Changes come to a game all the time while it is in beta, and with a game as big as World of Warcraft and the upcoming Cataclysm expansion you know there will be thousands of changes.  These changes are introduced in stages as each successive patch is released and tested. Last week patch 12803 was released with a large number of changes.

For those that have not seen the complete patch notes yet, I’ll add a link to the bottom of this article. For now though, let's start from the top and work our way down through what are the biggest changes. I’ll copy the section from the patch notes and then talk about what it should mean to players.

General

Elements of the guild leveling, perks, and roster page are now functional. Players should once again be able to buy and register guild charters, which now only require five signatures. See the Known Issues section for issues associated with this new system.

The amount of experience required to reach new guild levels has been substantially reduced.

Guild levels have been in and out of the beta several times already.  Each time they worked for a while but were just not quite right.  Now that everything is in again things are working a bit better.  Players are jumping guilds to experiment with the system a bit and so far it seems to be pretty good.  The beta guild I jumped in got several levels in a night with a great number of players working at it. I'm sure the system will change some more as the beta continues, but it's pretty solid right now.

Creature damage output has been increased from roughly level 65 and up. These increases scale upward with level. Creatures in exterior zones at level 80 now have 2.5 times the damage output they did previously in beta, 3.2 times at level 81, and 4 times at level 82 and up. To leave feedback about how this change feels with regard to creature spawns in level 80-85 exterior zones, visit our forums here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=26435496423&sid=2000

This change makes the game a little more interesting.  With the level of gear escalation that has gone on in past expansions and especially WOTLK, solo content was simply too easy.  There was almost not risk of dieing even when outnumbered 3-1, unless you were one of the most unskilled players in existence.  This change to damage output has put some risk back in the game again, which is a good thing.

This is one of the many changes that Blizzard seems to be making to recognize the fact that when you get through so much of the game and are at a high level that the game should expect some skill.  It feels like they are changing the game slightly so that the new endgame (level 75-85) will now have some challenge instead of being a cake walk.  Many players in the beta are cheering about this as much of the challenge of the game disappeared in WOTLK.  This could be seen in the disappearance of crowd control, AOEing groups in raids, etc.  All this will be fixed in Cataclysm!  Hurray.

PVP

- Twin Peaks is now available for testing: http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/cataclysm/features/twinpeaks.html

- The Battle for Gilneas is now available for testing.

While these two new BGs have been glitchy in the beta they are open.  This means two great new places to battle for all you PVP fanatics.  Watch for previews of both zones here in the near future.

Zones

No new zones opened up this patch.  Meaning that we are still limited to Vashj'ir, Mount Hyjal, and Deepholm. All of these zones are extremely well laid out with what seems like thousands of quests all put together into great story lines.  As can be expected there are still some glitches but many that stopped players from proceeding through quests have been resolved and players are now making their way through the various zones and completing the story arcs involved in them.

Dungeons and Raids

The Stonecore loading screen

The Stonecore instance opened recent providing a third new instance in Cataclysm to explore.  While not new this week, some changes have been done in the instance and the fights in it are starting to take shape.  There is still no loot from the bosses to analyze, but I'm sure that will come soon.  So far the instance plays very well and has a very cool look and feel to it.

Classes - General

All spell and ability tooltips will now display damage averages rather than minimum and maximum damage potential. This feature is on by default but can be changed via the Display settings under User Interface options.

This change makes a lot of sense as many spell tooltips are quite long and some have multiple damage entries.  The average damage cause is really what matters not the extreme highs and lows, and if you really need to know the details then you can always turn them back on.

Hunters

Five pets can now be stored with the hunter at all times. Any one of these five pets can be summoned via the Call Pet ability.

Being able to have 5 pets that you can get to at any time is pure win for hunters.  After all there are many different things you need out of a pet and it is a pain to have to run back to town to swap them.  I tend to have a pet for each of these things: soloing, DPS, AOE DPS, battlegrounds, and arenas.  That's 5 on the button so this new system works perfectly.  Could Blizzard’s hunters be using the same setup?

The Stable will now store 20 pets. If a pet is moved into the Stable, its talents are wiped.

20 pets in a stable! Hurray! Almost better yet is when you move a pet into the stables they reset talents! No more finding a pet trainer to tune your pet’s talents, just move them into your stable and back. This also allows those players that like collecting rare and different pets more space to keep them around for whatever they use them for.  I’m thinking the machinima community that still uses in game video will love this too as they can have a bigger variety of pets to use readily in videos.

Paladins

The new Paladin Holy Power bar

Paladins now have a new resource bar.

We are in the process of overhauling many paladin talents, spells and abilities. Expect updates in upcoming patches.

Blizzard has been playing with the addition of Holy Power as a resource for Paladins.  At first it simply showed up as a stacking buff for them, now however they have a cool new fancy resource bar that shows up under their character bars.  The graphic itself is pretty good looking and lights up in three sections to represent the fact that you can have up to three holy power.

While the new bar looks good, there is still a lot of work for Blizzard to do on how holy power actually works.  While it seems like a good idea and adds something to the class, so far in the game you are always looking for more of it.  With so many key abilities using it, you never seem to have it when you need it and are therefore always stuck waiting for it.  This leads to constant delays in rotations.  I am hoping, as are most Paladins in the Beta, that this will be resolved with some fine tuning as the beta continues.  Only time will tell.

Warlocks

There is now a new spell fly-out UI feature for warlock pets. Clicking on this single button will open up the list of available pets to summon.

This is a small change, but one that cleans up the interface extremely well.  Now instead of having to have several buttons on your screen, one for each pet you use, you can click one and have all potentials pop up.  I would love to see this type of feature become available for many different rarely used abilities, as it could save a lot of space.  It of course makes hot keying difficult or impossible, but you can always use the standard spell rather than the fly-out version.

Soul Shards have been removed from the game as items. Instead, they now exist as a resource system necessary for using, or altering the mechanics of certain spells.

This is something that Warlocks have been looking to happen for a long time.  Now that other items used for attacks and abilities are gone, I’m thinking about ammunition for hunters, it was just a matter of time before Soul Shards disappeared as well. Not playing a Warlock, it’s hard for me to say how much this affects the class, but I do know they get a ton of bag space back, and the rest will depend on how Blizzard modifies the spells to interact with the new resource system designed to replace them

Items

Durability: cloth, leather, and mail now have as many points of durability as plate, making the repair cost on death much closer to equal for all classes.

Mainly playing a tank, I love this change!  Now there will be no more laughing when I claim a several hundred gold repair bill, and others chime in that their bill was 50.  I never understood why some had to pay higher bills than others, yet everyone got the same share of loot in game.  I can see many players complaining about this, but I think it is something that should have been balanced from the beginning.

Match this up with what feels like higher repair bills in Cataclysm and people may really be screaming. I’ve had a 300+ gold repair bill more than once in the beta.

User Interface

Auto-quests have been added to the game. Players will automatically be given an auto-quest by entering specific areas in the game world. This alert will appear distinctly in the Objectives pane via the Advanced Quest Tracking feature. These quests will still be given to players with full Quest Logs, but will count toward the 25 total allotted quests if the log is not full.

This is an awesome new feature and one that I am surprised has taken this long to become part of the game.  Many other MMO’s already use this type of quest to get players more involved with what is happening in the zone around them and with players in the area.  I’m thinking of the group quests in Warhammer for example.  While I haven’t seen one in action yet in the game, I can only hope they are as well implemented as they are in WAR.

Patch Notes:  You can find the newest Blizzard Cataclysm Beta Patch Notes here: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=24702229998&sid=2000