MMO Gaming

…the kids love this one.

The patch notes for 2.0 are finally up and it is playable on the test realm. A few highlights, for those who don’t want to skim through the massive block of changes:

1. All players will have talent points reimbursed and will have access to new talents throughout their trees; this includes the 41-point talents. Several new abilities have also been added for all classes.
2. All pets now receive a percentage of their master’s armor, spell damage, spell resistances, attack power, and stamina.
3. Low-level spells cast by high-level players will receive smaller bonuses from +healing and +spell damage.
4. Honor System Revamp
5. Traps can be set while in combat, but require a 2 second arming time.
6. Auto shot will be automatically enabled if the Hunter steps out of melee range while in combat with target.
7. Spells can now require either a totem item or a totem category item to cast a spell. This means that the Enchanting Rods now count as all of the lower level enchanting rods as well, so you only need a single enchanting rod instead of all six. This also means that “Finkel’s Skinner” now counts as a Skinning Knife. Several weapons that are picks have been flagged as counting as a Mining pick as well.
8. All of the profession-made items that have been created up to now have been given proper stats based on the current expansion item level progression table.
9. Players will no longer lose an item when attempting to disenchant on a boat when the loading screen appears.
10. The Rend Blackhand arena event in Upper Blackrock Spire will now properly reset after a wipe

Numbers 7, 9, and 10 are things that annoy me. Not because I don’t like them, but because they were in existence up to this point, that to me shows an incredible lack of drive to fix bugs that exist in the game.

The others, for the most part, I’m happy about. I’ll talk about number 3 in an upcoming post, because it deserves special attention I think.

World of Warcraft, Patch Notes, Burning Crusade, WoW 2.0