Patch 3.1 goes live

by Tachyon on Wed. 15. April 2009, 18:30

Filed under: patch, ulduar, spec, mage

Patch 3.1 - The Secrets of Ulduar - went live today in the US and EU.
Not much has changed since my PTR 3.1 post, and the mage class wasn't affected much by the many changes made in class balance.

The complete 3.1 patch notes can be found here:
http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

Features in Patch 3.1:

Dual Talent specs

Class trainers now offer the ability to have a second talent spec for 1000 gold.
Each talent spec has its own set of mayor and minor glyphs, and its own set of key bindings. The two talent spec windows can be accessed by pressing 'N', that's also where you'll find the glyph sets now. Switching your talent spec is a 5 second cast (affected by haste!) and can be done everywhere when you're out of combat, except in battlegrounds and arenas. No tome of power is required for applying glyphs anymore.

As a mage, you will most probably want to have a raid-oriented spec, and a PvP/solo/trash spec.

My choice of spec is follows:

• Raid PvE: 56/3/12 Arcane
  http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#of0Vfz0IzxGuMtedcZb...
  That's the spec I'm using now, I'm quite content with it. I decided to keep slow, and placed another point in frost to get 3/3 Ice Shards for superb Blizzard DPS.
• PvP / Solo: 20/0/51 Frost-TTW
  http://www.wowhead.com/?talent#of0ic0McZZAc0fRbu0f...
  Yay, finally back to frost! The 20 points into arcane are mandatory for PvP to get Torment The Weak and Improved Counterspell. That leaves too few points left to get all the goodies in frost, so I had to make tradeoff decisions between DPS/utility/cooldowns.

Ulduar / T8

The new raid instance, Ulduar, is the main focus of the 3.1 content patch.

My guild will venture into that place starting tonight, and I'm really looking forward to learning new encounters with my guild mates (unlike the T7 dungeons, where I got piggybacked through more or less, which was rather challenging for me as everyone except me was already quite used to the encounters).

MMO-Champion already reports severaly world first kills of Ulduar bosses by US guilds, seems they managed to use their head start to their advantage (but I'm sure that the EU-Guilds will get the credits for a Yogg-Sharon first kill).

Mage changes

The changes to the mage class are, like, not spectacular. At all.
Despite Blizzard announcing that they intended to make frost viable for raiding again, and fire solid for PvP, neither of that happened.
Frost continues its existance as a pure PvP or trash mob spec for the time being, but thanks to dual speccing, that's not much of an issue.

Out-of-combat mana regeneration was lowered, but that affect more the healing classes, as we mages got compensated for that loss by higher in-combat regeneration, so for us it eves out.

There are only two big changes concerning the mage class:

• Molten Armor and the according glyph now grants its crit chance based on the spirit, and no longer on a fixed value.
  
  Molten Armor used to increase the crit chance by 3% (with the glyph: 5%), and now grants 35% crit rating (55% with glyph) per point in spirit.
  Remember that it takes 45.91 critical strike rating for 1% critical strike chance, so to end up with the same crit chance as before, you'd need to have 394 spirit (without the glyph) or 417 spirit (with the glyph).
  For PvP, this is a huge nerf (for solo play it doesn't matter that much), as you barely got any spirit on your PvP gear. With my current raid gear, I'm at 370 spirit unbuffed, so in a raid scenario my crit chance will be slightly higher than before.
  
  Despite the PvP nerf and despite the fact that spirit is one of the worst stats to get on gear, I think the change is justified, and mages finally scaling with spirit is nice and necessary.
• The Improved Scorch and Winter's Chill crit debuff were lowered to 1/2/3/4/5% (from 2/4/6/8/10%). After a few gazillion sour mage tears, we got compensated with an increased crit chance for Scorch, Fireball and Frostfire Bolt (1/2/3% with Improved Scorch) and Frostbolt (1/2/3% with Winter's Chill).

Argent Tournament

To be honest, I couldn't care less for the Argent Tournamentright now, but hey who knows, I'm sure I'll pass by some day anyway.

I never bothered to read into the details, but if I recall correctly it's a horse mount PvP duel thingy which rewards titles and vanity pets. Whatever.

Miscellaneous

• Mounts now can swim (and dive?)
• Flasks only last 1h (before: 2h). The recipies stay the same, but will yield now two flasks at once. Old flasks were migrated to 'mixtures' which can be transformed to 2 new flasks.
• Curse Gaming and WowInterface.com decided to block WoWMatrix requests. I switched to the curse client to keep my addons up-to-date, works quite well.
• A new boss named Emalon The Stonewatcher has been added to Archavon's Keep in Lake Wintergrasp. The new boss dropps the iLvl 226/232 Furious Gladiator PvP gear.

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