WoW PTR Patch 3.3.3 - General Overview

Tags : wow patch 3.3.3, wow overview, wow ptr patch 3.3.3, wow news    

For those of you who frequent the Test Realms don’t be alarmed if your characters no longer appear to have any achievement history. In an attempt to improve the copy process characters will no longer be copied with their achievement history. Not a very big deal in my opinion as achievement history will matter little if not at all on any Test Realm.

Glyph of Disease and Glyph of Fireball have been changed. Glyph of Disease now triggers a refresh of Icy Talons when Frost Fever is refreshed. This improves the Glyph and I would think Death Knights using it should notice a small improvement in their DPS. Glyph of Fireball has also changed, sort of. While it no longer increases the critical strike of Fireball, it reduces the cast time of Fireball by .15 seconds. So while you won’t be putting out as many crits, you will be able to cast more Fireballs. Sounds to me like not much of a change was made to this glyph.

Frozo the Renowed will be coming to Dalaran and he wants your orbs! Frozen Orbs that is. Let’s face it  Frozen Orbs are pretty much useless. Everyone I know has at least several stacks taking up space in their bank. You cannot sell them on the Auction House for any decent amount of money, and the gear that you make with them is obsolete even for alt characters. I’ve even considered selling them to a vendor just to be rid of them, now I am very glad I didn’t.

Frozo will now accept your once useless Frozen Orbs and will trade you other tradeskill items for them including:

Crusader Orbs - 6 Frozen Orbs
Runed Orbs - 4 Frozen Orbs
Eternals (Fire, Earth, Water, Air, Life, and Shadow) - 1 Frozen Orb
Frost Lotus - 1 Frozen Orb
Pattern: Frosty Flying Carpet (Tailors Only) - 6 Frozen Orbs

So for those of you who still have Frozen Orbs floating around, hold on to them, as they are going to become much more valuable.  In fact expect to see a dramatic rise in price if it hasn’t happened on your sever already. This addition will be good news to some, especially those who struggle to get these items normally. I know my guild will be pleased to be able to buy Frost Lotus for flasks for the price of just a few rather easily obtained Frozen Orbs instead of the 50-80G we pay on the Auction House.

On the down side this may spell the end of the huge profits being made by the Alchemy and Herbalism professions. With easy access to some of their most profitable items the prices on flasks and Frost Lotus will inevitably have to fall.

So be sure to stock up on all the Frozen Orbs you can, as they will prove to be worthwhile sometime in the near future. Be warned though, as with anything that is valuable, be wary of ninjas and be sure to set loot rules at the start of an instance so there is no confusion.

In the Dungeon and Raid department Blizzard will now be allowing players to skip the intro in the Culling of Stratholme once they have completed the dungeon at least once. Can I get a hallelujah? While I enjoy the in game dialog as much as anyone, after hearing it so many times it gets a little old. I can think of several other fights that I would love to see Blizzard implement this option for  in the future.

Players will now be able to use the Dungeon Finder to queue for Holiday bosses. Once a party is found players will be ported directly to the area the boss can be found, making everyone’s lives that much easier. To add extra icing to the cake Players may queue as many times as they want for each boss, meaning you will no longer need to search out players with summons. Don‘t think you will have infinite attempts to get those rare holiday items as they will now be found in troves which will only drop once for each player every day.

There are several small but significant changes here that should please quite a few people. Recipes that require Runed Orbs now have lower material requirements. While this is a nice change, and will allow more people access to these patterns, plus make leveling much easier I can’t help be a bit bitter. It always seems that after I make things they nerf how much it costs, or what materials it takes, ah well that’s life. Inscription has a similar change with most recipes that require two inks being reduced to one.

Pet collectors rejoice, as the Pet Bombling and Lil’ Smoky are no longer going to be Bind-on-Pickup. Not only will this allow many more players access to these very cute vanity pets, but Engineers should be able to make a little profit off of them. I know I will be getting both as soon as this patch goes live!

Tailors will be pleased to learn that the cool down and location requirements for Moonshroud, Spellweave, and Ebonweave have been removed paving the way for Tailoring items requiring these cloth to be much easier to obtain. This change will most likely drastically reduce the price of these cloths, so players wishing to fetch a good price for them should sell now.

It’s not all good news for Tailors though. The creation of Glacial Bags will now invoke a seven day cool down. So while it will be easier to obtain the cloth needed for these bags, Tailors will not be able to make them with abandon. This may cause the price of this particular bag to go slightly higher, however the price of the bag overall should be roughly the same as if predicted above cloth prices are reduced. However finding a Tailor who’s cool down is up may prove to be difficult.

Miner’s on the other hand will have the cool down on their Titansteel Bar removed, but unlike Tailors so far no other changes are being made to balance this out. This, as with the cloth, will likely cause the prices of Titansteel Bars to fall, perhaps to almost nothing. Players who wish to make a profit should rid themselves of their bars before Patch 3.3.3 is live.

Finally “Monsterbelly Appetite” one of the daily fishing quests has been renamed and relocated. The quest will now be called (and probably more fittingly) “Disarmed” and will take place outside of the Violet Hold instead of in the Frozen Sea. This seems to be a
rather small change and besides the location being much more convenient for players, this change will probably have little effect on the Fishing profession.

Blizzard has decided to improve the vehicle mechanics of quests vehicles. They claim the change was made all in the interest of fun. There are no real details as to what changes will be made, however I personally love driving the in game vehicles, so anything that could possibly make it even better is a good thing in my book. However as with all things these changes do have the potential to backfire and actually end up making driving vehicles less pleasurable. Cross your fingers that that is not the case.

The User Interface has one of the longer lists of changes, the simplest of which is the updated Alert icons added to the game.

More interesting changes were made to the Auction House, many of which promise to help improve the ease of use for all players. For example, now if the Auction House is not available on your realm, when opened players will be informed via pop up. This means no more standing around staring at a blank Auction House screen trying to decide if the Auction House is actually broken, or if lag is to blame.

Players will also now be able to right click to place their items in the Auction House. This is very good news. I can’t begin to tell you how many pots and elixirs I have accidentally used attempting to put them up for sale, and I know I can’t be the only one.

To further improve the usability of the Auction House whole stacks of  the same item can now be placed in the Auction frame, and several options are offered to choose how they should be listed, including Stack Size, Number of Stacks, and Price. An Auction Post Completion Bar has also been added. Much like a cast bar if multiple items or stacks are being listed at once this bar will report the progress of each listing. Players will need to stand still during this process as any movement will interrupt it, but they will still be able to browse the Auction House.

Overall these changes to the Auction House seem solid and I personally feel were much needed. I know that many players are in the Auction House “business” and sell large quantities of the materials they collect (leather, ore, herbs, etc) for profit. These changes should make that job at least a tiny bit less tedious. Hopefully much testing is given to it on the PTR, as changes of this sort tend to bring many bugs with them.

The Dungeon Finder system is receiving a rather big overhaul. Two of the bigger changes are that the Deserter debuff has been increased from 15 to 30 minutes, and players who choose to vote to kick another player will need to provide a reason. Both of these changes I believe are being made to help improve the Dungeon Finder experience for everyone. This should discourage abandoning the group, and vote kicking for superficial reasons, both of which I heartily dislike.

Smaller changes to help improve on the system are also being made. Anyone in the party will now  be able to re-queue for an instance, taking the pressure off the party leader. Parties will also now be arranged in the same fashion: tank, healer, damage, damage. This will make identifying who is filling the individual roles easier for everyone, especially for those of us who lack an interface that automatically tells us.

Finally, when in a random party created with the Dungeon Finder players will now be informed as to why they cannot roll Need on an item, and more generous level requirements will be used when joining as a group instead of the usual Random Dungeon requirements. While I am wondering why a player would be attempting to roll need on something that they really shouldn’t be, I feel all of these changes will benefit the PUG group lovers among us and make the already great Dungeon Finder system that much better.

More big changes here, and like the Dungeon Finder all are being made to make this function more player friendly. Changes include exclamation points over quest items that begin a quest to make them easier to see, quest objectives and exclamation points will no longer appear dim on the map or over quest givers heads for low level quests,
a function to widen the Quest Tracking Objectives Frame has been added, and a short description for a tracked quest is now displayed on the Map.

The Objectives Frame will also be changing, listing the number of quests displayed at the top. Players will also have the ability to sort and/or filter their quests. All of these changes should provide players, both old and new with a better questing experience. I feel these changes will make questing much easier, and in turn make completing achievements such as Loremaster more doable. Also by improving the questing experience it should encourage newer players to continue playing instead of becoming frustrated.

Rather small changes here that won’t really affect game play. Players will now be able to access maps of different levels of multi-layered dungons, zones, or cities. So for those of you who desire to stare at the sewers of Dalaran wherever you may be, this change is for you. The Authenticator frame is also changing, so those players who choose “Remember Account Name” at the login screen will be provided a box below the password field to input their Authenticator code. I’m not exactly sure why this change was made, I guess it makes logging in easier, but I didn’t feel that logging in was hard in the first place.

Just a small change here that will undoubtedly save players some small annoyances. When a player has two or more quests from the same NPC and not all are complete the incomplete quests will now show as gray question marks. Repeatable quests will also now be correctly colored as blue. While I have never really noticed this problem, I’m sure that it was a problem and I’m glad to see it being fixed. Every little thing counts.

Source:  tentonhammer.com

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