Hmph, going to write that off with Omen bugging for some weird reason and tank slacking. While still on topic of Illidan, it seems that they did something to the blue flame burst in the demon phase (or some mod is butchering it), but I managed to drop to singledigit FPS while running the fight otherwise in the 50 fps range.

Mana Tombs isn't a level 70 instance, which is why it stops giving rep at honored. Just like nearly every faction in the game, there is no level 70 instance for the Consortium.

Just got my Consortium gem bag (exalted) and it contained 4 blue-quality gems and zero green-quality gems. Random good luck, perhaps, or maybe they've upped the reward for the quest. What did everyone else get?

I got three blues and two greens, Exalted as well.

It's still random and even if it is upped, we would need very large sample to confirm it and I doubt anyone wants to see tens of pages full of posts like that.
For the record, I'm Exalted and got 1 Blue quality gem and 4 greens.

It's random, you got lucky.

Finally, this was annoying the crap out of me.

It's luck, I got all greens.

Has anyone seen a comment from Blizzard on this one? 2v2 queue times were 14 minutes last night. 3v3 queue times were 8 minuts. Both were twice what I have seen in the past.

Edit: Arena tournament started last night. I am guessing there was increased arena traffic from this that might affect live realms. Can anyone confirm arena times from after 2.4 release, but before the tournament started last night?

Queue times were definitely still bad, but maybe there were more people arena-ing due to the entry level blue PvP gear.


I know my groups ran into many (relatively) squishy teams.

During our last fight in SSC against FLK the shaman didn't drop his spitfire totem at all. Has anyone else run into this? I didn't see anything in the patch notes about this encounter being modified. Only the fathom lord himself dropped the spitfire totem.

...
I am kind of worried about this. 300 log entries is not very many, when you look at an entire raid. Since I've been depending on the Blizz combat log since the patch to look at "what killed me?" sorts of things, I'm thinking that I'm going to look at my combat log only to find out that the last 300 entries all happened after I died during the ensuing wipe.

If that's the case, I'll have to switch back to some alternative log like SimpleCombatLog, and probably have to leave my standard "combat log" tab fallow and hidden, since it seems to have stuff built-in that you can't turn off. Not particularly happy with that idea.

I didn't see this anywhere, the Sisters of Pain/Pleasure before Mother now have a shared health buff, much like the Broken Slaves in Zangarmarsh.

They also introduced new sounds for a few things, the most notable to me was Shahraz having an obnoxious new sound for her silencing scream. It's some vague cross between a fog horn and a bull elephant farting.

mmo-champion.com seems to indicate that the HWL and Season 1 Druid sets all have the 15% Travel Form speed bonus back, but the S2 and S3 sets still have the Starfire reduction for Moonkin and Regrowth reduction for Resto.

Similarly, the HWL and S1 Holy Paladin sets have the 10 second cooldown reduction on HoJ, but the S2 and S3 sets retain the Holy Shock healing bonus.

It'll be interesting to see if Druids would be willing to gimp their stats enough to wear 4 pieces of S1 and 1 piece of S3 just to get the Travel Form bonus.

I can confirm I saw the same thing. Queues before patch on Monday night were generally in the 4-8 minute range. Last night they were in the 8-12 minute range.

Even if, as one of the previous posters mentioned, there were simply more people pvping because of the new blue sets there wouldn't be such an influx of new arena players to cause queue inflation that much. Especially since they were supposed to be alleviating the issues with more instances to handle 2v2 queue times.

As a side note, am I crazy or did I remember the patch notes talking about a nerf to the lifebloom coefficient? There is none (Lifebloom still ticks for the same amount) but I could have swore I saw that in the patch notes.

The coefficient was changed, but Empowered Rejuvenation was updated to work on Lifebloom, so the end result is the same for Resto druids.

This was removed from the PTR. It was implemented originally as a nerf, but then retracted, just like the warlock Life Tap change. \

[e] See above for more details.

I'm going to be kind of pissed if this is the case. I'm enjoying the bonus to my holy shock healing.

What happens if you have a mix of S1 and S3 in that case?

Regarding Arena queue times (2v2):

On patch day, on Emerald Dream EU (Blackout battlegroup), queue times were measured in seconds. However, normal battlegrounds had insane lag, to the extent they were unplayable. A message came up in breaking news that they were aware of this and a fix would come. Next time I logged on, the BG lag was gone and 2v2 queues were back to normal.

I remember a blue post stating a reason for the lengthy 2v2 queues was a cap on the number of arena instances which can be running at the same time. I believe they upped this cap, leading to lower queue times (basically instantenous). However the increased number of instances busted the performance of the BG/Arena server cluster, which I speculate is one cluster, since the BG lag came and went with the arena queue time change.

So in essence, the reason for the lengthy queue times is because Blizzard needs to buy more hardware to host more BG/Arena instances. The solution given by the blue, as I remember it, was to queue up for 3v3 or 5v5, which makes sense from Blizzard's viewpoint, since it reduces the number of instances if players form larger arena teams. However, I believe 2v2 is by far the most popular format, for a variety of reasons (duo couples, ease of being online at the same time, etc.).

As I see it, there are only two ways we can have shorter queues:

a) Blizzard adds more hardware to support more instances.
b) Blizzard optimizes their code to somehow not bust performance when a very high number of instances are running.

It's funny, we had an issue with one of our frost mages pulling aggro on one of the flames and wiping us, when Omen showed him as being far below the flame tank. So even though Adrine was standing around doing what melee do on the fight(nothing), we still got to blame him for wiping us. Sometimes, it's nice raiding with a crazed rogue programmer.

Keep in mind that this announcement comes right before their coverage of the Bard Guitar Hero Class, Molten Core the console game for Atari, and a rickroll mod.

I'd take everything posted today with a grain of salt.