placement problem, though it admittedly took a bit to get the tooltip right where I like it, which is to say center of my screen right below TitanPanel. oRA2 is a mod recommended by a guildie as we prepared for a post 3.0.2 raid, and realized that CTRA had been abandoned. I replaced the bar mods part of CT Mod, which was always more broken than fixed, with Dominos, though I have a Druid in Cat while Prowling bug I had to fix. Lastly I have not yet found a fix for the mail mod, but I am working on it and have a few leads.

The last batch of mods I have come across is the Achievement mods. Overachiever is a nice mod that helps me track where I am on an achievement, and it also changes exploration tracking based on zones and the /love you've given, or need to give to critters all over the world. AchievementSS is a cool mod which takes a screenshot whenever you complete and achievement, no matter where you are. Lastly, we have Urban Achiever, which is accessed by /ua and allows you to search for any achievement, text for an achievement, or criteria in order to find an achievement.

So there you have it. A few of the neat new mods I have found in this, the post 3.0.2 mod world. Like I said before, check back for the strong and true mods that never, or barely faltered for me when modpocalypse hit. [Update: Dominos not only allowed me to turn off the bar changing in prowl mode, but also turn off the moonkin bar change! I have more bars now!]

As we all know, there comes a time, once or twice an expansion, when we go through what is lovingly called a Mod Apocalypse. No, the moderators in the forums do not suddenly begin banning people en masse until only the CMs and MVPs remain. No, this is when all of our beloved mods cease functioning and have to be recoded, redone, or dumped in favor of fresher code. It is because of this apocalypse that I have had to dump a few mods. Now while I have added some back in since the first writing of this, specifically WIM, there was a time when I had to dump the mods cause of problems that were game breaking.

WIM was on the chopping block for the last week and a half because, unlike in beta, the chat windows and confg interface were transparent. Thankfully 3.0.3 version fixed that, and I am now using it again. Advanced Trade Skills Window(and the Levels plugin) was an awesome mod in the pre patch days, but I got very annoyed with error messages every time I tried to link a recipe or skill in chat, so I ditched it for Skillet, and that one combined with Trade Tabs makes for an awesome, and light weight crafting package. I am still looking for an updated CraftList2, but I can do without for now.

Another mod I am saddened to set aside is Fizzwidget's Linkerator. For some reason every time I tried to link something, even when I tried to hit the [ to start a link guess, the mod would spawn multiple errors and lag my machine for 5-25 seconds. Clearly the mod is not ready for 3.0.2, though to be honest FactionFriend and other Fizzwidget mods are working fine. I tried Talented, which just gave errors, and like the Classic DK frames mod, with two different era DK player frames, but I dislike mods that cannot check for class and automatically disable themselves for those who don't count, which meant this mod gets relegated until Wrath hits.

I did try to look into some new mods, like a few in the Easy* series, EasyPanel, EasyCopy, and EasyDaily, but the panel was not movable that I could tell, and the Daily one choked on the Ata'mal Armaments turn in, making my whole client freeze hard. This will essentially be a 3 part series covering the mods I put behind me, the ones I still use eagerly, and new ones I am loving my experimentation with, ending with current working macros I rely on. Keep reading for the next ones!

I have been growing incredibly frustrated with WoW of late, since I had grown really comfortable with questing and farming on my characters. I blogged about all of this, hoping that someone in the community would know how to fix all of this. To remind you, I have a general macro, and a Paladin macro, both of which uses the bird in Outlands and my cat in the old world, where flying is not allowed. The Paladin version has the added code to swap my aura's between Crusader and Retribution, so that I am always able to fight and fly to my best.

The old macro, posted here, was:

/cast [nocombat, nomounted] Crusader Aura; [mounted] Sanctity Aura;
/stopcasting
/use [flyable]  Cenarion War Hippogryph;
/use [nomounted,noflyable] Reins of the Swift Frostsaber
/dismount

As I explained, the aura's and the mounts are all on the GCD, which prevent them from being used one after the other. For some reason, though, even removing the aura bits still didn't actually do what I needed. The new, and working macro, is as follows:

#showtooltip
/cast [flyable] Swift Blue Gryphon; Swift Mistsaber

As you can see, the new macro, even being the extra line for the tooltip, is much shorter and more concise, but also does exactly what I need. It summons the right mount based on location, dismounts, and works perfectly after much testing. I do not see any reason, when patch 3.0.3 hits, why the following will not work.

/cast [nocombat, nomounted] Crusader Aura; [mounted] Retribution Aura;
/stopcasting
#showtooltip
/cast [flyable] Swift Blue Gryphon; Swift Mistsaber

I will, of course, let you all know when I have had a chance to test 3.0.3 for that macro and see if it truly does work as well as it does in text on the blog. Cheers!

Patch 3.0.2 has been out for mere days and already we have word of tweaks and hot fixes incoming. Based on the list compiled by MMO Champion, every class including the Death Knight are getting tweaks in coming builds/patches, with 3.0.3 coming out this Tuesday or next. Some of my favorite tweaks are Paladin Auras no longer activating the GCD, instead having a built in 1 second cooldown, Moonfury and Earth and Moon down to 3 ranks from 5, but keeping the same overall benefit. That buys you 4 extra talent points to get more utility or fun talent, ans Instead of getting new ranks of Hawk at level 75 and 80, you now get the new Aspect of the Dragonhawk, not to mention Hunter Aspects coming off cooldown as well. This powerful aspect combines all of the effects of Hawk and Monkey. These will help all 3 of my played classes, and I hope make the my playtime more enjoyable.

I thought I would write a few thoughts on my experiences this lovely October patch day because my realm is not up yet and I am bored. I guess my first thought is on the admission by Blizzard that there are some balance issues with some talents and those were excluded from this patch, unlikely to return until closer to, or the day of Wrath's release. I am disappointed by this. That means that either a) they are pushing an unfinished patch or b) they intentionally held back this information until well into the patching process, knowing the fans would be furious. The first denotes a significant amount of proof that things have changed at Blizzard since the merger, and the second shows a great lack of respect for their customers.

My day, odd as it was, started at about 5 am my time, which is to say Central. I had taken a nap, and slept longer than planned, missing the entirety of the few hours before the realms went down. I went ahead with my plan and blew away my install of WoW after backing up a few of my favorite folders, and began the process of installing the client from scratch, since my client felt really sluggish of late. I went through the entire patching system all the way up to 3.0.2, and, knowing the beta realms were down, I decided to launch my beta client since I had word through Twitter that those were still up. I got about as far as 2 or 3 seconds after click and I got an error message saying there was an error in one of my beta files. I have since narrowed this down to the Wrath beta looking for files that are not there.

The likely culprit is that during the install of 3.0.2, the patch asks if it can move my install to Public folders, cause Vista's User Access Controls or some such don't like it in the Program Files. I think this is bogus, but I did it anyway. Now, though, there was a problem. I run over and begin downloading the beta client again, and load up the beta and live forums to look for an answer. 503 Service Unavailable. Uggh. So I go out for a bit while my client downloads, and come back to the beta installer saying it cannot install since I already run a WoW.exe that is in the 3.0.2 generation. /facepalm. The servers are slowly coming back up now, and I am dreading seeing what patch changes didn't make it, and worried what we will all come to see, some day, that this is not the Blizzard we are looking for.

While many of watch the crawling progress bar of our installs for patch 3.0.2, I thought I would let you know what talents I recommend for a couple of my classes. These will be for the specs I choose to play, and are not necessarily going to reflect what you will, or may choose to select for your characters. Next up, I am going to shift to my roaring Doomkin Druid, and their Ret build. This will be a 61/0/0 build.

Let me start off by saying that, while I thought Ret was hard to choose, this tree is so full of the awesome talents I have always wanted, there is too many for a mere level 70. Hell, there are not even points at 80 to get everything, though I suppose that's the point. I would have loved to take Improved Paw, but I think it will be a struggle at 80 to scrounge 2 points to fill that one out, so at 70 I had to ditch it. In tier 1 I chose Starlight Wrath over Genesis because I don't often find myself using moonfire spam to bring something down. If I have that much mana, especially now that pushback is better, I will just Wrath or Starfire something to an early grave.

There were a total of 4 empty talents and 1 partially full talent left in my Balance tree when I was hitting on 70; Genesis, Improved Faerie Fire, Wrath of Cenarius, and Eclipse. Earth and Moon was the one talent only partially filled up in my level 70 tree. At 80 I will only have the first 2  empty, as I will fill out Earth and Moon, and pop the rest of my points into Wrath of Cenarius and Eclipse. I may scrounge a point here or there in the tree, like I said to improve my paw, but at this point I am not sure I really need to do that, especially with the diversity the trees get and the ability of a Resto Druid to actually stay Resto through the leveling process.

Some of the key talents I hit on were Brambles, Dreamstate, Owlkin Frenzy, Typhoon, Gale Winds, Earth and Moon, and of course, Starfall. All of these abilities either boost my DPS or lower my threat, which will only help me as I level through Northrend, and in the pre Wrath month it will help me a lot in raids. Typhoon has a nice knock back which, while it won't give me time to do a HoT or two before going back into Moonkin, might just keep those mobs off me that one or two seconds I need to use a Fel Blossom and Wrath them down.

I will point out that in beta I have done almost no work on my Druid, choosing instead to focus my early beta days on Medros, since I have two characters who use his leveling spec, but from the stats alone this spec should rock the house. It boosts just enough for other classes to make a Balance druid worthwhile in raid, and much nicer in soloing. We will see what happens in the coming hours, days, and weeks as we learn the new way of things in the Wrath era of Warcraft. Patch progress: Complete. 

While many of watch the crawling progress bar of our installs for patch 3.0.2, I thought I would let you know what talents I recommend for a couple of my classes. These will be for the specs I choose to play, and are not necessarily going to reflect what you will, or may choose to select for your characters. First up, I am going to start with my beloved Paladin class, and their Ret build. This will be a 0/3/58 build.

I feel this build maximizes crit rating while still giving some points into the new lower tier and more accessible Blessing of Kings in Protection tree. Admittedly this does not have the full 5 points in Kings, but it gives us some, and can always be changed if the majority of players you group with have the full one, or just wait five weeks and hit 72 so you can go full in. As with before, I have chosen to ignore Pursuit of Justice and Eye for an Eye, as I do not feel they are worth those essential points for the next month before Wrath goes live.

I also left Divine Purpose out in order to get those 2 extra points in Improved Blessing of Kings, and these points can be added back in later if you feel the need. Crusade, while potentially nice, will not, I think, improve the damage output enough to go 3 in for this talent. Maybe at 80. Essential talents from my time on beta are Repentance, Improved Ret Aura, Art of War, Judgment of the Wise, and Divine Storm. That last one, of course, is why we limit the diversity of our talents. Sheath of Light is a good one, giving your heals a much nice kick to them. Flash of Light can heal for enough to keep you alive in a pinch, and with the new push back changes even a Holy Light can be hit for almost a full to top heal.

The big thing about the new Ret tree is that it seems to focus in two areas. First it boosts crit rating. With a crit rating of 205 before, I had a chance of 23.5%. I will be sure to add in my new crit rating here ____% when the servers go live, and with all the bonuses to crit, I am sure that percentage will get a bump. The second focus is on mana. Ret gear is well known for it's lack of int and mp5 points, and as we of the Light use mana for a lot of put spells, we have long been those of the oom. This tree will fix that. Judgment of Light being used alongside the Judgment of the Wise talent and Divine Storm triggers, a ret Paladin should have little to now trouble staying healthy and mana filled for a long, long time.

While this isn't the idea spec, it is what we can do with the points we have and the month that spans between this patch and Wrath. Remember, we heard at Blizzcon that there will be a 3.0.3 patch coming in a week or two, and that might in itself bring us more changes still to the live game. I would love your thoughts on this spec, and even your thoughts on other Paladin specs. For now, I am off to look into the Druid trees, and get a refill of my drink. 32% done installing...

Today we have 38 days until we can begin hopping on boats and zepplins to travel to Northrend and begin the much touted Death Knight Starting Experience. I thought I would go over a few things that you, me, or anyone can do to pass the next 38 rotations of our big blue marble.

Farm Herbs - With the new Inscription profession coming in the patch that is expected to go live in 9 days, there are a multitude of herbs that you can gather, even if you are a level 70 and fresh to herbalism. If you want to check out the numbers of herbs you may need to get a character up to 375, the level that you will be able to learn up to before the actual expansion.

Farm Ore - Once you have all the herbs you want, you may want to think a bit on the professions your Death Knight, if you choose to make one, will have. Mine will be going Incription/Weaponsmith, since the Death Knight's most noticeable piece of gear is his blade. I would look into the burn rate on materials for the profession, including the steps needed to become a Weaponsmith, then begin gathering those materials up to power to 375 Blacksmithing as early as possible into Wrath.

Prepare for Achievements - There are hundreds of achievements coming in Wrath, and while some will have to wait for the expansion to go live, there are plenty of Achievements you can begin working on now, like exploration, professional, and more. You can go to dungeons, go to NPCs, or just wait for 3.0.2 to be live and start /love'ing the critters in your life.

Grind Rep - There are a number of reputation Achievements in the expansion that rely on reputations, and some of those even award titles. If you are a druid, you might find the Guardian of Cenarius to be one destined for your To Do list, and with the huge leaps in rep for the Encrypted Twilight Texts, you can get the rare Exalted Cenarion Circle part done in no time, assuming you are 70.

Obtain the Impossible - When 3.0.2 hits, there are several raid based rewards that will no longer be available, so why not spend some time now shooting for them? Champion of the Naaru, Hand of Ad'al, and the Amani Warbear are all going bye bye, for those who do not have them, once the new patch goes live, so I encourage you to go for them with all you have, if that is your wish.

There you have it, folks, a short list among many things you can do to pass your time for the next 38 days, that is if you are not participating in one election or another, working your ass off to earn the time off to play Wrath, or just, ya know, taking a break and trying out the competition while they are still around. What are you doing for the next 38 days?