Patch 3.1.2 goes live today

A minor patch it may be, but it does bring a few changes of interest:
- The Equipment Manager, which was originally slated to be a part of patch 3.1, is now enabled. Personally, I'm still sticking with Outfitter.
- The Argent Tournament mounts now have a new look. Old mounts already bought are upgraded to the new look automatically. You can buy both kinds of mounts from the Tourney vendors.
- Innervate: This ability has been redesigned to grant 450% of the casting Druid's base mana pool to the target over 20 seconds.
- [Warrior] Juggernaut: Critical strike chance bonus reduced to 25%, down from 100%.
The whole patch notes, including some fun class changes, are after the break.
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).
- Copied Test Realm characters will no longer be copied with their achievement history in order to better facilitate the character copy process.
PVP
- Vehicle health and damage output in Strand of the Ancients and Lake 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 Lake 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.
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.
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%.
- 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
- 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 Conflagrate redesigned: When you use Conflagrate, the damage done by your next 3 Destruction spells is increased by 10% for 15 seconds if the Immolate on the target has 5 or fewer seconds remaining.
- 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.
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
- 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
- Players can no longer become saved to an instance when they aren't in the instance during a boss kill.
- 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.
Filed under: Patches, News items






Reader Comments (Page 1 of 8)
Amonneth May 19th 2009 11:08AM
Wonder if Equipment Manager will break Wardrobe/Outfitter... sigh.
Scott May 19th 2009 12:17PM
Seeing how the Equipment Manager can be turned on/off via in-game settings (off by default), I can only assume Outfitter will continue working as is.
Mageymage May 19th 2009 1:47PM
"The images summoned by this spell will now target the creature that most hates the Mage"
So... warlocks?
Xanwryn May 20th 2009 1:46AM
Had a discussion on that a while back. Warlocks and Mages don't have to be enemies, not even lore-wise. They usually are though depending on the personality of both people since Warlocks are apparently failed Mages who turned to demonic powers instead.
Of course, IMO, if both Warlock and Mage are evil they'll kill you anyways. Like they give a shit (I know I don't, I love both classes).
Allin May 20th 2009 6:55AM
@ Mageymage
I made the exact same joke in the article about mirror images on May 1st 2009. =p
zidaneqrro May 20th 2009 7:11AM
OOOH SHIT WARRIORS
SmellySocks May 19th 2009 11:12AM
Okay I have a problem ... it would appear to be a 3.5gb download... does that make sense
Zef May 19th 2009 11:20AM
Mine is 14.8MB which seems more reasonable.
Fadmin May 19th 2009 11:25AM
Mine says/was 14.8 mb - fast download even with p2p turned off. Patch ver is 3.1.2.9901-enUS-patch.exe - ymmv.
Arcaria May 19th 2009 1:56PM
Yours is downloading the entire game again. That's a corrupt file or patcher. Do a search on the tech forums to get it to work.
Auguste May 19th 2009 11:13AM
I wonder if they're finally going to fix the tournament tabards. :(
Malkavos May 19th 2009 2:30PM
I was wondering about that. Do they all look like your guild tabard?
AruKusanagi May 19th 2009 11:14AM
Upon getting to the title screen I got a message saying "some of your video settings have been reset." Any idea what was changed because of the patch?
Amonneth May 19th 2009 11:26AM
I got the same, and no idea, but I *hope* they optimized the "Ultra" mode rendering techniques a bit, crystalsong forest brings my machine to its knees, while the rest of the game is perfectly fine at 8xAA. The engine is really showing its age... Not that upgrading it significantly is a significant value proposition to Blizzard, but a guy can hope!
Arcaria May 19th 2009 11:22AM
I just got the same message. That sucks.
Joshua Ochs May 19th 2009 11:44AM
@Amonneth: I'll place bets that it's when you're in the vicinity of Dalaran that it happens. Whenever I get within spitting distance of it (even on the ground below it), my frame rates drop by nearly an order of magnitude. Blizzard's only response is advising me to get a new computer (I wasn't aware a MacBook Pro was a slouch).
Blizz seems to want you to have one computer for Dalaran, and a different one for all of the rest of WoW. And they see nothing wrong with that.
MacDisciple May 19th 2009 11:44AM
So change them back using the control panel = not hard.
Gnosh May 19th 2009 11:54AM
Yup, it's Dalaran. Avoid the maxed Shadows setting- it forces hardware rendering of shadows you can't even SEE (people in Dalaran). They're only per-texel shadows, but it can get ugly.
Keyra May 19th 2009 11:55AM
I received the same message, so I clicked on the "Options" button there on the login screen...hmm...no changes that I could see. Weird.
mdmadph May 19th 2009 12:05PM
@Joshua Ochs
Turn down your graphic settings, including the shadows setting.
No a Macbook Pro is not old nor a slouch, but its video chip isn't exactly the fastest around (not even in the newest Macbook Pro). It's quite underpowered if you're trying to play games at their highest setting.