Project Lore

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?

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