Posts with tag undocumented

An undocumented change that probably occurred in patch 4.1 is that the Icy Prism, a source for rare and epic Wrath of the Lich King-era gems, no longer has a cooldown. The highest stat gems that can be inserted into gear with an ilevel lower than 300 (which means all pre-Cataclysm gear) are Wrath gems, and this is likely now the cheapest way to get them.

The main way currently to get Wrath gems is to prospect Wrath ores, usually Saronite. Prospecting a stack will yield an average of about one blue-quality gem, and while other ores may look more attractive, I've had trouble finding them in volume. Now that the cooldown has been removed, any jewelcrafter can make an Icy Prism with nothing more than a Frozen Orb and a couple of cheap Wrath green gems. Each prism will yield a couple of blue-quality gems, rarely a Dragon's Eye, and even more rarely, an epic gem.

The Dragon's Eyes don't look like they'll be usable for much, but considering the price of Frozen Orbs, the blue and epic gems certainly look like they're worth making the prisms for. One thing to note: The prisms are unique, so you need to open one before you can make another. If, like me, you had stockpiled almost a thousand Frozen Orbs in Wrath just in case they ever became worth anything, this means a lot of clicking.

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WoW Patch 4.1 is live, and WoW Insider has all the latest news for you -- from guides of the revamped Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub to new valor point mechanics and new archaeology items.

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I've talked here before about just how wacky Blizzard's coding is -- they are obviously great programmers (even with all of the 180,000 bugs), but man, when things go wrong in this game, they go wrong in the weirdest, strangest ways. Take the bug above, spotted in patch 3.2.2 by xella over on Livejournal: the female dreanei /train emote is bugged like crazy, but instead of not playing or playing a random sound like you might expect it to do as a software bug, it instead plays a cacophony of the strangest sounds, including a slice of the original sound and then a female blood elf /chicken noise instead. This will surely be fixed soon (and as a few people in the comments over there say, it's probably a bit of file corruption on Blizzard's part), but what a weird bug.

Fortunately, as granular and strange as Blizzard's bugs are, their fixes are just as minute: tree druids will be happy to see that, since patch 3.2, their treeform now actually moves correctly after Levitate is cast on it. It's a small change, sure, but every little bit helps with immersion. Maybe someday we'll see mounts do it, too.

Mania's been doing a great job of covering the undocumented Hunter changes in the latest patch -- she's got them on this post down below the usual patch notes. In short, there are a few pets that have become untameable: the Sapphire Hive Queen in Sholazar Basin, the three Oracles spirits summoned during their daily quest, and Gezzarak the Hunter, a Warp Stalker summoned back in Skettis during the Aversarial Blood quest. Strangely enough, problems with those pets have been fixed, so if you've got one tamed from before the patch, it should work better, but you can't seem to tame them now. And finally, the low-level blue moths on Bloodmyst Isle can now be tamed (apparently though the ability to tame Moths got added a while back, these guys couldn't be tamed for some reason).

Of course, lots of BM Hunters aren't real thrilled about the changes to their class, and getting to tame some low-level moths probably isn't a good enough tradeoff. But still, if you've been waiting to go all the way back to Bloodmyst and pick up a moth to take to 80 with you, now's your chance.

Before 2.4.2 is even up on PTRs, MMO-Champion and World of Raids have undocumented changes listed on their sites. That's dedication! Of course, given that none of this can be verified, you should take it with a grain of salt, but most of the time changes found in the game files end up going live. Here's what's been noticed so far:

• Most mount-speed-increasing trinkets (Carrot on a Stick, Skybreaker Whip, Riding Crop) have been changed to enchantments, which can be permanently applied to a single mount in your inventory and cause it to become soulbound. Furthermore, Charm of Swift Flight (which will stay a trinket) now also reduces the mana cost of Flight Form and Swift Flight Form by 115 mana, and Carrot on a Stick is now craftable (1x Simple Wood, 1x Fine Thread, 1x Golden Sansam). I imagine it would be an engineering recipe.

  This seems like a good change for the most part, since we won't have to use add-ons to swap in our riding speed trinket all the time (and we'll save an inventory space). However, it does have the major drawback that you'll need to get a new one for each of your mounts, which could get expensive if you're a mount collector. More business for the leatherworkers, I suppose.

• Continuing on the mount theme, a sort of horned Swift Zebra mount appears to have been added to the game, as well as a Headless Horseman's Mount (both pictured).
• Aspect of the Viper has been buffed. Previously, it generated mana equal to up to 55% of the hunter's Intellect every five seconds; now, it generates up to 55% of the hunter's Int plus 35% of his or her level. This means a boost of up to 24.5 mp5 at level 70.

There are also some changes to various items and recipes; check MMO-Champion for those. What do you think of this mount trinket change? Oh, and if you haven't seen the official patch notes yet, check Adam's post from early this morning.

Update: I just signed on to the PTR, and was unable to verify the change to Riding Crop. So this might well not end up happening after all.

Yesterday, after the realms finally came back from the small 2.4.1 patch, I logged on for my usual round of dailies. The first thing I did was to group up with another player for Distraction at the Dead Scar, hoping to get it done in one try. And we succeded -- in fact, we got it done by about halfway through the first run! I've never finished that quest that soon, even in a full group of five. So I grew suspicious that perhaps the difficulty of this daily was reduced in the patch.

And indeed, MMO-Champion is reporting that the following changes were made to the quest:

• Eredar Sorcerers now die in one hit instead of two
• Pit Overlords now die in two hits instead of three

Welcome modifications indeed. The number of times I finished the run one Sorcerer short was starting to get annoying, and the flight time to and from the Dead Scar is irritatingly high if you have to go for repeat runs. This should be much more easily soloable now. Has it been made too easy? Maybe a bit, but bombing is fun regardless, and most of the dailies are of a similar level of difficulty.

Now we're to my favorite part of a new patch -- sussing out the undocumented changes. Everyone's really known about the patch notes for months, but it seems like every time Blizzard releases an update, there are always plenty of undocumented changes that don't quite make it in.

WorldofWar.net has a good set of changes so far: Troll offhands are small, Gruul's Lair's and Kara's reset display is off, and Shamans' Mental Quickness talent doesn't seem to be working. A few people have already noticed that there is no repair character on the Isle of Quel'danas yet, but that's only because the daily quests haven't moved forward yet -- with a bigger foothold, the Shattered Sun should be able to bring in a blacksmith or two.

Void Reaver seems to have been buffed a bit, the Shaman clearcasting ding is bugged, and I've heard that the Blood Elf mounts (a.k.a. Chocobos) will now squawk on demand (though I'm not sure that's new). Seen any other undocumented changes on the realms yet?

Good evening ladies and gentlemen (cue the WoW Insider Show intro music). For tonight's entertainment, I present to you a fully functional PTR – complete with Sunwell Plateau and lots of goodies to play around with. Well, at least it's evening if you're up with me at 3:00 a.m. when I'm posting this.

But even if you're not a night owl, now is probably your last chance to head over to the PTR and test out all the goodness that is patch 2.4. Blizzard had shut it down until now, possibly to just test out one or two other things before releasing the patch soon. My bet is still on March 25th. I have no little birdie in my ear saying that's a for sure thing, but I just have this gut feeling I'm right. If you've participated in the guess the release date contest, you might be under a week away from winning a nice 60 day game card.

I had to apply a couple of patches when logging onto the game tonight. It only took about 10 minutes though. Not too bad. We've looked over the patch notes and in-game items and can't find anything different – although perhaps there are some changes we're overlooking. However with that said, often times Blizzard will make the "undocumented" changes on the PTR right before they release the live patch. Who knows what those are...

Happy PTRing!

If you've been waiting for yet another performance upgrade, you might not have to wait too much longer -- the kind folks on the test realm forums have confirmed that patch 2.4 will bring both audio and video performance upgrades with it. As we've said before, Blizzard is usually pretty kind to system requirements, but players are reporting that graphic and audio glitches are fixed when you load up the PTR for 2.4, and CMs say that those changes will move to the live realms as well.

Unfortunately, there's no more details than that on what got fixed, but it's good news, we're sure, for anyone dealing with technical problems. If our readers are right, you've only got a few more days to wait -- patch 2.4 ahoy!

Today a big new build went up on the patch 2.4 PTR, and every change that was in the patch notes was detailed here. However, inevitably, there were some changes that didn't make it to the patch notes, and for that we have the intrepid researchers at MMO-Champion and World of Raids. Here's what they've managed to tease out of the realms:

• Most of the Tier 6 belts, boots, and bracers found in the Sunwell raid have had their Stamina removed, and other stats increased to compensate. The exception is the Warrior tanking set, Onslaught Armor. Edit: And the Paladin tanking set, Lightbringer Armor.
  
• The five epic BoP jewelcrafted trinkets we learned about previously have had patterns added; they're available at the Revered level from the Shattered Sun Offensive quartermaster.
• In what must be a bug of some sort, rank 1 of the Warlock talent Emberstorm now increases the casting speed of Incinerate by 2%, as well as its previous effect of boosting all fire damage by 2%. Other ranks of the talent are unchanged.

That's everything discovered so far. Seen anything else that wasn't mentioned in the new patch notes?

Every patch has its patch notes listing changes. However, for reasons that are not entirely clear to me, every patch also comes with a bunch of undocumented changes, not listed in the patch notes. Thanks to WoW's tireless army of enthusiasts, many of these changes come to light, and are collected in places like this World of Raids post. There's nothing that looks terribly important to my eye; however, for the sake of completeness, it's all copied after the jump. The changes that look the least unimportant:

• New items have been added to SSC bosses loot tables (some of them can be viewed here)
• the Monstrous Kaliri [changed] to not attack people on the ground (Skettis)
• Fire Elemental Totem now cause guards to aggro them when dropped in neutral cities.

You alert players have noticed a few undocumented changes in Zul'Gurub lately. Reader Ajax (or "Ajaxthegreat," his choice, I guess) writes to say that his guild noticed tonight that the bat boss seemed buffed. Actually, that's not new as of 1.12.1-- my guild went in there a few weeks ago after 1.12 came out, and noticed exactly what Ajax did-- that High Priestess Jeklik had a little more bounce to the ounce. She's got more HP for sure, her mind blast seemed harsher to us, and Ajax's guild guesses that there's more bat spawns coming out with each wave.

But the newest news is this: with 1.12.1, the bats leading up to Jeklik are now exploding again. That's right, one of the great joys of running ZG-- avoiding the exploding bats-- got nerfed on a previous patch, but apparently, according to Jenn over on lj, the bat-splosions are back. OMG run away from the bats! You have to love the exploding flying rodents.

Makes you wonder if the whole non-exploding thing was really a nerf or just a bug. The only other unlisted change I can think of lately is that hitting V no longer works to find the real Jandice Barov in Scholo-- you've got to use a macro ("/target Jandice") or just hit Shift+Tab to focus on last target. Anyone else notice any undocumented mob buffs or nerfs, in ZG or anywhere else?

Another patch, and another set of changes that didn't quite make it into the patch notes. Of course, everything on the test realms is subject to change, but as it stands, this is what you will find on the test realms. This list seems to be updated regularly, so if you aren't planning on playing on the test realms, check back often to see what's happening. Most controversial of these changes seems to be a battlegrounds change that automatically adds everyone to a group upon entering a battleground - a group they cannot leave. As a healer, I am always glad to have a group in battlegrounds in order to be better able to monitor my group's health and step in as needed - but to those who preferred to gain maximum honor per kill by attacking battlegrounds ungrouped, this is the end of the battlegrounds system.