I've Moved!

I've moved the blog to my own hosting account, you can find me at:

http://wow-addict.pwnyguild.com

3.1.2 Patch Notes

In case you didn't actually read the patch notes from yesterday, here they are:

World of Warcraft Client Patch 3.1.2 - (2009-05-19)

The latest test realm patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

The latest patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

General

• Equipment Manager
• When enabled from the Interface Options menu, this feature will allow players to store sets of equipment, easily swap between saved sets using hotkeys, and pull items directly from backpacks or bank slots (must be at the bank to equip inventory from the bank).
• New art textures have been added for Argent Tournament mounts. Any mounts already purchased from the Argent Tournament vendors will be updated automatically. Argent Tournament mounts with the old textures will still be available for purchase from the Argent Tournament vendors for a small Champion's Seal and gold cost (standard faction requirements apply).

PVP

• Vehicle health and damage output in Strand of the Ancients and Wintergrasp now scale with the item level of the operator's gear. Power scaling is now 1% damage and 1% health per average item level.
• All Wintergrasp daily quests have been changed to a weekly format. The honor and Stone Keeper's Shards rewarded for completing these quests have been increased to compensate.
• The bonus honor for winning the battle in Wintergrasp and controlling/destroying towers has been reduced.

Death Knights

• Improved Death Strike: This talent now also increases the healing from Death Strike by 25/50% and the tooltip has been adjusted to reflect the actual functionality after the hotfix in 3.1.0.
• Ghoul Frenzy: Now has a 10-second cooldown.

Druids

• Innervate: This ability has been redesigned to grant 450% of the casting Druid's base mana pool to the target over 20 seconds.
• Improved Moonkin Form: Now grants 10/20/30% of spirit as spell power.

Hunters

• Disengage: Cooldown reduced by 5 seconds.

Mages

• Mirror Images: The images summoned by this spell will now target the creature that most hates the Mage, and should no longer cast Fire Blast or Frostbolt on targets that are affected by crowd control debuffs that break immediately on damage unless they are already casting these spells when crowd control is applied.

Paladins

• Blessing of Wisdom and Greater Blessing of Wisdom: Now grant 92 mana per 5 seconds to prevent being overwritten by Mana Spring Totem.
• Exorcism: Can no longer be used on player-controlled creatures.

Priests

• Divine Hymn: Healing and healing scaling reduced by 30%. Buff on affected players changed from 15% to 10%.
• Renewed Hope: Effect can no longer be dispelled.
• Soul Warding: Mana cost reduction is now 15% down from 30%.

Warlocks

• Conflagrate updated: Consumes an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 12 seconds of your Immolate, or 8 seconds of your Shadowflame.
• Fire and Brimstone: Now increases the damage done by your Incinerate and Chaos Bolt by 3/6/9/12/15% on targets afflicted by Immolate, and increases the critical strike chance of your Conflagrate by 5/10/15/20/25%. In addition, the increased critical strike chance of Conflagrate provided by this talent no longer requires the Immolate effect to have 5 seconds or fewer remaining on the target.
• Nether Protection reduced to 30% damage reduction, down from 60%.
• Sacrifice (Voidwalker) redesigned: Sacrifices a portion of the Voidwalker's health, giving its master a shield that will absorb X damage for 30 seconds. While the shield holds, spell casting will not be interrupted by damage. 1-minute cooldown.
• Shadow and Flame: Now also includes Shadowburn.

Warriors

• Juggernaut: Critical strike chance bonus reduced to 25%, down from 100%.

Items

• Arena weapons with an item level of 239 have had their rating requirements increased to 2350.
• Darkruned Battlegear 2-Piece Set Bonus: The bonus critical strike chance for Frost Strike and Death Coil has been increased from 5% to 8%.
• Furious Gladiator's Staff and Furious Gladiator's Greatstaff: The agility values on these two items were too high. They have been reduced by 50%.
• Glyphs
• Glyph of Innervate: Has been adjusted to grant the Druid 90% of his or her base mana pool over 20 seconds.
• Glyph of Mass Dispel: Now only decreases Mass Dispel cost by 35%.
• Glyph of Rapid Charge: Reduced to 7%, down from 20% cooldown reduction to Charge.
• Guise of the Midgard Serpent: The base attack power on this item has been lowered to balance it against items of a similar quality.
• Increased the health and mana restored from Northrend food and drinks.
• Most scopes now have a level requirement and will bind the item to which they are applied.
• Nightsong Garb 4-Piece Set Bonus: Chance for Insect Swarm to trigger an instant Starfire changed to 15%.
• Scourgeborne Battlegear 4-Piece Set Bonus: The runic power gain has been reduced to 5 runic power from 10 runic power.
• Ulduar 10-player hard mode weapons have been updated to item level 232.

Professions

• Fishing
• Jewel of the Sewers: You can now fish in all parts of the Dalaran sewers for this quest.
• Phantom Ghostfish: Can now be caught from Nettlefish schools in Sholazar Basin.

Bug Fixes

Death Knights

• Anti-magic Shell: Tooltip error corrected.
• Blood Boil: If no target is available for Blood Boil to hit, the spell will now cast and consume a blood rune but generate no runic power.

Druids

• Maim: Rank 2 of this ability is properly considered a stun and can be escaped by Blink.

Hunters

• Go For The Throat: Explosive Shot critical strikes now trigger this talent.
• Lock and Load: The tooltip has been corrected to display its actual chance to occur.
• Rabid: This Hunter pet talent no longer lists a percentage chance to be triggered, as that chance varies by the attack speed of the pet.

Paladins

• Divine Sacrifice: Damage done to the Paladin while this is active will no longer cause the effect to break early, and if it is dispelled or cancelled early, the damage counter will reset correctly the next time the spell is cast.

Rogues

• Shadow Dance: Issues with action bars and ability use arising from using Stealth while Shadow Dance is active have been fixed.
• Tricks of the Trade: To prevent exploits, this ability can no longer be cast on non-player targets.

Warlocks

• Demonic Sacrifice: This spell will no longer appear in any Warlock's spellbook.

Professions

• Tailoring
• Swordguard Embroidery: Now correctly increases ranged attack power.

Dungeons and Raids

Ulduar

• Hodir should now reset in a timely manner if a group fails to kill him.
• 10-player bosses that drop Runed Orbs will also sometimes drop the recipes that use those orbs.
• The Spark of Imagination: Characters that release in part of the boss room will no longer be ported to Westfall or The Barrens.

Add Ons

Who doesn't love addons? I love them. I might actually be addicted to them, last time QuestHelper broke I was literally unable to do any quests...seriously.

So, I'm thinking that I'm going to start featuring addons that I use and maybe even try to get some of my guildies to do write-ups about their favorite addons.

Sometimes it can be so hard...

We spent last night in Naxx on alts instead of clearing bosses in Ulduar...

Our guild isn't large, we rarely have more than 12 people logged in on any given night and if the moon is aligned properly we might have 16 but it's super rare. Out of those 12 regulars we have 10, maybe 11 "raiders". Raiders are the folks that we expect there to be logged in and raiding on most, if not all, of our three raid nights. One benefit if having those solid 10 regulars is that we have a lean, mean boss-killing machine. But, if one or two people don't log in it can seriously put a wrench in the works. Last night was a prime example- one of our DPS/off tank DKs is out of town. Normally that wouldn't be a problem, but we start raiding at 8PM so if we don't have enough people on by 7:50 or so we have to start figuring out what we're going to do instead and one of our main healers wasn't logged in.

So, we got on alts and went to Naxx. By the time we got in the missing healer logged in which was a relief because I was main healing on Ipaq and I'm just not geared enough to main heal quite yet. That being said I did a pretty bang-up job last night if I do say so myself and I did get a number of good upgrades, two of which replaced some questing greens that I still had. Shameful, I know.

Overall a good night for our alts, but it's frustrating that we lost a whole night of progression raiding for this week. But then again, we probably won't have enough on for our Sunday raid due to Memorial Day Weekend that is coming up in a few days. I know I'll be out of town and may not be on.

Girl's Name.

So you may have noticed that I have a girl's name but my toon is a dude. Last week I gave Blizzard $15 to partake in the character customization service that they offer. To be honest it's a pretty good deal considering that a name change alone is $10, so for $5 more you get the option of a name change AND the re-customization.

Lyssa was the first character I created when I started playing WoW back in December of '04. I had this great idea of playing a toon modeled after my wife. Well after almost 5 years of my wife telling me that Lyssa looks like a dyke and having to look at sissy tanking shoulder graphics and sissy character animations I finally got fed up and turned Lyssa into a man.

The entire process was pretty painless, I initiated the process at work by logging into my WoW account, picking the server, the toon then giving Blizzard a credit card number. They ask that you have to be logged out of the game for at least 30 minutes before you can start customizing in the game client, not a big deal since I was at work and wouldn't be doing it until I got home that night.

I wish I had thought to take some screenshots of the game client, when you login there is an icon next to the character that you are customizing. You have the option to login with the character as-is or change him/her- if you login as-is you can still customize but I'm thinking you have to wait 30 minutes after logging out again. Once I clicked the customize button I was taken back to the original character selection screen. All the race and class buttons are grayed out, the only active buttons are the sex and feature buttons. Your toon actually appears with all the gear you currently have equipped which I thought was pretty neat. Anyway, after about 10 minutes of picking skin color and face I got to the name field.

Now, the name was something that I was struggling with. On one hand everyone who knows me on the server knows me as Lyssa and the blizzard servers will automatically update friend's lists, etc with the new name. On the other hand...well, it's a girl's name.

The more I thought about it the more I realized that who cares if it's a girl's name or not and, besides, our server is one of the original servers and any name that I would want is most likely taken already. I decided to stick with what I had.

It's been a few days now and I've got to say that keeping the name isn't that big a deal, it doesn't bother me at all. The guildies are having a good row at me (loltranny) and I've certainly shocked a few buddies who had no idea that I was through with it.

At the end of the day I'm totally glad I did it, I'm much happier with my toon.

No Stock UI

There is a new WoW blog that started up a few weeks ago that I've been following, No Stock UI. The folks over there are all about addons. When you have some time check them out, they may introduce you to just the addon you've been looking for.

Freya Down

Last night we downed Freya for the first time, it took us 3 or 4 attempts. She dropped:

Gloves of the Wayward Vanquisher - Raistln
Ironbark Faceguard - Lyssa
Alchemist's Cache - Finnegus

After, we cleared to Mimiron and he's going to be a tough fight. We got him to phase 2 and called it a night. Tomorrow we'll be back and should be able to clear most of everything so, hopefully, by Thursday we'll be back at Mimiron for some new attempts.

We had Wintergrasp so we went and did 10-man Archavon. This was my first time fighting the new boss they added, we got pallie, druid and shaman gear.

Wow, this blog has been sitting for a year.

Damn, somehow I completely forgot about this blog. Jeez, the last boss kill I posted was us killing Mag...a lot has happened since February of '08.

Pwny is still around and kicking.

In BC we cleared up to Lady Vashj, KT and Zul'jin. We downed Rage Winterchill as well. At that point we had lost a bunch of raiders to real life and stopped all 25-man raiding. We broke off and joined another guild for a short period, but things didn't work out so we left and came back to Pwny.

It was a slow wait for Wrath of the Lich King, a bunch of people lost interest and we were just biding our time.

When the new expansion came out we all busted our butts to get to 80 and for the first time we are actually on the cusp of the new content.

Because Blizz made 10 and 25 man versions of the instances in WotLK the officers made the decision to keep us small and stick to the 10-man raiding. With our current size we don't have a problem fielding a solid 10-man team 3 times a week.

We cleared Naxx, Maylgos and Sartharian before the latest patch and we are currently working Ulduar. For once we are on the cusp of content, we aren't playing catch-up with other guilds, lagging an instance or 2 behind. It's awesome to be seeing the new content when pretty much everyone else is.

Another 70

I hit 70 on Blessyou this morning. That makes 4 70s...and another flying mount to buy...

Another 60...

Last night I dinged 60 on my Rogue Veddy. I rode out to Kharanos to pick up my epic riding mount and totally forgot that it was 540g for the riding skill. Ugh... Guess Veddy is taking the slow bus for a while until I get that gold saved up.