Tuesday (23 Nov) - The End of the World

Tuesday (23 Nov) - The End of the World

On Tuesday, 23 November 2010, on the exact date of the sixth anniversary of the release of World of Warcraft, Patch 4.0.3a was implemented - otherwise known as "The Shattering. "

The single biggest change with this patch is the massive destruction and reformation of the landscape of Azeroth. The dragon Deathwing will cast it's long shadow across the world and rain death and disaster in it's wake, not just in the major cities, but across the land. No where will be safe.

Another major change is that all players level 1-79 will have their damage and healing "retuned." The cited reason is to "bring combat times at low levels to a more reasonable length." How that translates to individual classes and toons is just something we'll have to test and see how it goes. And because of all the changes in talents, almost every Wild family member will have to reconstruct their talents once back in game. This includes druids, paladins, priests, and shaman. Revised talents also affect level 80 toons, and druids were nerfed (ie, their healing/DPS was deemed "too good" so they "fixed" that). This could have a dramatic effect on whatever ICC battles Wild has left to him.

Minor changes include allowing more race and class combinations; reducing experience requirements to make it easier to level from 71-80; and eliminating city portals in Dalaran and Shattrath.

Removing the city portals deserves an explanation. When the Burning Crusade expansion was released, the central city for both horde and alliance players was Shattrath, located in the new zone of Outland. As the central hub of player activity, Shattrath was provided with "city portals" which allowed players to port directly to other major cities across the world, such as Orgrimmar and Stormwind among many others. This greatly reduced travel time to those cities, which was necessary because the Shattrath city designers intentionally did not locate class trainers or an Auction House there.

When Wrath of the Lich King expansion was released, the same format was applied. The central hub was the city of Dalaran in the new zone of Northrend, and it too was lacking class trainers and an AH, and was supplied with city portals.

In Cata there is no new coherent zone like Outland or Northrend. The landscape changes are spread across multiple areas with both new areas and massively changed old areas. There is no central hub city in Cata, and as noted above, the removal of the city portals in Shattrath and Dalaran ensures that no city will provide that kind of ease of transport. In short, we are back to Vanilla WoW in that respect. I believe that players will gravitate to what they are used to - horde will wind up at Orgrimmar as their base of operations, and alliance will wind up at Stormwind. The in between of The Shattering and the release of Cata creates an interesting dynamic - we still can't fly in the old world, we still must spend a lot of time in Northrend, yet we no longer have portals in our "home" city of Dalaran. Hmmm. Wild, Philly, and JB are going to have to decide where they want to live.

What will NOT be activated is just as interesting as what is. The Shattering does NOT include the two new races (Worgen and Goblin), although crazily players will be allowed to pay $25 to change a current toon from it's current race to one of those; you still can't level past 80; new zones for over level 80 are not activated; still no flying in the old world continents (Eastern Continent and Kalimdor); no higher level professions or the new profession, Archaeology; and the new guild advancement system is not activated. All of those things come with the expansion itself.

Maintenance today was scheduled for 3am to 11am. There was no new download when I checked, so it appears that all of patch 4.0.3a was pre-loaded in a previous download. So no last minute changes or fixes.