Patch 4.0.6 hotfixes for Feb. 18
by Anne Stickney 
Feb 19th 2011 at 3:16AM
Blizzard's serving up some weekend hotfixes, included the promised dungeon finder changes from earlier this week. Community Manager Zarhym posted the updated list earlier, and along with the dungeon finder tweaks, we've also got a fairly good list of class changes. Keep in mind, while the dungeon finder changes have been implemented, they will take a realm restart in order to take effect. Some highlights:
- For hunters, Aspect of the Hawk now provides around an additional 2,000 attack power at level 85.
- For paladins, Light of Dawn no longer heals targets outside the paladin's party or raid. It correctly heals up to five targets in the paladin's raid.
- For warlocks, instant-cast Shadowbolts from Shadow Trance (both the talent and Glyph of Corruption versions) should no longer consume charges of Backdraft if both procs are available.
Zarhym- Battlegrounds
- Demolishers were respawning too quickly in Strand of the Ancients. They are now on a 20-second spawn timer.
- Classes
- Death Knights
- Death knight Ghouls under the effects of Dark Transformation can no longer cast Gnaw while it's on cooldown.
- Hunters
- Aimed Shot damage has been decreased to approximately 160% weapon damage (at level 80+), down from 200%.
- Aspect of the Hawk now provides around an additional 2000 attack power at level 85.
- Paladins
- Light of Dawn no longer heals targets outside the paladin's party or raid. It correctly heals up to 5 targets in the paladin's raid.
- Priests
- Body and Soul no longer reduces the mana cost of Power Word: Shield (the hotfix made on February 16 to provide this additional benefit has been reverted).
- Rapture now returns 2/5/7% of maximum mana when Power Word: Shield is consumed, up from 2/4/6%.
- Warlocks
- Instant-cast Shadowbolts from Shadow Trance (both the talent and Glyph of Corruption versions) should no longer consume charges of Backdraft if both procs are available. Shadow Trance will always take priority and be consumed first when Backdraft is active. Subsequent Shadowbolts will consume Backdraft stacks.
- Warriors
- Two-Handed Weapon Specialization (Arms passive) now gives 20% bonus damage with two-handed weapons, up from 10%.
- Death Knights
- Dungeon Finder
- If a party member remains outside of a dungeon for more than 3 minutes, they become eligible for removal, regardless of other Vote Kick restrictions.
- When players queue as a group with a tank or a healer, and the tank or healer drops group (or is kicked) within the first 5 minutes, all of the other players who queued with them are removed from the group as well.
- If there is a group of 3 or more friends and someone in that group initiates a Vote Kick of a random party member, it now requires 4 votes to kick the player, instead of the standard 3 votes.
- The penalty for using the Vote Kick feature too often is not issued to a player who kicks someone with whom they queued for a dungeon (i.e. the party member being selected for removal is not a player randomly selected via the Dungeon Finder).
- The penalty for using the Vote Kick feature too often will be issued much more quickly to players who join as a party of 4 and kick the randomly selected 5th player.
- The penalty for using the Vote Kick feature too often will now not allow the player to initiate a Vote Kick for 2 hours, up from 45 minutes.
- These changes will require realm restarts to take effect. More information can be found here.
- Dungeons & Raids
- When switching a normal raid dungeon over to Heroic difficulty, players were instantly becoming saved without warning. There is now a warning dialog box which will appear before the difficulty is changed.
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Ghoti Feb 19th 2011 3:28AM
Thank god for the priest change.
It was rather Ironic that holy priests got more synergy with PW:S than disc does.
On another note:
...does Blizzard actually test? Some of these changes are bug fixes, granted.
But most of them are to do with im-balancing.
I mean, do they test with numbers? Like "Mr.Robot" style 'this spell is good, use it'.
Or do they test with actual gameplay? I know there's the PTR, but how many people can raid/dungeon/group in those?
If the game is being balanced around raids being balanced for every classes, wouldn't it be supportive of blizzard to test each class/specs viability in raid...by actually doing a raid test run?
Surely the healers at blizzard can't be as crap as me.
Spazmoose Feb 19th 2011 3:53AM
Coming from the viewpoint of a programmer/designer, there are always things that come up in your code that you weren't expecting. You may make a small change to the code in one place, that has amazingly incredible, unexpected effects elsewhere.
For instance, I recently made a change to a bit of code at my workplace, which ideally would have made my life much, much easier. As it turned out, it broke a section of code that was only remotely related to what I was dealing with, and as such, the changes I originally made had to be reverted, and another method (which was much more cumbersome) needed to be used.
You have to realize too, that a lot of what Blizzard changed with Cataclysm not only made things nicer for the players, but likely made the lives of the developers easier as well (which is evidenced by their ability to change a couple numbers on the server side in order to balance, as opposed to having to wait until patches to fix it). Balancing numbers like this is extremely difficult to model due to the volume of numbers you are dealing with, and things slip through, it happens.
In the end, my guess is that Blizzard does do a lot of testing on the game, with most of it focused on whether or not an ability is or is not "broken", as opposed to "does it hit hard enough".
radda Feb 19th 2011 3:55AM
Why pay a lot of testers when they can get stuff tested for free?
They think of a minor change, implement it, watch what happens, and tweak it as needed. Major changes go on the PTR of course, which is also free testing.
That's not to say that they don't have any testers, but using us for free (hell, we PAY them for the privilege to test their game...) just makes sense, especially when fixes can be made very quickly. Sinestra was hotfixed in-between bouts with Paragon after all.
yujie.max Feb 19th 2011 4:30AM
Because the impatient gamers who play the game are NOT happy playing to test. They play to enjoy the game in its balanced state. If Blizzard does that, it will result in massive QQ.
I personally would not mind doing it, though.
In moderation, of course! I know the game is ever-changing, but, come on, changing every few minutes? Naww.
cyanea85 Feb 19th 2011 6:03AM
You act like it wasn't like this in Wrath.
Except it was.
However in Wrath, they lacked the ability to make certain key changes to the game without patches, so classes and abilities remained broken or OP for longer stretches of time. (And every major patch had a week or two of hotfixes afterwards).
It's been two months since the patch that unlocked Cata content came out. We've had one major patch and a number of hotfixes. In that same stretch of time, Wrath (from the patch where Wrath content opened up) had two. I'd rather have more of the former if it means less downtime and less constantly having to update addons.
cyanea85 Feb 19th 2011 6:05AM
*four months
Stupid tired brain.
Manadar Feb 19th 2011 8:07AM
I'm ok with there being some bugs they don't find until patches go live, but it's obvious that they for example didn't test 10-man HC themselves, and instead just tweaked the numbers from 25-man.
Some bugs can be hard to find, but Valiona's adds having the same HP and damage as 25-man is so obvious they couldn't miss it if they tested the encounter. Or how a lot of fights pretty much required 3 tanks and the same number of interrupts.
araquen Feb 19th 2011 8:29AM
First - LOVE the handle :)
Second " ...does Blizzard actually test?" - A Blues just posted that though they see the feedback from the PTR, they don't believe the feedback is sufficient to actually ACT.
So, of course, I had to ask: why even bother with a PTR?
Drakkenfyre Feb 19th 2011 8:38AM
Spazmoose,
Hotfixes have been possible since the beginning. They may have made some changes, to make them easier, but they are not new.
We have seen more hotfixes this expansion so far than we saw at the beginning of other expansions, but they still aren't new.
Pandalicious Feb 19th 2011 7:44PM
Welcome to Chaos Theory
Teresa Feb 19th 2011 4:03AM
I blame the Aimed Shot nerf on the hunters that were whining about hard casting it. Like hitting Arcane Shot 3 times is a more fun focus dump.
Strait nerf for me since I only pvp and rarely if ever use Hawk.
Bagelator Feb 19th 2011 4:34AM
Stupid whiners!
SINisterWyvern Feb 19th 2011 5:45AM
Right, that
SINisterWyvern Feb 19th 2011 5:47AM
Right, that
BigRed Feb 19th 2011 5:52AM
Hmm, following the discussion over at elitistjerks, the Aimed nerf might in fact have more to do with the fact that during Careful Aim Aimed Shot basically crowded out everything else and in the rest of the fight was still on par with Chimera shot - which technically [b]is[/b] the 31-point talent :)
sherekhan88 Feb 19th 2011 10:39AM
@BigRed
That argument doesn't make sense, because the 31-point talent for Survival is Black Arrow, and not Explosive Shot, yet it's signature shot IS Explosive Shot. Which brings to mind, why is there no synergy between Chimera Shot and Aimed Shot, and why is the extra ability to spec into Marksmen NOT Chimera Shot but instead is Aimed Shot?
lazymangaka Feb 19th 2011 11:39AM
I never even switched from Survival post-4.0.6. for this very reason. Alot of the buffs to MM were too good to be true, and I preferred the mobility and CC abilities of SV for PVP as it was.
Sometimes laziness and apathy wins the day.
wutsconflag Feb 20th 2011 1:17PM
If you aren't using Hawk in PVP, then you're doing it wrong. (IE, you need to learn to "stance dance" better - even though Blizzard said we shouldn't need to do that. Macroing Fox/Hawk to the appropriate shots really helps in this regard.)
Anony Moss Feb 19th 2011 4:48AM
I'm generally confused on all the Vote to Kick rules now and why they're so complex. Does Blizzard really think that if 3-4 people in a 5 person group don't want to deal with someone that they got randomly put with that they should have to anyway?
We've seriously had times when someone did nothing but be obnoxious in a group, like running forward and agroing mobs, dieing intentionally, and then just waiting for us to wipe or manage to kill them all then doing it again; but we had to wait 45 minutes to kick him because Blizzard thinks we should have some type of forced socialization.
I can understand trying to put in some protections against purely elitist behavior, but at the same time 45/120 minute restrictions are ridiculous.
Tri Feb 19th 2011 5:02AM
Because those who use the system incorrectly ruins it for the rest of us.
And that is why we can't have nice things.