WoW Patch 2.4
Patch 2.4 hit the European servers of World of Warcraft on Wednesday, and was the smoothest patch yet - things were up and running well by the time people were coming home from work. It chewed up a lot of addons, mainly due to the changes in the combat log, but that's to be expected, and there wasn't a lot Blizzard could do about it anyway.
Quel'Danas
Quel'Danas is the new island, aka Sunwell Isle off to the north of Silvermoon. The Shattered Sun offensive (a combination of the Scryers and Aldor) are mounting an offensive to take back the island from Kael'thas. This offensive will happen in multiple stages, with each one granting access to new areas of the island. Stage 1 is already over on the European Argent Dawn - it lasted, I think, about 32 hours in total. The stage one dailies were fun, as long as they lasted, even if my rewards were all greens rather than the Badges of Justice other folk were getting. I've done one run through the Stage 2 ones, including the incredibly awesome bombing run quest - and last night, there were literally hundreds of people doing that run all at once, so there were dragonhawk trains chaining through the sky.
Crafting Changes
The crafting change that affects me most is the ability to turn my stacks and stacks of near worthless green gems into blues. Now, it take 18 greens to make a blue, and you can only do it once a day, but that's well worthwhile. There are also stacks of attractive looking jewelcrafting recipes on the Shattered Sun vendor, so I'm going to be working hard on my rep there. I'm at friendly now, after two rounds of dailies, and a run in Magisters' Terrace.
Magisters' Terrace
This is being referred to as "Mr T" on my server, which amuses me greatly. We did a run through on the first night, and got as far as the third boss. Owing the the composition of our group, and the composition of the set of mini-bosses there, we wiped repeatedly on that, and eventually gave up. We'll try again, with a slightly different group, sometime early next week. Crowd control, I think, is absolutely essential for that fight.
No More Attunements
The attunement process for Karazhan has been done away with. This means that when signups opened for the weekend raid that my guild participates in, I was able to go for it. The news that I'm going to have to have various addons, Teamspeak-type things and so on is not so welcome, but I'm willing to give it a go. My opinion on this is that any aspect of the game which requires external stuff to work, is broken. And I really object to using my own voice in CRPGs. However, the RPG aspect of any raid is pretty minimal, so I'll be good, for now.
PvP
Two major changes I've seen so far are that you can trade in marks of honour - one each of the four - and get bonus honour for it, and that Warsong Gulch is now playable again. I used to hate WSG, but in order to get enough marks from it to trade them in for the bonus (I have stacks of the others), I gave it a shot. And lo, the changes concerning flag-carriers have made it a far better game. Basically, flag-carriers show up on the map after a short period of time, and start taking increased damage a bit later. This prevents a LOT of idiocy. I know there are changes in Alterac Valley as well, but I've yet to try those - too busy acquiring enough honour to rid myself of the last green item Wormson is wearing.
Posted by Drew Shiel at March 28, 2008 11:39 AM
