The long awaited patch for World of Warcraft has been released today to bring it to v3.0.8.

Among many thousands of changes there are some game changing changes that most players will find were required for pvp to work again and some very nice changes to make pve less 'grindy'. Overall it's a great patch and adds tonnes to the wow experience

-- General
* Players may now create death knights on any realm once they reach level 55.
* Bonus Armor: The mechanics for items with bonus armor on them has changed (any cloth, leather, mail, or plate items with extra armor, or any other items with any armor). Bonus armor beyond the base armor of an item will no longer be multiplied by any talents or by the bonuses of Bear Form, Dire Bear Form, or Frost Presence.
* Racial restrictions on mounts have now been lifted. Night Elves on mechanostriders? Tauren on raptors? You’re not seeing things.
* Racial Resistances: These can now be mitigated against by gaining additional chance to hit.
* Tapping: All player spells which cause a creature to become aggressive to you will now also immediately cause the creature to be tapped.
* All Silence spells now have diminishing returns. This includes: Arcane Torrent, Garrote silence effect, Improved Counterspell effect, Improved Kick effect, Silence, Gag Order, Silencing Shot, Spell Lock, and Strangulate.
* Dispel Resist talents have changed to protect only beneficial spells and damage over time effects.
* Shield Wall, Barkskin, Guardian Spirit, and Divine Protection are now off the Global Cooldown.
* A new mailbox is now available at the Crows Tavern in the Dalaran Sewers.
* We have added over 60 new graveyards to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms.
The run speed in spirit form has been increased by 50%. Night Elves in Wisp form will now move at a bonus 75% speed.
* Reputation rewarded for killing mobs will no longer automatically deprecate. This means trivial mobs will continue to give out their full amounts of reputation on kill for the majority of cases in the game (level 70 creatures in Stratholme, for example, will continue to award the full amount of rep to level 80 players seeking to boost their Argent Dawn faction).
* World of Warcraft now supports 3-D imaging. Visit http://www.nvidia.com/object/GeForce_3D_Vision_Main.html for more information.

Please see all the documented (blizzard) patch notes and undocumented (mmochampion) patch notes at http://www.mmo-champion.com/

Been playing WoW again over the summer period because I've been bored.

We have added over 60 new graveyards to Kalimdor and the Eastern Kingdoms.
The run speed in spirit form has been increased by 50%. Night Elves in Wisp form will now move at a bonus 75% speed.

yay.

Sick of getting PKd by 80s (at 40) and having to walk 5 minutes to res.

Reputation rewarded for killing mobs will no longer automatically deprecate. This means trivial mobs will continue to give out their full amounts of reputation on kill for the majority of cases in the game (level 70 creatures in Stratholme, for example, will continue to award the full amount of rep to level 80 players seeking to boost their Argent Dawn faction).

More yay. I've been grinding timbermaw rep for the last few days, this'll make it so much (5x) quicker.
Next up: Cenarion Hold.

last edited by Raven at 11:30:54 21/Jan/09

Just to confirm guys this is not the new content patch with the new raid instance Ulduar... this is bugfix, balancing patch... thousands of item, talent, spell and glyph changes.

Ulduar = 3.1 (and possibly dual-spec too!)

They need to release a patch that makes playing fun again.

Anyone got a link to the Mac version of the patch? Got plenty of links to the doze version.

they f***ed my gold making strat over.. c***s

Rev evil, that was the wotlk patch... alot of the slower/un-fun aspects of the game were changed. Looks like you missed the boat.

No more grinding crapptones of rep the hard way, simply dawn a tabard and do your favorate instance.

No more having to be a part of a big guild that you dont like, 10 man loot is almost 95% of what the 25 man loot is and there is no more 40 man raids.

No more 6-8 hours a night spent in wow raiding otherwise your kicked form the guild. Most instances are cleared within 30min-40min. Heroics <1.5hrs. Raids <3-4hours.

Summoning food, healthstones, people etc have all been refined and less strenuous to those classes.

Many talents spells and abilties that were 'required' and 'unfun' were revamped to make them fun. This resulted in the 'lol' classes such as survival hunters, ret paladins, balance druids, discpline priests (pve), fury warriors and subtly rogues (pve) being viable again.

The crafting professions were all changed to be less 'grindy'. No longer do you need rep with different factions or be raiding high level raid content and a craptonne of luck to get your alchemy and enchanting patterns etc. You simply 'proc' a new pattern or spend certian reagents buying those patterns from vendors.

The ability to pve gear with pvp time expenditure and visa versa now exists. There is raid bosses that drop pve/arena gear and visa versa. There is also quite an extensive amount of pvp rewards you can get such as gems, enchants from pure pvp 'currancy'.


I could go on and on (for the benefit of others reading this) but i wont, because i know you are trolling and i try and not encourage f***** trolls like yourself.

He probably isn't a troll at all just one of the many thousands of ex-players that watched wow go from a game with potential to a pile of s***. His view is probably more one of disapointment than an outright troll.

As far as the aparent positive changes that have been. Well to little to late and things such as the change to spells that cause a mob to be tagged should of been changed 4 years ago when the issue was first raised. It was such an obvious change to make but you are left with the feeling that Blizzard won't change simple things like that purely because they didn't think of it first so 14 year old gamer did. SO they sit there for 4 years with their thumbs up their ass until they can pass it off as a postive and intelligent change that they came up with.

Of course they go the other way when people hammer the s*** out of the forums crying over call imbalances. It became pretty obvious early on that blizzards answer to class balance wasn't one of actually getting it right but more so giving every class a few months at the top then tearing them down to give someone else a turn. I know thats a pretty simplistic view of it but thats how it is in wow. To my mind this is not what an MMO should be ... not even close

last edited by Taipan at 13:31:09 21/Jan/09

No more grinding crapptones of rep the hard way, simply dawn a tabard and do your favorate instance.

Wrath is the biggest grind ever. Once you're at 80, its all grind, I guess WoW has always been like that, but for me anyway it just felt like more of a slap in the face than ever before.

No more having to be a part of a big guild that you dont like, 10 man loot is almost 95% of what the 25 man loot is and there is no more 40 man raids.

No more 6-8 hours a night spent in wow raiding otherwise your kicked form the guild. Most instances are cleared within 30min-40min.

Yep, everythings been made easy mode, all the challenge is gone, and hence, most of the fun and any of the satisfaction you would get from downing a boss in a raid is also gone.


I really enjoyed the 70 - 80 quests in wrath, but once I got to 80, the game was just dead. I've been a solid WoW player since it was in closed beta, but I stopped playing a few weeks ago, and sold my account last night, the shine has most definitely worn off.

Well Khel I hope you find something to your liking soon. Then again you are porbably just happy you are done with it atm.

BTW if you don't mind me asking, how much did you get for your account and a rough idea of what chars you had on it. I am just interested to know.

last edited by Taipan at 13:38:34 21/Jan/09

"It was such an obvious change to make" - do you realise how neive that is? do you realise what an amazing impact a small change like that can (and probably does) make on a game of such a large scale? (I could list a great deal of issues with that single change alone but i cbf'ed)

Khel you sold up? Usually i hear people sell up because their lifestyle has changed and the amount of gaming they do is changing not because they have found a better game. If you have, let me know i would love to check them out. The only thing about wow i hate is the fact that they didnt realise the server with the game. I would love to level to 80 with xp at x500% or something with mates on a weekend lan or something.

Either way diablo 3 and sc2 this year looks fun and i look forward to it, untill then it will be much of the same wow ... with sides of l4d, cs:source, warcraft 3 custom maps, dota, sc custom maps + melee, quake3+mods, hl2+mods, tf2 and all those other games that get old after 5 minutes.

They need to release a patch that makes playing fun again.

why would they? sounds like lots of work for a game you're game to play anyway...

bring the f*** on diablo 3

I should be able to rape dks now thanks to the dnd nerf, yay

Yeah, I wasn't trying to be a troll but it was nice to be called a f*****.

Anyway, I've been playing for about 3 years now so I guess I've spent too much time on this game. I've got one lvl 80 so far and about 5 lvl 70's I think but I'm f***ed if I could be bothered to get them up to 80. Plus I'm not all that fussed with Northrend to be honest. I did really like Grizzly Hills and Sholozar Basin but apart from those places all the other zones felt boring to me.

One of my accounts expires tomorrow or it could be Friday US time and my second account finishes sometime in March since I was silly enough to have that one on a 3 month payment thingy. So if I get the urge I can always muck around on that one when I'm bored.

Anyway, the game will always be a grind no matter what Blizz does. I also have no regrets either with this game because it is one of the best games ever made. Just need to find something else to play now.

^ TF2...or....the game called life?!

I'll prob be playing tf2 tonight after 8 :)

i think blizz lost a lot of players because they released wow to early.. what they should have done is released ulduar with wrath, that way the nubs can do naxx / os 3 drakes / malygos etc like gruul / mag / kara etc and then the better players move into ulduar.. a.k.a. SSC

It was a dangerous move to make Naxx so easy but I think they are banking on the next tier of raid content to be challenging, leaving Naxx to be the ultimate in accessibility for more casual players.

Naxx is the new Kara, easily farmable for easy epics. Better content will come. And I reckon there's less grinding required in WOTLK than there was in TBC by far. I've always hated grinding and it was s*** in TBC but in the new exp. it isn't too bad at all. The new patch is great too, seems to balance out more stuff.

BTW if you don't mind me asking, how much did you get for your account and a rough idea of what chars you had on it. I am just interested to know.

I sold it to a friend for $300, I probably could have got more for it though (or so I've been told). The only characters of any real note on it were an 80 DK with some tanking epics, and my mage that I played during TBC that was still 70 but had full t6 and some sunwell epics. But it also had about 8k of gold on it, and all three collector's editions activated on it.

Khel you sold up? Usually i hear people sell up because their lifestyle has changed and the amount of gaming they do is changing not because they have found a better game. If you have, let me know i would love to check them out.

Nah, I haven't found a new, better game to move onto, its more of the first thing you said. I just decided I've been spending waaaaaaaay too much time playing WoW, when theres so many other things I could be doing with my time. I did play a lot of Fallout 3 though while I was on holidays :P But I guess the good thing about games like that is I can be hooked on them for a few weeks and play them heaps and then move on, they don't get their teeth into you like an mmo does.

Guess I'm the opposite to you guys. I'm playing and raiding again after taking most of TBC off an quite enjoying myself.

I have also quit now - 80 just got boring - it was just like TBC @ 80 all over again.....Nax was to much like Kara and im well and truely over that s***.

Its a shame because i have a 80 Prot/Ret Pally, 72 Druid and 75 Warrior sitting there doing nothing now. Maybe one day i will go back to it.

they need to release ulduar asap and get the following raid released as people are finishing it.

the 1 thing i'm disappointed in is simply how long they had to do wrath, and all they did was tweak naxx to make it 10man / 25 man, nerf the flying f*** out of it... sarth 3 drake is retarded since it's still the same instance... and malygos is meh

haha mages nurfed again...

good thing i dont play anymore..

also i think i have the rarest mount in the game on my account..

its the 70% mechanostryder but it runs at 100% cause i never upgraded it when they fixed the 100% model...

you cant get it anymore and those that upgraded cant go back...

Re-enabled my account, played for about a week then canceled. All I really wanted to do was PVP, I just can't be assed leveling to 80 to start PVPing again.

tbh ashes of a'lar was prob the rarest out of any mount, a lot of people never upgraded their original mounts

So scorp how could a change like making DOT's tag a mob when the spell lands rather than when it first ticks be such a critical change? I mean honestly what on earth could it f*** up?

It was a change people screamed for from pretty much day one and it was a fair call from those people that screamed for it. All that change does is allow DOT based classes to tag a mob instead of getting f***ed over by moonfire spamming druids and other classes that have penchant for stealing mobs with their instant cast instant damage abilities.

The way you talk about it you make it sound like it could of been a world ending event. I'd like to hear your reasons for this change being a bad thing at any point in wows past 4 years.

Of course, the shoe is on the other foot now, as Locks can run in and tag the s*** out of everything. Unfortunately, they (like myself) are still Locks...the new laughing stock of the game.

This resulted in the 'lol' classes such as *snip* fury warriors *snip* being viable again.

lol?

Since when has fury been lol? Maybe on launch & throughout MC, but once the gear started improving Fury scaled a lot better with the raid content than MS does/did..

Played a bit on my 42 mage last night, and it was actually quite a bit better to play as the run time back to my corpse was much lower (I kept getting ganked by 52+s). Didn't notice any nerfiness, but maybe that's cos I'm a fire mage. Either way, was able to take down 45 mobs I couldn't normally, though could only take on one at a time still for most of the quests - need more arcane/shadow resist :( Bloody 44 voidwalker dude guys. CC as a fire mage ain't very good ;/

What got nerfed for mages?

I hear mirror image's aggro reduction component got changed a bit, but that might been in response to the fact it was somewhat bugged (the images sometimes spawned with 133% aggro instead of whatever it was meant to be. I've seen some amusing Heigan wipes because of it). No idea what else was changed as yet...

Single hit mining nodes 4tw.. cleaned up last night with a bunch of titanium nodes.

The mage nerf was that frostfire bolt no longer benefits from frost talents which makes me think why dont they just call it fire bolt instead :)

Also I am not happy about all the hunter nerfs yet leaving in bugs that have been there since WotlK came out plus adding new bugs(kill shot range + aspects on GCD)

You mean the aspects that were supposed to be off the GCD?

Yes the aspects which were suppose to be off the GCD then they thought they might put it back on the GCD to much outrage so they decided to take it off the GCD again only to ship the patch and its "bugged" and all aspects other than Viper are back on the GCD.

shad i wouldnt bother either, the pvp is badly broken at the moment

lol arena is f***ed and has been taken offline, two bugs made the new system completly s*** on itself, i ususually sit around 1800... maxed out at about 2000 once.. i'm 2100 atm... lawl

I like WOTLK

All 25man content cleared and don't have to raid again until Wednesday.. pro

All 25man content cleared

While that might have meant something in the past, it really doesn't mean jack s*** in wrath :(

For the first tier of raid content anyawy. I'm sure Ulduar & beyond will actually mean something (hopefully!)

Isn't there like a hard version of all the raids?

10 man is normal and 25man is heroic I thought

Plus Sartharion can be done in harder increments by leaving his drakes alive.

It all sounds a bit broken to me. I stopped before the new expansion, had a mage at 70, got sick of trying to fit RL with raids and just stopped.

ps - Play Eve, join my corp, shoot stuff, get paid to mine, make ISK, get cheap ships. Evemail Harvee Normarn.

sif you wouldnt be in goonfleet, nub

I'm not a combat dude. But the alliance has a combat arm that are doing pretty well. Wardecs have dropped since the we pwnd the last couple.

Also, goonfleet are... goons.

edit: Also, we need more aussies!

Plus Sartharion can be done in harder increments by leaving his drakes alive.

From memory the 10 man version of Sartharion + 3 drakes is currently the most difficult encounter in the game isn't it?

^^ I believe so.

It is, there is also an achievment for it.

Yep and if you armory most of these people saying wow is too easy and there isnt enough content... guess what... THEY HAVENT GOT THE 2 or 3 DRAKE ACHEIVEMENT.

People who are complaining are complaining about not enough easy to farm content and thinking they are pro. If you want good hard content go hit saph 3d and before you bitch link me your armory with the achievement done.

Haha, are you serious?

So 1 encounter, which is difficult, when played under specific conditions, is enough to make you happy with endgame content? Do you seriously not see this as a problem?

no but it's enough to hang on the rtards that say the content isnt hard enough... when they havent even done sarth 3d yet...

No it's not. One encounter doesn't make a game no matter what your arguement is. Every other part of the game might be a total cake walk for even the most useless of plebs yet by your logic one miserable encounter makes it ok.

I bet blizzard wishes they had 10 million people just like you playing. They only have to make one instance every 18 months.