Via WoWInsider

* General
o Inspect distance has been increased to 30 yards (from 10 yards).
o The amount of parry rating needed to get 1% parry has been reduced by 25%.
o Many set bonuses did not work properly when combined with an item or enchantment that had the exact same effect at the exact same magnitude. That issue has been corrected on all set bonuses.
* PvP
o The new battleground matchmaking system is now implemented and active. This system allows the battleground to select teams of similar equipment quality and organizational level to battle each other. For now, the system will be very forgiving about creating matchups in order to keep queue times low. However, the parameters will be adjusted as necessary when more organized teams become active in the battlegrounds.

* Druids
o Bestial Wrath: The immunity granted by thtis ability now lasts the full duration of the ability. Bestial Wrath now grants immunity to Cyclone. Cyclone will no longer prevent the immunities from being granted.
o Celestial Focus: The delay on the stun effect for Starfire has been reduced.
* Mages
o Impact: The delay on the stun effect has been reduced.
* Paladins
o Consecration: Corrected a tooltip typo. Low ranks of this ability being cast by high-level players are now being properly penalized.
o "Illumination": This talent now only gives 60% of the mana cost of the critical heal. It also now returns the correct amount of mana when used with ranks 4 and 5 of "Holy Shock". [up from 50%]
* Priests
o Blackout: The delay on the stun effect has been reduced.
o Mass Dispel mana cost reduced.
o "Shadow Word: Death": Cooldown increased to 12 sec and will now properly damage the casting Priest when it is reflected. [the reflection part is new]
o Spiritual Guidance: This talent now works while the Priest is in Shadowform.
* Rogues
o Blade Twisting: The delay on the daze effect has been reduced.
o Gouge: This ability will no longer trigger poisons (and thus break itself).
* Shaman
o Earth Shock: Rank 8 is now properly considered an Interrupt effect for talents and abilities that affect interrupts.
* Warlocks
o Death Coil is now is now subject to diminishing returns in the Horror category. Currently, only Death Coil is in this category.
o Felguard: This pet will periodically check to see if you know the talent which allows you to summon it, and die if you do not know the talent.
o Seed of Corruption: This spell will now interact properly with town guards when bystanders are hit by its detonation in a duel.
* Warriors
o Bloodrage: It is no longer possible to gain extra rage from this ability by using tradeskills to keep you in combat.
o Charge: This ability will now properly cause the warrior to go into combat with its target.
o Flurry: Ranks 1-4 will no longer trigger from ranged critical strikes.
o Improved Hamstring: The delay on the immobilize effect has been reduced.
o Sweeping Strikes: This ability will no longer be modified erroneously on additional targets by percent modifiers to your damage.
* Quest
o Void Crystals maximum stack size has been increased to 20 from 10.
* Dungeons and Raids
o All 25 man raid bosses who drop set tokens will now drop an additional token.
o Coilfang: Serpentshrine Cavern
+ Morogrim Tidewalker has been moved to a more central location in his room.
+ Hydross the Unstable's hit points have been slightly reduced.
Colossus Ragers have had their health reduced significantly.
o Auchindoun: Shadow Labyrinth
+ Reduced the number of creatures in Shadow Labyrinth.
o Karazhan
+ Netherspite will no longer cast Nether Burn while crazed.
o Magtheridon's Lair
+ Hellfire Warders have been significantly reduced in difficulty.
+ Hellfire Channeler's Shadow Bolt Volley has been made much more easy to interrupt.
+ The melee damage of Burning Abyssals has been significantly reduced.
o Tempest Keep
+ High Astromancer Solarian's hit points have been greatly reduced.
o Tempest Keep: The Arcatraz
+ There are fewer Protean Nightmares roaming the halls of the Arcatraz.
* Items
o Alliance Shaman PvP Sets: These sets now have set bonuses as intended.
o "Mystical Skyfire Diamond": The triggering rate on this item has been increased, but it now only reduces the cast time on spells by half; and Warlocks casting "Corruption" with maximum ranks in "Improved Corruption" will no longer consume the "Focus" buff from this gem.


I like this change the most: "All 25 man raid bosses who drop set tokens will now drop an additional token." Brings the new bosses inline with old-world stuff (2 tier items/kill).

I can't believe it took them this long to figure this out. People were pointing out the problem back when the first Gruul kill occurred.

Damn those chain Death Coils!

Wow.
2 major things.

o All 25 man raid bosses who drop set tokens will now drop an additional token. (As brought up before)

and...

o Inspect distance has been increased to 30 yards (from 10 yards).

..and perhaps the one about parry rating. I'm still more cheerful about the inspect one though.

This is probably the change that makes Magtheridon trash "significantly reduced in difficulty"!

Double tokens is a really welcome change.

Not to mention bringing them in line with Karazhan. It always seemed really stupid to me that you could accumulate T4 helms and gloves 2-3 times as fast as the rest of the pieces.

Pardon the derail, but what was the original reason for not just calling Death Coil a fear?

It would be much less useful as a fear -- immunities, being able to break out of it, etc.

I don't play any melee classes really but isn't that parry change pretty big for tanking?

omgomgomg this patch is just getting more and more awesome... CAN'T WAIT!

Warlocks used to be fairly terrible at PvP - in particular against a few melee classes. Death coil was the spell that truly saved them from a veritable abyss. Its still a great spell, and it will continue to be one with these changes.


The only major changes here (aside from the obvious biggest one concerning loot), are the major nerfs. I think its pretty obvious that they intended more than 1-2 guilds per server to be dropping magtheridon. WHAT A SURPRISE.

Not really - your items either have it or they don't. Using parry gems or any gems with parry on it is basically a colossal blunder imo. Just because it takes something like 22 parry now instead of 30 its still kinda a worthless stat. Big deal, warriors get more avoidance.

I wouldn't call it "big", the net result is we're just going to get more parry since lots of the gear has quite a bit of parry rating on it.

This thread is potentially going bad places. Lets not sweat the parry change too much - people are gonna gain 1-2% avoidance.

On a side-note: Is Mag's trash also on a 2 hour timer now?

I'm pretty interested to see the big gear matching system in action, too, and to what point they've got it currently tuned to "fair matchup vs. two-hour queue times". It seems like something that would be pretty impossible to see on the PTR.

Can you game the system by throwing on your twill to queue up with? I wonder how they're determining this.

The only way I can see it working is by not letting you switch out eq after you queue and until you are out of the BG.

It just says "while crazed", so I'm sure he'll be casting it the rest of the time (it's the shadow damage aura, not his breath attack).

How about take the average ilvl of your highest ilvl items for each slot, taking into account stuff on your character, in your bags, and in your bank. Average that gear stat among everyone in a group when queueing, and match with groups as close to that as possible.

Hi there hidden cooldown confirmation!

That would be problematic for hybrid classes who wish to play, let's say a DPS spec, while they've been specced for raid healing and only have raid healing gear.

The crafted engineering gun was changed - http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/th...00100024&sid=1

Old Stats:
(73.8 damage per second)
+17 Stamina
Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 15.
Equip: Increases attack power by 14.

New Stats:
(72.0 damage per second)
+26 Stamina
Yellow Socket
+3 Stamina Socket Bonus

New Mats:
1 hardened adamantite tube
20 khorium bars
4 felsteel stabilizers
12 primal air
12 primal fire
1 primal nether

Speculation, but a server side "rating" kept for each player based on battleground activities (rough gear level when scoring HK's/objectives) and match-making logic vs those values may work.

It's going to be a bit touch-and-go as far as I see it though. At the moment, there's few enough battlegrounds (on Bloodlust at least) that additional filtering may make queue times go up even -more-. The only way it'd start getting effective is, like the patch notes said, the new matchup system garnered heightened/renewed interests in the battlegrounds.

I have my reservations though... another system that relied on more people getting accustomed to it would be the LFG interface, and we all know just how succesful it was. :/

That, and the BG incentives at the moment are just pretty meh anyway, compared to the time investment and rewards for Arena.

Edit: Post doesn't properly convey how excited I am about 2.1. Where 2.0 seemed to address many, many issues that plagued WoW 1.0, 2.1 seems to fix everything that's wrong with 2.0 endgame... and I'm loving it more and more with each PTR patch. If I could give Tigole & crew a big hug, I would. I'd honestly have quit playing at the rate 2.0 was going - total bummer since I promised myself I'd see Illidan dead after missing out on Kel'Thuzad before TBC hit, so the initial announcements about the biggest changes came at a really, really excellent time.