Focused Aim

Servers are still down for patch day. Time to catch up with blades. Its guild time!

Wow Armory finally got its much needed upgrade. The new site includes:

• 3d armory with animation
• shows all pet specs (even the ones in storage)
• rss achievement page
• ability to embed to another site… shown here.

Update: Bingo Card Links Now Work! Also, another card added.

I’ve covered the good side of fast forming pugs with the latest patch…. now time for the ugly side of pugs cross realm.

There has been some bingo cards circulating the wow blogs originally found on the official forums. They explain how crappy pugging can be. (most of these refer to lvl 80 toons)

Bingo card 1

Bingo card 2

Bingo card 3

Bingo Card 4

I have found a few more that should be on these cards…

1. Tank goes AFK after the first boss in VH for 5 mins.
2. DPS pally wears all classes of gear (cloth, leather, mail, plate) and has a complete mash-up of stats.
3. Hunter doesn’t have pet out entire instance
4. Pally tank exclaims “Pallies aren’t designed for tanking” yet checked the tank box just because its faster.
5. First time ever tanking.

I’m sure there’s more. I will update when I find more to complain about.

Another issue I have with pugs is that since everyone is cross realm the chances of running into someone again is very slim.  This is an issue because since theres no cross toon reputation issues few bring their “A” game.

Example:

Problem: Loot issues.

Answer:Toons bring their “B” game.

• The tank can decide to get certain people killed.

• The healer can not heal people.

• Cc can grind to a halt (if cc is ever needed).

Cross realm pugs can be a great leveling tool but, can easily turn from good to bad to pugly in the blink of an eye.

Wow! What a patch. The new LFG system is really helping my druid level pretty nicely. Milwaukee was stuck at level 70 for quite a few months. Finding a group pre 3.3 was pretty exhausting and questing is boring. This patch saved the day. Milwaukee is definitely feeling Blizzard’s love. She is almost at level 73 by mainly pugging.

The new LFG system is good and bad at the same time. Many bugs still need attention. Here’s my thoughts.

The Good.

• Great way to level a toon.

With the release of patch 3.3 all rep based enchants are boa. This is great news for all us with mains with high rep values. This means there’s no need to do the rep grind for any of our alts. By running pugs only you get the best gear, the most experience with group dynamics, and end game experience for your talents and abilities.

• Quick group formation.

I used to get Djfinster (pally healer who is a master at pulling a group together) to start up my groups. Now I form a group effortlessly in 30 minutes max. I can be doing auctions, organizing the guild bank, respeccing, or anything that might look interesting.

• Nice reward for using random dungeon.

The random dungeon system works nice for my level. I get 33k XP 16G and 2 Emblems of Triumph. This pack is nice for a level 72.

The bad… coming soon

Patch 3.3 trailer.

Today is patch day. Its been officially confirmed that it was from blizzard today. This patch day I’m not going thru the fact that this is our last content patch or how specs are changing. I’m not even listing the notes (you know where to find them). Today I’m going thru the patch notes for the small changes that I feel are pretty cool.

1.  “Players no longer need to kill the final bosses in all four wings of this dungeon (Naxxaramas) in order to teleport to Sapphiron. Teleportation orbs have been added to allow players access back and forth from Sapphiron’s lair.”

I find this point to be quite nice. This allows skipping of all the easy but time consuming aspects of Nax and going right for the good stuff at the end. It would not surprise me to see regular guild runs of this raid just for easy gear for the noobs.

2.”Will of the Forsaken now shares a 45-second cooldown with similar effects, including the Medallion of the Horde, Titan-Forged runes, Insignia of the Horde, etc.”

This is sucky for all those undead out there. Their racials have already been going down hill for some time. This is just another nail in the coffin for that race. I would expect to see alot of race changes out of undead in the coming months in preparation for the next expansion.

3. (combo point)”Pet Resilience: All player pets now get 100% of their master’s resilience.
Avoidance: This talent has been replaced by Culling the Herd. Hunter pets now innately take 90% less damage from area-of-effect abilities like all other class pets. This does not apply to area-of-effect damage caused by other players. ”

This is a double dose of trouble for anyone fighting a hunter. That damn pet just wont die so quickly in PVP. I forsee hunters being envolved with arenas alot more.

4.”The Looking For Group chat channel has returned and can be accessed in all major cities (similar to the Trade chat channel) without the use of the Dungeon Finder interface. ”

I will probably use this the most of any other in town chat. I’m always rolling alts and would love to see whos running what without getting in the lfg app just to see lfg chat.

Working a real job if only for a few days sucks. I haven’t had time for much of anything but work and sleep. While I was away alot was announced. Here’s my version of the 3.3 patch guide.

There is no sound on the preview. This just shows the inside of the Icecrown Citadel.  No mobs and many extras are not shown. This is just the way it will look inside.

The same rules apply to this video.  This is the 5 man portion of the Citadel. This is called the forge of souls.

Blue posted class changes:

Death Knight
Glyph of Icy Touch Nerf in 3.3
As several players pointed out, the old glyph was driving too many other decisions with regard to spec and abilities used. We want DKs to be a melee class with some ranged abilities, not a ranged class.

Druid
Rejuvenation “nerf” in 3.3
We don’t want rank 15 to have that extra tick. It is technically a bug in that we didn’t intend for it to have that behavior, but obviously we sat on the change for awhile. However since the popular Resto style has now become Rejuv on as many people as possible, we thought the extra tick had become problematic. Frankly we think druids can absorb the small nerf without hurting their overall healing much.

We’re not trying to hide a nerf, and we can certainly change the patch note to not say bug fix if that makes it go down any easier.

We’ll look into any discrepancy in numbers between rank 14 and 15 and make sure things are working as intended. Death Knight
Glyph of Icy Touch Nerf in 3.3
As several players pointed out, the old glyph was driving too many other decisions with regard to spec and abilities used. We want DKs to be a melee class with some ranged abilities, not a ranged class.

Druid
Rejuvenation “nerf” in 3.3
We don’t want rank 15 to have that extra tick. It is technically a bug in that we didn’t intend for it to have that behavior, but obviously we sat on the change for awhile. However since the popular Resto style has now become Rejuv on as many people as possible, we thought the extra tick had become problematic. Frankly we think druids can absorb the small nerf without hurting their overall healing much.

We’re not trying to hide a nerf, and we can certainly change the patch note to not say bug fix if that makes it go down any easier.

We’ll look into any discrepancy in numbers between rank 14 and 15 and make sure things are working as intended.

Hunter
Avoidance and Fluffy’s lack of intelligence
It is likely we will just replace the hunter pet Avoidance talent with one that increases pet dps. It is too situational to have as a talent now. Hunter pets will just take 90% less damage from creature AE the same as other pets do (meaning “for free”). We offer that avoidance as recognition that Fluffy doesn’t have the AI to get out of the fire on boss fights and likes to go in straight lines between you and a target, even if that means crossing fire.

Ninety percent avoidance should be enough to survive almost all boss AE attacks for a second or two — enough to get a heal or move your wolf (or sporebat). It isn’t intended to let your pet just ignore AE completely and stand in void zones. If you’re a pet class, you are going to have to manage the pet a little in dungeons and raids.

It was never our intent that pets just shrug off AE in PvP situations. In fact, it’s a little goofy if you think about it. We just technically couldn’t distinguish between creature and player AE before. We only go to that distinction as a last resort, since we like for PvP and PvE to work similarly. However we thought it was necessary in this case, since the complexity of boss encounters just doesn’t always leave pets with a way to avoid the AE damage. We think PvP AE damage often is avoidable (dude isn’t literally Bladestorming the entire arena at once), but we still understand that this is a PvP nerf to pets and we may buff them in other ways to compensate.

Paladin
Seal of Corruption in 3.3
Seal of Corruption’s tooltip incorrectly stated that it did higher damage than it actually did. It actually did (and still does) the same damage as Seal of Vengeance. Vengeance’s tooltip did not have the error. We changed Corruption’s tooltip to be correct.

Actual damage did not change. You were not nerfed.

Rogue
Vanish in 3.3
We need to make Vanish work as advertised. As I’ve said, if this results in a massive net buff for rogues, we will compensate in other ways. However, the intent isn’t that it’s another version of Cloak. We just want to compensate for server lag, missile travel time and the like. It’s entirely possible 1 sec is too generous to accomplish the job and a smaller number will work. That’s the kind of thing we will be evaluating through the PTR process.

Unless my understanding of the spell is completely wrong, Flare actually removes stealth, so it should work in any case. I will verify this part tomorrow.

[...] Dear rogues, it’s really pretty irrelevant if something is a bug fix or a buff. Both can increase power. We aren’t going to let a class be overpowered because “Well, we had to fix the bug, so our hands are tied.”

Dear everyone else, we’re not going to let a broken ability stay broken just because the class is doing well. That’s not good design. As I said, we may have to make adjustments in other ways.

Warlock
Curse of Elements (Rank 4) (Yes, blame it on me, I’ll just argue that you didn’t check the spell rank)
Datamined info is datamined. Curse of the Elements rank 5 is still 13%. It’s possible the reference refers to rank 4 going from 10% to 11% (since rank 3 was also 10%). OMG lock buff!

[...] Curse of Elements rank 5 has not changed between 3.2.2 and 3.3.

Hunter
Avoidance and Fluffy’s lack of intelligence
It is likely we will just replace the hunter pet Avoidance talent with one that increases pet dps. It is too situational to have as a talent now. Hunter pets will just take 90% less damage from creature AE the same as other pets do (meaning “for free”). We offer that avoidance as recognition that Fluffy doesn’t have the AI to get out of the fire on boss fights and likes to go in straight lines between you and a target, even if that means crossing fire.

Ninety percent avoidance should be enough to survive almost all boss AE attacks for a second or two — enough to get a heal or move your wolf (or sporebat). It isn’t intended to let your pet just ignore AE completely and stand in void zones. If you’re a pet class, you are going to have to manage the pet a little in dungeons and raids.

It was never our intent that pets just shrug off AE in PvP situations. In fact, it’s a little goofy if you think about it. We just technically couldn’t distinguish between creature and player AE before. We only go to that distinction as a last resort, since we like for PvP and PvE to work similarly. However we thought it was necessary in this case, since the complexity of boss encounters just doesn’t always leave pets with a way to avoid the AE damage. We think PvP AE damage often is avoidable (dude isn’t literally Bladestorming the entire arena at once), but we still understand that this is a PvP nerf to pets and we may buff them in other ways to compensate.

Paladin
Seal of Corruption in 3.3
Seal of Corruption’s tooltip incorrectly stated that it did higher damage than it actually did. It actually did (and still does) the same damage as Seal of Vengeance. Vengeance’s tooltip did not have the error. We changed Corruption’s tooltip to be correct.

Actual damage did not change. You were not nerfed.

Rogue
Vanish in 3.3
We need to make Vanish work as advertised. As I’ve said, if this results in a massive net buff for rogues, we will compensate in other ways. However, the intent isn’t that it’s another version of Cloak. We just want to compensate for server lag, missile travel time and the like. It’s entirely possible 1 sec is too generous to accomplish the job and a smaller number will work. That’s the kind of thing we will be evaluating through the PTR process.

Unless my understanding of the spell is completely wrong, Flare actually removes stealth, so it should work in any case. I will verify this part tomorrow.

[...] Dear rogues, it’s really pretty irrelevant if something is a bug fix or a buff. Both can increase power. We aren’t going to let a class be overpowered because “Well, we had to fix the bug, so our hands are tied.”

Dear everyone else, we’re not going to let a broken ability stay broken just because the class is doing well. That’s not good design. As I said, we may have to make adjustments in other ways.

Warlock
Curse of Elements (Rank 4) (Yes, blame it on me, I’ll just argue that you didn’t check the spell rank)
Datamined info is datamined. Curse of the Elements rank 5 is still 13%. It’s possible the reference refers to rank 4 going from 10% to 11% (since rank 3 was also 10%). OMG lock buff!

[...] Curse of Elements rank 5 has not changed between 3.2.2 and 3.3.

More to come probly tomorrow. Just figuring out a way to organize the rest of the info.

from a blue post…

“You guys are correct, we reduced the expert riding skill price in 3.2.2 to 225g. We also changed the faction discounts for the riding skill vendors in Honor Hold and Thrallmar to use Stormwind and Orgrimmar faction.

There are a couple reasons we made this change. First off, we wanted expert riding to be available to more people at level 60. 600g just did not seem like a reasonable expectation for most level 60 players to have when they roll into Hellfire Peninsula. Especially after purchasing your level 60 skills. The second change, regarding the factions just made a lot more sense this way since you will not have any Thrallmar or Honor Hold faction when you enter Hellfire.

Finally, I want to apologize for this change not making the patch notes. We strive to get every change we make into the notes but this one somehow slipped by. Once again, my apologies on that, but hopefully the lower price will help make up for it.”

Also off subject, a bloodlust drum maybe gracing leatherworkers in the near future. Sweet idea. No more relying on a shaman to be in your group to down a boss.

There is currently a bug in WOW that affects all you levelers. The level 60 expert flying skill is now priced at 250g (or cheaper depending on rep) down from 600g. Before purchase please check the price. Reports are coming up that some areas are bugged and charge a substantial amount more than the 600g.