Groat

Hello all,

I recently went through all of the live patch notes and pulled out every change specific to character classes and dumped them here:
http://madnesslabs.com/wow/classnotes.html

You can jump to individual class AND you can filter based on the type of change (Buff? Nerf? Bugfix? Oh you'd better believe it) - I made this due to a discussion a few of us were having over which classes had been screwed around with the most and it is kind of interesting when you break it down to really see which way everything had been tweaked.

Please let me know if anything is grossly miscategorized (there are a few things that I have listed as "change" just because I honestly didn't know if it was a buff or a nerf OR they were just literally changing it).

In case the coloring isn't immediately obvious, green = buff, red = nerf, italic = bugfix, bold italic = overhaul, grey = change, bold = new feature.

The totals aren't dynamic, but they are accurate to each top level item. Oh, and don't bother glancing at any of the rest of the site - there is nothing to see there.

Please, by all means critique so this is more accurate.

Thanks!

 

archz0r

Might be my laptop but I find the green and red colors to be somewhat vague. Making them brighter would make it look better.

Otherwise, good stuff.

 

Sapphrina

Nice work, time to find out which class have had the highest amount of "icon changed"!

The only legitimate use of the BLINK tag:
Schrödinger's cat is [BLINK] not [/BLINK] dead.

 

• Fogbug

looks good, although the colors are kind of hard to tell apart and a "red = nerf green = buff" table at the top wouldn't hurt it.

In terms of corrections, these could be classified as nerfs:

and this was a big buff, since it also affected abilities like sweeping strikes and berserker rage:

 

Miaxi

Nice work. Interesting to see how few shaman changes were actually mentioned in patch notes. :/

I would categorize this one as bug fix.

 

• Navaash

Don't forget stuff that was slipped in with the 2.0 talent revision. There's a couple of fairly big nerfs to PvE mages that are missing from this list because they were slipped in with the talent redesign, the first looking something like this:

Arcane Precision: Added a reduction on the mana cost of fire and frost spells by 1% per rank but reduced the chance to resist by 1% per rank.

Basically, it made it so you need +13% hit on your gear rather than +10% to hit cap against 73s/raid bosses.

Also, the threat reduction of Burning Soul and Frost Channeling was tuned down from 15%/30% and 10%/20%/30% to 5%/10% and 3%/7%/10%, respectively. Both changes are still in place and don't look to change anytime soon.

 

• Dazwin

On a semi-related note, as I try to put this all in a timeframe (since some changes still seem really new, even though they went in with friggin 1.3), does anyone remember which patches were insanely seperated from one another? I remember an incredibly long period of time between a couple of the first few patches that seemed to have the community up in arms, including a nifty little site with a "this many days since last content patch" counter.

 

Groat

I've updated it again (a bit of formatting clean-up, stuck a legend in, and updated a definitions).

This literally contains just the documented changes; I'll eventually get the non-documented ones in there, but for now it is an interesting picture of that which has been documented.

 

• Navaash

Ahh patchtimer.org. It looks like he's promised a "self-important" rant.

The following dates were culled from the Blizzard site:

1.1 - 11/23/2004 (launch)
1.2 - 12/18/2004
1.3 - 03/22/2005
1.4 - 05/05/2005
1.5 - 06/07/2005
1.6 - 08/02/2005
1.7 - 09/22/2005
1.8 - 10/10/2005
1.9 - 01/03/2006
1.10 - 03/28/2006
1.11 - 06/19/2006
1.12 - 08/22/2006
2.0 - 12/05/2006
2.0.3 - 01/09/2007 (Burning Crusade content activates)
2.1 - ???

1.2 -> 1.3, 1.8 -> 1.9, and 1.10 -> 1.11 were pretty atrocious. It looks like this patch is going to set the record, though.

 

◊ Malan

The change to the shaman sentry totem was most definitely a nerf.

 

Vernichter

Just as a heads-up, I think that in your legend you switched the buff and nerf colors. This is a very interesting read, by the way.

 

Groat

My bad; I've reversed those properly now. The shaman totem one sounded like a bugfix - are you sure that's a nerf? This is much like how I wanted to list the one about Warlocks no longer being able to kill people in duels as a nerf; though it really is just a bugfix.

 

◊ Twid

In 1.08, you have for Warlocks. I believe this was a change that never saw the light of live servers.

[13:45] <kenlyric> goddammit, I wish google news had a "only real news" alert.
[13:45] <Kalman> I wish journalists had one.

On the topic of Knight Rider:
<Vontre> What is a KITT?
<Nite_Moogle> jesus christ vontre were you in a test tube until 1995?

 

Harwin

Hunters, patch 1.4

# Aspect of the Cheetah/Pack - These Aspects will now be canceled when mounted.

You've colored it as a nerf but based on the prior behavior, it was a buff - the effect never stacked, so it was just a useless aura, but the daze effect would still trigger on every hit - Rather than just not have it daze you if you were mounted when it hit, Blizzard just turned it off when mounted. The only sense in which this could be a "nerf" is that it cost a bit extra mana to turn it back on afterwards, it was overall a buff.

And from the 2.0 patch:
# "Silencing Shot" now does only 50% of weapon damage instead of 75%.
# The base damage for "Arcane Shot" has been reduced by about 9% and the bonus damage from ranged attack power reduced from 20% to 15%.

Silencing Shot didn't exist prior to the 2.0 patch. Not sure if this is a "nerf" or not.
Prior to 2.0, Arcane shot received NO ranged attack power bonus, so the effect of the patch was really to go from 0%->15% (and some base damage reduction which is minor when compared to the fact that RAP matters)

 

Amerle

Slightly OT, but does anyone happen to have (or know where I can find) any of the really old notes/updates from the various beta and pre-release pushes? I find it really interesting to look at old changes and see how class have changed from their original conceptions.

 

Groat

I suppose that the Aspect of the Cheetah change (if anything) sounds like a Bugfix then if it was generating no effect at all; to have it go away instead of causing a harmful unintended effect would be fixing a bug.

The other two are technically buffs from the initial implementations of those abilities; the abilities would have a separate entry of "New" which I'll do for 2.0 once I get around to it for every single new expansion talent / ability. From there, that change is indeed buffing the functionality (it is just missing the information about it being added in the first place 'cause they didn't itemize it).

 

Abaxial

This was a bug fix, you have it as a buff.

* Ghostly Strike no longer deals damage to you when you use it.

And I'm unsure when the change went in but there was a change to slice and dice where it could previously be used on a dead target.

<Unregistered> what happens in 2.3?
<Kalman> Skill is eliminated from the game.

 

• Navaash

There's a list of mage patch notes that includes beta changes here, and I imagine you can find them for the rest of the classes on that site too.

Of particular note is the 0.9.0 patch, which was widely seen as "the big mage nerf" patch and I swear half the retards that play this game still wanted us to go back to the pyro-rape days of 0.8.0 until the big buff in 1.11. (In context: the level cap at 0.8.0 was 50.)

 

Groat

Oh very nice - excellent resource - I'll loot their information and categorize it as well.

 

Trippy

Not to derail here but, does anyone have a link to the orignal class talent tress?
I remember when Druids had Hurricane as a 31 point talent and Warlocks had a Soul Link that lasted 10 seconds or so and cut damage by 50%.

 

Cel

This was an effect from the change that combo points would be removed when the target died.

"There is much pleasure to be gained from useless knowledge." - Bertrand Russell

Alpha is recruiting... go go.

 

Abaxial

Here's a link to the original beta talents, if you want to see what was at release you can probably poke around the site a bit more than I did, otherwise the last beta build should be somewhat close to what release was.


http://wowvault.ign.com/View.php?vie...ry_select_id=8

<Unregistered> what happens in 2.3?
<Kalman> Skill is eliminated from the game.

 

Entropie

Might be my memory playing tricks, but I remember paladins being unable to use axes. I couldn't find it in the list. Is there anyone who can confirm either this or my hallucinations?

 

• frmorrison

This.

Pallys have always been able to use Axes.

 

• Erongg

I used a 1h axe on my paladin in beta.

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