Project Lore

Ever held a grudge against a Blizzard employee? Resented a class change? Sick and tired of lag? Been spurned by a Blue on the forums? 

Well, now you finally have a chance to enact revenge! If you can beat them at their own game, that is...

Sign up for the PTR, transfer a character or two, and download the latest build of Patch 3.3.3 for your chance to lock swords with members of the development team. The primary purpose of this special outing (available only on U.S. realms at the moment) seems to be testing out the new Random Battleground function. 

You may recall that the Blues conducted several similar sessions when testing the Dungeon Finder function for 3.3, which means that if you can't make it tomorrow (Friday, the 26th), there may be others in the near future. At the same time, this patch isn't nearly as large and will likely not have as long of a testing phase.

Either way, hit the jump for scheduling and the rest of the deets.

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Making the trek to Ahune should be a lot easier this year.A new version of Patch 3.3.3 hit the PTR today. To be completely honest, there's not a whole lot in this build that we haven't already tipped you off to. From the new holiday boss mechanics to the class changes hinted on Facebook last night, it's all there. 

But if you still need a quick run-down of what's been modified in 11599, here are some highlights:

• Holiday bosses can now only be fought by queuing up through the Dungeon Finder system or special NPCs (likely to be found in major cities). As a result, the previous requirements for summoning these bosses has been removed.
• Death Knights' Chains of Ice now automatically inflicts Frost Fever.
• Druids' Nature's Grasp spell now has 3 charges.
• Hunters' Ferocious Inspiration is now an aura.
• Warriors' Vitality talent now buffs Stamina by 3/6/9%.

The rest of the details, including more class changes, can be found after the jump!

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Sure, holiday bosses (and the potential for their phat lootz) are one of the biggest draws for many of us to world events. But up until now, a lot of drama has come with them - the potential for players not being "fresh" for their daily kill, the difficulty in forming groups late in the day, and of course QQ over rolls on loot.

Patch 3.3.3 aims to bring closure to some of those issues by bringing in the LFG system that we so love here at Project Lore. And now we also have a bit of clarification from blue poster Zarhym on exactly how it will be implemented (at least as of now).

Buried within the Patch Notes for 3.3.3 on the PTR, we have this little morsel:

• World Event bosses (such as Ahune for the Fire Festival) will now be accessible through the Dungeon Finder. Players must use the Dungeon Finder to access these bosses.

And here's what Zarhym said to bring a bit more clarity to the matter:

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What? So soon?! With the Lich King Hard Mode the only remaining unconquered content in Icecrown Citadel (well, for the guilds at the tip of the top, anyway), it may not be that big of a surprise.

Nonetheless, my ears perked up when I heard that WoW-Europe had recently activated their Patch Test Realm forum again, indicating that a new testing phase may be on the way.

Do keep in mind that, despite the curiosity of these events, there is no official indication that anything is about to happen. In fact, Wryxian emphasizes that the PTR is not currently live in one of his posts on the forum:

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Love 'em or hate 'em, rogues have got to be sneaky. It's a good part of what defines the class, allows them, as leather-wearers, to deal melee dps without instant death, and sets them apart from other DPSers. So it's no huge surprise that Vanish, one of the key skills that rounds out that specialty, has long been debated because it's, as some players would say, "broken."

Just how is it or isn't it broken? Different players of different classes will give you varying answers. But the debate revolves around players/mobs/pets still being able to attack a rogue who has vanished, and a number of AoE/DoT effects that will immediately pull a vanished rogue back out of stealth. Personally, my main is a rogue, so I tend toward the side that vanish should allow a little bit of lenience to allow some time to get away, heal or regenerate some energy. But I certainly don't want it to be overpowered, either, because then it will inevitably get a nerf.

Enter Patch 3.3 on the PTR, and game developers announced hefty plans to unveil a Vanish fix. The hoopla began about a month ago, with blue poster Ghostcrawler announcing Blizzard's intentions on the WoW forums:

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Players on the test realms will get to take their first steps into the Lich King's domain tomorrow, assuming that excessive lag and crashing servers don't put put a damper on the event. No doubt many guilds (and PuGs) will be trying their damnedest to get their foot in the front door, so you can expect the outside of Icecrown Citadel to look like something like an Azerothian Woodstock (can we get The Artist Formerly known as Level 80 Elite Tauren Chieftain to play the event?).

That big bad skeleton in the background might just be Marrowgar.

Testing itself kicks off with (obviously enough) the first boss in the instance, Lord Marrowgar. As yet, we don't know a whole lot about the specifics of each boss, but the achievement associated with him does tell us that he has a spell called Bone Cyclone which, ideally, people should be staying out of to avoid damage. Though we've yet to see his ugly mug, I'm also going to go ahead and guess that Marrowgar shares his model with those big old Bone Sentinels running around in Icecrown Glacier.

Here's the downlow from Daelo on the testing phase:

"We are scheduling a raid test for Icecrown Citadel tomorrow at 7pm EDT/4pm PDT for the two US PTR Servers. Lord Marrowgar, the first boss of the raid zone, will be available for testing. The trash leading up to him will also be ready for testing.

The Icecrown Citadel raid test schedule will be very flexible, and can change at a moment's notice due to build status, bugs, and server issues. Remember that this is the test server, so things can, do, and will break from time to time. Check this forum for the latest US Icecrown Citadel raid testing schedule information in the weeks to come.

The EU region will have a different raid testing schedule, which I will announce on their forums in the near future as I have further information and more bosses are ready for testing."

 

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The new build brings several changes, but we still have to wait for the Halls of Reflection. It looks like that little bit of extra maintenance on the PTR today wasn't just for show, as a new build of 3.3 has been deployed on the test realms. Unfortunately, this one doesn't seem to be quite as substantial as the first two, as there seem to be no new instances to run through. Part of me wonders if they'll just keep Halls of Reflection internal for the duration of the testing period in order to preserve the secrecy of whatever events might transpire there. But that doesn't mean there aren't any new or interesting changes. Here are the updated patch notes:

Druid

• Rebirth: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
• Gift of the Earthmother: Redesigned. This talent now increases spell haste by 2/4/6/8/10% instead of its previous effect.

Hunter

• Call Stabled Pet: Cooldown reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.

Mage

• Improved Scorch: The debuff from this talent no longer stacks, and instead can apply the full effect from a single cast of Scorch.

Priest

• Power Word: Shield; This spell can now be cast on non-raid/party friendly targets.
• Improved Devouring Plague: This spell now deals 10/20/30% of its total periodic effect instantly, up from 5/10/15%.
• Shadowform: This talent also now causes Devouring Plague, Shadow Word: Pain, 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.
• Vampiric Embrace: This ability is now provides a 30-minute buff that cannot be dispelled, instead of a target debuff.

Shaman

• Reincarnation: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 60 minutes down to 50 minutes (Improved Reincarnation will continue to lower the cooldown by 10/20 minutes).

Warlock

• Create Soulstone: The cooldown on this spell and duration of its buff have been lowered from 30 minutes down to 15 minutes. Cannot be used in Arenas.
• Decimation: Redesigned. When Shadowbolt, Incinerate or Soul Fire hit a target that is at or below 35% health, the cast time of Soul Fire is reduced by 20/40% for 8 seconds. Soul Fires cast under the effect of Decimation cost no shards.
• Molten Core: Redesigned. Shadow spells and damage-over-time effects have a 12% chance to increase the damage done by Incinerate by 5/10/15% and Soul Fire by 4/7/10% for 12 seconds. In addition, Molten Core now has a new spell effect.

User Interface

• Non spell-based tracking now persists through logout.
• Any party member may mark raid targets.
• Users will be warned when their talents are reset due to a new patch.
• “/Settitle” command has been added.
• Instant quest text is on by default.
• “Tentative” status added for calendar responses.
• Players below level 10 may not join raids.
• Ignore list expanded to 50 to match the friends list.
• Unit frames added for special encounters.
• Interface element added next to the mini-map to show what dungeon you are in (ex: 10- and 25-player Heroic dungeons marked with a skull).
• Experience earned for a quest will display in the Quest Rewards section.
• Confirmation box added when buying stable slots.
• Macro Changes

Symbol “@” added as a synonym for “target=”;. For example, “/cast [@focus] Flash Heal”. New macro conditionals: “vehicleui” (if the player has a vehicle UI) and “unithasvehicleui” (if the target of the macro has a vehicle UI). Character and Creature Nameplates

• The range at which players can see nameplates has been significantly expanded.
• You can no longer see nameplates through objects which block line of sight.

As long as you are able to peer through the doorway of a room, you will see nameplates of characters and creatures in that room. Pillars and bridges in Arenas will not hide friendly or enemy nameplates.

• Totem nameplates can be toggled off under “PRODUCTION” settings via “Interface Options” on the test realms.
• Instead of nameplates for large groups of players or creatures trying to sort themselves, they will now overlap. This functionality can be toggled off under “PRODUCTION” settings via “Interface Options” on the test realms.

Addon Author Changes

• “registerForClicks” added to xml buttons.
• “MouseIsOver” has been converted to a “C” function for increased efficiency (e.g. /dump PlayerFrame:IsMouseOver() ).
• When an addon file is loaded, the addon name and an addon table are passed to the file through ‘…’. The same addon table is passed to every file loaded by a particular TOC file (example at the top of a Lua file: “local addonName, addonTable = …;”.
• “motionScriptsWhileDisabled” attribute added to buttons. This allows “OnEnter”; and “OnLeave”; to fire while the button is disabled.
• “GetFileHeight()” and “GetFileWidth()” added to Texture objects. 0 is returned if no texture file is associated with the texture.
• You can now query for a list of completed quests with “QueryQuestsCompleted()” then wait for the “QUEST_QUERY_COMPLETE” event, and call “GetQuestsCompleted(<luatable>)”.

As you can see, several spells have been redesigned (and I'm personally pretty happy about the reduced cooldown on Rebirth), but some of the most exciting changes are coming to the User Interface. Though allowing anybody in your party to mark targets may seem like trouble waiting to happen for an unruly group, it should be quite beneficial for those that know how to control themselves. It takes some of the sweat of the tank or raid/party leader if other people can be designated to mark targets on the fly. Likewise, I'm glad that they're finally adding a "tentative" option to calender responses. I'm sure we've all had days when we weren't entirely sure we'd be able to make it to a raid or not, and just knowing that much makes organizing them a heckuva lot easier. As for the nameplates? Well, I always have them on, and while I can see a few problems with allowing them to overlap, I think it'll be much less confusing than the current setup which has them bouncing all over the place when there is a large group of mobs to deal with. That makes them extremely hard to individually target with the mouse. You go to click one and its nameplate has just jumped across the screen, and we all know that mis-targeting can, on occasion, lead to rather unfortunate consequences. As a side note, MMO-Champion has revealed that Oswald the Penguin will now once again go by his old name, Mr. Chilly. One might wonder why Blizzard did such a quick one-eighty! This new build is sure to bear more fruit as we continue to explore what it offers, so please stay tuned, and let us know what you think of the changes above!

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It seems as though the patch notes for 3.3 have been updated once again, meaning that a new build on the PTR should hit sometime within the next couple of days. Here's what's new:

General

• The existing /welcome emote now greets/welcomes targets (character says “hello”), while the new /yw is for saying "you're welcome."
• Many of the tail sweeps with knockback effects will no longer hit players’ pets.

Icecrown Citadel

• The Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron in the 5-player dungeon are currently available for testing.
• Additional Icecrown Citadel dungeon and raid content will be made available in future test builds. For more information and testing schedules please visit our Test Realm forum: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?forumId=11572&sid=1

Classes: General

• Area-of-Effect Damage Caps: We’ve redesigned the way area damage is capped when hitting many targets. Instead of a hard cap on total damage done, the game now caps the total damage done at a value equal to the damage the spell would do if it hit 10 targets. In other words, if a spell does 1000 damage to each target, it would hit up to 10 targets for 1000 each, but with more than 10 targets, each target would take 1000 damage divided by the number of targets. 20 targets would be hit for 500 damage each in that example.
• Pet Resilience: All player pets now get 100% of their master’s resilience.
• Taunt Diminishing Returns: We’ve revised the system for diminishing returns on Taunt so that creatures do not become immune to Taunt until after 5 Taunts have landed. The duration of the Taunt effect will be reduced by 35% instead of 50% for each taunt landed. In addition, most creatures in the world will not be affected by Taunt diminishing returns at all. Creatures will only have Taunt diminishing returns if they have been specifically flagged for that behavior based on the design of a given encounter.

Races: General

• Orc and troll shamans now have their own unique totem art.

PvP Battlegrounds

• Battleground Experience: Battleground experience gained is now based on the level of the player gaining experience, rather than the highest possible player level in that Battleground.

Death Knight Unholy

• Scourge Strike: Redesigned. The base ability now deals 50% weapon damage plus an additional amount as physical damage. However, for each disease the death knight has on the target, the target will take additional shadow damage equal to 25% of the physical damage done.
• Unholy Blight: This talent now deals only 10% of Death Coil damage as a damage-over-time effect on the target.

Druid

• Prowl: This ability no longer has multiple ranks and penalizes movement speed by 30%.

Hunter

• Call Stabled Pet: Cooldown reduced from 30 minutes to 5 minutes.
• Deterrence: Now also increases the chance for ranged attacks to miss the hunter by 100% while under its effect.

Pets

• Avoidance: This talent has been replaced by Culling the Herd. Hunter pets now innately take 90% less damage from area-of-effect abilities like all other class pets. This does not apply to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
• Cower: Redesigned. This ability no longer affects threat, and instead reduces damage taken by the pet by 40% for 6 seconds with a 45-second cooldown. While cowering, the pet’s movement speed is 50% of normal speed. Cower now only has a single rank and is available at pet level 20.
• Culling the Herd: This pet talent has replaced the Avoidance talent in the pet trees (Hunter pets now gain that benefit automatically without expenditure of talent points). Culling the Herd increases pet and hunter damage by 1/2/3% for 10 seconds each time the pet deals a critical strike with Claw, Bite, or Smack.
• Demoralizing Screech: The attack power reduction from this ability has been increased by 40%, equaling the maximum possible attack power reduction from the abilities of other classes.
• Improved Cower: Redesigned. This ability now reduces the movement penalty of Cower by 50%/100%.
• Venom Web Spray: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards.
• Web: Range increased from 20 yards to 30 yards.
• Wolverine Bite: This talent is now enabled when the pet lands a critical strike rather than from the target dodging the pet’s attacks. In addition, this talent no longer has a prerequisite.

Paladin Protection

• Divine Guardian: This talent no longer increases the amount of damage transferred to the paladin from Divine Sacrifice. Instead it causes all raid and party members to take 10/20% reduced damage while Divine Sacrifice is active.
• Divine Sacrifice: Redesigned. The effect of Divine Sacrifice is now party-only and the maximum damage which can be transferred is now limited to 40% of the paladin’s health multiplied by the number of party members. In addition, the damage transferred to the paladin is now reduced by 50% before being applied to the paladin. Finally, the bug which allowed Divine Sacrifice to sometimes persist despite reaching its maximum damage has been fixed. Divine Sacrifice will now cancel as soon as its maximum damage value is exceeded in all cases.

Priest Shadow

• Mind Flay: The range of this ability has been increased to 30 yards, up from 20.

Rogue

• Vanish: For the first half second after this ability is used, neither Vanish nor Stealth can be broken by taking damage or being the victim of a hostile spell or ability.

Warlock Affliction

• Improved Felhunter: This talent now also reduces the cooldown on the felhunter’s Shadow Bite ability by 2/4 seconds.

Demonology

• Decimation: Redesigned. When Shadowbolt, Incinerate or Soul Fire hit a target that is at or below 35% health, the cast time of Soul Fire is reduced by 30/60% for 8 seconds. Soul Fires cast under the effect of Decimation cost no shards.
• Demonic Pact: This talent now also increases the warlock's spell damage by 1/2/3/4/5%.

Destruction

• Conflagrate: Redesigned. This talent now consumes an Immolate or Shadowflame effect on the enemy target to instantly deal damage equal to 9 seconds of Immolate or 8 seconds of Shadowflame, and causes additional damage over 3 seconds equal to 3 seconds of Immolate or 2 seconds of Shadowflame.

Pets

• Doomguard/Infernal: These pets now innately have Avoidance like all other warlock pets.
• Shadow Bite: This pet ability now provides 15% increased damage for each of the warlock’s damage-over-time effects on the target.

User Interface For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros Forum: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/board.html?sid=1&amp;forumId=11114 Enchanting

• Enchant Weapon - Unholy: This enchantment now inflicts Shadow damage in addition to its original effect.

First Aid

• The training costs for most bandages have been reduced.

Mining

• Enchanted Thorium: This ability now uses the Mining skill and is learned from trainers at a skill level of 250.

Quests

• Weekly raid quests are now available from Archmage Lan'dalock in Dalaran. Every Tuesday at 3 AM the Council of Six will choose a different strategic target that must die from either: The Obsidian Sanctum, Naxxramas, The Eye of Eternity, Ulduar, Trial of the Crusader, or Icecrown Citadel.
• For the various Icecrown Bomber quests at Aldur'thar: The Desolation Gate, players can now choose to eject from their bomber seats mid-run. If you do so, a rescue vehicle will transport your character back to the safety of your infra-green platform.
• Azure Drakes and Dragons will now attack back when attacked by characters not riding Wyrmrest Defenders.

Items

• Death Knight Tier-9 4-Piece Bonus: This set bonus no longer grants Frost Fever a chance to be a critical strike. It still grants that possibility to Blood Plague.

Bug Fixes Items

• Glyph of Immolation Trap: Now properly increases damage by 100%.

Classes Druid

• Infected Wounds: This ability is no longer considered to be in the magical defense category; therefore spell hit no longer applies to its activation.
• Nature's Grace: The tooltip now correctly indicates that it will not be activated from periodic spell critical strikes.

Hunter

• Concussive Barrage: This ability is no longer subject to spell reflects.
• Point of No Escape: This ability no longer stacks and now only functions for the hunter.

Mage

• Flame Strike: Some ranks of this spell had an incorrect cast time of 3 seconds. All ranks now share a 2-second cast time.

Priest

• Inspiration: The tooltip now correctly indicates that it also functions with Prayer of Mending.
• Mind Flay: The rank 1 tooltip has been corrected to indicate the accurate damage and snare effect.

Warlock

• Curse of the Elements: Rank 4 has been increased to 11%, up from 10%.
• Drain Soul: This spell now deals 4 times the normal damage for all ranks. Previously it was only ranks 6 and above.
• Suffering (Voidwalker): Ranks 5-8 had the incorrect taunt radius of 5 yards and have all been adjusted to a 10-yard radius.

Looks like there are a lot of changes coming to Hunters and their pets as far as class tweaking goes. And it also seems as though the design team still hasn't settled on how to handle a Rogue's Vanish skill, as it's down to .5 seconds from 1. Feral Druid's Prowl skill has now been modified to stay in line with the changes made to Rogues' Stealth. There's also a confirmation of weekly raid quests, and I do believe that we'll get to test Forge of Souls pretty soon. Looks like they fixed the bugs associated with it (we were supposed to test FoS instead of Pit of Saron last week), so hopefully that means those that prevent people from seeing the instance portals are, as well. You can find the full list of Patch 3.3 changes here. Whether you like the shape of things to come or not, chime in with your thoughts on these latest changes below!

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Haste can sometimes be a hard stat to measure. Not being the mathematics whiz that some of my fellow WoW players are, I honestly couldn't tell you the difference between a spell that takes 2 seconds cast and another that takes only 1.9. Sure, I can generally assume that the latter will lead to more damage somewhere down the road, but does that make it worth gearing for as opposed to other stats that might have a more immediate or obvious effect? Like sand through an hourglass, so are the raids of lives... Well, Ghostcrawler and the rest of the Systems team has a plan to make Haste a more marketable stat than it ever has before: allowing it to effect "Heal over Time" and "Damage over Time" spells. According to a recent post on the official forums, this implementation would decrease the time between ticks on an individual cast, allowing the effects to be felt more frequently. For instance, let's say you know there's going to be some consistent damage coming in and a player is at very low health. You cast a HoT in hopes of keeping him alive, but the damage kills him in-between ticks. In this case, Haste might have saved him by ticking sooner than the damage did. Of course, this may present another problem, as GC points out:

"This means more damage or healing per time but also having to refresh those spells more often. Since there is a trade-off, we're not sure the change is a no-brainer, especially in the healing case."

So what's their solution? Instead of forcing the changes on players, toss Haste-increasing effects onto Glyphs, so they can choose whether or not it makes sense for them to make use of it:

"For 3.3 we are talking about introducing three new glyphs for Shadow Word: Pain, Corruption and Rejuvenation that would allow these spells to tick faster with the more haste you have. There are glyphs of Corruption and Rejuv already, and we're not sure how we're going to resolve those yet. For Shadow Word: Pain, we are likely to rename the current glyph to Glyph of Mind Flay, remove the old Glyph of Mind Flay, and increase Mind Flay by 10 yards in the base spell."

It should be noted that these changes are NOT guaranteed! This is just a concept that the team has been tossing around for a little while, and apparently they've stumbled across some new technology that actually allows them to do it. If they come to pass, though, they'll most likely be available for testing in an upcoming build of Patch 3.3 on the PTR. We'll be sure to keep you guys posted, but in the meantime, do you think that allowing Haste to affect HoTs and DoTs would help or hurt your performance in-game? Perhaps it should only be applied to damage-boosting glyphs so that the stakes are lower for healers?

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The jury's still out on whether or not Garrosh Hellscream is truly a dangerous man. Sure, he's pushy, belligerent, hot-headed, and more than a little racist, but he seems to honestly believe that what he's doing is best for the Orcish people. And yet, we know somewhere in there, that he seeks to defy the more... unsavory aspects of his father's legacy, who was equally lustful for power, but failed to control himself by drinking Mannoroth's blood and esnlaving the Orcs. Likewise, we must consider that Garrosh has spent nearly his entire life in Nagrand. He's not as familiar with the struggles on Azeroth as his compatriots are; not as beholden to the same love of certain humans or ideals of peace as Thrall is. And let's not forget that he's got a virtual equal in the Humans' King Varian Wrynn. In Garrosh's eyes, he is a man who cannot be controlled and will take the opportunity to destroy the Horde when it presents itself. If Garrosh is to slated to become Warchief, he has to do what he thinks is right to protect his people, even if his methods seem wrong. We haven't reached the expansion just yet, or even the world events that will lead up to them, but signs of the changing times are already starting to show themselves on the PTR. While everyone else is distracted by the shiny, new 5-man dungeon (Pit of Saron), I decided to do a little bit of poking around, and discovered a rather interesting development in the good old Undercity. Bye-bye Abominations! As you might recall, after the events of the Wrathgate, Thrall sent his elite soldiers, the Kor'Kron Guard, to keep watch over the remaining apothecaries in the Forsaken capital. The difference on the test realm is that now, they're all over the place. Gone are the abominations that used to protect the city, replaced by Orcish knights patrolling the city. It's possible that this is just an expansion of Thrall's policy to keep the apothecaries in check, but it also fits in with things we've heard about the future. Namely, Garrosh becoming Warchief and changing the way things work. Only letting Orcs and Tauren into the center of Orgrimmar, because he believes that they're the only ones actually capable of defending it. Hey, what about the Trolls, Garrosh? Sure, the double-dealing of a certain faction of Undead and the inherently shifty Blood Elves need to be scrutinized, but what did the poor Trolls ever do to lose your trust? But, I digress. If the betrayal at Wrathgate made Garrosh lose faith in his already tenuous allies, the installation of Orcish guards in foreign cities may be a sign of the new Horde to come. And if this is truly the younger Hellscream's policy, then we may see him take the throne sooner than we thought. Another interesting tidbit that could possibly corroborate this idea: pre-BlizzCon claims cited that Cairne Bloodhoof, leader of the Tauren, would be framed for treason against the Horde and be killed by Garrosh. We don't yet know if that's actually how things will play out, but the tag for Cairne's son, Baine, has been changed in MMO-Champion's database. He is now listed as the High Chieftan, leader of the Tauren. Food for thought, people. Food. For. Thought.

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