Monday (20 Sep) - Before Cata There is Patch 4.0x

Monday (20 Sep) - Before Cata There is Patch 4.0x

Coming up below is a look at what's in the next patch. But there is team action with Lao, Ando, and EZ in there, too, so don't miss that!

Note that this will be posted Tuesday morning, which is the regular maintenance day, and regular maintenance (5-11am) is what the schedule says. So it's unlikely the patch will come this Tuesday.

It's a good thing I finally got the Blizzard background downloader working again, because on Sunday morning another huge chunk of patch changes started trickling in. I'm hearing that the patch is now at over 4GB.

I'm talking about Patch 4.0x, not the Cataclysm expansion, although both are currently in testing, something that had me perpetually confused for awhile. I kept hearing tidbits about what was going to happen in Patch 4.0x, and I finally went in search of the facts.

Here are some of the major changes (in no particular order) that are going to hit us probably much sooner than we are ready for. Ok, there are also a growing number of players for which it can't get here soon enough.

* Ammo has been removed from the game - for some engineers a profitable business is about to die, so sell that ammo while you still can.

* Talent trees overhauled - it's forward to the past; after two expansions in which the talent trees grew larger, this time the trees shrink back to the size they were at in vanilla WoW with 41 points. Hybrid specs get nerfed because players MUST use 31 points in a single tree (instead of being able to spread them out in the three trees any way they wanted), leaving only ten points to put elsewhere.

* Spells and abilities overhauled - the biggest change is that "spell ranks" have been eliminated and instead spells will automatically scale with player level.

* Death knights still confused - DK tanking has been a confusing mix of talent trees, but officially the Frost tree was the tanking tree. Blizz has decided that the Blood tree is now for tanking and the two trees have had their talents switched around.

* Hunters happy - Hunters can now have five pets with them at all times (no, you can't use them all at once). Oh, and instead of a stable with a max of four pets, hunters can now store 20 pets. Yep, 20.

* Glyph profession overhauled - Most say it still sucks, though.

* Durability changed - Currently the costs to fix damaged gear was different depending on the type of gear (cloth, plate, etc) based on the number of durability points the item had. Now all like gear (belt, gloves, etc) will have the same amount of durability points. Clothies beware, your repair costs are going to skyrocket.

* User Interface changes - as usual with each major release, Blizz steals ideas from third party addon authors and inserts less capable versions of them into the interface that no one will use. Here's one:
* Spell alerts added to show procs. I doubt anyone will stop using ClassTimer, DoTimer, Quartz, or any other spell alert addon we already have.
* BUT WAIT! Could there be something good here? Raid Frames can now be used in place of the standard group frames. WOW. If this feature can be used with third party raid frames like Xperl, Grid, etc, this would be HUGE. Raid frames are much more compact than party/group frames and would make party/group frames and raid frames have a consistent look. I WANT THIS.
* Lots of cosmetic changes - this includes viewing panes such as character page, professions, pvp, spellbook, etc, that actually look to be an improvement.

* Reforging - This is very interesting. Players will be able to convert 40% of one stat on a piece of gear and convert it to another stat that's not present on the gear. For example, Wild's old cloak had 60 crit on it, but Wild wanted haste and the cloak didn't have any. Using reforging, Wild could convert 24 points of crit (40%) and convert it to haste. The cloak would then have 36 crit and 24 haste. I'm really liking this new feature.

* Launcher Update - the most "fun" change has been the Launcher and the related background downloader. Boy, has this one worked out well. NOT.

So that's it so far. The biggest challenge will be rebuilding all our talent trees with a new system and completely revamped talents. We will all be spending gold redoing our talent trees multiple times until we figure out what works best.

The impact of the changes to the talent trees has another, possibly dramatic impact. Blizz has stated that it is a goal of Cata to make playing (questing, dungeons, raids) more challenging. Players running the beta have reported that with the talent changes tanking has become tougher, particularly against multiple mobs where AoE is used. Crowd control, once a staple of groups and raids, but virtually ignored since the Burning Crusade expansion, is now important again.

Another major change - one that you won't find in the patch notes - is how badges/emblems and pvp honor will be handled.

First, about badges/emblems: The new badge/emblem system starts with Justice Points. Sigh - first we had badges, then emblems, and now they will be called Points. Just name the thing once and stick with it, will ya? Well, that's what they say they are doing. The two active badges/emblems, Triumph and Frost, are going to be converted to Justice points in the patch. Older legacy badges that players might still have will be converted to gold. That's good news for Wild, who still has 98 older badges that can't be used for anything at all. At least I'll get a little gold for them. Ironically, those old badges were called Badges of Justice. More moving forward to the past.

On the pvp side, all arena, honor, and battleground points/marks (including the Wintergrasp Stonekeeper shards) will be converted to Honor Points and will be used to purchase items you used to use those other things to buy with. PvP honor earned before the patch is going to be heavily nerfed at patch time, so the gurus say spend that stuff down or essentially lose it.

There's no limit to how much honor or justice points you can have when they are first converted, but a hard cap will be set at a later time restricting the total you can have at any given time. But there's a catch - if you are over the cap you can't earn any new points until you spend down to the cap. This begs an interesting question:

Should I spend my pve badges and pvp currency now, or should I stockpile the old stuff to maximize the points I'll have at conversion?

Consider this - frost badges are harder to get than triumph badges, but both will be converted 1:1 to justice points. This effectively makes triumph badges just as valuable as Frost. Another way to look at it is that Frost badges will become half as valuable after the patch. If you are farming badges for conversion to justice points, farm the easier triumph badges. One other thing to consider. Justice points canNOT be used to buy the gear from Cata dungeons and raids. Just as in the past, there will be another point system for that, called Valor Points. In other words, if you still need stuff that is available now before the patch, and you think it will still be useful after the patch, then farming triumph is the best way to accumulate the points you need to buy it. If you need gear that will be useful after the patch that are bought with Frost badges, you should probably buy them before the patch. But don't forget this final point - nobody knows what things we can buy today will cost after the patch. See below.

For the Wild Family, I think heirlooms of every stripe are the most important purchases right now. Wild keeps eyeing the Tier 10s, but without the very hard to get "Sanctified" marks from the ICC25/VoA25 raids to upgrade the i251 "starter gear" to i264, those T10s are useless to Wild beyond the two pieces he already has. So let's say Wild wants to buy an heirloom that costs 50 badges. Wild can farm the badges and buy it, or I can farm the badges and hold them for conversion to justice points, and then buy it. The question is, will that heirloom cost 50 justice points? Or maybe it will cost 100 justice points? We don't know. But I can bet you one thing - it won't cost LESS than 50 points. Which means I'll buy what I can before the patch.

CHANGE - I just learned that the conversion is now:
Justice=(Frost+Triumph)x2.75.

That tells me that the cost of each item will go up. If it goes up by exactly the 2.75 multiplier, then the price is essentially the same. I'm still betting it won't be less than 2.75, so I'm still buying early. I do wish I had a real need to use those Frost badges now, instead of them losing half their value come the patch.

Patch 4.0x is not Cata. But it is a MAJOR alteration to the game.

Our Monday night foray got back underway after several weeks of real life interference. Even so, Ando was not expected to be in game, so it was a real treat for EZ to find that both Ando and Lao were in game when EZ logged in around 9:15pm. Our scheduled start time is 10pm, but all three of us attempt to get in as early as 9pm when we can.

We wanted to get started right away to maximize our game time, so EZ quickly grabbed the family heirlooms from Mery and we got started. It was EZ's first time in game since the disaster with the downloader and the repair tool that wiped out so many of the settings each toon had laboriously built. Unfortunately that was the case with EZ, too. While EZ was playable on Monday night, there were some critical user interface issues that reduced her effectiveness. The biggest issue was that her totems were missing. A shaman is defined by her totems - it's the main thing that distinguishes her from other classes. EZ has three defined sets of totems, each on their own bar for quick casting. EZ didn't have them. What EZ did have were a few totems that were probably left over from an earlier UI setup that EZ hadn't gotten around to consolidating. That was a good thing in this case because EZ had access to them for the night's run. We had already entered a random dungeon and were engaged in combat when EZ realized her totem bars were missing.

Had the missing totems caused severe problems in the dungeon run EZ would have called a halt and spent the time to fix them. But the dungeon we were in was Maraudon, in a section we were very, very familiar with, and our five man crew swept through it without any trouble and with EZ still coming in second in DPS even without many of her totems.

Mana regen continued to be a problem for EZ, as it has been on every dungeon run she's been on. Her primary means of regen is her Water Shield, but that shield has to be hit by a mob in order for the regen to occur. Ando's tanking is so good few mobs felt inclined to attack EZ directly, despite her best efforts to steal aggro from Ando. That's a good problem to have, but it still meant EZ struggling for mana to use her most powerful abilities and spells. Lao was awesome as our healer. For long stretches EZ forgot to even check her health bar, so good was Lao at keeping EZ, Ando, and the rest of the group fully topped off with health.

We cleared Mara quickly, and all of us, including the two random DPSers that joined us, agreed to run again. And again. When ran three random dungeons in a row, and each time we got Maraudon. When that third Mara popped up, Lao quipped, "Oooh! I haven't seen this one before!"

The three of us then ordered up a fourth random dungeon with time getting tight for Lao. Mara just takes a few minutes, though, so ... we got Zul'Farak instead. ZF is a much longer dungeon, with a couple of large scale battles that "back in the day" made ZF one of the most exciting (and difficult) dungeons in the game for that level (mid level 40s). Lao was a trooper and stayed for the whole run. EZ had as much fun taking on ZF as Wild did back when he first stepped into that amazing warren of trolls and beasts and special characters. It was loads and loads of fun, and I wish the dungeon finder would select it more often. The loot is pretty good, too.

Lao had to leave after the ZF run, but Ando and EZ wanted to run one more, hoping for another ZF. We got Mara instead and swept it clean quickly even though the healer we got wasn't nearly as good as Lao.

EZ got a stack of gear she still needs to sort through, but there's some nice stuff that will be solid improvements. EZ also leveled up TWICE on the night, going from level 42 to level 44. Many thanks to Lao and Ando for grinding through those dungeons with EZ!