World of Warcraft Patches to 1.9

Xehn writes "The much-anticipated 1.9 patch has been released and can be downloaded via the Blizzard Downloader." Among many new features the Patch includes a complete revamp of the Paladin class, and the inclusion of the first unlockable 'World Event': The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj. From the patch notes: "Players will now be able to buy and sell goods with greater effectiveness using the Linked Auction House system. Auction Houses in Orgrimmar, Undercity, and Thunder Bluff will now share the same pool of Horde player-created auctions, and Alliance players will find the same to be true when visiting Ironforge, Stormwind City, and Darnassus Auction Houses. This system has been expanded to support the neutral Auction Houses as well."

Comments

also know as the PvP whiners rejoice patch

[Shivetya]

as many changes are directly because of whining by the PvP crowd of WOW which isn't the majority no matter how much they or even Blizzard would pretend otherwise.

Depending on how you count them this is the third nerfing of Paladins and probably the most effective. The new fear is that someone will find a way for his Paladin to dual wield shields :) Paladins are probably the worst implemented class in WoW. Simply put they should probably never have been put in WoW as player conceptions based on past Blizzard products and those of competitors portray an idea that is far from what was implemented in WoW. In WoW Paladins are the hardest things to kill for those with little skill in PvP and probably the easiest character to play badly.

Before commencing on the changes to the class Blizzard asked the community through multiple threads what they thought was wrong with each of the Paladins talents and abilities and why. They got an earful, some were inane comments while others delved into the numbers to explain their position. Come the first preview patch on the Test Realm and it was evident to many that the developers chose to ignore all the responses they received. The primary evidence was a talent named Blessing of Kings. One of the major issues with Paladin players was having this 5 minute Blessing as the top tier of one of the talent trees. Two revisions of the new Talent tree and it finally moved. There were other obvious indicators of developers not acknowledging the issues but this was the most glaring.

Come patch time and Paladins will find a major change. The one and formost speciality of Paladins was their ability to heal under stress. This was because of a talent called Spiritual Focus, when bought fully provided a 70% chance to heal while being wailed upon. This was one of the first talents many Paladins obtained and found in many builds. Now a new Paladin will find previously class defining talent further down the holy tree and the complimentary talents even further down. In other words, what was once the defining ability of a class will not be for only a few of the class.

The second defining ability of Paladins were their shields which gave them short time immunity from about anything, upwards of a dozen seconds. Paladins had two of these and could use them back to back on themselves is necessary. Multiple Paladins could use them on allies for protection from somone important who pulled to much aggro. After incessant whining by PvP players who could not play a FPS without cheat codes this ability now cannot be used on the same target more than once per minute.

Many classes have gone through revisions that greatly enhanced the playability of those classes or fixed glaring issues with one of the three talent trees each class enjoys. Beastmaster Hunters became more viable in 1.7 and Feral Druids became truly viable in 1.9. Druids of other talent trees also enjoyed improvement. Not so with Paladins, in fact many priest players, whose class gets reviewed in 1.10, are now afraid of being "Paladinized".

Paladins can rejoice in knowing they are not the only class to suffer in 1.9. As PvP ruins most PvE play in games it is found in Hunters will enjoy considerable changes in 1.9 No longer will pets have unique abilities because of who they were before training. Players sought out special pets, sometimes at great time expenditure, to give themselve something fairly unique and an advantage. This has been lost as pets are now differentiated only by type and skin texture. Type being wolf,cat, and etc. Skin texture as the only difference between any two wolves will be the texture, same for cats and so on. Used to be you could find pets with fast pursuit speeds, odd attack types, or even slower speeds. No more. Beastmastery specialist top tier power, Bestial Wrath, got the nerf stick as too many cloth wearing PvPers complained it wasn't fair that a pet could kill them. Even food was apparently causing too much benefit to players so that

Re:also know as the PvP whiners rejoice patch

[Godai]

I can't believe how much of what you wrote I disagree with.

First, my guild has several pallies and thier intial reactions were mixed. Some liked what they were getting and some hated it. Once they'd all had a chance to mix around on the test server though, they'd pretty much come together at "reasonably happy" to "okay with it". None of our pallies are unhappy anymore, the most displeased now of the opinion that it simply "doesn't do much for what I'd hoped, but at least it does X, Y & Z". About half our pallies PVP too, and a couple of them are consistently high (ie. first, second or third) in the standing at the end of a battleground. Pallies who say their class sucks at PVP are, frankly, poor paladins.

Second, the 'nerf' to hunter pets (as in making them uniform) is hardly unexpected and actually makes a lot of sense when you look at from a different angle. Bliz has been saying for MONTHS that this was coming, and explained why: they have always wanted pet customizability to be soley from pet points, and not from the base pet. The reasoning is actually very simple: if base pet mattered, eventually all hunters would have the same two or three pets, because those two or three would be the 'best'. Not only would this reduce uniqueness, it would create competition for those few pets. The vision of the pet is that players will choose an animal that they like (whether for the slight variation in abilities it can learn or for aethetics) and that will help provide player distinction. In my opinion, this is a far better tack to take.

Finally, I laugh at the notion that unified LFG & General channels will result in only 'local players' being accepted into groups. I can't remember the last time I joined a pick-up group (PUG) and found all 5 (or 10, or whatever) were in Ironforge (I play Alliance); inevitably at least one person is on the other continent and usually more. This is because you could always join a General chat channel from elsewhere if you knew how, and by the upper levels most had figured it out. Linked auction houses is nothing but a Good Thing(tm).

Frankly, this is looking like one of the better patches unless you're one of those Paladins that for some reason thought they'd be promoted into Gods.

Re:also know as the PvP whiners rejoice patch

[The Kow]

It never fails to astound me just how little paladins seem to recognize that their strength lies in the fact that they are a healer who is virtually impossible to kill. Being that I play a priest, the relevance of this combination of strengths is pretty goddamn distinct, but whatever. As long as paladins are on "the other team", I'll enjoy the fruits of their misguided mental labors.

My Thoughts

[The Snowman]

The other day I was playing my paladin and partied with some random guy to work on a quest. He mentioned that he loves partying with paladins because they can buff, heal, and tank. I came up with a quote that captures the essence of the class:

My paladin does not die, and neither do his enemies.

Other than that, I am looking forward to linked auction houses. As it stands right now, all of my characters use Ironforge as their base of operations. While I have a good computer and don't get lag running around, I do get lag when initially loading all those textures and junk from the hard drive. All the memory and GPU in the world won't help you load about 400 MB of data from a hard disk. So, spreading the load around between capitol cities will certainly help. Hell, Darnassus might actually be useful for something now.

Gates of Ahn'Qiraj: meh. Sounds cool at first, but we already have raid instances so it's nothing new. Apparently it will take a few hundred players to unlock the instance. The word "clusterfuck" comes to mind, especially considering that horde and alliance are supposed to work together to git'r done. As if Ironforge and Orgrimmar weren't bad enough, now we're going to have some massive world event that will not only turn our framerate into a slideshow, but likely crash the server as well. Anyone remember the huge battles on the Dark Iron server between PA and PvP? This will be ten times worse.

Still, overall, it sounds like a good patch and it just got done updating my files. I am looking forward to this so bye bye, I have an addiction to support :-)

"The Warden"

[ClamIAm]

So is this thing gone yet? If it were, I would consider playing WoW. As it stands, I cannot support a company who uses anti-cheating software such as this and sues reverse-engineers. No, I'm not trolling.

Re:"The Warden"

[obeythefist]

That's a perfectly fair statement to make.

No, Warden isn't gone, much like Raven Shield still uses Punkbuster. I hear even CoD2 is getting anti-cheat software put into the next patch.

Warden is responsible for the 18 odd thousand accounts being removed recently, and I am quite happy for that because the vast majority of those banned would be people violating the terms of use agreement, cheating, and sweatshop farming goldminers.

If you like, you're free to circumvent Warden by using the Sony rootkit, but I for one thank you for not playing WoW and therefore not cheating. WoW is a very easy game to play, and reaching level 60 does not need a "god" mode.

Re:"The Warden"

[GermanShepherd]

Actually if you start the game with the normal exe, the warden thing doesn't even come up.

Warden is the small program that only runs when WoW.exe is running. No bypassing that. The launcher (that loads when you use the default shortcut) is a cheatware scanner in addition to Warden. http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/misc/launcher.html seems to say that the Blizzard Launcher only notifies the user if you have cheatware. If you disregard the warnings and go ahead and start the game, then it's Warden's job to tell Blizzard that you're cheating and it won't be pretty.

So I'm not exactly sure what you meant... if I misunderstood and corrected with something you already knew, then my apologies, heh.

But I must say: More power to Blizzard for banning all those crazy level 1's with names comprised entirely of consonants that spam-whispered me offers to buy gold and disrupted my roleplaying. Booyah! (...and heck, even if they didn't get 'em all, at least they're trying.)

God!

[Wilson_6500]

Why call them paladins if they can't swing a sword or a mace or whatever? Call them Priests in Plate or Hateful Healers or something. Paladins are traditionally (in game terms) the folks who the men of the cloth turn to when they need someone to go out and _hurt_ something. Why rely on the expectations and the weight of the _name_ of a familiar gaming Job when you're not willing to work in the familiar idiom of that Job? Why pass up the chance to bolster your "lore" with a little creative license? If you want Paladins to run around half-naked with a sword in each hand, fighting for some greater cause using the art of War Dancing--fine! They're still un/holy warriors fighting for a higher power. By calling Doctor Tank a "Paladin," you're giving new players the idea that they will be able to play one out as a traditional paladin. I'm not saying that they should be in a party to do _all_ the damage or to manage Hate (through Provoke, or whatever WoW uses)--if they were, why have Warrior classes?

Everything I read about WoW makes it out to be the most nonsensical number crunch yet, wrapped up all pretty in the famous Blizzard brand name.

Re:Not a Total Paladin Revamp

[Chi Hsuan Men]

I knew that paladins were best at healing, buffing, and assisting other players going into the class, so I knew what to expect

This statement on its own makes some sense. After all, Paladins do have a dearth of talents that allow them to buff multiple ways. In addition, if you outfit a Paladin with a decent set of cloth, you have a functional secondary healer. If you play them in a creative manner, Paladins can be extremely flexible and helpful in a party.

but I can see why people who choose paladins thinking they'd get a 'holy warrior' are irritated with what they've gotten in exchange.

This I don't understand. Overall, paladins, on their own, stand up as a class. They won't be the first to finish off a mob, but they will last a lot longer against higher level mobs than most classes. If you do your homework, you're going to find a lot of alliance players complaining that paladins do not do enough damage; however, the flip side of the argument comes from horde players saying that they're impossible to kill. So, if the alliance players get their wish, paladins become death dealing nightmares and if Horde players get their wish, paladins become a class that can't heal or deal damage.

This also goes for anyone who gets angry about warriors not doing the most damage, or how x class cannot do y. Warriors aren't supposed to deal the most damage, they're suppose to tank (or take damage) and maintain aggro (keep an enemy's attention). This is the reason why I stopped wasting my time with the Blizzard forums, as it is simply 2% of the player base constantly whining about how their class was not powerful enough.

Class balance does not mean: "my class is more powerful than everyone elses'".