Posts with tag patch

Patch 6.1 is on the horizon and if the patch notes are any indication, there are a lot of changes coming our way. Fishing, in particular, is slotted to get a lot of tweaks -- and there have already been some changes to the changes announced in the last patch notes. With the latest changes, fishing throughout Draenor will be streamlined for everyone... though it will still take up an awful lot of inventory space, so be sure to clear your bags before heading out fishing.

Here's the current state of fishing:

• Fish caught in Draenor can be automatically filleted with the Bladebone Hook, a new consumable you can buy from fishing vendors in Draenor. The hook lasts for one hour. Though this was intended to be automatic for everyone without a consumable, negative feedback on the feature seems to have changed Blizzard's mind.
• Different sizes of Savage Piranha have been consolidated into Savage Piranha and can be consumed directly for the transformation effect.
• Players can now always catch enormous fish from pools, regardless of skill.
• Fish that have already been caught can be converted to the appropriate amount of flesh.
• Draenor fishing bait now lasts for 10 minutes (up from 5 minutes). Bait will not spoil, which was originally in the patch notes.
• Nat Pagle (Level 3 Fishing Shack) will give you any of the standard baits if you ask nicely.
• Lunkers can now be caught from fishing pools and have an improved catch rate with higher fishing skill.
• Summoned Cavedwellers now drops random fish flesh and drops less Worm Supreme.
• Fish Eggs used as turn-in for the Fishing Shack Daily quest are now bind on pickup and no longer have a sell value.

Happy fishing!

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We may not see another patch before Warlords of Draenor, which means the content in the game right now could be all the content we'll have for a while. And though plenty of players are still working through Siege of Orgrimmar raid content or collecting endless numbers of Timeless Coins, some of us are already starting to get bored of the Warlords waiting game.

But sometimes, not having any new content on the horizon can give you a chance to stretch your virtual wings and work on in-game goals you haven't gotten around to yet. Maybe now is the perfect time to try your hand at PvP, the Brawler's Guild, or finishing up your Loremaster (or the Insane) achievement. So tell us, readers -- how are you killing time before Warlords arrives?

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We're at that time in World of Warcraft where I'm not quite done with the expansion we have - there's still a few things I'd like to do like kill Heroic Garrosh - but at the same time, we've been playing long enough that I'm starting to really, really feel the urge to move on to a new place. At the least, I'd really like to feel finished with Pandaria.

It's not that I didn't or don't like the expansion. Nothing could be further from the truth. In many ways, I still feel like this was the best expansion, in terms of pure storytelling - an incredible amount of story unfolded over the past year and four months, if you get right down to it. The voyage we undertook to a distant shore ended up teaching us almost as much about the world we left behind, ultimately taking us to a confrontation at the very gates of Orgrimmar. Garrosh Hellscream's journey from Warchief to reviled enemy of almost the world entire, even his own faction, was surprising and at times maddening and I played through it on both factions. There were some deeply troubling twists - to this day, I look back on the Dalaran purge on my worgen and shudder at stalking and killing an elf for the crime of wearing the wrong color and trying to take his money with him when he fled, while my tauren felt responsible for it all, having stolen the Divine Bell in the first place.

After all of it - after having marched from the Jade Forest and those first arrivals to here, after having seen the destruction we left in our wake and done what I could to ameliorate it only to see it eventually bring even the Vale of Eternal Blossoms to the brink, after having finally waged war all the way back to that chamber deep beneath Orgrimmar I feel conflicted. I feel like there's more to do - the sha need to be cleaned out of the Vale, for instance, and the final fate of the mogu and mantid would be nice to discover - but at the same time, there's the urge that got me to Pandaria in the first place. The urge to go somewhere new. And that's likely still a way's away at this point.

It's times like this, I actually miss Halion.

• The crafting UI has had a lot of updates to make it more intuitive
• You can now hit spacebar to quickly open a pack after unwrapping your last one
• You'll now be spammed notified when your friends complete arenas or open legendary cards
• Play, Practice and Friendly Play modes will now default to the custom deck selection UI if you've previously created a deck

And most notably, a big step in the right direction as far as gold income in-game goes:

• Gold gained in Play mode has changed from 5 gold per 5 wins to 10 gold per 3 wins.

It's not as much as we'd hoped, the general WoW Insider consensus was 5 gold per win, instead of 3.33, but it's a big improvement from 1 gold per win. Hit the break for the full notes.

While we're not going to reveal the big spoiler in the latest patch here in this column, I think it's fair to say everyone's aware... there was one. Something big just happened in WoW, answering the biggest Azerothian "Will they or won't they?" since Ross and Rachel. (The orcs. Did you miss that quest?)

In our role as helpful video game journalists, a few of your intrepid WoW Insider staffers made our best guess about what the next big shock would be. Read on to see what we thing... and leave your own guess for the Next Big Spoiler in the comments!

Patch day is finally upon us! Soon enough, patch 5.4 will be here to bring a world of exciting new content on our virtual doorsteps. So the question of the day, as we wait out the downtime, is just what are you looking forward to in this patch? There's plenty to chose from, with the Siege of Orgrimmar (and potentially a new leader of the horde), the new flex raiding system, connected realms, and the mysterious Timeless Isle.

So tell us, readers -- what are you most looking forward to? What are you going to jump into as soon as the servers come back online?

Tomorrow -- that's Tuesday, September 10th -- U.S. realms will be going offline for maintenance at midnight, Pacific time and are scheduled to come back up by 10 in the morning. This downtime is, of course, for the launch of patch 5.4: so by tomorrow afternoon the Siege of Orgrimmar should be upon us. We think the schedule is on the optimistic side for a patch roll-out, but here at WoW Insider, we'll keep our fingers crossed for servers popping back online quickly so we can all get back to gaming.

Not sure what all the fuss is about? Blizzard posted a roundup of patch 5.4 info to catch you up on all the news, but if you need to go more basic than that you can also check our rookie writeup on what WoW patches are.

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There have been plenty of patches -- 24, to be precise -- since the game launched in late 2004. And if you've been playing for any length of time -- or since the beginning -- chances are that you have a favorite patch amongst them. Perhaps it was a new dungeon, a world event, or just a class change that made your character, for a time, feel godly.

For me, it was definitely patch 1.9, when I was dedicating the time to be part of a serious raiding guild and got to take part in the incredible quest line that led to opening of the Gates of Ahn'Qiraj (and, coincidentally, around when I first started writing for WoW Insider). Looking back, there was as much bad as there was good -- long hours raiding that I couldn't find time for if I tried today, the tedious task of collecting linen and peacebloom to fuel the Ahn'Qiraj war efforts, and intense guild rivalry over who would complete the quest first -- but it was definitely a memorable time in my WoW-playing life.

So what about you, readers? Which patch do you look back on fondly and why?

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We've gone through 24 patch cycles and four expansions since World of Warcraft launched. But while that sounds like a lot of patches, in the past Blizzard has only done 3 or 4 patches per expansion -- 11 of those 24 patches were between vanilla WoW and the game's Burning Crusade expansion. But the recent breakneck pace of patches -- one every couple of months -- doesn't quite mesh with the fact that Blizzard doesn't tend to do more than 4 patches per expansion and the fact that they recently confirmed that patch 5.4 will be the final raid patch of Mists of Pandaria.

While final raid patch doesn't necessarily mean final patch, it certainly doesn't get our hopes high for exciting new WoW content. So what's a gamer to do with a potentially tremendous content drought on the horizon? We really don't expect to see an expansion announcement before BlizzCon this November, which would mean an actual expansion launch date even later than that.

So, readers, I put the question to you: how many more patches do you expect Blizzard to roll out to keep us engaged and interested before the next expansion launches?

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PTR files are the gift that keeps on giving: today AdriaCraft posted videos of two mounts from the patch files, which we expect will be drops in the Siege of Ogrimmar raid. On show are the Kor'kron Proto-Drake and the Iron Juggernaut. The Juggernaut may actually be the Kor'kron Juggernaut Wowhead lists as dropping from Garrosh, but we can't yet say with certainty where either of these drop, so if you're desperate to nab one, stay tuned for more info.

If you're in this post for the eye candy, check the videos embedded after the break for a close look at what could be your next mount!

Looking back on the days of vanilla WoW, we had a lot of patches -- and I don't mean that as a figure of speech. Original WoW went to patch 1.12 before Burning Crusade hit the scene. Since then, we've seen fewer patches between expansions -- 4 patches during BC, 3 patches during Wrath, 3 patches during Cataclysm, and, to date, 3 patches during Mists. But with the speed at which Blizzard is rolling out new content lately, I think it's safe to say that we can expect Mists to beat the average number of patches before we get another expansion... but is that too many patches?

More frequent patches could mean we're hard-pressed to keep up with all the new shiny toys presented to us... or they could mean plenty of content to keep us busy and interested. But what do you think? Are patches coming too quickly these days? Or are they just frequent enough to keep you interested? Or are patches still arriving too slowly for your tastes?

If World of Warcraft had but one holiday, it would be Patch Day: the glorious Tuesday (or Wednesday) in which the WoW servers go down for maintenance but come back online brimming with new, unexplored content. If you're new to World of Warcraft, or MMOs in general, you may not entirely understand all the fuss the community makes over patches. So just what is a patch? Why are they so important? And how can you get your hands on one? We'll do our best to explain.

What is a WoW patch?
Did you know we're playing version 5 of World of Warcraft right now? It's true: Version 1.1 was World of Warcraft's launch client and every expansion since has bumped the version number up a full number, while each patch release is a decimal place. The original game went up to patch 1.12 (the 1.1 launch client and 11 patches after), Burning Crusade (2.0) had a scant 4 patches, Wrath of the Lich King (3.0) had 3, Cataclysm (4.0) had 3, and Mists of Pandaria (5.0) is about to see the release of its 3rd patch, patch 5.3. These days, patches are coming more quickly than ever and we have no idea how many patches to expect before the next expansion arrives.

The latest Mists of Pandaria beta build has revealed over 100 new achievements, including about 60 (yes, 60!) related to Pet Battles. If you like your points, I hope you like your pets. There's also mention of a platinum level for challenge modes.

Some of the more interesting achievements:

• Realm First! Pandaren Ambassador This is the first guild realm-first achievement that involves reputation (non-guild), I believe.
• Guild Hardware - Platinum This one's new to me. Looks like Blizzard's adding a new tier for challenge modes above the gold tier that was previously announced. It's unknown if the rewards previously mentioned for gold will move to platinum or there are new shinies we haven't seen yet.
• Grand Master Pet Battler / Grand Master Pet Brawler If you were planning on cheesing -- erm, helping your friends with every Pet Battle achievement, might want to think again.
• Master Pet Hunter Collect all the things!
• Raise 75 pets to level 25 Once you've collected all the things, fill all the bars!

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It's open warfare between Alliance and Horde in Mists of Pandaria, World of Warcraft's next expansion. Jump into five new levels with new talents and class mechanics, try the new monk class, and create a pandaren character to ally with either Horde or Alliance. Look for expansion basics in our Mists FAQ, or dig into our spring press event coverage for more details!

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