In case you live under a rock, you will most likely have heard that patch 2.4 information is being released all across the WoW boards.
This is the REAL DEAL people, none of this cruddy “Ice Lance with a 6 second cooldown” crap. These be the geniune articles.
And I can say, with a straight face, that I am really excited for this new patch. There are some (dare I say it?) very exciting changes for PvP. Namely, the abolishment of the whole idea of diminishing returns when you kill somebody.
In case you don’t know, currently the honor system calculates a guesstimate of what your honor is going to be, and then calculates it out actually during that nightly rollover thing. Now, the estimates are always off because of diminishing returns on honor gained from killing opposing players. You will always get 10 honor when you kill somebody, but the next time you kill someone… you get less… and less…and less… until finally you don’t get any honor at all from killing somebody. It seriously gimps some battlegrounds *cough* WARSONG GULCH *cough* as you were essentially forced to kill the same players over and over again.
“We’ve reached a point where we’re now confident that applying diminishing returns to honor is no longer necessary, and we’re currently planning to remove it with the 2.4 patch.”
Therefore, every time you kill somebody, you will gain the full 10 honor from the kill. Which, of course, means that there will be no estimation of how much honor you would get. There’s no more estimating to do, you see. It will always be 10 honor. Therefore, Blizz is doing the following:
“What the removal of diminishing returns means for you is that as soon as you defeat an opponent that rewards you honor, you will receive that honor, and you will be able to spend it right then. There will no longer be an estimate, and you will no longer need to wait until the next day until you can actually spend it. Your achievements through honor-based PvP will be instantaneous.”
Awesome, huh? No need to dick around doing nothing waiting for 5am server time. Its there. Right now. Go spend it. With one caveat:
“Players that have the resurrection sickness debuff will not be worth any honor, and if a player dies 50 times or more during a battleground they won’t be worth any honor for the remainder of that battle.”
So, upon entry into a battleground, you will be worth 500 honor. I find this cool. Tee hee, my gloves are worth more than you.
Needless to say, I will be spending a LOT of time playing battlegrounds after 2.4 hit. The amount of honor to be gained from them has increased significantly. Heck, even Warsong Gulch could become incredibly lucrative now.
Oh, yeah, and there’s this thing…
“Spell Haste: Spell haste now reduces the global cooldown on spells, down to a minimum of 1 second. This change does not apply to melee and ranged abilities.”
/yawn. Booooooring….
OK! OK! I WAS KIDDING!! GAWD!!
I’ll go over the details once we have some math, but for right now all we know is that spell haste will apply to the GCD. Which, in my humble opinion, will be the hugest, mostest sweeping awesome change to happen to all casters in any and every game that ever existed since the invention of the word “Fireball”.
Seriously. This is going to be the most awesome thing ever. My keyboard is all sticky just from thinking about it.
Anyways… yeah. *Awkward pause*
So.
Yeah.
Anyways, a couple other announced changes for mages.
“Spellsteal will no longer overwrite a longer duration buff. “
You have no idea how annoying it is to spellsteal something you already have. Like, spellstealing Ice Armor and having it overwrite your Molten Armor. Or spellstealing Arcane Brilliance and having it overwrite your own… and its only there for something stupid like 2 minutes. So bloody annoying. Thanks so much, Blizz, for fixing this. <3
“Players can now only carry 80 Conjured Manna Biscuits at a time.”
Manna Biscuit Ninjas, eat your heart out. OH WAIT YOU CAN’T NOW. HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.
*cough*
“Items intended for Retribution Paladins have had their stats adjusted. Retribution Paladins should see an increase in dps as a result.”
Ret paladin re-itemization? Does this mean that the removal of spirit from mage gear is imminent?
Please?
/taps foot.
C’MON! I DON’T NEED NO BLOODY SPIRIT!
Hmm…where are you seeing these new patch notes? I can find the pvp post easily enough, but not the full-blown notes.
[...] have been strategically leaked by various Blizzard reps. Here’s a few community takes and responses to [...]
Hehehe I understand your excitement. One of the mages in our guild who is right into PVP has been gibbering happily about these changes.
Speaking of PVP I can’t understand how I can’t beat the mage in my guild in duels but I can beat the warlock quite consistently who also consistently beats on the mage.
Is it one of those class balance thingummas? I’d note that the mage is PVP frost spec when I’ve duelled him and the lock is um.. the spec with the felguard I forget what it’s called.
Any thoughts etc? Um.. I guess you’re not likely to give me tips on slaying mages huh… >.>
I’ve really enjoyed reading your mage guides (I have a 31 mage) – are you going to put them back up here with links in the side bar?
The another great change about the honor system lies in its simplification. No batch process, no estimate calculation, no diminishing returns tracking.
This means less server-side code, less client-side code and thus less bugs. This will cause PvP UI addons to be simplified as well, which is a good thing.