World of Warcraft Updates

Thinking about the Ironman challenge has sparked a bit of interest in actually playing World of Warcraft again in a real way and not just in a silly 'do something crazy' way. Sthenno commented yesterday about upcoming (or maybe current?) changes to the priest class which are altering the way you get psychic scream which got me thinking about what else had changed in the game in the 10ish months since I'd quit. I've made a bit of a point of avoiding reading about the game after I quit playing for two reasons: I have lots of stuff to read about that impacts the games I am playing and because it could well suck me back in.

Well, I'm on the path to getting sucked back in anyway, so I figured I'd go and read some patch notes to see what was new. There are a lot of them so I decided to skip the class specific stuff (except for Death Knight) and just see what cool overall stuff might have changed. Here are some of the highlights that I've run across:


Stratholme - Postboxes no longer require keys to open, because really, who locks their postboxes anymore when they're all undead? It's just people sending coupons for brains anyway.  {I just found this to be really amusing.}

Bind on Account stuff - Apparently can be mailed to other accounts on the same Battle.Net login which is cool. And you can mail stuff to different factions too?

Archaeology - Added new rare items (I wonder if I should look them up and add them to my post?) and made it so you're less likely to get dig sites if you have all the rare stuff. Making it more likely to get the Tol'Vir stuff I guess!

Crowd Control - Many crowd control abilities no longer cause creatures to attack players when they are cast. The creature will not attack the player when the crowd control wears off, and nearby creatures will not become hostile to the player either. {AWESOME!}

Raids - Holy cow did they ever nerf the raids we were running when I quit. For example: Nef adds falling over after 33 seconds instead of 50 seconds is such a huge change to the difficulty of that role. The kiter had to pretty much play perfectly to win before but now they'd never stack up enough damage to kill you if you just turned around and ran the whole time. Of course with Nef himself having 20% less health and doing 20% less damage that wouldn't really matter.

Items - If a player wins a Need roll under the Need Before Greed system on a Bind on Equip item, the item will become Soulbound to that player. The item will remain unbound if won via a Greed roll. {Nice. Now someone ninjaing all the BoEs can only vendor them and can't get a lot of cash on the AH.}

Call to Arms - Apparently they set it up so the rarest role in a 5-man group gets extra loot for signing up. So if there aren't enough people who want to tank a heroic the game starts bribing tanks to queue up. If there are enough tanks but not enough healers then the healers get an extra something for playing. It sounds so simple but it seems fantastic. Apparently it reduced queue times for DPSers from 45 minutes to 15 minutes when it came in because more people were willing to tank if it meant more stuff. Like a very unlikely shot at rare mounts! I don't know that it would have worked on me (I hate people so much) but it probably would have tricked me into going a few times for points as well. And I can really see how less antisocial people would really fall for it.