Well, patch 2.3 has gone live and people are already crediting as the single best patch since The Burning Crusade was released. With changes to Weapon Skill, Alterac Valley and the addition of Guild Banks, this patch looks set to either break a game that has suffered from many trials over the last year or set up another great expansion for a game that has well over 9,000,000 subscribers world wide.
Sadly however, I haven't been able to access the ptr on my main character, a priest. This should be resolved at some point in the next 24 hours and it isn't like I am not trying (this was resolved a couple of hours ago). That is always one major thing I have held against Blizzard - the design philosophy behind the website. That is not what I am here to discuss however and in an attempt to pass the time, I'm going to go through the main cahnges and say what I think is likely to occur from them and then go on to say what is actually the case.
Guild Banks
Having been promised Guild Banks since well before the release of The Burning Crusade, the player base is anxious to get a hold of this one. Effectively, this will allow guilds to maintain a banking system that will both aid their members but also aid the raid attempts by providing not only a guild resource for item and gold storage but a way of allowing players to pay for the access to those areas of the bank. In effect, new member and trials can be restricted to deposits where as long standing veteran members and officers can be allowed full access to the bank. It boasts a veyr neat function that allows those with the right permissions to pay raid repairs using the guild gold fund in the guild bank. This is sure to impress the high end raiding guilds. The patch notes put it slightly better than I did.
The Guild Bank is a shared repository for an entire guild and will be accessible through new NPC's called guild bankers. The Guild Bank will allow players with the appropriate permissions to store items and money for use by the rest of the guild. Permissions to withdraw and deposit money and items are controlled by the guild leader through the guild controls menu. The Guild Bank is divided up into separate tabs so that the guild leader may restrict access or group items into distinct categories.
- Up to 6 purchasable tabs each containing 98 item slots
- Permissions to view/deposit/withdraw per tab
- You may use your Guild Bank withdraw limits to pay for item repairs (now enabled on all merchants)
- Transaction logs of the last 50 actions in the bank viewable on a per tab basis
So what is it actually like? Well it is everything they have said it would be. The 6 purchasable tabs can be used as storage for different items. For example, tab 1 can be used for reagent storage, tab 2 for green items, tab 3 for rare items, tab 4 for pots and buff food and so on and so forth. What makes this the best way to use the stores is the permission system. The Guild Leader can assign permissions to players in the guild allowing him to restrict or unrestrict access to certain aspects of the guild bank. So, for example, Officers may be allowed unrestricted access to all elements of the guild bank where as trial members may only be allowed access to tab 1 and 2 and may only be allowed to deposit items. This also reprisents aan interesting idea. You can allow players to view the contents of a particular tab but not withdraw/deposit items so you could offer a system where by players without the appropriate permissions can buy items out of tabs they don't have access to withdraw from for either other items or straigh out gold and then use the revenues to pay for raid repairs. The raid repair feature is also an interesting idea. If your repairs fall below the withdrawal threshold then you can use the guilds funding to pay for your repairs. If they fall above that threshold, you can part fund your repairs and pay for the rest your self. Neat stuff, huh?
In effect, Guild Banks is just a tidy up of a few guild orientated economic issues that were occuring and now, the need for guild, "Mules," will be obsolete and if not, they will only be used to transfer items to and from the Guild Bank. The lack of mules means more character slots for twinks or new mains... which can only be a good thing, right?
Healing Items and 33% Damage Bonus
This is a rather controversial change but an understandable one. Players were forced in to a role where by they either healed for insane amounts but did no damage, or damage for insane amounts and did no healing. Now however, it seems the PvP devs have decided to throw Holy Priests, Resto Paladins, Resto Shamans and Holy Paladins a bone by giving them a limited amount of + damage from the healing items. This means that players with 1300 + damage will now also have around 429 + damage as well, enabling them to do a limited amount of damage but not compromising on + damage and healing stats. That said however, 33% seems to be a little steep and we may see this figure get reduced down to the 25% mark as newer more powerful items appear. After all, players spec holy for a reason and it isn't because they wish to go and gank someone. Again, the patch notes explain it far better than I do.
Healing: Almost all items and enchantments that provide bonus healing now also provide a smaller number (approximately 1/3) of bonus spell damage. There are a few items and enchantments where this was not possible, such as random-stat items and Zul'Gurub enchantments, but this is now the case on virtually all other items.
Now, what is it actually like? Well to be perfectly blunt, it is too nice. 33% on all + healing items as damage is not too overpowered but does reprisent a slight problem. If the figure was 25% then this problem would go away but seeing as it is arounf 1/3 of the + healing, players with + damage and healing gear may feel a little discontent with the change. There are no real reasons why this will occur either but it does have the aura of one of those smart things Blizzard designs (like fear mechanics) that the player base whines about with no valid reasoning (like fear mechancis) and that promptly gets nerfed (like fear mechanics... oops... taboo?). In effect, this is a nice change that will give healers a chance to do something other than healing, albeit limitedly.
At the end of the day, no one will truly know how this will be recieved by the mass player base until the final patch goes live but it is more than likely to be released into a crowd of people heavily biased against it.
Expertise Rating?!
This seems like one of those things that resulted from an overly bored dev finishing his work far to quickly for his own good and thus sounds completely stupid. Why replace one perfectly reliable stat with another stat that doesn't even apply to all weapons? Now I haven't looked in to this too much but from what I can tell, it hasn't really changed anything and it is more of a calcualtion orientated over haul. Interestingly, ranged weapons don't benefit from the new stat and instead have had their weapons skill replaced with bonus hit or critical chance. Again, why replace a perfectly good stat with a far to complex equivalent? The patch notes this time, don't really give any details or explain very well. They just say, "we have done this to this regarding this but we aren't going to tell you why," in usually anti-customer style.
Weapon Skill: All items and abilities that granted weapon skill have been changed. In most cases, they were converted to expertise or expertise rating. Ranged attacks do not benefit from expertise, so ranged weapon skill has generally been replaced by critical strike bonuses or hit bonuses. In a few cases, talents have been changed to other effects to avoid granting players excessive amounts of expertise.
So what is it actually like? No idea. I don't play melee so I haven't had any experience with this one. From what I can tell though, nobody seems to have noticed and there are slight balance issues here and there but nothing worth writing home about. It just seems like a step towards redefining the game slightly. Over the past few months, the game has become slightly more complex stat wise and the devs seem to now be doing it intentionally. With another MMOG in the works at Blizzard, perhaps the devs are subtly suggesting and moving towards a more mathmatical experience when gaming rather than hiding that aspect of the game from view. I don't know... just a random theory for you there.
This is just the first part of the cahnges that are likely to not get changed by the fiendish dream-breaking developers and these are just the bits I looked at in my short time on the PTR. Once I have had some more experience of the PTR, I will cover such things as the Alterac Valley changes and Priest and Rogue changes (as they are my two level 70 characters) and sign and seal an oppinionated outlook on WoW until the 51-point talent trees are released.
