Posts with tag patch-3.0.9

We've got a good show planned on the podcast tomorrow afternoon: we'll welcome back Michael Sacco (formerly "Belfaire" on the official Blizzard forums), and, after long last, we're welcoming Matthew Rossi back onto the show -- we just couldn't ignore the demand after he posted that badass picture of himself the other day. And speaking of pictures, the pic above is put together by Michael at Galefire, from Turpster's little illustration we posted last week. How awesome is that?

We'll talk about all the biggest stories of the past week, including patch 3.0.9, the dual spec news, and the Love is in the Air event. Our Facebook page is less than 100 fans away from our goal of 4,000, so odds are that the new Turpster song is really close. And as usual, we'll answer your emails and hold our unofficial pre-show and aftershow, so be sure to come a little early and stay a little late.

It all starts at 3:30pm Eastern tomorrow (20:30 GMT) over on Ustream, and we've also put the streaming dealy below the cut on this post, too, so you can just click through below to listen and chat if you happen to be around. See you there!

For about five shining minutes, Mages were over-powered. Arcane Mages, to be precise. Or so everyone tells me. All I know is that for the first time in a long time, I felt the kind of power I always assumed Mages were meant to wield.

Patch 3.0.9 has brought Arcane Mages back down to earth, though, and only some of the bad stuff was actually in the patch notes. You see, along with the incredibly clunky and obtuse changes to Arcane Power and Presence of Mind (effectively ending PoM-Pyro specs as we knew them), and the nerf to Slow, this briefly mighty spec has also received a bonus undocumented nerf to our signature spell: Arcane Barrage.

After a whole lot of us noticed we simply weren't doing the same damage post-patch that we were pre-patch, the official forums lit up with Mages contending that Arcane Barrage simply wasn't packing the punch it used to. Though the tooltip hadn't changed, the damage had fallen off considerably. Last night, Eyonix responded with a post explaining the change and letting us know that its effects would be monitored. I always thought the PTR was a good place to monitor changes, but what do I know?

Before we discuss this any further, let me just put it up front that I'm setting the over-under on "QQ MOAR" comments following this post at 45. I'm taking the over.

Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we dive deep into the 3.0.9 patch changes for Rogues.

I remember where I was at when I read the 3.0.9 patch notes when they were forwarded our way on the WoW Insider tip line. I was in line at the grocery store, picking up a gallon of milk and some sausage to make biscuits and gravy. Reading the tiny print on my iPhone, I scrolled down to the Brittle Yellow class text that triggers an instant reaction from any fellow assassin: Rogue changes.

Just four tiny lines, yet our entry doubled that of nearly every other class. These short, simple sentences would set the blogging community and the Official Rogue (and General, and Damage Dealing, and Paladin...) Forums ablaze in riot. How could we keep believing in Blizzard? My first thought upon reading the now infamous Assassination nerf: "They're nerfing Mutilate by HOW much?"

I've been out of the office more than I've been in this week due to moving into a new place, so I haven't had a chance to gush about this yet: Holy crap, they actually made Inner Fire unable to be dispelled. Moreover, it has a 30 minute duration! That's just beautiful, even if it still has the Charges mechanic.

Inner Fire is pretty great, and it does its job well. Usually. The big issue with the spell was that it had so many hooks and drawbacks. Short duration, limited charges, and able to be dispelled. That's about two hooks too many. I don't mind keeping the Charges around because the spell supplies a massive amount of armor (for a cloth class.) I'm okay with making a Priest be careful about keeping it up at all times in PvP. In PvE, the 10 minute duration is just a nuisance and in PvP some random melee will burn away the charges in less than its full duration anyway. It was just an annoyance all around and a very unnecessary hook.

Inner Fire probably should have been unable to be dispelled right from the point they did it for Mages and Warlocks, but better late than never. That Enhancement Shaman will just need to swing his weapons a little longer to get rid of your Inner Fire, instead of just spam Purge to shut you down. To me, this is a good thing. To the Shaman... perhaps not so good.

Mirror, mirror on the wall... who has the bestist mirrors of them all?

Big Download has mirrored patch 3.0.9 for everyone. We've got localizations up for the EU WoW as well (English, German, Spanish, French, and Russian). Remember that you need to have WoW updated to patch 3.0.8a in order to install patch 3.0.9. Big Download also has those files available.

Patch 3.0.9 contains a few changes, and is a postscript to patch 3.0.8 and patch 3.0.8a.

We're expecting the patch 3.1 PTR to drop anytime.

Updated 2:24 p.m. EST: You can also now get the Mac client (enUS only).

As usual, please do not post links to other mirror sites in the comments. We cannot verify their integrity. We do this for your safety!

So here we are. It looks like we're getting a patch 3.0.9 today with no PTR and no major advanced warning, if the extended maintenance has anything to say about it. On the good side, maybe this means they're working hard to get 3.1 out, and didn't want to spare the time on a 3.0.9 PTR. Then again, the patch is so small it seems sort of strange to me that they needed a new version number for it and not that other little patch just after 3.0.8 proper. Then again, maybe that is why I am a writer instead of a software engineer.

Anyhow, since we're looking at 8 hours of downtime, you're going to need something to occupy your time. So, as usual, let me recommend some articles from the past week that you have missed the first time around.

You knew it was coming. Wipe that surprised look off your face.

All realms will be down for maintenance tomorrow, February 10th, from 3:00 a.m. PST / 6:00 a.m. EST until 11:00 a.m. PST / 2:00 p.m. EST.

The maintenance is coming about to release patch 3.0.9, which will contain a few modifications you can read about here.

There is also a good chance the PTR for patch 3.1 will be released soon. Check out WoW Insider's Guide to Patch 3.1 for more information.

If there are any problems with the patch or maintenance becomes extended, we'll let you know right away.

In the fast and furious world of Wrath of the Lich King, Blizzard delivers a new patch hot on the heels of the less-than-stellar Patch 3.0.8. According to MMO Champion, Patch 3.0.9 will be going live this week, likely after Tuesday's weekly maintenance. It's a relatively minor patch but will have some significant changes for some classes and encounters. Notable changes include:

• Paladin seals now last 30 minutes and are no longer dispellable
• The Divine Plea nerf is pushing through, with the heal penalty raised to 50% but no longer dispellable
• Hunger for Blood was buffed, and Mutilate was nerfed
• Curse of Tongues, Slow, and Mind-Numbing Poison were nerfed to a maximum of 30% casting speed penalty
• The void fissures in the Obsidian Sanctum have been recolored to make the encounter easier

The rest of the changes after the jump.

Once you start throwing multiple drakes into the mix, I love the Sartharion encounter. It's very frantic, and takes everyone performing. What I don't love is how hard it is to see the shadow fissures that spawn in the encounter when there's a lot going on. Red on red is awful, and then when you throw a Death Knight's Death and Decay into the mix if you're using one? It's pretty much an orgy of red, and you can't really tell which red is from what source.

I quite literally leapt for joy when Daelo, lead encounter designer, mentioned that they'll be turning blue in a future patch. It's a minor tweak to the encounter, but it will seriously help those moments when you have a void zone beneath a Death and Decay and you have a tank who is tanking loads of whelps and elementals which are already obscuring their vision. The hardest part of the fight isn't the movements, the hardest part is being able to see.

This does make me wonder what they'll do with future, similar things. The terrain alone makes the void zones hard to see during Sartharion, but the largest issue (I think) is Death and Decay. It's big, fluffy, and extremely red. Will they simply not be able to use red ground effects anymore? My raid doesn't do it, but there are raids out there that forbid Death Knights from using Death and Decay for the specific reason that it hides AOEs beneath it, so I have to wonder if there's a better solution to the problem than changing colors without removing the 'cool factor' of the DnD particle effect.

Dear Blizzard: Undo the Beastmastery nerfs or the cow gets it. Signed, Scattered Shots.

So as you heard the other day, the dev team admits it. They were a little too overly enthusiastic in their nerfs. Beast Mastery is too low, and will be seeing some buffs "before Ulduar," probably related to Serpent's Swiftness or Kindred Spirits. Of course, Beastmastery Hunters could have told you a while ago that the nerfs were too much, and did. Ghostcrawler not only told us that we had the wrong numbers, but that it hardly mattered because everything would change with Ulduar anyway. So to see him change to this degree is a little disorienting, I must admit.

But anyway, this column is not meant to rake Ghostcrawler across the coals. I think he's a pretty decent guy all around. Besides, it's not the first time he's put his foot in his mouth, and it probably won't be the last, either. Overall, I'm glad he's at least communicating, and that he, as the "face" of the dev team, is at least willing to come out and communicate and admit when they were wrong. What I'm really interested in is exactly where the class is going.

There is a small patch deployed today, fixing at least the three bugs we reported on last night.

The patch is a client side patch. This means you'll need to download a new, albeit small, patch when you first log onto WoW today. For me, the patch downloaded and installed automatically when I executed the World of Warcraft Launcher on my desktop (pictured above).

This patch brings the game from version 3.0.8.9464 to 3.0.8.9506. Updated: The patch is 6.923mb in size on a Windows computers (interestingly the program you have to download to get the patch is an additional 2.1mb). The realms should be up by 11:00 a.m. PST / 2:00 p.m. EST today.

We'll bring you more as we learn it.

Tomorrow we'll be seeing maintenance for all realms between 3:00 a.m. PST / 6:00 a.m. EST and 11:00 a.m. PST. / 2:00 p.m. EST. Ideally these things don't go over, but as you know, they often do. Look to posts throughout the morning on WoW Insider for updates.

We know that there'll be a few bug fixes, which we posted about earlier. There is still no word if this will be a server side only fix or if there'll be a client side patch, presumably patch 3.0.9. Again, we'll get the news up on the site as soon as we find out.

Ghostcrawler has updated us on the status of three major bugs that have been present since patch 3.0.8 went live last Tuesday.

• The Hunter Aspect bug, in which aspects are on a global cooldown like mechanism.
  
• The Warlock Ritual of Summoning, which had a two minute cooldown implemented to prevent some sort of undisclosed exploit.
• Howling Blast, which showed to not have a cooldown, but in reality had a five second one.
  

"Assuming nothing comes up at the last minute", Ghostcrawler says, "[these] will be fixed tomorrow."

There is no word if these fixes will come in the form of a small patch to the client, or if they are going to be done server side. Since the Howling Blast is a bug that is linked to client data files, I would assume that fixing it necessitates rolling out a minor patch. However that's just an assumption based on the way things were done in the past, and Blizzard could have other technology present to circumvent the need for a full patch.

Nonetheless, a couple more bugs will get fixed tomorrow. This is a good thing.

On Thursday, January 8th Nethaera sent out a memo to all the fan sites asking them to announce it, and Eyonix posted on the forums for all the rest of us. Latency and connectivity issues will be fixed in patch 3.0.8. The crowds cheered, babies cried in joy, and dog and cats started to live together. The world would be right again.

Fast forward 15 days later.

The high latency while raiding places like Naxxramas and Malygos is still there. The servers are still packed with queue. The patch was a near disaster. And we're still getting bug reports in every 10 minutes, both in comments and via our tip-line.

Many people want to know why this hasn't been fixed. People are out looking for blood. The whole head on a pike sort of thing.

A better way to approach the situation is to try to come up with contingency plans and other activities to do. If Blizzard cannot get their servers to work, to the point that many consider the game playable, then people will need to focus on other aspects of the game or try to work around the problematic parts.

On the couple servers I play on many of the top guilds have decided to stop raiding for the night if there are any problems with high latency in the raid instances. On Alex's server people raid only for a couple hours after 10pm when the queues and population have dropped off. And still other guilds I know have just said forget it completely and are on hiatus until these issues are fixed.