WoW patch 1.9.0 comments

Patch 1.9.0 arrived in Europe yesterday, with some problems. That resulted in the patch not being available for download already during the downtime in the morning, and I had to spend half of the evening downloading the patch with Blizzards slow peer-to-peer system, the Euro version of the patch not yet being available for download from Fileplanet. So what did the patch change?

The major content added in patch 1.9.0 is "The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj". This is a combination of a world event to open said gates, and then a 20-player and a 40-player raid dungeon behind it. A "world event" is something that only happens once on each server, once the gates are open, they presumably stay open. To open the gates, all players of all levels, Horde and Alliance, can contribute. In Ironforge and Orgrimmar there are "war effort commanders" instructing players what to do. Basically players will need to collect a huge amount of resources of many different kinds, from 90,000 copper bars to 17,000 cooked yellowfish. There are three different types of metal bars to collect, three types of herbs, three types of leather, three types of bandages, and three types of cooked food. You get the idea. You hand in the items in stacks of 10 or 20, and receive a number of commendation signets and a box with a random magic item. The level of the magic item corresponds to the level of the resource you handed in, copper bars give lower level stuff, thorium bars higher level stuff. The commendation signets you can hand in for more magic items, or exchange 10 of them for 75 reputation points with one of the major city factions.

On the positive side, the event involves all players. Even if the lower level players aren't terribly interested in opening the gate, they might well be interested in the rewards for handing in resources. And being able to contribute to "changing the world" is nice too. On the negative side, the event is totally messing up the resources economy. Prices for the kind of resources that you can hand in immediately shot through the roof in the auction house, so that lower level resources you can hand in are now worth considerably more than higher level resources which can't be handed in. For the next couple of weeks, trying to find copper ore for mining, or buying copper bars for low level smithing will be impossible, and the same problem will apply to many other levels of many tradeskills. I just hope that Blizzard knew what they were doing when they set the numbers of resources to collect. With a stack of 20 thorium bars already being worth 9 gold, I wonder how long it will take to hand in several thousands of them. Although my personal favorite for "last resource to be completed" is the cooked yellowfish, I think there aren't all that many high level fisherman around. Actually I'll try to produce some of those with my level 28 hunter, that could earn me some nice magic items for use or sale.

The second patch feature is that all the cities of one faction are now linked, sharing a common auction house, trade chat, and looking for group chat. Being able to use the auction house without having to travel to Ironforge or Orgrimmar is very useful. The linked chat channels will take time to get used to:
[2. Trade - City] Me: WTS [Toughened Leather Gloves]
[Elfhunter] whispers: I'll buy. Where are you?
To [Elfhunter]: On the bridge in front of the AH in Ironforge.
[Elfhunter] whispers: Doh, I'm in Darnassus. Forget it.
Insert your similar scenario for the LookingForGroup chat here. With time people will get used to doing more trade by cash-on-delivery mail, and traveling more between cities to find a group.

There have been numerous changes affecting different character classes, but mainly warlocks and paladins. Warlocks now get soul shard bags, the common version holding already 20 of them, with rare recipes from Scholomance and Molten Core leading to even bigger shard bags. For paladins it was their turn to get their talent tree reworked. I don't play a paladin, so I can't really say much about the changes, but previous changes for other classes were generally positive, leading to more viable talent builds. As usual all paladins got their talent points refunded for free, so they can choose new talents at no cost.

In PvP there have been some changes, Blizzard is still trying to get a viable PvP system running, with little success. You can now sign up for several battleground queues at once, which hopefully will cut down waiting times. But if you leave a battleground before the battle is finished, you can't sign up again for 15 minutes, which should prevent people quitting whenever their oppenents look stronger than they. Battleground reputation rewards have been improved.

Furthermore there are lots of minor changes of details, some of them very welcome to me. For example slimes now drop decent loot, they were my least favorite mob up to now because even the highest level slimes only dropped worthless junk. Some new recipes have been added to tradeskills, most notably oils to temporarily enchant weapons for enchanters, special schools of fish for fishermen, and the ever popular mechanical yetis for engineers. The highly annoying timbermaw faction gaining has been made easier by adding new quests. The guild interface has been slightly improved. Most visible to all players, tips have been added to all loading screens. The mail you get from the auction house whenever you buy or sell something now lists more information, like the sell price, fees, and who bought/sold your item.

Some bugs have been fixed, notably the popular bug that allowed players to traverse steep terrain by walking slowly. That bug had allowed people to reach places like the Ironforge airport, which weren't supposed to be accessible. Now you can only visit these places out of the game with a WoW map viewer program.

Handling of add-ons has been changed, as have some commands in the language that they are written in. Unfortunately the result of this is that you will manually need to reactive loading of add-ons in the character selection screen. And many of the old add-ons will now produce error messages due to the changed code. Just hope that your favorite add-ons are still well supported, and that new versions compatible with 1.9.0 will come out soon.

All in all a nice patch, but nothing that would knock my socks off. It will take some weeks before the gates of Ahn'Qiraj open, with lots of bragging from the first server to do it. Then it will be time to judge the two raid dungeons there. I'm not too fond of the last addition, Zul'Gurub, because I found it too hard for smaller guilds. It doesn't help if a raid dungeon needs only 20 players to go in, when you still need Molten-Core-like equipment and skills to conquer it. There are a lot of guilds that aren't powerful enough for Molten Core and Blackwing Lair, and could use something a bit easier.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:05 AM Permanent Link