Patch 3.1.2 Live
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Heartbourne on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 - 19 Comments Tags: 3.1.2, Patch, argent tournament, equipment manager, patch 3.1.2, wintergrasp
Heartbourne on Tuesday, May 19, 2009 - 19 Comments Tags: 3.1.2, Patch, argent tournament, equipment manager, patch 3.1.2, wintergrasp 
The new patch, 3.1.2, is now live on all realms. We have been covering what would be in this patch for awhile, and it's great to see some of our long-lost favorite features implemented, like the equipment manager. Check out the full patch notes.Here are my selected highlights from the new patch:
Equipment Manager- When enabled from the Interface Options menu, this feature will allow players to store sets of equipment, easily swap between saved sets using hotkeys, and pull items directly from backpacks or bank slots (must be at the bank to equip inventory from the bank).
I'm not quite sold on the equipment manager. I use Outfitter for all of my gear management and it's very robust. It automagically equips my lance when I enter the Argent Tournament grounds and puts on my PvP gear when I enter a battleground, arena, or Wintergrasp. I can also throw all my PvP gear in the bank when I'm going to raid for bag space and integrates beautifully with Fishingbuddy. The Blizzard implementation of interface components are generally not as good as player-developed addons (as evidenced as Omen versus in-game threat manager as well as all the interface mods from everything from the auction house to unit frames). We'll see how much this breaks Outfitter and whether it will replace it for most players.
New art textures have been added for Argent Tournament mounts. Any mounts already purchased from the Argent Tournament vendors will be updated automatically. Argent Tournament mounts with the old textures will still be available for purchase from the Argent Tournament vendors for a small Champion's Seal and gold cost (standard faction requirements apply).
Not only does this mean new, pretty mounts, but also that there are 5 more mounts, and cheap mounts at that! Five Champion's Seals is nothing, and 500g minus the 20% exalted discount is a mere 400g per mount. I might start seriously trying for that dragonhawk mount.
Vehicle health and damage output in Strand of the Ancients and Lake Wintergrasp now scale with the item level of the operator's gear. Power scaling is now 1% damage and 1% health per average item level.
Thank god! If only they implemented this on Oculus and the Eye of Eternity, then I would be perfectly happy with vehicle combat. Vehicles don't get tenacity, and this makes my average 7-8 tenacity buff in Wintergrasp pointless for actually doing objectives relevant to victory. Now that vehicles scale up with gear, there is a better incentive for getting gear for Wintergrasp and Strand of the Ancients.
All Lake Wintergrasp daily quests have been changed to a weekly format. The honor and Stone Keeper's Shards rewarded for completing these quests have been increased to compensate.
There are a few reasons why this is a good idea. First off, it should be noted that the honor rewarded from Wintergrasp on a whole has been nerfed to try to encourage people to do other battlegrounds. On the flip side, they changed the dailies to weeklies with much more honor and Stone Keeper's Shards. This means that there is less of an incentive to play Wintergrasp at every moments it's up, and instead encourages players to play it a few times per week. Hopefully this decreases the plague of Wintergrasp lag. Additionally, they won't take up one of the 25 daily quests you can do every day, meaning that overall the amount of gold and whatnot I can get each week has increased!
What changes are you excited about?
Reader Comments (19)
nice!
I am really excited about the Equipment Manager. Can't wait to try it out :) Sorry for double post by the way.
first ;O!?
awww =(
Nope, you are not first. How does that make you feel? Owned?
Finally! I was wondering if I have to get outfitter or not for dual speccing enhance and healer shammy, looks like I dont need to anymore :D
I still have reservations about Blizzard's decision to change the Wintergrasp dailies to weeklies, but I'll withhold judgement for now. :|
Having the Argent Tournament mounts would be nice except for two things: they're ugly, and I can't afford the gold on them if I want to get my Death Knight's epic flight training. : P
@Shamtastik
Take it from another shaman: Outfitter is better.
none. don't do wintergrasp, nor do i have multiple sets of gear to manage. :)
Im all set.
(sorry for the sudden spate of posts)
Apparently, the link in the "Website" field got cut off some time ago. I have corrected this so that if someone is curious, he/she can click on a valid link now. :oops:
Heartbourne, the dragonhawk mount is a lot harder to get than it seems. It used to be nigh impossible, needing all but a few currently available mounts, but with the addition of 11 extra mounts for the argent Tournament only relaxes the difficulty by a small amount. You still need most of the rare drop, all the purchasable, all the rep, and all the PvP mounts. Its easier with the extra mounts, but its still a feat.
could this patch suck anymore :(
:angry:
The mounts for sure. 5 seals and 400g (I'm exalted with everyone) is nothing for me and I'll gladly fork up the cash for it!
I think the changes made to WG are typical half baked and lazy Blizzard-esque solutions to problems. If they wanted the Wintergrasp battle to be used correctly make it an instanced BG This way there will only lag when the Battleground servers are playing up, the battle will be of manageable sizes and on Servers where populations are unbalanced fight will become more even with no need to try and compensate with the tenacity buff.
After destroying AV with sweeping changes and failing to address situations like Uneven teams in Battlegrounds they now want to encourage people to play other battlegrounds 0.o
WG changed to weeklies. Erm does Blizzard not know of Mark farming? People are still going to enter the battle to get there WG marks, unless there is actually something with stops you entering more than a few times a week. :bu me thinks not. So lag is still going to be a problem, as for the above comment, whilst the AV battles on my server have become more fair in numbers terms many times it is still 16 v 40 :O the general is dead.. well what a surprise, blizzard need to totally revamp PVP. Maybe with a new bg coming they may do very soon.
Tell me they've finally fixed the minimap glitch.
I saw this comment a while back and it's something I've pondered and I think they may be on to something. Is Blizzard busy focusing on it's next gen MMO and letting interns direct current development in WoW? These changes are not feature complete lack any forethought and don't appear to offer much if anything to game play. I played for about 3 hours last night after the patch and aside from the regen buffs everything was about the same as it was before the patch.
One of the things that I find the dumbest, the spell and particle densities are the same thing now, so if you want to see spells in all their glory, you've got to deal with the dust, fire and everything else around you. Way to go Blizz for making my already crappy PC run WoW crappier.