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Monday, November 26, 2012

Thoughts on Patch 5.1

According to MMO-Champion, the Patch 5.1 is coming live this week (in a couple hours, really) and I wanted to highlight some things I'm excited about. Complete patch notes can be found here. My comments are in red. 

Classes
  •  Hunter  I very rarely ever used Aspect of the Fox because I suck. I usually spam Arcane Shot when I'm moving, so this change is really awesome. 
     Monk (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
    • The Tiger Power provided by Tiger Palm now reduces target armor by 30% with a single application and no longer stacks.
Not a big change, but if the buff ever drops, it'll take 2 less GCDs to apply it back.

Pet Battles
  • A new item has been introduced that can be used to upgrade the quality of Battle Pets: Battle-stones. I have some uncommon quality pets who are really happy about this. 
  • Pet Journal
    • Pets can now be filtered by name, type, rarity and level, and filters will remain in place each time the Pet Journal is viewed.
    • It is now possible to search locations in the Pet Journal. For example, searching “Westfall” will display all the Battle Pets that can be found in Westfall.
  • Battle Pet tooltips will now display whether a pet is owned, and how many pets of that type are owned.
  • Pet Quality is now displayed in battles, and will be visible on portraits, names and tooltips.
  • The level of battle pets in a zone can now be seen on the map, and it’s now possible to see the strength of wild pets relative to your team at a glance.
Until now, I needed addons to do most of this. And have Warcraft Pets open on my second monitor. This will save a lot of time and effort!  

Raids, Dungeons and Scenarios
  • Raid groups are no longer necessary to enter pre-Mists of Pandara raid dungeons. Enemies in these raids that previously required more than one player to defeat are now more easily dealt with by players battling alone.

Wonder how much easier these raids will be. The fact that we won't need to bother friends or guildies to form a raid just to enter raids is a nice plus.

These are only a portion of all the things that are coming tomorrow, so you should definitely read the complete patch notes. It's nice to be getting a patch so quickly after the new expansion's launch (almost exactly two months later, I think this might be a new record!) bringing so much quality of life improvements. 

I'm a bit worried though that I didn't see anything about reputations in those patch notes. I thought I had read somewhere that with patch 5.1 were coming new items you could buy once you hit revered with a faction that made gaining rep on all your characters easier. Maybe I'm mistaken, or maybe I missed them. Either way, fingers crossed!

1 comment:

  1. LOL I too have Warcraft Pets open on my second monitor when zooming around! I'm glad I can stop doing that now. And maybe I will have less addons with Blizz fixing up that Pet journal.

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