2.1.0 PTR Patch Notes

[Jayce]

Tigole says he'd love to redo Gnomeregan.

Someone needs to.

[Chimpy]

Tigole says he'd love to redo Gnomeregan. Yeah, I bet he would.

God damnit now I have those stupid soundclips from the last boss in Gnomer going through my head.

Thanks a lot.

[Jeff Kelly]

edit: and once more, there's an interview with Tigole (ugh) and some other guy I can't remember on WorldofRaids where they talk about the future. Tigole says he'd love to redo Gnomeregan. Yeah, I bet he would.

If Tigole redoes Gnomeregan it will probably be a Level 70 heroic 5-man where you have to faction grind to gain access need all the potions available to survive, where every encounter is max-dps and with an enrage timer razuvious style and you have to farm ages to get some sort of resistance equip to survive the final boss. Also it will be buggy as hell and won't drop anything worthwile at all. As usual really.

[Fabricated]

I'd be happy just because the Gnomes would get some fucking lore for a change.

-Night Elves have all their happy tree bullshit with the Emerald Dream and their connections to the main plot of WC3.
-Dwarves were created by the gods that made the whole planet.
-Humans have most of the pivotal roles in the lore.
-Blood Elves actually had lore BEFORE the expansion.
-Taurens...well okay you kinda got me, but they got more backstory than the Gnomes.
-Orcs. Thrall, duh.
-Trolls. A bunch of really important characters I cannot remember since their naming conventions suck.
-Forsaken. Actually got a lot of lore in the game.
-Draenai. Retconned lore, but lore none the less.

-Gnomes...they're gnomes. They're kinda there. They had a city but they lost it.

[Merusk]

Gnomes already have more lore than they deserve.


My hate of gnomes is on par with most other folks hate of elves.

Fucking gnomes.

[Chimpy]

The only good gnome is a leper gnome.

[bhodi]

Hey, fuck you guys, you would have to WALK from Stormwind to Ironforge without us!

[Lum]

Hey, don't be hating on the gnomes.

"I like big posteriors and I cannot prevaricate!"

[Rasix]

The only good gnome is a leper gnome.

Or a dead one.  There is no greater feeling than watching a gnome death animation.  Especially if they were jumping at the time of expiration. 

Joy.

That being said, it's the only alliance toon I'd ever play. Being that small in PVP is just too big of an advantage to pass up.

[Jayce]

Gnomes already have more lore than they deserve.


My hate of gnomes is on par with most other folks hate of elves.

Fucking gnomes.

Hear, hear.

you would have to WALK from Stormwind to Ironforge without us!

Only once.

"I like big posteriors and I cannot prevaricate!"

.. is the only good thing about gnomes.  That, and the other voice emote "[Shout-outs]... you might be short, but you're real, baby!"

[rk47]

gnomes racials are not bad actually. Pretty good for warlocks +5% int is more mana and a little bit more spell crit and Escape Artist is instant and applicable for PVE/PVP.
Much better than Human Spirit & Perception.

[Cyndre]

I'm just glad we don't drown in Black Morass anymore.  Working properly is enough for me...  lore would just be overboard imho.

[Triforcer]

After the patch, I STILL can't get my Karaz key because the three instances in Netherstorm (Mechanar, etc.) crash my computer EVERY SINGLE TIME I enter them.  I had been playing WoW for nearly two years, off and on, and NEVER ONCE did any specific area of game geography cause my computer to go berserk.  I always get to one of the rooms with one of the bridges over the white sparkly bottomless pit, and then I crash and enrage my group 

[Kail]

Yeah, I've been having a lot of problems with the patch, too...  Mountains in the distance keep flickering, texture issues, crashes to desktop... very odd.  Hope they fix it soon.  The amount of gold spam I'm getting hit with has dropped substantially, though.

[SurfD]

After the patch, I STILL can't get my Karaz key because the three instances in Netherstorm (Mechanar, etc.) crash my computer EVERY SINGLE TIME I enter them.  I had been playing WoW for nearly two years, off and on, and NEVER ONCE did any specific area of game geography cause my computer to go berserk.  I always get to one of the rooms with one of the bridges over the white sparkly bottomless pit, and then I crash and enrage my group 

A warlock guildie of mine appearently gets fatal exception errors EVERY single time he gets into a fight with a particular type of mob in Netherstorm.  He can target it fine, but if he actually fights it, it hard crashes his WoW.

[Ironwood]

My animations are fucked.  Watching the Fel Reaver glide over the mountains like a dalek was pretty fucking messed up.

[Azazel]

Tigole says he'd love to redo Gnomeregan.

Someone needs to.

leave it the fuck alone and build a new low-mid-end instance.

Unless he's talking about taking out some of the trash. That would be acceptable.

[Threash]

gnomes racials are not bad actually. Pretty good for warlocks +5% int is more mana and a little bit more spell crit and Escape Artist is instant and applicable for PVE/PVP.
Much better than Human Spirit & Perception.

At the moment a lot of the top pvp teams are rerolling alliance for their superior pvp racials, which i find hilarious because everyone always considered the horde racials better for pvp.  Turns out the problem was simply that the alliance is 90% elves and humans rather than the incredibly powerfull dwarves and gnomes.  Stone form + escape artist + FEAR WARD trump anything the horde gets, mainly the fear ward though.

[Chimpy]

My animations are fucked.  Watching the Fel Reaver glide over the mountains like a dalek was pretty fucking messed up.

Did you try deleteing your WDB folder and logging back in? (don't recommend doing this in Ogrimmar or Ironforge though)

Any time I had weird graphics problems after a patch deleting that folder and letting it recache all the image data helped.

[caladein]

It's that the importance of defense and offense have switched in the transition from BGs to the Arena. Alliance has always had good defensive racials, and that's what gets the job done. It's not that Horde have inferior general-PvP racials, it's that the Arena places such an emphasis on defense that it plays to the Alliance's racial emphasis (reason that UD/Tauren are so popular for the classes they can be).

Don't get me wrong though, giving Fear Ward to Draenei instead of Blood Elves still irks me the wrong way.

[Calantus]

gnomes racials are not bad actually. Pretty good for warlocks +5% int is more mana and a little bit more spell crit and Escape Artist is instant and applicable for PVE/PVP.
Much better than Human Spirit & Perception.

At the moment a lot of the top pvp teams are rerolling alliance for their superior pvp racials, which i find hilarious because everyone always considered the horde racials better for pvp.  Turns out the problem was simply that the alliance is 90% elves and humans rather than the incredibly powerfull dwarves and gnomes.  Stone form + escape artist + FEAR WARD trump anything the horde gets, mainly the fear ward though.

Dwarves were always the best priest race by far, and a decent PVP race for any class. Gnomes though... gnomes used to be SHIT. Escape Artist used to be a 1.5 second cast, only removed 1 effect (so you'd be fucked if you had nova and chill from ice armor on you), and IIRC was on a 2 or 3 minute timer. Oh and at one point you couldn't EA out of nova for months. In short it was a shitty, shitty move. Buffing it out the ass did wonders for its power though. :P

Oddly enough dwarves are less powerful than they used to be, stone form was once a 20 second effect and now it's 12 seconds. A sad day when that change went through. :(

I reckon actual racials are pretty balanced right now, though I still hate WoTF because it just totally rapes against the only alliance mains I've ever had (priest and warlock). It's just the fear ward + desperate prayer combo that makes alliance arguably better.

[Jayce]

Don't get me wrong though, giving Fear Ward to Draenei instead of Blood Elves still irks me the wrong way.

Is there something that irks you the right way?

I agree with the statement though... if their new strategy is to level the two sides by giving both sides pallys and shammys, they should consider giving fear ward to both sides.  It's the only racial I think of that's that powerful.

Re: stoneform, I only ever used it with my dwarf priest to get rid of poison effects.  12 or 20 seconds, your chance of guessing when a poison effect was inbound is pretty low vs the ability to dump it/them.

[Morfiend]

Don't get me wrong though, giving Fear Ward to Draenei instead of Blood Elves still irks me the wrong way.

Couldnt agree more. It was the perfect time to fix the imbalance of Fear Ward, and what did they do? Give it to fuck Draenei. Some times the stupidity boggles the mind.

[Chimpy]

I agree with the statement though... if their new strategy is to level the two sides by giving both sides pallys and shammys, they should consider giving fear ward to both sides.  It's the only racial I think of that's that powerful.

IIRC They said they would fix the fear ward problem by removing the amount of fear mechanics in future encounters. But giving another race the damn thing was annoying.

Of course, having raided heavily on both sides before I stopped playing. I found that alliance tends to treat fear ward as a necessity and the tanks don't learn the relatively simple tactic of having 2 tanks alternating stance dances to offset fear effects early on so when things went nuts they went really nuts.

[Jobu]

Did the ignite mechanics change again in this patch? It seems to actually be rolling again.... kind of. I can't quite tell.

[ajax34i]

They'd have to give WotF to the Alliance, though, so you'd have Horde Priests [just BElves] gaining Fear Ward, and Alliance [a number of classes all belonging to one race] gaining WotF.  If they're gonna equalize anti-crowd-control, they better get everything equalized.

[Chimpy]

They'd have to give WotF to the Alliance, though, so you'd have Horde Priests [just BElves] gaining Fear Ward, and Alliance [a number of classes all belonging to one race] gaining WotF.  If they're gonna equalize anti-crowd-control, they better get everything equalized.

WoTF and fear ward are totally different things. One is a self cast reactive spell, the other is a cast on anyone pro-active counter.

The balancing issue for the factions was an almost entirely PvE thing anyway, and WoTF was only slightly less useless than the orc bloodfury racial in PvE.

Giving a second alliance race fear ward was one of the most inexplicable things done by blizzard in the expansion.

[Jayce]

They'd have to give WotF to the Alliance, though, so you'd have Horde Priests [just BElves] gaining Fear Ward, and Alliance [a number of classes all belonging to one race] gaining WotF.  If they're gonna equalize anti-crowd-control, they better get everything equalized.

WoTF and fear ward are totally different things. One is a self cast reactive spell, the other is a cast on anyone pro-active counter.

The balancing issue for the factions was an almost entirely PvE thing anyway, and WoTF was only slightly less useless than the orc bloodfury racial in PvE.

Giving a second alliance race fear ward was one of the most inexplicable things done by blizzard in the expansion.

Yeah, I actually thought about WoTF when I was trying to think of racials to compare.  The differences is that's a pure racial ability.  Priests just have these special racial spells, which is slightly different.  For example humans get desperate prayer as well, but undead priests get some other thing (call of the grave) and night elves get starshards and elune's grace.

However, no races share "pure" racials like escape artist, stoneform, cannibalize, etc.

[caladein]

Of course, having raided heavily on both sides before I stopped playing. I found that alliance tends to treat fear ward as a necessity and the tanks don't learn the relatively simple tactic of having 2 tanks alternating stance dances to offset fear effects early on so when things went nuts they went really nuts.

It's the same reason that most Hunters can't Ice Trap to save their lives: they've relied on Mages forever for CC.

For the Priest Racials though:

Damage = Undead and Troll (w/ 2.1 and only marginally)
Defense = Human (marginally), Draenei, and Dwarf
Useless = Blood Elf, Night Elf (HAHA, that's what you get for being attractive!)

[Zetor]

I believe the problem is the entire "Undead rogues with fearward" thing. Since about 80+% of all horde mages/warlocks/priests/rogues are undead, it'd make pvp for alliance warlocks and priests even more "interesting" than it already is... I have an alliance affliction warlock + holy priest, so I can relate. In other words, [long stream of expletives]...

... personally I think they need to realize that hard-counter racials [wotf, escape artist] are out of whack.


-- Z.

[Calantus]

I'd give up fear ward if undead lost WoTF in exchange, get rid of all the racial fear breaks/immunes. It's just so fucking annoying having an entire race cancel out your only CC. In arena, if the enemy are non-undead our chances of winning just shot up by a whole lot because the second fear bomb I drop is actually going to do something useful.

[Jayce]

I'd give up fear ward if undead lost WoTF in exchange

Can you imagine the wailing and gnashing if undead lost WoTF or it got nerfed?

I don't have a single undead character but I wouldn't support it just because it would create a black hole of bitching that would suck the whole internet down into a singularity.

[Chimpy]

I'd give up fear ward if undead lost WoTF in exchange

Can you imagine the wailing and gnashing if undead lost WoTF or it got nerfed?

It has been nerfed more than once since release.

[ajax34i]

Giving a second alliance race fear ward was one of the most inexplicable things done by blizzard in the expansion.

It's explicable if they equate fear ward with WotF in some way.  It's not that they wanted the Alliance to have more fear wards, it's that they didn't want the Horde side to have it.  Trinket + racial, only two ways to deal with fear for each side, supposedly.  Well, now, three, as a lot of classes get 15% fear resist talents.

[Zetor]

It has been nerfed more than once since release.

With good reason, too (originally it lasted 20 seconds, still on its 2 minute cooldown, which means warlocks and priests had zero chance against a competent undead; it also broke sap/gouge type effects). It's STILL the best pvp racial in the game, by far, and the only way to break seduce and mindcontrol since charm breaks were removed from trinkets.

Now for pve, yeah, it's not too useful, though the biggest 'fear ward' fight [nightbane] just got nerfed so the tank has 2.5 seconds to switch stances for the fear. If he can't even do that, well...

So yeah, I'd be for removing all hard-counter racials (not just wotf, but escape artist etc). They just unbalance the game too much, a race choice shouldn't determine a matchup by itself.


Edit: Bloodfury isn't useless in pve at all.. it's a free damage trinket! My warlock cries great tears of gnome justice every day for not rolling orc in the first place. :P


-- Z.