Month: March 2010

Update – Yes, the Icecrown Citadel buff is still at 5%. You can stop asking.

Patch 3.3.3 on Live Servers This Week
Patch 3.3.3 will hit the live servers this week, it's time for the super-big recap of all the changes and additions from this patch.

Patch 3.3.3: Frozo The Renowned

Patch 3.3.3 – Random Dungeons Changes
Patch 3.3.3 should be deployed during the next maintenance on live servers and it's time to mention a few interesting changes to the Dungeon Finder that I forgot to report in the past weeks. Tons of minor changes have been made to make your life easier but there are two changes that will probably make you very happy.

First, the patch notes mention a change to "skip" the introduction of Culling of Stratholme. The change doesn't sound really exciting but it's actually a huge improvement over the previous version, you can basically talk to Chromie and skip all the roleplay to jump directly to the first Scourge wave. A couple of other tweaks have also been made to make the dungeon slightly faster and I'm pretty sure you won't skip it anymore. (Especially with a Deserter debuff extended to 30 minutes)

The second major changes to the random dungeon system is the new vote kick system, you can now give a reason when you start a vote to kick someone. At some point it was mentioned in a blue post that the 15 minute limit before you can kick someone was gone, but it doesn't seem to be the case in the current build of the PTR. We will have to wait and see how it works on the live servers.

Patch 3.3.3 Professions Changes
Patch 3.3.3 will introduce a couple of VERY interesting changes to professions. The first part of the change is obviously the removal of most of the transmutation cooldowns, it will affect most tiers of crafted items and it wouldn't be surprising to see items like Breastplate of the White Knight drop from 4000 to 2000G at the AH.

The 2nd part is also very interesting if you're looking for cheap epic gear to start running instances with your alts, all the crafted recipes from Ulduar had their reagents cost considerably lowered and you can expect to find these items for less than 1000G.

Reminder

• Frozo the Renowned will let you trade Frozen Orbs for a lot of rare reagents, including Crusader/Runed Orbs and Eternal elements.

Is Patch 3.3.3 this week?
Yes, most likely. (The "most likely" is only here to make sure that you don't yell at me if something changes)

Check the Patch 3.3.3 PTR Notes for a quick summary of the changes, the regular recap will be available on MMO-Champ soon.

Blue posts

Quote from Blizzard staff

Rogue (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Rogue damage distribution
Overall, we think rogues do too much passive damage — autoattacks + poison. We want to shift more of that towards their specials, which will let both the finishers and the generators hit harder while keeping sustained damage about the same. It might mean less-skilled rogues do less damage by comparison, but that's not really a bad thing. (Source)

Warrior (Forums / Talent Calculator)
Tanking and Rage Management
Early on in Karazhan you could get rage starved, and then letting off of some of the buttons for Shield Block or vice versa if you needed threat was a decision. I disagree with you that it was a major problem past that point. In the raids that followed you pretty much had enough rage to do whatever you wanted because the bosses hit so hard, unless you just got unlucky and had a string of avoidance or something.

If you look at parses today of good tanks, you'll see them convert a great deal of autoattacks to Heroic Strike. Some of them can hit 100%. That implies rage is never an issue and they would have been able to hit the old Shield Block as often as they wanted… perhaps macro it even.

Now if rage was a little harder to come by, then yes, you might make the decision between threat and survivability abilities. However, as a counter to that point, consider that MD and ToT combined with tauntable bosses and a lack of threat management fights like Voidreaver or Vael probably make threat rarely matter, so you lose the decision again.

If we nerfed tank rage income in Cataclysm as well as nerfing the threat of MD and ToT, then I could see warriors and druids maybe having to manage their rage so they have enough for both threat and cooldowns. It's tricky though. If we went too far, then you'd feel continually rage starved, which is pretty frustrating. Having to manage a resource can be fun. Never having that resource to manage would suck. (Source)

The MMO Report Spoiler Alert
Oh, look, it's Monday! And it's MMO report time! With a spoiler alert this week, I guess. And people will probably yell again.

Comics
Dark Legacy Comic #230 and Teh Gladiators #118 are out.