Glad to see the shamans are taking this well.

The new Turn Evil looks great. The 20 seconds of downtime could still be a problem, but it finally gives me a reliable way to get a felpuppy off of me.

Oh they tuned it alright
Brutallus v4
No Grounding for Burns
1 Million Less Hp(? peoples windows were reading 9.x mil not sure though).

<nevermind, above poster ninja-editted>

If Forte decides to care about this race, we are ofcourse considering a transfer, and if they would reset transfer cooldowns with the introduction of 2.4 as you're suggesting, it's 99% likely that would will move. The problem lies in that you would have 20+ other guilds moving aswell, most likely to the same server. We moved to Boulderfist around three months ago when nothing was announced about how Sunwell opening would happen, in hope of a server without queues and instanceservers that don't crash. We wanted to lower the load on Kazzak and help build up a nice community on the before very dead and empty Boulderfist. Believe me, transfering is not any effort or obsticle for us, would it not be for our trials that are on cooldown. We are basicly forced in a position where we'll choose wether to be humane to our new members and recruits, but not care about progress, or to care about progress and leave our new blood on an empty server.

We had hundreds of thousands of gold ready to motivate people to do dailies and similar, some of us even leveled up 5 alts to 70 just to do dailies with, but with the current situation we're basicly left out of the competition no matter what we do.

Ninjaedit
And to those saying that it never was fair anyways:
We're talking about 5 weeks now, not a disconnect or 1day instanceserver down. This is something that could be prevented if there was a bit more thought and effort put into it.

Well this is an interesting change and I suspect it is going to require quite a bit of testing to determine what the effect of this is. Specifically is it a buff or a nurf? The wow forum denizens are crying nurf end of the world etc but points to consider of the top of my head include:

• How well does it scale with bloodlust for crazy manaburn/dps action
• Does this make a discipline priest more viable in raids?
• What will people do with the 6 talent points if this turns out to be a massive nurf? (without PI who will realistically take mental strength)

my initial takes (haven't had a chance to test yet) are that it will mesh with bloodlust/heroisim as abilities that don't specifically state that fact. c.f. the icy veins changes that went live at the same time. this would make it an overall buff for burst when combined with a shaman.

It should make Disc priests slightly more desirable for raids but being single target with a long downtime it's unlikely to change the viability of disc in the eyes of raid leaders.

They clearly wanted to take real short-term burst down a few pegs. PI + NS/EM/CL was gamebreaking, as was PI + Icy Veins + Lust. They let single players put out far too much short-term gib DPS.

Nice. So it looks like Twins drop shoulder pieces and their fourth loot slot is a random PvP neck?

Is this actually implying that, if I were to have zero spell haste, I would gain no benefit from PI? I'm assuming I'm reading it way too literally, but with the way they're throwing around spell haste, now, I figured I'd ask!

The first actual adjustment to daggers in ages, and it does nothing to improve their desirability in a PvE setting.

True that it does absolutely nothing for the dying(well, already dead) backstab, but this change might make combat mutilate a serious competitor for combat swords in raid damage. It also makes mutilate pretty much a clear cut winner in pvp specs. 15% extra crit on mutilate is huge.

15% extra crit both in terms of pure damage and in terms of an effective ~25% crit boost for purposes of SF.

I'm not at all sure it'll put it past CS, but it at least helps, and is probably enough to boost it to similar levels at early stages of gear.

I'm going to guess that the wording on the PI change is awkward and it will be like Icy Veins, a 20% haste effect. Yes, it's speculation, but it wouldn't make sense to me if it were

They could still remove race racials like warstomp/wotf. Chastise is a priest racial.

Considering they also have introduced a new dagger called "The Mutilator", I think it's pretty clear the goal is to bring at least one dagger-based spec back up a bit. Looks like Mutilate is gonna be it, and combat daggers is going to be allowed to decay away. With the the new poison immunity changes (and bleed for that matter) coupled with this crit change, I'm pretty confident that Mutilate can be used full-time now for a raider for those who love daggers. At the least, a viable alternative to swords that won't make raid leaders laugh at the rogue.

Letting Combat Daggers die off is not really that odd of a choice. The natural comparison is Arms Warrior vs. Fury Warrior. Two completely different specs, both are useful in raids...and require drastically different playstyle, gear choices, and weapons. A greater diversity of specs is a good goal to have.

Edit: On the topic of Chastise: It seems like a valid change on the face of it. Of course, Chastise is *still* an ability every priest would want, and priest racials are still foolish (Why does Feedback cost 700ish mana?!). I wonder if this hints at further changes to priest racials. Regardless, it's reassuring to know that the developers are aware of the issues and take action to change things for the better.

Edit 2: Via world of raids. I haven't seen these mentioned yet.

"Mages

- Arcane Fortitude now increases your armor by an amount equal to 100% of your Intellect, up from 50%.
- Blink, Slow, and Spellsteal have all had their mana cost reduced. "

and

"PvP
Arenas
- Matchmaking: If a queued player has a personal rating higher than their team rating, the matchmaking system will now use the highest personal rating of a queued member of that team for matchmaking purposes, instead of the team rating. "

The change to Arcane Fortitude is much needed. Armor is extremely valuable for a mage, and all these changes directly increase mage survivability.

The arena matchmaking using the highest personal rating of a team should have been implemented when personal rating came out (it would have helped prevent 'cheesing' to 1850 personal with a 1400-rated team). Now? It seems fair, but makes me wish that personal rating would 'close the gap' with team rating much faster. It's extremely frustrating to gain 100 team rating and only 10 personal rating after a dozen matches.

I'm increasingly impressed with 2.4's careful tweaking.

i just wondered if i missed it or if it hasn't been said yet but what about guilds that don't want the gates to be opened that fast? So many here are concerned about the possibility that the gates aren't to open soon enough that they can't see the other direction.
Well, i can imagine that there are guilds that could use 2.4 as a possibility to catch up with the top guilds of their server. Perhaps they killed Illidan serveral months later then the top 3 and now have to minimize the lack of equipment if they want to be a part of the shiny server ranking. For example, if they don't have the necessary raid dps for beating the last few % out of brutallus once the 1st gate is open, they'll never be able to catch up. But what if they would just need possibly 2 more weeks of bt/hyjal farming to reach the needed raid-dps? Wouldn't everyone then think about grabbing this opportunity in favor for own guilds progress and holding the essences back?

just what comes to mind

However, this pretty much removes the need for fast daggers at all. Arms/Fury don't have useless weapon types between them.

That's not true at all. Fast weapons of any type are 'useless' (except in execute range) to Arms and Fury Warriors both. Cataclysm's Edge, for example, would be classified as a mediocre weapon because it's relatively fast (3.5 delay), except that it's the highest dps weapon, a sword, and has excellent stats.

Fast one-hand weapons, in both main hand and off hand, are inferior to slow weapons for a fury warrior. Furthermore, daggers themselves are terrible for a warrior in either hand because of the normalization difference between a dagger and anything else for whirlwind. The *only* exception is within execute range, but at a high gear level execute's effectiveness becomes questionable anyway.

On the topic of fast vs. slow dagger offhands for mutilate: My impression from the Mutilate Raid DPS thread is that the difference between fast and slow weapons is vastly overrated. Perhaps the 30% crit bonus will make the difference larger, but as is it seems to be that the difference is fairly negligible. Fast offhand daggers may even be better for PvP where poison application is quite important.

Furthermore, remember that a subtlety build can always use any offhand of any type and have it be equally effective. In such a situation, a fast offhand dagger remains a solid choice.

It's all preference really.

While you do get higher damage with Mutilate by using a 1.8 speed dagger in your offhand.. thats not to say that a fast one is clearly inferior. Faster weapons apply poisons more often and give you cheaper shivs. Shiv is base 20 energy with each 0.1 speed adding an additional 1 energy to the cost of the abilitiy.

Think it's a haste for the arena priest, now people might actually take it

It does. Not on the bleeding edge, but Mutilate will most likely come to 90% of combat swords. With the change to poisons for any non nature immune mobs and the improved backstab in the build it is a lot better. So at least you don't have to respec every time between arena and raids. 40% to 55% crit chance on both Mutilate attacks (depends on gear / feral aura) will give enough combo points to keep rupture, Slice and Dice and a another finisher running. If the Evenom change comes, then 41-20 could very well become a raid viable build.

Edit: I forgot about the Ashtongue exalted trinket, which is another big plus.

I wouldn't call that a buff as much as adding basic tanking functionality in a situation where it's currently lacking. Previous to that change it was impossible to taunt a mob if it was tanked by an NPC in any TBC content; adding the ability to do so, while certainly improving the functionality of a Prot Paladin, merely means that Righteous Defense now functions in the same amount of situations as other taunt abilities do.

The wording on the Molten Armor change seems a bit vague to me as a non-mage.
Since i assume that the crit-chance reduction always worked on ranged attacks and spells (Molten Armor - wowhead), does this mean that Molten Armor can now proc Impact on Hunters and Casters?

I would also like to point out that a large amount of the changes of the last build were predicted by mmo-champion two weeks ago (unable to find the original mmo-champion posting at the moment, here's what i found on google):

Additional 2.4 Patch Notes (unconfirmed) Spicytuna