How patch 1.10 will change your life

Today is patch day in Europe, and the patch 1.10 was already applied to the US servers yesterday. Uff, I escaped the torches and pitchforks, my prediction was correct. :) So now I'm reading through the final version of the patch notes 1.10, and I'm wondering what the biggest change is. Is there anything is patch 1.10 which will change your (virtual) life, the way you play WoW? Lets go through the patch notes.

Weather effects certainly won't change the game. Everybody looks at them in awe for about 30 seconds, then either ignores them or turns them off in the options to improve his frame rate.

The high-level instance changes aren't actually that dramatic either. They are annoying if you would have preferred to raid these places. They are nice if you wanted to 5-man them anyway and now get better loot. Related to this is the introduction of the "Dungeon Set 2" aka tier 0.5 armor. That is added content, it will give some of us something to do for some time. But it doesn't change the game play.

The priest revamp will change the life of *my* priest, but that is mainly because I was shadow specced before and was waiting for the free respec to switch to holy. In general, if you were already a healing priest, you are now a better healing priest. You will probably notice the difference, but your raid mates might not. I like the changes, they will make my life easier, but they will not change the way I play.

Various bug fixes and minor improvement, for example the flight path interface, are generally positive, but have no effect on game play either.

The changes to the macro language I can't judge yet. The one thing that I am sure about is that the "mana conserve" function of some addons, which automatically interrupted your spells if they weren't necessary any more, will stop working. I used these functions of CTRaidAssist to prevent me from wasting mana on healing somebody who already got healed by another priest. This will get some time getting used to, and the priests might lose a part of their new gained healing power to wasted heals. But in general I'm pro removing macros that replace a players skill, you now have to watch your target yourself and interrupt yourself by moving or hitting escape. I'm not quite sure how the "decurse" type of macros are affected, I heard some rumors that they wouldn't work any more either, but didn't find a confirmation of that in the patch notes. Manual decursing in a 40-player raid will be hard. On the other hand automatic decursing in PvP is very unfair against classes which rely on debuffs, like warlocks. I'll have to see what still works and what doesn't.

In the end, the one change in patch 1.10 that I think will change our lives is the quest experience to gold conversion at level 60. Think of it! From level 1 to 59 World of Warcraft is more or less defined as the one MMORPG in which people quest more than they grind. But that used to stop at level 60, where if you wanted to earn money for paying raid repairs or buying stuff, you were forced to farm mobs. You could have done quests at 60, but the rewards often weren't worth it. Getting a message that you earned 8000 xp for a quest while you couldn't gain xp any more was more annoying than rewarding. Now 8000 xp are converted into 5 gold pieces, which makes quests a lot more interesting.

Before the patch, there were some mobs who dropped more valuable loot than others, so many people were farming the same corners, while poorer monsters were just ignored. Post 1.10 killing a poor mob for a quest will probably earn you as much or more than farming a rich one. Just like the generous quest rewards from 1 to 59 make players switch from monster to monster, following the quests, now the same will happen at level 60.

Not only will making money by quests become easier than farming, it also is obviously more fun. Brad McQuaid, when promoting his upcoming Vanguard MMORPG says that players follow the path of least resistance, and that his game is designed to make the path of least resistance also the path of most fun. The quest xp to gold conversion is doing exactly that. It basically is the end of gold farming, and the beginning of level 60 players returning to the quest game.

Incidentally that might have a huge effect on commercial gold farmers, destroying their business. I always said that to suppress Real Money Trade (RMT), the selling of gold for dollars, you would either have to make all gold transfers impossible, or design your game in a way that the buyers have no desire to buy gold any more. Trying to "catch" the gold farmer is pretty much impossible, as the "illegal" part of their business, the dollar transfer, happens outside of the game. Now imagine a typical level 60 player with a desire to get money for an epic mount or something, but a limited amount of available time. Before the patch his options were either to buy gold for dollars from a gold farmer, or to farm gold himself, stupidly and boringly kill the same mobs over and over. Unsurprisingly many people chose RMT in that situation. But after the patch that could change completely. Your choice becomes either spending dollars, or continueing to play the game just like you liked it from level 1 to 59, doing quests. I'm sure that lots of potential customers will choose the quest way in this situation, leaving the gold farmers without a business. This is the one brilliant change in patch 1.10 that will change our virtual lifes, the way we play the game after reaching level 60.
- posted by Tobold @ 7:14 AM Permanent Link