Tuesday, March 3, 2009

3.1 patch notes part 1

There's been much said about the infamous 3.1 ulduar patch but it seemed to take forever for anything substantial to roll in.

I bided my time a little trying to hold off on saying anything about it without substantial information in hand and outwaited myself a little since there's now more to report than will fit in a single post.

Or at least that's what I decided.

I will get into my typical routine of highlighting the warlock changes in the next post (and there's a lot of them) and maybe grab some other interesting notes as well.

Today however I devote to the curious, the strange and the vaguely documented additions. If you want some more details on the patch you can check out mmo-champion of course or take a look at what wowinsider had to say here


Let's start with a few general ones. A notable entry here is a 'gear manager' addition to the game that will allow you to save and apply armor sets meaning you'll be able to swap out your gear for another set in an instant. Spectacular? By no means, but a hopeful candidate to replace addons like outfitter and the like meaning the end of the update season for yet another addon.

There's also a new set of high-res textures coming in. This really doesn't do much considering we're already playing on an outdated graphics engine but it's nice to have another option to turn on to decrease overall game performance ;) which is nicely coupled with a video mode ultra to show that even wow still has enough oompf in it to bring a decent fx card to it's knees.

Apparantly we're also getting some new quest tracking options. Who knows what that means, but we'll have to remember to turn that one on before we go through our alternative of updating the questhelper addon and see what this shiny new gem will do for us.

The final noteworthy entry from the general section is the fact that you will no longer be dismounted while swimming... I have a feeling it's going to look curious but if the speed increase from mounts persists then most of us will enjoy the change while druids will lament their now profoundly less impressive water form.

The glyph section and profession sections are always interesting but I think I'll check if we can't make some money out of it in a later post, what I do however want to give you is the stats for the elusive titansteel spellblade to be added to the game. Take them with a grain of salt, it didn't make it into any official databases yet it seems:


Titansteel Spellblade [440] MH Dagger, (99-316) 82.9 dps, Speed 2.5, +40 Spirit, +33 Stamina, +408 Spell Power, +37 Critical Strike Rating, +27 Haste Rating, Level 80 (Epic, BoE)(Unique-Equipped)
Materials: 6 Saronite Bars, 6 Titansteel Bars, 2 Frozen Orbs


Last but not least from the noteworthy section is: dual specs

They have been announced, I made my analysis on who would win/lose on that feature a while back and the exact functionality is still a bit sketchy beyond the fact that: you will be able to dual spec at level 80 for a price.

And there we have it, a quick glance at the patch notes from a neutral perspective. There's a lot of class changes in there though so I suggest you put on your QQ resistant outfits and wander over into the patch notes section and see what fresh hell/blessing awaits your class.

3 comments:

Darraxus said...

They really need to make an epic BOE healer weapon that is actually useful for a resto druid.

Andrew Boeger said...

Great more spirit, more junk for mages.

Whoever at Blizzard tried to change itemization in the expac by making items more useful to multiple classes should be fired. It's a good idea, but it wasnt built in very well. Spirit still is not useful to a mage yet most clothy gear has +regen or +spirit.

WTFspaghetti said...

Spirit in 3.1 is going to be a good stat for mages now.

FYI