What does this mean? From a quick glance on the create new character screen I didn't notice anything obviously different.

Lies and slander. Everybody knows that stickied threads shouldn't be read and should be left alone.

If not already mentioned, there's a meeting stone now just outside the raid entrance.

Not a huge deal for those non fisherpeople (or alliance) but the new fishing quest reward hat seems to work with Nat Pagle's rod now after the patch (was getting a "too low level" error before). I know I was a little miffed when I got it and couldn't use it for anything but style points.

Pretty random, but the model size of weapons/shields/objects held in hands was increased for human females.

ImageShack - Hosting :: modelsizewg3.jpg

It's not a patch unless there's been some arbitrary gear size changes!

Now human females can look even sillier as they limp-wrist even larger pieces of metal.

Are the shoulders larger on that character, too? It's hard to tell because the zoom levels are different in the pictures, but it looks like they might be.

It could be used to get an upper bound on the dps but it wouldn't say what a non-stacked raid could do. I really don't want to go back to the loatheb-kind of raids (we had 8 mages, 8 rogues on our first kills).

Although we kill Illidan since late October, we had our fair amount of players who quit or left and we simply have no chance to meet such a requirement. Also we weren't really pushing it, we rather raid without consumables than going to see how much we can squeeze out.

So I hope that this will indeed get tuned a bit later (maybe there's a new mechanic that increases DPS temporarily, who knows?). On the other hand, I also hope to finally get our people together on the PTR and being able to actually wipe a bit against him to wake up and motivate the raidforce to finally start trying harder even when there is no need in the current game.

Also it could simply be a test to see how many can actually beat him now and it is already planned to go down with his HP later, as has been mentioned.

edit: bah, nevermind.

Yeah, we killed Kalecgos tonight, and lo and behold, for the first time I looked for my badges of justice and they were actually on the boss. I've been trying to loot them from BT / Hyjal ever since they added them to Karazhan. Nifty change.

:P

p.s. Assuming it really replaced the item instead of being an additional drop, what happens if someone had those equipped?

Hopefully they reduce Tauren hit box range as well, rather irritating that they have this unfair advantage of being outside of stun/fear(Kaz'rogal/Vashj's Striders), and now on Brutallus' Stomp range.

Though they didn't fix it for the former cases, I wonder if it'll be fixed for the latter. =/

Are there any http mirrors for the current PTR patch by the way? I am on uni ISP and they block all p2p traffic, and for some reason the PTR downloader doesn't move one bit with p2p disabled...

Patch mirrors - WoWWiki - Your guide to the World of Warcraft

Have fun.

Original Gruul comes to mind.....

And I hope when he's nerfed (at least the first time) they don't nerf too much. Remember Blizzard needs this patch to last until WotLK...and i think it would be refreshing to have a real challenging instance for a change.

In a pure DPS benchmark fight like this, however, there is only so much they can do... at least to challenge the guilds that have been clearing Tier 6 instances since September or October (or even earlier).

* Gear-wise most of said players have 90% or higher of what they need from Tier 6 to maximize their performance. Kalecgos drops aren't going to make a significant difference.

* Consumable-wise everything has been virtually normalized. Flask, oil/poison/windury, and food. On the margins physical DPS classes can use a demon-slaying elixir and Haste and Destruction pots can be used every cooldown but, for the most part, world buffs and such no longer factor into things. I suppose you could drag out an alt who hasn't done the Greatmother questline on Horde for the 15% melee haste buff in Nagrand but... again... pushing it.

* Player-wise damage 'rotations/priorities' have been spreadsheeted, graphed, put through a blender, and modeled a hundred times to provide most DPS everything they need to know button-pressing wise to maximize their output.

The other things that would have a major effect on a raid's success would be pretty poor to design the encounter around, e.g., raid stacking, warglaives, etc. It is possible to tune the fight to make it challenging for people who only started killing Illidan in December or so (and even then it is still going to be another 4-6 weeks before this goes live) but for the top 200ish US and EU guilds I don't see a way, other than fundamentally altering the encounter, to prevent them from walking over him in relatively short order.

As Gurg explains: raid tuning is a curve. If you're in a top guild you're at the front of the curve and there is basically no way they can tune an encounter to be extremely challenging for you without making it borderline to, in fact, impossible for those further back on the curve. Unless of course you just go through the standard boss nerfs that come through every so often. Even then it is relative -- it can be tuned to be challenging to the top one hundred guilds (pre-hypothetical-nerf) but within that subset it is still going to be less challenging to the top ten guilds.

I might be mistaken here, but as far as I remember it, Gruul on TBC closed beta was far too easy. They saw that and changed him, but the change went in only when TBC went live with no further player-feedback. Then later the live version was nerfed back.

That is unfortunate, I hope it's a bug. Yeah my Cataclysm's would look cooler, but it's already cool enough, and I don't need my Bulwark looking that retarded.

Anyone able to confirm if any other 25 man bosses drop Badges of Justice?

Edit: Yes I do mean Gruul/Mag/SSC/TK/Hyjal/BT by this.

Yes, here: http://elitistjerks.com/640900-post1360.html

He meant other than Kalecgos. As in, Gruul/Mag/SSC/TK/etc.

They fixed the look of the "distortions" for the Multiphase Survey quest in Nagrand:

Is it just me or does shield look smaller on my tauren?