Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Patch 2.2 First Impressions

Ahh, patch day raiding. So much troubles. My raid UI was completely messed up with groups being stuck in the middle of the screen. If you have that problem, type /reloadui until you can click on them, then close them immediately. After doing that several times, things got cleaned up nicely.

Also, my UI scale seems off. Everything seems very slightly larger, and things are not fitting together quite perfectly.

I think the new sound engine is working well. Everything seems to sound a little bit better to me, and the game performed slightly better. As well, there are new sounds scattered about. I haven't tried the Voice Chat yet.

The buff changes are extremely nice. 10 or 30 minute buffs are great. Also, the changes to pet buffing are really nice. If you're wondering how pet buffing with greater blessings works, it goes like this:

1. Hunter pets share blessings with Warriors. Buffing a warrior will hit all the warriors and hunter pets. The jokes just write themselves.

2. Warlock pets share blessings with Warlocks. Buffing a warlock will hit all the warlocks and their pets. The only exception is a phase-shifted imp. If the imp is phase-shifted, it will not receive the buff.

This is a great change, as it means that the pets get buffed without any extra effort on the part of the paladin.

The nerf to Blessing of Sacrifice was muted. The cooldown was reduced to 30s, which is the duration of the spell. So that means you can still use it in PvE on tanks. It is still useful in PvP, but it can be countered by Purge.

I haven't tried out the new Seal of Vengeance yet, so I can't comment on it.

Other than that, the patch looks pretty decent. Many people have commented that it's not worthy of being a "full" patch, as it doesn't have a lot of new content. However, I think introducing a new sound engine is a big enough change that it warrants its own patch.

8 comments:

  1. I heard from someone in AV that they didn't see any AFK-ers.
    :-)

    Happy news with AV weekend coming up and me needing ~6000 honor for a PvP gear piece I'm after.

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  2. Yes, AV is beyond amazing having 38 people trying to actually work towards the same goal (there's always 2 people who try to afk, but we nab them). I've actually won 5 out of 6 AVs that I tried, so if it continues through the weekend we will be seeing some nice honor. Not to mention it is a lot more fun and quicker no matter who wins.

    I believe either the new SoV or my SCTD was bugged though, when I tried testing the new functionality it would only do 4-5 holy damage on white hits after 5 stacks, and sometimes not at all.

    I was lucky with my UI, nothing was moved into crazy positions, I just had a few broken addons which I updated anyway.

    And the nerf to Sacrifice isn't bad, but the change to Freedom really hurts, even for PvE fights like Vashj. They did give Freedom and Protection new animations which are both pretty cool, though also a bit of a "Purge Me" sign. Oh and Greater Blessing of Kings finally has the same animation as vanilia BoK.

    All in all not a bad patch, but the server instability (as least on Draka) got annoying, hopefully they will get it worked out.

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  3. The changes to Blessings are awesome. Hooray for that. I know they primarily benefit Paladins, but as a Druid, it's nice to get 10-minute versions of Wisdom while the Ferals get 30-minute Might or vice versa.

    The new sound engine is okay, I guess. Just disappointing to wait so long for a patch with little to nothing new to do (although my PvP pants did become a PvP skirt - yay!).

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  4. From PTR with about 1400 spelldmg after jotc+trinket, SoV instant damage was only like 40. Anyone know if this was changed at all?

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  5. With about +300 dam, I saw the SoV spillover hitting for about 22. So that doesn't appear to have changed much.

    This is the fix I heard from my guild about stuck raid frames:
    1. Log out.
    2. Open the folder WTF/Account/YourAccount/YourRealm/YourChar/SavedVariables and delete Blizzard_RaidUI.lua.
    3. Log back in.

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  6. One of our guys discovered this fix for the UI scale:

    1. Check the previously unchecked "Use UI Scale" checkbox in Video Options.
    2. Leave the slider at 1 for now, and click Okay.
    3. Type /console uiscale .9

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  7. There was a blue response somewhere about the UI scale issue. It's caused by a change in how the scale works. Upping your resolution no longer scales the UI. People running at higher resolutions would notice this change the most. Dragging the UI scale slider around should fix it.

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  8. I need to get into AV...

    2.2 was rather Addon Breakful with the UI resizing...

    2.3 looks like a buff for PvP Ret. Sad :(

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