WoW patch 2.3 is a major UI improvement

Europe gets patches a day later than the US, so it was only last night that I could play with patch 2.3. Now most comments on that patch are about the added content. Added content is nice, especially if it is well targeted. And nothing could be better targeted than finally eliminating the Stranglethorn Hole, that curious lack of quests in the level 40s. By adding 50 quests to Dustwallow Marsh, and to a lesser extent by making the Arathi quests non-elite, World of Warcraft has much improved in that level range. At the high end of the spectrum the patch added another raid dungeon Zul'Aman. With many casual raiding guilds now somewhere in Karazhan, that is also well targeted added content, although I would have wished the new raid to be for more than just 10 players.

But obviously there are a lot of players that are neither post-Karazhan raiding, nor currently at level 40. And I am really happy how much of an improvement patch 2.3 is for everybody, even if he doesn't use the added content. Patch 2.3 gives the WoW user interface another major overhaul, and improves many aspects of it considerably:

- Much, much easier to find stuff in cities. You can now set your tracker to point out whatever kind of NPC you are looking for, for example all profession trainers, or the reagent vendor. In addition to that you now see all quest givers, including quest giving objects on your radar. No more missing a quest because you never thought to look on the second floor of every house in the city. No more walking 10 times past a wanted poster without noticing it, it now even has a golden exclamation mark floating over it.

- Mailing of several objects now enabled without special addons. You can mail up to 12 items in the same mail. And you just need to right-click them in your inventory, no more drag-and-drop necessary. Same works for trade windows.

- Guild banks. These have so much space that I've already started to see solo players founding their own 1-man guild to get a guild bank.

- Improved auction house, with the UI somewhat cleaned up. But more importantly you can now put up items for sale for up to 48 hours, twice the previous limit. And finally, finally, if you search for something and get several pages of results, the sorting functionality covers all of those pages. Previously if you had lets say several pages full of silk cloth and sorted them by price, you had to scroll through all pages to see what the lowest price on each page was. Now all the lowest cost silk cloth will be on page 1.

- Inspecting now sees another player's talent build. I'd call that one controversial. Yes, you might want to see the talent builds of other players, for example to get some inspiration for your own build. But do you really want every pickup group criticizing your build?

- If you try to cast something while sitting, you will now automatically get up and cast, instead of just getting an error message. If you don't like that, there is a command to turn this feature off: /console autoStand 0

All in all a lot of improvements to make the life of the players easier. And I must say that having spent some more time in EQ2, I already appreciated the UI of WoW much more. World of Warcraft has a much more user-friendly UI. And a good part of it comes from "borrowing" the best ideas of the most successful UI mods programmed by players.

Besides the UI improvements and added content, there are also some changes to the gameplay. XP to gain a level between 20 and 60 has been lowered, and the quest xp between level 30 and 60 has been increased. The most reliable data I found talk of 18% less xp needed per level between levels 30 and 60, less bonus between 20 and 30. Assuming a similar increase of quest xp, and gaining half the xp per level by questing, you would need about 30% less time to level now between 30 and 60. Rewards have been improved in the dungeons of old Azeroth. But I'm afraid that won't help much, because low population and faster leveling means even less people available to form a group for a dungeon. At least for Outlands there are now "quests of the day" for one heroic and one non-heroic dungeon, which should improve people's chances to find a group for that place. I'm not even discussing all the changes to classes, because that would go into too much detail.

While of course in such a huge bundle of changes everybody will find bits he likes a bit less, in general I think this is a rather nice patch with something for everybody. It was a good time for me to come back to World of Warcraft.
- posted by Tobold @ 8:26 AM Permanent Link