Project Lore

A new round of changes to go with the next week of testing! Perhaps the most important of the bunch are those relating to the way Rogue poisons work. We brought a potential problem to your attention last week, which involved an add-on allowing Rogues to weapon-swap (and thus poison-swap) on the fly. This was supposed to increase DPS because whenever Deadly Poison was maxed out at five stacks, the mod would switch a different piece of gear with Instant Poison on it to maximize its proc rate. When DP needed to be reapplied, it would automatically switch your weapons again. Naturally, Blizzard didn't intend for Rogues to work this way and figured that the normally clunky mechanic, (which the add-on made easier, and thus, more popular) would set a bad precedent if it was allowed to continue unchecked. So they changed Deadly Poison to proc the poison on your other hand whenever it is at five stacks itself. In addition, Deadly Poison now also procs more often. I'm not sure how long this mechanics will stick around since it seems to be a quick fix for the add-on problem, so enjoy the DPS boost while you can Rogues! Massage your brain-things with the rest of the latest changes below:

Paladins

• Divine Intervention: This ability now also removes Exhaustion or Sated from a target if the recipient is out of combat when the effect ends. In addition, the cooldown on this ability has been reduced from 20 minutes to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Priests

• Shadowform: This talent also now causes Devouring Plague and Vampiric Touch to benefit from haste. Both the period length and the duration of these spells will be reduced by haste. In addition, the mana cost has been reduced from 32% to 13% of base mana.

Rogues

• Deadly Poison: In addition to its existing effects, when a rogue applies Deadly Poison to a target which has already reached the maximum number of applications, this will also trigger the poison which the rogue is using on his or her other weapon.

Assassination

• Improved Poisons: Bonus chance to trigger Deadly Poison from this talent increased. (4/8/12/16/20% per rank, up from 2/4/6/8/10%)

Shamans Elemental Combat

• Elemental Mastery: This talent now increases spell haste by 15% instead of critical strike chance while active.

Warlocks Affliction

• Improved Drain Soul: This talent now reduces threat by 10%/20%, up from 5%/10%.

Destruction

• Destructive Reach: This talent now reduces threat by 10%/20%, up from 5%/10%.

User Interface

• Dungeon System renamed Dungeon Finder

Graphics

• A new feature has been added to the D3D graphics engine to improve texture management (particularly for Windows XP users). If you are experiencing random crashes related to file read errors or out of memory, this new backend may help. To enable the new backend, add the following line to your Config.WTF file: SET gxApi "d3d9ex". For more information please visit our Test Realm forum: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11572&sid=1

Items

• Shaman Tier-9 4-Piece Set Bonus (Elemental): This set bonus now does an additional 10% of Lava Burst’s initial damage over time instead of increasing the size of the Lava Burst.

Bug Fixes

• Misc. bug fixes added. Check here for the complete list.