Thursday (21 Feb) - The Thunder King

Thursday (21 Feb) - The Thunder King

Patch 5.2 is due to arrive in the next two weeks, barring unforeseen issues. Blizzard promised that new content would be delivered more often and in greater depth in between major expansions. Patch 5.2, named "The Thunder King" is a patch almost worthy of it's own expansion.

In Mists of Pandaria, the Horde and Alliance races battled the new race of Pandaren and each other. In The Thunder King, the Pandaren nemesis, the Mogu (who once reigned over the Pandaren) come to the fore as well. Lei Shen is the Mogu Thunder King.

A new zone called the Isle of Thunder offers new quests for those following the lore or various quest threads still in progress. The quests take players to the Thunder King's palace and offers more pve faction grinds, more pvp, more dailies, more single person scenarios and single person loot runs (new), and I'm if I look hard enough I'm sure I'll find a kitchen sink to throw in there as well.

Patch 5.2 also adds a new, four wing raid called Throne of Thunder.The new raid has a stunning thirteen bosses, quite large for a patch addition. More interesting than the new raid is what is happening with the "old"ones; ie, the ones that came with the MoP 5.0 release. More on that later down the page.

There's plenty to like and/or complain about for all. Even Fist can look forward to becoming his own farm boss, and many farming functions have been simplified.

Patch changes to Pet battles have been discussed previously, but have become very specific instead of general. The sense that I have is that they have made pet battles harder, with many, many nerfs to abilities. I'm sure they worked to make balanced changes, but my take is that the many nerfs are going to mean the battles will take longer to complete. Getting pets to level 25 is going to take longer.

I did manage to find one nice change. Pets are "bind on account" and so all pets are shared among every character. However, pet bandages were not shared across all characters, so one character might have won ten bandages, while another might have none. Pet bandages will be changed to bind on account, so all characters can share the bandages, regardless of who got them. For some reason they did not apply this same logic to battle stones, which are still awarded to just one character, instead of account bound to all.

In the weird and unnecessary category, there is a "fix" to complaints that when abandoning/fleeing a pet battle, the targeted wild pet would despawn, meaning that other players nearby lost a chance to battle it. Pets will no longer desapwn when a fight is abandoned, but it will cause damage to the team. I'm not much of a fan of this particular change. When I am hunting a rare in a group of wild pets, it's easy to check them down until I get the rare I want. Since those unwanted pets won't despawn under this new rule, it will be harder to keep track, and I may have to simply kill them, which means other players still won't have access to them.

For players who have reached the pinnacle of pet battles, new "elite battle pets" are being added. All three pets on a team will battle a single elite battle pet. It's not clear whether elite battle pets can be captured, or whether they are only the means to acquire a new Panda pet. Lots of new grinding for pet battle aficionados.

Back to the raiding, well ... Oh my. In the I can't believe this category, Looking For Raid has gotten even easier! Now, each time a raid group fails to down a boss - fails! - all members get a 5% buff to health, DPS, and healing against that boss. That 5% buff stacks up to TEN times, giving the worst raid group in history a 50% buff to ensure that they complete the content. The LFR is now simply one more required grind for raiders. No actual talent required. Not sure even that will encourage raiders, the loot satchels have been stuffed even fuller, including, for the first time, actual weapons and gear normally earned only through boss kills.

Meanwhile, following past practice, the now dated MoP 5.0 raids are getting a 10% nerf and bonus loot rolls are being "greatly" increased.

I guess that if Wild really cared, he could rather easily gain the minimum gear level to get into the LFR and ... never mind.