Posts with tag patch-3.3

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

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Our sister site Big Download has hosted the patch 3.3.2 files for easily accessible and speedy downloads. Right now they only have the North American PC patch available, but they will be getting the additional versions of the patch up later today.

Head over there and grab the patch if you're having trouble with the downloader. Enjoy!

• PC NA/US Patch - World of Warcraft Patch 3.3.2
• Mac NA/US Patch - World of Warcraft Patch 3.3.2

We'll update this post when other versions become available.

Comments have been disabled on this post. We need to be sure we only link to sources we are 100% confident are virus free, and cannot allow outside links to executables. Thanks for understanding.

As many suspected might have been the case, the recent resilience change seems to have made healing a little too strong in PvP. To continue the efforts of slowing down the pace of PvP in the final arena season of Wrath of the Lich KIng, Zarhym has made the following announcement regarding healing Patch 3.3.2:

Patch 3.3.2 is bringing about a change to the way healing functions in Arenas, Battlegrounds, and Wintergrasp. We have applied a debuff to all players in these zones which will decrease the effectiveness of all forms of healing by 10%. This includes heals from items such as Healthstones and potions, however, it will not affect defensive shields or auras. This change is being made to balance the effectiveness of healing against the recent buff we made to the damage reduction component provided by resilience. Rest assured that we will be closely monitoring the effects both the healing and resilience changes have on Battleground, Wintergrasp, and Arena PvP game play to ensure that fights last a reasonable amount of time without overtly skewing the effectiveness of any class, role, or team combination.

Should we hear any further announcements today, we'll make sure to keep you posted.

Patch 3.3.2, the next minor content patch, will include the much requested strength-based rings for melee DPS from the Ashen Verdict reputation. This should make warriors, paladins, and death knights quite happy. This afternoon Zarhym has released the stats for the different reputation levels (friendly, exalted, etc...), which we have for you after the break.

The minor content patch will also bring with it an influx of other small changes, as well as arena season 8. You can check out all the changes in the translated version of the patch notes that were discovered last night.

The rings after the break.

Blizzard, perhaps jumping the gun a little, has posted the patch notes for the upcoming Patch 3.3.2 mini-patch on the official Korean site. We've translated them for your convenience. Lots of changes to heroic dungeons, some class buffs (warlock, shaman, druid), and some class nerfs (prot warrior). All this and more, after the cut.

Disclaimer: Translation is hard! Some of these notes, especially more complex ones, may be slightly off. We'll post the official English notes when they're posted as well.

Update! Warbringer change clarified (again). Ghostcrawler chimed in about it.

Dungeons and Raids

Icecrown Citadel

• The Frostwing Halls, the last stronghold of the Lich King and the Scourge, has been added, but the Ashen Verdict must break down the door first. (Does this mean we have to wait some additional time to fight Arthas?)

Halls of Stone

• Brann Bronzebeard has been working out, so he'll run faster during the escort event.

Forge of Souls

• Devourer of Souls will cast Mirrored Soul less often.
• Trash mob Spell Reflect abilities have been changed. It now has a casting time, and will proc only twice at a rate of 75% instead of 100%.

In a follow up to the thread we discussed recently, Ghostcrawler discusses where the buff to protection warrior DPS will come from (sorry, guys, but it sounds like a buff to Devastate to me, yay for spamming) and a whole lot more. The discussion indicates that while they're interested in single target DPS increases over AoE increases that they don't think tank DPS is that big a factor in boss fights (and to be fair, he's right, it isn't a major factor although the fact that players will overreact to minor factors and stress out their tanks over their DPS, that is) and moves on from there.

The discussion about Devastate (that it's an easy ability to adjust) is fair enough but ignores the even easier solution of simply reducing the defensive stance penalty. To be honest I'd like to hear why there's still a penalty there when abilities like Righteous Fury and Frost Presence suffer none. I find the idea that buffing defensive stance would cause big problems for PvP balance kind of absurd. Battle stance grants 15% ArP and Zerker grants 3% crit, at most people would pop into d stance when focused, like they do now anyway. But we're likely to see buffs to Devastate, so just get used to it. My suggestion? While we're buffing Devastate, also have it queue Heroic Strike for us so that's one less button to spam and I can retire my macro.

By now, those of you that have slowly progressed throughout the initial part of Icecrown have witnessed (or at least triggered) various traps. Some traps seem to show up after your group has cleared out a room or killed certain mobs or met some other condition like the ones before Lord Marrowgar.

But wait, there are more of them!

Dinaer at Forever a Noob demonstrates that there are more traps as you progress through the levels of Icecrown Citadel.

• Spirit alarm: Trip these to bring in the big skeletons. Great for reputation. There are four of these in the two chambers leading up to Lord Marrowgar.
• Mist trap: Not exactly a trap per se, but it can catch the unwitting raider off guard if they run into it. Either have a rogue disable it on the side, or activate the teleporter on the other side and beam in. You'll run into it after you've downed the Deathbringer and zone in behind him.
• Geist trap: You'll find these littered in the hallways of the Plagueworks. Have a tank behind the raid to intercept them as they appear.

I wonder what other traps we'll see in the remaining parts of Icecrown. I can't remember the last instance that had traps on the scale of Icecrown.

Poster Sennshi makes a post to the general forums questioning why we have to run the whole dungeon to get the two frost emblems for completing our first random dungeon of the day. Thankfully, Crygil comes in and makes sure it is known that skipping to the end isn't something Blizzard has in mind for heroics. It's kind of sad that it even needed to be said, but at least they've said it.

I have to say, and keep in mind I'm one of the bitter sour curmudgeonly tanks who constantly gripes even when things are going well, but if you can't endure a 20 minute instance run to get 2 frost badges, you need to reconsider running random heroics. Even the longest heroic dungeon is hardly so huge an imposition that you can't get through it without asking for some kind of magical backdoor that summons the boss to you. We've seen changes to dungeons like Oculus to give players an incentive to run them or streamline them, going to some weird Thunderdome of boss summoning would be a step backwards in my opinion.

In a forum thread discussing the recent prot warrior block changes and Warbringer nerf and the state of prot warrior DPS (it's basically acknowledged as the lowest DPS among the tanks) Ghostcrawler chimes in that they intend to buff sustained prot DPS while reducing burst in PvP. However, he quickly comes back to point that at this stage in the expansion they don't want to make any sustained mechanical changes and so, don't expect one. The sustained DPS increase will come from buffs to existing abilities.

While I can understand the trepidation from prot warriors at this statement (no one is terribly excited about a buff to Devastate, not even me) it's an unfortunate but valid point he makes here. You really don't have the time to make drastic mechanical changes this far into the cycle. We might like a more drastic solution, but with Cataclysm looming on the horizon you don't really want to see too much tinkering with the base mechanics.

Still, please don't just buff Devastate. Please. I'm begging you here.

Even though Crimson Halls has been open for about half a week, a series of hot fixes have been applied today. Most of the fixes posted by Bornakk are applied to Blood Queen Lana'thel. I have to admit though, the bug where the Kinetic Bomb could trigger Blood Queen Lana'thel during the Blood Prince Council encounter did make me chuckle. I'm glad that's been resolved as well.

• Blood Queen Lana'thel will only be available after the Blood Prince Council is defeated.
• Blood Queen Lana'thel's Essence has a longer duration.
• Kinetic Bombs no longer aggro Blood Queen Lana'thel during the Blood Princes encounter.
• Blood Queen Lanathel should no longer cast Vampiric Bite on pets.

In addition, Daelo posted another set of fixes for the Blood Princes encounter:

• Prince Keleseth will no longer melee players. So if you get knocked into Keleseth or happen to move by him, he won't swipe in between his casts and kill a non-tank.
  
• The first Shadow Resonance should appear earlier in the fight, which will allow the Keleseth tank to have more orbs on him or her if Keleseth is empowered second instead of third. We didn't want which Blood Prince was empowered second to be a major element of the difficulty in the fight.
  
• We reduced the melee damage for the Princes by 10% for the 10 player difficulty. They were doing less damage than the 25 player before the hotfix, but this change lowers the damage further.
  
• Empowered Flames will now run out of power after shooting fewer firebolts in the 10 player difficulty. We did not change the initial impact damage.

Valnoth states that the Essence duration was lengthened because the developers didn't like the idea of sacrificing a player to get through an encounter. As a healer, I'm inclined to agree. I hate it when I have to stop all heals on a player in order to progress through a counter. It just goes contrary to everything my character stands for.

I want Last Word. Yes, I know everyone hates the proc. I look at it and say "remember Heartpierce" and keep on wanting it. (I've actually considered picking up a Heartpierce for tanking heroics with but they didn't buff the rage gen when they buffed the energy and daggers have crappy coefficients for warriors.) I half expect to see that mace get buffed to add 200 str when it procs. If not, not. I still want the great ugly thing, even if I'll probably pick up a rogue offhand axe to use as a threat weapon.

None of this has much to do with what we're here for today, namely clearing out the Plagueworks, hopefully with as few attempts on Putricide as possible so we can save them for Lana'thel over in Crimson Halls. (No bets on what next week will be about.) I'll probably also mention some loot they drop, but don't expect a comprehensive loot list, this is more about the strategy and tactics of killing some really rather disgusting bosses.

Sometimes a boss just seems to get lucky.

You know what I'm talking about: you just see 1% wipe after 1% wipe and you don't know what else you can do to get over the edge. Do you need more DPS? Are the tanks dying? Are the healers going OOM, or people standing in stuff that's killing them? What's the important thing you're doing or not doing to get that last little bit of performance out and kill that big loot sack on legs in front of you? You tweak strats, and then tweak them back, you play with raid comp, you change positioning... sometimes you get that little click and it all falls into place and some times you don't, nothing seems to work. Whether it's a PuG wiping on Garfrost or a raid working on the Blood Queen, things don't always go our way.

So what do you do? Are you the 'stomach it out' type who won't leave until it's dead or someone else pulls the plug? Are you a tinkerer always coming up with new strats and new approaches? Are you the "this is what I read on Wowhead" guy? How do you move past failure to success?

When I was growing up, I was a total Final Fantasy geek. I can still remember the thrill I got when I first started playing Final Fantasy II (Final Fantasy IV to you purists).

I never paid much attention to stats aside from the basics back then -- there was no reason to. When I did take a look under the hood, though, what I found was easy to understand. Cecil beat stuff down with a sword, so he had a high amount of strength. Rosa was better at healing things than Cecil, because she had more will than he did. Rydia blew things away with black magic and summons, so she was loaded up with wisdom.

When I eventually got around to playing World of Warcraft, I went into it with a lot of preconceptions from my Final Fantasy days. This healing priest? Spirit. Makes total sense, that's a healer stat. When it was time to use the darker side of the priestly art, it was time to look for gear with intellect. It made logical sense from a Final Fantasy standpoint. And just like in Final Fantasy, the most important thing to pay attention to was how well a piece of armor protects you from attack. Right? RIGHT?!

For a few days now, I've been mulling over a point raised by Spinksville in a blog post concerning the Dungeon Finder's impact on smaller servers. It was her contention that, although the Dungeon Finder makes getting 5-man runs faster and easier for people on underpopulated realms, the new tool was contributing (or likely to contribute) to the depopulation of realms without a lot of options for raiding. It's never been easier to gear up a character, she observed, and someone with a geared character is increasingly likely to want that toon raiding. However, smaller servers rarely field the array and depth of PuG raiding opportunities offered by larger realms. Her conclusion? "Being on a smaller server has never been less attractive for a casual player."

While I go back and forth on that point -- lots of people will just gear a toon for its own sake without necessarily planning to raid on it -- I don't think she's entirely wrong, and I also think the larger point concerning the Dungeon Finder's potential impact on server communities is probably accurate.

Crimson Halls, another wing within Icecrown Citadel has been unlocked this week. The Icecrown Citadel raid overview here on WoW.com has been updated accordingly. Summaries of the Blood Princes Council and Queen Lana'thel are available along with links and resources. Just starting out in Icecrown CItadel? Don't worry as information about the bosses in both the Lower Spire and the Plagueworks are still available

Good luck! Guess you'll be playing for Team Edward for one fight.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

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