Posts Tagged ‘Patch 3.0.8’
Patch 3.0.8 promises to make it even better. When this spell was announced in June at the Worldwide Invitational, I’ll admit I wasn’t very excited about it. It sounded like a lame way to allow Mages to deal decent damage to mobs who were immune to their spec of choice. Then we all realized something: FFB would benefit from both Frost and Fire talents. Suddenly the spell became a whole lot more intriguing. Lo and behold, when Wrath rolled around in November, we all found that with the right talent build, this spell was the single most powerful nuke in a Mage’s arsenal. Plus it looks all sparkly and cool.
We here at Arcane Brilliance thought that since next week’s column will be posted in 2009, we should take a moment this week to remember the year that was, and what it meant to all of us who walk the path of magic. There were some pretty high highs, and some exceptionally low lows, so we figured it would be fun to throw the highs into a ring with the lows and let them fight to the death. Join us after the break to see who wins!
(Boo!) Deep Freeze doesn’t do any damage Now, I’ve been on the wrong end of a well-placed Deep Freeze several times in PvP, and boy does it suck. This is still a highly effective spell in PvP, don’t get me wrong. The problem is that it’s entirely useless for a raiding Mage. Read the rest of this entry »
You’ve read already about Heirloom items, which were implemented in the latest beta build and are bind-to-account. You can equip them, and then when you get a replacement, send them to any alt you have on the server; the stats on the items scale with level. They’re bought with heroic/raid badges, as far as I can tell.
In Wrath of the Lich King, Emblems of Heroism are one of the Badge of Justice equivalents. They’re acquired through beating Heroic bosses and 10-man raids. Currently 25-man raids award Emblems of Valor, which are not used for any Heirloom items.
You guys have discovered our Heirloom items. These (as you know) are Bound to account, which means you can mail them to any character on the same realm. They also scale with level. So you can mail these to a level one character and it will have appropriate stats (although slightly uber) for about 10 levels and then the item scales in power again, all the way up to how you’re seeing it now.
We’re also going to add some Bind on Account non-scaling items for higher level alts. in the future. Read the rest of this entry »
Shaman
Elemental
Elemental Oath now has an additional effect, while Clearcasting from Elemental Focus is active, you deal 5% more spell damage. Lasts 15 sec.
Elemental Mastery now gives your Fire, Frost, and Nature damage spells a 20% increased critical strike chance and reduces their mana cost by 20%. Lasts 30 sec. (Old - Only affected your next spell, increased critical strike chance by 100% and reduced mana by 100%)
Enhancement
Static Shock has been swapped with Mental Quickness and moved to Tier 8.
Mental Quickness has been swapped with Static Shock and moved to Tier 9.
Mental Quickness PTR changes have been reverted and now properly scales from attack power again, increases your spell power by an amount equal to 10/20/30% of your attack power.
Glyphs
Glyph of Lightning Bolt - Increases the damage dealt by Lightning Bolt by 4%. (Old - Reduces the cost of your Lightning Bolt ability by 10%.)
The highly anticipated Unbreakable Healing Amplifiers are pretty good, and just like the other Northrend goggles, they only require level 72 to wear. While many peoples’ mains will outgrow these goggles in 10-man raids, they’re perfect for breaking into raids or twinking out an Engineering alt. Holy Paladin Engineers can finally rejoice, because patch 3.0.8 is bringing them the goggles that have been oddly missing from Wrath thus far. Along with all the usual Engineering sorts of things, the stats are:
87 spell power, 73 crit rating So they’re pretty good! But they don’t really hold up to raid gear. As for our Feral Druid buddies who also happen to be missing some goggles, I’m not 100% sure if they’ve opened up the Leather goggles to you yet, but if it hasn’t happened yet it probably will. The addition of these goggles shows that they’re aware of the problem, at least. If I had a Druid I would hop onto the PTR and take a look, but alas, I do not.
Unbreakable Healing Goggles
1821 Armor
55 Stamina, 60 Intellect
1 meta socket, 1 yellow socket
While we were originally under the impression that the shoe throwing incident took place in Iraq, it appears via the mini-map that it actually took place in Thousand Needles. Perhaps if the President ate some Tracker Snacks he’d have avoided the incident all together, as “Ghostrunner” say the buff will include reporter tracking in patch 3.0.8.No matter what your political persuasion is, we can all find the above animation funny. President Bush had a shoe thrown at him last week, and this week we’ve seen the incident take on a World of Warcraft spin.
The person throwing the shoe is playing an Elemental Shaman. He or she really needs to clean up their UI: as you can see in the above picture, it’s not very good. Way too many buttons spaced out at odd intervals.
The show is now right there below, and also available on the side of our site, and of course in iTunes as usual, where it’s been phenomenally popular — just the other week, we appeared on the top Games and Hobbies podcasts lists, along with tons of other great podcasts (and even some of our favorite Warcraft-related shows). We appreciate every bit of support we get over there — if you’ve subscribed to get the shows weekly or have left a review (hopefully glowing, though constructive suggestions are fine as well), thanks very much.
BigRedKitty was on board to talk Hunter nerfs with us (and talk Hunter nerfs we did — there’s a lot of Hunter talk on this show), and we also went down the upcoming changes for patch 3.0.8 (including all of those mage buffs), Turpster helped us dissect the ideas of dual specs and achievement looting, and of course as usual we answered reader emails and chatted live with everyone in the chat.And of course we’ll be back next weekend as always — we tape the show live on Ustream every Saturday afternoon at 3:30pm Eastern. Thanks for listening, enjoy the show.
The Bracer enchant is a 28 stamina over Burning Crusade’s equivalent: Enchant Bracer - Fortitude. That’s quite the jump. While neither of these enchantments are especially interesting due to the lack of procs and things like that, they’re definitely very good and I fully expect tanks to be scrambling for them as soon as patch 3.0.8 goes live.
It seems the devs took notice of the fact that many important Tanking enchants were just plain missing from Wrath, because we’re getting a couple of new ones in patch 3.0.8. At the price of 5 Abyss Crystals each, you can buy the following formulae from the Shard Trader in Dalaran:
Requires a level 60 or higher item. Before Titanguard, Mongoose remained the best tanking enchant (unless stacking threat stats), which was just downright silly. It’s still a good avoidance enchantment, but for your pure tanking set you can’t really pass up +750 HP on your weapon, before any talents or buffs are thrown into the equation. That’s pretty incredible!Enchant Weapon - Titanguard: Teaches you how to permanently enchant a melee weapon to increase Stamina by 75. Requires a level 60 or higher item. Enchant Bracer - Major Stamina: Teaches you how to permanently enchant bracers to increase Stamina by 40.
What you won’t see here is Dual Specs. They are scheduled for Patch 3.1. Patch 3.0.8 is on the horizon and there are a lot of interesting changes coming our way. Although this info is currently on the PTR (or Public Test Realm for those of you not into acronyms), this does not mean that it is final.
A lot of things could change before this patch goes live, but as things stand, here is a list of changes to be ready for.Leveling will become even more convenient, some fundamental gameplay changes are being made and classes are being adjusted… again. While these changes affect everyone, I’ll be going over the ones that will particularly matter to those of us with limited playtime.
More graveyards, faster death travel
Hardcore players are already decking out their level 80 in purples, but many more casual players are still leveling up mains and alts in the old world. (I certainly am.) With 60 new graveyards being added to both of the old continents, dying will become much less inconvenient. And as if that weren’t enough, everyone’s runspeed while dead has been increased. So gank away griefers! I’ll just run back and blink away before your emote macro has completed. Read the rest of this entry »
And so, as you can imagine, I look at the PTR 3.0.8 patch notes as Blizzard’s Christmas gift to me personally. It’s as if they decided, “yes, we would like to keep taking money from your credit card, Christian, and so make our product better specifically for you.” Actually, that’s probably exactly what they decided, only substituting the names of every person ever for my own. The difference is that for me specifically, they’ve actually been successful. Anytime you give me a patch that buffs my spec of choice specifically and also fails to nerf it in any way, your “give him what he wants and he will give us money for it” business model has been successful.
Follow me after the break and we’ll discuss what will hereafter be referred to as patch 3.KeepChristianHappy.8 (ok, maybe not…that’s incredibly cumbersome), and all that it will change for Mages, especially those of the Arcane persuasion.I wasn’t always. I spent my initial leveling days as a pure Fire Mage, and loved it. I spent a good chunk of time PvPing as a Frost Mage, and had a glorious time. But now I’m all Arcane, all the time, and I’m as pleased with it as it is possible for an unapologetic cynic like myself to be pleased with a thing.
Now that I’ve got that out of my system… let’s take a look at the three changes they’ve made to the Warrior class for PTR Patch 3.0.8.First and foremost, the one you’ll hear around the campfire the most – Titan’s Grip has had the hit penalty removed. Completely gone. It is no more. The Titan’s Grip hit penalty ceases to be. It is an ex-hit penalty!Warriors are now the most powerful class in the game. Please delete all other characters and switch to your level 13 Warrior alt you haven’t played in three years. Also, please be sure to level bandaging up quickly as 24 other warriors bandaging the main tank is all you’ll need to defeat most Wrath raiding content.
‘Ello hit penalty? Testing! Testing! Testing! Testing! This is your nine o’clock alarm call!
/thumps-the-hit-penalty-on-the-counter
Now that’s what I call a dead hit penalty. Read the rest of this entry »