Patch 5.2 interview with Dave Kosak
Inside an old alt's vault
The latest patch 5.2 news
All of the latest Mists of Pandaria newsOfficial Patch 3.3.2 patch notes
by Alex Ziebart 
Feb 2nd 2010 at 5:20AM
- Halls of Stone: Brann Bronzebeard has been getting into shape and now feels comfortable walking faster when escorted.
- Concussion Blow: The damage done by this ability has been reduced by 50%, but its threat generation will remain approximately the same.
- Violet Hold: The time between a boss being defeated and a new portal opening has been decreased.
- Season 8 has officially begun featuring all-new rewards!
Dungeons & Raids
- Icecrown Citadel
- Frostwing Halls, the final stronghold of the Scourge and their Lich King, has been added.
- Halls of Stone
- Brann Bronzebeard has been getting into shape and now feels comfortable walking faster when escorted.
- The Forge of Souls
- The Devourer of Souls will now cast Mirrored Souls less often.
- The Spell Reflect ability has been altered on several creatures. It now has a cast time, only has 2 charges, and has a 75% chance of reflecting spells.
- The Nexus
- Anomalus will now use the Create Rift ability only once, down from 3 times.
- The Old Kingdom
- Elder Nadox now only gets one Ahn'Kahar Guardian during the encounter.
- Jadoga Shadowseeker now only ascends once during the encounter.
- Several enemies between the Befouled Terrace and The Desecrated Altar have been removed or had their pathing altered.
- Pit of Saron
- Players can now zone back into the instance if they are dead while encounters with Krick and Ick or Forgemaster Garfrost are in progress.
- Utgarde Pinnacle
- Skadi the Ruthless can now be removed from his drake with 3 harpoon strikes, down from 5.
- Svala Sorrowgrave now casts Ritual of the Sword 1 time during the encounter, down from 3.
- Vault of Archavon
- Toravon, the latest boss to join the Vault's giants and masters of the elements, is now accepting challengers in 10- and 25-player formats.
- The Violet Hold
- The time between a boss being defeated and a new portal opening has been decreased.
- All healing abilities (including items such as potions) will be decreased in effectiveness by 10% when in Battlegrounds, Arenas, or Wintergrasp.
- Arenas
- Season 8 has officially begun featuring all-new rewards!
- Talents
- Balance
- Earth and Moon: This talent now increases the druid's spell damage by 2/4/6%, up from 1/2/3%.
- Balance
- Talents
- Elemental Combat
- Shamanism: This talent now provides 4/8/12/16/20% extra spell damage to Lightning Bolt/Chain Lightning, up from 3/6/9/12/15%, and 5/10/15/20/25% to Lava Burst, up from 4/8/12/16/20%.
- Elemental Combat
- Talents
- Affliction
- Shadow Embrace: This effect can now stack up to 3 times, up from 2. However, the periodic healing reduction effect has been reduced from 3/6/9/12/15% to 2/4/6/8/10% per application.
- Demonology
- Demonic Pact: The damage bonus granted the warlock by this talent has been increased from 1/2/3/4/5% to 2/4/6/8/10%. The buff granted to a raid or party by this talent remains unchanged.
- Destruction
- Conflagrate: The damage-over-time effect of Conflagrate has been increased to 40% of the spell's total damage, up from 20%.
- Empowered Imp: The pet bonus damage provided by this talent has been increased to 10/20/30%, up from 5/10/15%.
- Improved Shadow Bolt: Damage done by Shadow Bolt increased by 2/4/6/8/10%, up from 1/2/3/4/5%.
- Affliction
Warriors
- Talents
- Protection
- Concussion Blow: The damage done by this ability has been reduced by 50%, but its threat generation will remain approximately the same.
- Devastate: This ability now deals 120% of weapon damage, up from 100% of weapon damage.
- Shield Slam: The damage scaling from block value for this ability now diminishes faster and diminishes starting at a lower block value. The difference should be negligible for players in high-end tanking armor. In addition, the threat caused by Shield Slam has been increased by 30%.
- Warbringer: This talent no longer allows Charge and Intercept to break roots or snares. Intervene remains unaffected.
- Protection
- The party leader is now referred to as Guide in chat when a group is formed via the Dungeon Finder.
- Fixed a bug where players with Raid Assist capabilities were unable to perform a Ready Check.
- Fixed a bug where the first couple of tutorials were not displaying upon logging into the game.
- New strength-based melee DPS rings are now available from representatives of the Ashen Verdict.
- Tier-9 Sets: The Aspirant vendors at the Argent Tournament grounds have worked out a deal with merchants in Dalaran so that all item level 232 set pieces will now be available on armor vendors in the city. Set pieces which require trophies will still be available for purchase only from vendors at the Argent Tournament grounds.
- Tier-10 Balance Druid 4-Piece Bonus: Fixed a bug to allow for this bonus to properly trigger.
- Tier-10 Elemental Shaman 4-Piece Set Bonus: Redesigned. Successful Lava Burst casts now increase the duration of Flame Shock on the target by 6 seconds.
- Tier-10 Tank Sets: The gloves and chest pieces for warrior, death knight, and paladin tanks have had their stats adjusted slightly to provide additional armor value.
- Tier-10 Warlock 4-Piece Bonus: This bonus should now correctly be applied to the warlock's pet.
- The cvar 'processAffini
tyMask' controls which CPU cores are available for the World of Warcraft client to use. Previously the game client was limited to 2 cores as a default which players could override in the configuration file. In the past this provided a performance boost on some CPUs and operating systems. We have identified several systems that are experiencing severe performance issues with this restriction and have removed it. Players who would like to restore the old behavior can do so by updating the Config.WTF file by adding: SET processAffinityMask "3".
Reader Comments (Page 2 of 7)
Sword Feb 2nd 2010 10:06AM
Well, that is true. But would you be opposed to a "Valorious" difficulty setting for those of us who like harder five mans? I just think it would be nice to have fun in five mans as opposed to them just being a grind.
That is basicly all I was trying to say. I don't care if heroics are easy, I would just like it if there was an actual hardmode setting for Five man content, like in BC. With most if not all classes having crowd control these days, bring the player not the class would apply to this, like shamans.
Charlie Feb 2nd 2010 12:11PM
ZOMG someone actually likes BC. I'd rather staplegun my toenails to my forehead than go back there. In fact, it's a disincentive for leveling new toons.
They're simplifying the bosses in some instances not to make them easier but because they're ANNOYING. And getting rid of the downtime in VH can only be a plus. I mean how long does it take even the dumbest lock to drink? :-)
Now if they'd only get Arthas to STFU in CoS....
Boocat Feb 2nd 2010 5:26AM
I guess Blizzard is helping with the speed runs for the randoms
elboricua1974 Feb 2nd 2010 5:29AM
The heroics changes appear at least to me to be catering to the gogogo faster crowd.
Minidrake Feb 2nd 2010 7:14AM
It may seem that this is just a bone thrown to the "Go Faster" growd, but the changes are also catering for the "Incredibly Overgeared" crowd. They're removing the artificial delays that they originally put into the instances.
Consider, for example, Svala: When a bunch of currently geared 80s rock up to her, it takes about six seconds to burn her down enough to trigger her Ritual of the Sword. Then we kind of stand around and wait for the ritual to finish. As soon as she lands, somebody glances funny in her direction and her HP is down far enough to go into another Ritual.
These sorts of artificial slowdowns were fine when most of us weren't overgeared and the Ritual really was a race to burn down the three channelers holding Svala's victim before the hammer (or sword in this case) dropped. Now, it's just a meaningless, annoying delay.
I know when I sit down to play a game, what I really want is to what a timer tickticktick away whilst I stand there waiting. Yeah. That's some awesome gaming.
Nemu Feb 2nd 2010 7:54AM
Echoing Minidrake, it also seems like Blizz is catering to us "Been there, done that for 4-5 years now" crowd.
Sorry, while I enjoy the lore as much as anyone, I've done this same stuff now forEVER, I don't necessarily want to run Vanilla and BC content AGAIN at the old pace.
(Tho, I have to admit, LFG is fun as heck for a baby toon-it's been years since I've been able to regularly run things like RFD and ZF at-level.)
vanye111 Feb 2nd 2010 9:17AM
@Mini:
You wait for her to come down? Aren't you throwing all your ranged attacks at her as fast as you can? (Pally exorcism, hand of Righteousness, Judgements, Shields; warrior heroic throw, obviously ranged...)
Most of the time I run that one, she's down, then back up.
I just wish they'd do somethign with Anub'arak. Azjol'Nerub is a pain because of all the burrowing....
Minidrake Feb 3rd 2010 10:05AM
Yeah, maybe I should have used Anub'arak for my example. You see what I mean though.
Tom Feb 2nd 2010 5:34AM
Thanks for the notes.
Although i don't quite understand the 'processAffinityMask' change on the WTF file:
Can i change the value to use all my 4 cores? If so, which value should i add?
Tzivya Feb 2nd 2010 5:42AM
My impression is that it will default to using all of them now, and you can throttle it if, for some reason, you need to.
MartinX Feb 2nd 2010 7:35AM
WoW will only ever use two cores max, that's just how it's coded, you can't make it use more than that.
The affinity mask thing only specifies which two cores it will use, the old default setting of "3" locks it to the first two logical cores on a PC (core 0 and core 1).
The problem that some people were having was that on PCs that use hyperthreading, like the core i7s and some pentium4s, logical core 0 and 1 are actually on the same physical Cpu core, just divided by software magic.
What this means is that if you have a quad core cpu with hyperthreading, like an i7, WoW is effectively capped to only using 25% of your processors total power and can choke under certain conditions.
With the new setting Windows itself can now just automatically move half the workload to a different physical core when it detects that another is working too hard, so it'll just switch to using logical core 0 and core 2, which are on different physical cores.
None of this matters if your cpu doesn't support hyperthreading.
The affinity mask setting does allow for some cool tricks though, like if you run more than one copy of wow at once and have a quad core cpu, you can tell each copy of WoW to use different cores so that they aren't fighting for resources. Theres a big thread on the official techforums that describes how it works.
Gx1080 Feb 2nd 2010 5:37AM
To be fair, doing the aditional bosses on Old Kingdom is a major pain in the ass due to the mobs.
Anito Feb 2nd 2010 5:43AM
The Chaos Theory and Volunteer work achievements will be much easier to get now.
I kinda wish they made less-rabi easier to get too, i've been trying to get that achie for a long time now but still no luck :( That's the only achievement i have left for "Glory of the Hero"
MO Feb 2nd 2010 6:06AM
Less-Rabi is already easy to get to, just go in the back door to the instance and you are right there. Similarly if you screw up the achievement just wipe and run back in until you get it done. Btw, if you can bribe an ele shaman to spec for 5-second shocks he can hit the first one after 50% and then just spam his interrupt to catch the rest automatically.
Zahira Feb 2nd 2010 6:35AM
or just fill your part with rogues that know how to use kick...it's really not that hard
RetPallyJil Feb 2nd 2010 6:47AM
Or, and here's a crazy idea:
How about having paladin stuns actually work in instances? As God is my witness, I was helping a friend in Shadowfang Keep, and that punk Arugal laughed at my level 80 Hammer of Justice.
Honestly, it's stupid and needs to be addressed. Everyone else has stuns that work on bosses, so why don't we?
Arann Feb 2nd 2010 7:15AM
Wait, "Everyone else has stuns that work on bosses..."
What?
I'll admit that my prot warrior isn't too far into his career at level 80, but I honestly haven't noticed my fat-finger shockwaves/concussion blows doing much to slow down any bosses. I also haven't seen many bosses suddenly forgetting to bash in a tank's face when a rogue decides to get uppity with kidney shot or something, either.
Am I missing something, or are you referring to interrupt affects rather than stuns?
zweitblom Feb 2nd 2010 7:18AM
"Everyone else has stuns that work on bosses, so why don't we?"
Yes? Who? Bosses are usually immune to stun. Kick is an interrupt, not a stun.
Beruza Feb 2nd 2010 7:24AM
@ Arann
I think RetPallyJil actually meant interrupts. But he/she is wrong anyway. Hunters don't have any interrupts and they dont have any stuns that work on bosses. Some pets have interrupts but I'm pretty sure they don't work on bosses
eenersumbrella Feb 2nd 2010 7:34AM
In response to the paladin, HoJ does interrupt on bosses. It may not stun, but it does interrupt.