June 29, 2009
You see a sight that almost stops your heart
Feedback works! Although nothing is confirmed until it’s live, of course.
- Hunter T9 2P Bonus – The damage done by your Serpent Sting ability can now be critical strikes.
- Hunter T9 4P Bonus – Each time you hit with a ranged attack, you have a chance to grant your pet 600 attack power for 15 sec.
Other PTR changes.
- Berserking now increases your attack speed by 20% for 10 sec and isn’t affected by your % of health anymore.
- Deterrence: This ability now allows the hunter to parry spells and attacks from behind as well as in front. Now has a new visual spell effect.
And this came as sort of a surprise but here you go.
We wanted to give everyone a very early heads-up that, in response to player requests, we’re developing a new service for World of Warcraft that will allow players to change their faction from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance. There’s still much work to do and many details to iron out, but the basic idea is that players will be able to use the service to transform an existing character into a roughly equivalent character of the opposing faction on the same realm. Players who ended up creating and leveling up characters on the opposite factions from their friends have been asking for this type of functionality for some time, and we’re pleased to be getting closer to being able to deliver it.
As with all of the features and services we offer, we intend to incorporate the faction-change service in a way that won’t disrupt the gameplay experience on the realms, and there will be some rules involved with when and how the service can be used. The number of variables involved increases the complexity of implementing this service, but we plan to take the time needed to ensure that it lives up to expectations before officially rolling it out. We’ll go into much more detail on all of this here at http://www.WorldofWarcraft.com as development progresses. In the meantime, we wanted to let you know that because this type of functionality requires extensive internal testing well in advance of release, you may be seeing bits and pieces of the service in the test builds we use for the public test realms moving forward.
June 23, 2009
Tier 9 set bonuses
Please make sure to give your feedback regarding the Hunter Tier 9 set bonuses. Please.
- 2P Bonus – Reduces the focus cost of your pet’s abilities by 50%.
- 4P Bonus – Increases the critical strike chance of your Steady Shot ability by 5%.
June 22, 2009
Roar of Surrender
Looks like the change to Roar of Sacrifice is here to stay come 3.2, although the cooldown might be changed. In the same breath it looks like Deterrence will also be receiving more than just a visual makeover.
We like Roar of Sacrifice being used on other players for many of the same reasons players originally asked for it to be when we changed it. Furthermore, it’s a talented pet ability, so it doesn’t seem like that should be the linchpin of hunter PvP survival.
At this point we are probably likely to keep RoS as is (though we may have room to lower the cooldown a little) but buff Deterrence by removing the facing requirement. Deterrence is supposed to be your survival tool and RoS is supposed to be a cool bonus ability.
June 22, 2009
Roar of Sacrifice
As mentioned in the 3.2 patch notes, Roar of Sacrifice is being redesigned. Here’s the whys.
The Roar of Sacrifice change we are trying in 3.2 is to give hunters back a little of the utility they lost when we changed it to be hunter only. Relating the ability to crits is to make sure hunters don’t use it to keep the MT alive. Before we made the change to its current, live version, this was happening, and we didn’t want to have to start balancing around the assumption that hunters were RoS’ing the tank. This would have led to making sure other classes had a mandatory buff, and so on.
The 3.2 change is intended to restore RoS to the PvP functionality it had before, which is something a lot of hunters said they liked since they could use it on team members and not just themselves. The cooldown is something we could iterate on, though we needed to start fairly conservatively with it to avoid having to nerf it right away. We can’t change the ability back to damage reduction for anyone or we’d be back with the same tanking problem as before. But this is intended to be a buff to utility not a nerf to the ability itself. Feel free to offer your feedback on the change in this thread.
June 18, 2009
Disclaimer
The test realm patch notes only apply to features that exist on the public test realms. We provide these patch notes to players who wish to know what features and changes exist in the test environment in order to more effectively test these features.
- All pets now receive 40% of their master’s resilience and 100% of their master’s spell penetration. In addition, if a player is at their appropriate spell hit chance or hit chance maximum, their pet will be at the maximum for spell hit chance, hit chance, and expertise. If they are below the maximum, their pet will be proportionately below those maximums.
- Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).
- Silence, Strangulate, Silencing Shot, and Arcane Torrent: These abilities will also apply a 3 second interrupt effect against non-player controlled targets, making them more versatile against creatures immune to silencing effects.
- Aspect of the Cheetah: Can now be learned at level 16.
- Deterrence now has a new visual spell effect.
- The time that traps will exist in the world after being put down has been reduced to 30 seconds, down from 1 minute.
- Traps now have separate 30 second cooldown categories: Fire (Immolation Trap, Explosive Trap and Black Arrow), Frost (Freezing Trap, Frost Trap) and Nature (Snake Trap). A hunter can have one trap of each category placed at one time.
- Catlike Reflexes now also reduces the cooldown of your Kill Command ability by 10/20/30 seconds.
- Entrapment: This talent no longer works with Immolation Trap or Explosive Trap.
- Lock and Load: Now has a 22 second cooldown. The Lock and Load effect cannot be obtained on targets immune to snare effects when Frost Trap is used.
- Roar of Sacrifice: Redesigned. This ability can now be used on any friendly target to make that target immune to critical strikes, but the Hunter pet takes 20% of all damage taken by that friendly target. Cooldown increased to 2 minutes.
- Blackened Dragonfin Recipe: Now only requires 1 Dragonfin Angelfish.
- The Ultrasafe Bullet Machine and Saronite Arrow Maker schematics have been simplified to create a full stack of the appropriate ammunition. No longer requires an anvil. Reduced the materials required to make this ammunition.
- All ranks of Sonic Blast now properly have an 80 Focus cost.
- Black Arrow Ranks 5 and 6 training costs have been lowered significantly.
- Lock and Load: The tooltip for this talent has been updated to indicate that it also works with Explosive Trap.
- The tooltip for Improved Tracking has been slightly re-written to indicate that it only works on the hunter, and works on melee damage as well.
- T.N.T. (Rank 3): Now indicates that the talent works with Black Arrow.
Here are just some additional highlights of the entire 3.2.0 notes. Not listed here (among other things) are all the tradeskill changes so again, if you want the complete patch notes, read them here.
- Construction of the Crusaders’ Coliseum is complete. Testing not yet available. New raid normal and heroic modes for the Crusaders’ Coliseum can be toggled using the Dungeon Difficulty setting. This applies to 10 and 25 player versions. 10 player (normal), 25 player (normal), 10 player (heroic) and 25 player (heroic) all share separate raid lockout timers.
- Isle of Conquest, the new 40 vs. 40 player siege-style battleground is now available for testing.
- The Argent Tournament Expands. All new Argent Crusader daily quests and rewards have been added for players with the Crusader title. Rewards include a new Argent Crusader banner and tabard (which can port players to the tournament grounds), a mounted squire (can periodically run bank, mail or vendor errands for the player), a paladin-exclusive Argent Crusader Charger mount, and new heirloom items.
- Portals from Orgrimmar and Stormwind have been added leading players to the Stair of Destiny at the Dark Portal. Once there, players can access a flight path directly from the Stair of Destiny to Shattrath.
- The local Postal Service has grown tired of walking so far each day to collect mail and have decided to install a large number of new mailboxes to Stormwind, Undercity, Darnassus and Orgrimmar.
- Northrend Children’s Week has arrived in Dalaran! Players can find out more by visiting the Eventide District.
- The newest season of Arena gear can only be purchased if you meet the requirements with your 3 or 5 player team rating. Rating requirements from 2 player teams can still be used to purchase the previous season of gear.
- Players will now be awarded experience for completing objectives and actions that yield honor in Battlegrounds (honorable kills not included). Players who do not wish to gain experience through PvP can visit Behsten in Stormwind or Slahtz in Orgrimmar – both located near the Battlemasters in either city – and turn off all experience accumulation for the cost of 10 gold. Disabling experience gains will prevent a player from gaining experience through any means available in the game. Behsten and Slahtz can reinstate experience gains for players, for a 10 gold fee of course. Any experience that would’ve been accumulated if experience gains were not turned off cannot be recovered.
- Axe Specialization (Orc): The weapon bonus from this effect now applies to fist weapons in addition to axes.
- Both the 10 and 25 player instances of the Crusaders’ Coliseum drop a new Emblem of Triumph. Any dungeons that previously dropped Emblems of Heroism or Valor, such as Naxxramas or Heroic Halls of Stone, will now drop Emblems of Conquest instead. Emblems of Conquest can still be converted to Valor or Heroism.
- The cast time for summoning any ground mount is now 1.5 seconds, down from 3 seconds.
- Apprentice Riding (Skill 75): Can now be learned at level 20 for 4 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 20 directing them to the riding trainer.
- Journeyman Riding (Skill 150): Can now be learned at level 40 for 50 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 40 directing them back to the riding trainer.
- Expert Riding (Skill 225): Can now be learned at level 60 for 600 gold from trainers in Honor Hold or Thrallmar. Faction discounts now apply (Honor Hold for Alliance; Thrallmar for Horde). Flight speed at this skill level has been increased to 150% of run speed, up from 60%.
- Artisan Riding (Skill 300): Faction discounts now apply (Honor Hold or Valiance Expedition for Alliance; Thrallmar or Warsong Offensive for Horde).
- Flying over Dalaran and Wintergrasp is now possible so long as players keep a healthy distance above the ground.
- Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage over time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. The other effects of resilience (reducing critical chance, critical damage and mana drain effects) have not changed.
- Casting bars under a target’s portrait will now indicate whether or not the cast can be interrupted.
- Item Comparisons: Holding the shift key while hovering over an item will now display the stat differences with the item currently equipped in the relevant slot.
- Quest creatures and objects will now show on the player’s world map.
- The quest log is now double-paned for more easily viewing quest information.
- Vendor prices will now be listed on items whether or not players are at a vendor.