When I was much younger, on every birthday my Grandmother would place
her gift lovingly on my lap, and wait eagerly for me to open it. While
I was of course always thrilled (and thankful) to receive presents of
any sort, my Grandmother’s idea of a great gift was sometimes
a tiny (and by tiny I mean massively) bit different from my own. So I
was always prepared for the very worst, yet always hoping for the very
best.



I view new patches in much the same light, waiting eagerly to see what
Blizzard has in store for the World of Warcraft community, but inside
braced for the very worst. So what can we expect from Patch 3.3.3? Find
out below with my personal take on the changes.

For those of you who frequent the Test Realms don’t be
alarmed if your characters no longer appear to have any achievement
history. In an attempt to improve the copy process characters will no
longer be copied with their achievement history. Not a very big deal in
my opinion as achievement history will matter little if not at all on
any Test Realm.

Glyph of Disease and Glyph of Fireball have been changed. Glyph of
Disease now triggers a refresh of Icy Talons when Frost Fever is
refreshed. This improves the Glyph and I would think
Death Knights using it should notice a small improvement in
their DPS. Glyph of Fireball has also changed, sort of. While it no
longer increases the critical strike of Fireball, it reduces the cast
time of Fireball by .15 seconds. So while you won’t be
putting out as many crits, you will be able to cast more Fireballs.
Sounds to me like not much of a change was made to this glyph.



Frozo the Renowed will be coming to Dalaran and he wants your orbs!
Frozen Orbs that is. Let’s face it  Frozen Orbs are
pretty much useless. Everyone I know has at least several stacks taking
up space in their bank. You cannot sell them on the Auction House for
any decent amount of money, and the gear that you make with them is
obsolete even for alt characters. I’ve even considered
selling them to a vendor just to be rid of them, now I am very glad I
didn’t.



Frozo will now accept your once useless Frozen Orbs and will trade you
other tradeskill items for them including:



Crusader Orbs - 6 Frozen Orbs

Runed Orbs - 4 Frozen Orbs

Eternals (Fire, Earth, Water, Air, Life, and Shadow) - 1 Frozen Orb

Frost Lotus - 1 Frozen Orb

Pattern: Frosty Flying Carpet (Tailors Only) - 6 Frozen Orbs



style="float: right; width: 395px; height: 300px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/81511">So
for those
of you who still have Frozen Orbs floating around, hold on to them, as
they are going to become much more valuable.  In fact expect
to see a dramatic rise in price if it hasn’t happened on your
sever already. This addition will be good news to some, especially
those who struggle to get these items normally. I know my guild will be
pleased to be able to buy Frost Lotus for flasks for the price of just
a few rather easily obtained Frozen Orbs instead of the 50-80G we pay
on the Auction House.



On the down side this may spell the end of the huge profits being made
by the Alchemy and Herbalism professions. With easy access to some of
their most profitable items the prices on flasks and Frost Lotus will
inevitably have to fall.



So be sure to stock up on all the Frozen Orbs you can, as they will
prove to be worthwhile sometime in the near future. Be warned though,
as with anything that is valuable, be wary of ninjas and be sure to set
loot rules at the start of an instance so there is no
confusion.

In the Dungeon and Raid department Blizzard will now be allowing
players to skip the intro in the Culling of Stratholme once they have
completed the dungeon at least once. Can I get a hallelujah? While I
enjoy the in game dialog as much as anyone, after hearing it so many
times it gets a little old. I can think of several other fights that I
would love to see Blizzard implement this option for  in the
future.



Players will now be able to use the Dungeon Finder to queue for Holiday
bosses. Once a party is found players will be ported directly to the
area the boss can be found, making everyone’s lives that much
easier. To add extra icing to the cake Players may queue as many times
as they want for each boss, meaning you will no longer need to search
out players with summons. Don‘t think you will have infinite
attempts to get those rare holiday items as they will now be found in
troves which will only drop once for each player every day.

There are several small but significant changes here that should please
quite a few people. Recipes that require Runed Orbs now have lower
material requirements. While this is a nice change, and will allow more
people access to these patterns, plus make leveling much easier I
can’t help be a bit bitter. It always seems that after I make
things they nerf how much it costs, or what materials it takes, ah well
that’s life. Inscription has a similar change with most
recipes that require two inks being reduced to one.



style="float: left; width: 400px; height: 291px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/81512">Pet
collectors rejoice, as the Pet Bombling
and Lil’ Smoky
are no longer going to be Bind-on-Pickup. Not only will this allow many
more players access to these very cute vanity pets, but Engineers
should be able to make a little profit off of them. I know I will be
getting both as soon as this patch goes live!





Tailors will be pleased to learn that the cool down and location
requirements for Moonshroud, Spellweave, and Ebonweave have been
removed paving the way for Tailoring items requiring these cloth to be
much easier to obtain. This change will most likely drastically reduce
the price of these cloths, so players wishing to fetch a good price for
them should sell now.



It’s not all good news for Tailors though. The creation of
Glacial Bags will now invoke a seven day cool down. So while it will be
easier to obtain the cloth needed for these bags, Tailors will not be
able to make them with abandon. This may cause the price of this
particular bag to go slightly higher, however the price of the bag
overall should be roughly the same as if predicted above cloth prices
are reduced. However finding a Tailor who’s cool down is up
may prove to be difficult.



Miner’s on the other hand will have the cool down on their
Titansteel Bar removed, but unlike Tailors so far no other changes are
being made to balance this out. This, as with the cloth, will likely
cause the prices of Titansteel Bars to fall, perhaps to almost nothing.
Players who wish to make a profit should rid themselves of their bars
before Patch 3.3.3 is live.



Finally “Monsterbelly Appetite” one of the daily
fishing quests has been renamed and relocated. The quest will now be
called (and probably more fittingly) “Disarmed” and
will take place outside of the Violet Hold instead of in the Frozen
Sea. This seems to be a

rather small change and besides the location being much more convenient
for players, this change will probably have little effect on
the Fishing profession.

Blizzard has decided to improve the vehicle mechanics of quests
vehicles. They claim the change was made all in the interest of fun.
There are no real details as to what changes will be made, however I
personally love driving the in game vehicles, so anything that could
possibly make it even better is a good thing in my book. However as
with all things these changes do have the potential to backfire and
actually end up making driving vehicles less pleasurable. Cross your
fingers that that is not the case.

The User Interface has one of the longer lists of changes, the simplest
of which is the updated Alert icons added to the game.

More interesting changes were made to the Auction House, many of which
promise to help improve the ease of use for all players. For example,
now if the Auction House is not available on your realm, when opened
players will be informed via pop up. This means no more standing around
staring at a blank Auction House screen trying to decide if the Auction
House is actually broken, or if lag is to blame.



Players will also now be able to right click to place their items in
the Auction House. This is very good news. I can’t begin to
tell you how many pots and elixirs I have accidentally used attempting
to put them up for sale, and I know I can’t be the only one.



To further improve the usability of the Auction House whole stacks
of  the same item can now be placed in the Auction frame, and
several options are offered to choose how they should be listed,
including Stack Size, Number of Stacks, and Price. An Auction Post
Completion Bar has also been added. Much like a cast bar if multiple
items or stacks are being listed at once this bar will report the
progress of each listing. Players will need to stand still during this
process as any movement will interrupt it, but they will still be able
to browse the Auction House.



Overall these changes to the Auction House seem solid and I personally
feel were much needed. I know that many players are in the Auction
House “business” and sell large quantities of the
materials they collect (leather, ore, herbs, etc) for profit. These
changes should make that job at least a tiny bit less tedious.
Hopefully much testing is given to it on the PTR, as changes of this
sort tend to bring many bugs with them.

The Dungeon Finder system is receiving a rather big overhaul. Two of
the bigger changes are that the Deserter debuff has been increased from
15 to 30 minutes, and players who choose to vote to kick another player
will need to provide a reason. Both of these changes I believe are
being made to help improve the Dungeon Finder experience for everyone.
This should discourage abandoning the group, and vote kicking for
superficial reasons, both of which I heartily dislike.



Smaller changes to help improve on the system are also being made.
Anyone in the party will now  be able to re-queue for an
instance, taking the pressure off the party leader. Parties will also
now be arranged in the same fashion: tank, healer, damage, damage. This
will make identifying who is filling the individual roles easier for
everyone, especially for those of us who lack an interface that
automatically tells us.



Finally, when in a random party created with the Dungeon Finder players
will now be informed as to why they cannot roll Need on an item, and
more generous level requirements will be used when joining as a group
instead of the usual Random Dungeon requirements. While I am wondering
why a player would be attempting to roll need on something that they
really shouldn’t be, I feel all of these changes will benefit
the PUG group lovers among us and make the already great Dungeon Finder
system that much better.

More big changes here, and like the Dungeon Finder all are being made
to make this function more player friendly. Changes include exclamation
points over quest items that begin a quest to make them easier to see,
quest objectives and exclamation points will no longer appear dim on
the map or over quest givers heads for low level quests,

a function to widen the Quest Tracking Objectives Frame has been added,
and a short description for a tracked quest is now displayed on the
Map.



The Objectives Frame will also be changing, listing the number of
quests displayed at the top. Players will also have the ability to sort
and/or filter their quests. All of these changes should provide
players, both old and new with a better questing experience. I feel
these changes will make questing much easier, and in turn make
completing achievements such as Loremaster more doable. Also by
improving the questing experience it should encourage newer players to
continue playing instead of becoming frustrated.

style="float: right; width: 309px; height: 300px;" alt=""
src="http://www.tentonhammer.com/image/view/81513">Rather
small changes
here that won’t really affect game play.
Players will now be able to access maps of different levels of
multi-layered dungons, zones, or cities. So for those of you who desire
to stare at the sewers of Dalaran wherever you may be, this change is
for you. The Authenticator frame is also changing, so those players who
choose “Remember Account Name” at the login screen
will be provided a box below the password field to input their
Authenticator code. I’m not exactly sure why this change was
made, I guess it makes logging in easier, but I didn’t feel
that logging in was hard in the first place.

Just a small change here that will undoubtedly save players some small
annoyances. When a player has two or more quests from the same NPC and
not all are complete the incomplete quests will now show as gray
question marks. Repeatable quests will also now be correctly colored as
blue. While I have never really noticed this problem, I’m
sure that it was a problem and I’m glad to see it being
fixed. Every little thing counts.



Overall I am rather pleased with the changes this patch will bring.
While I do think that there are a few unneeded changes being made I
feel that Blizzard is making an honest effort to make the game better
for all and for that I salute them. To read about the PvP and Class
changes coming with this Patch be sure to check out the writings of my
collogues Messiah and Xerin, or join us on our forums where your
opinion is always welcome!