You’re going to get to play with some of the WotLK changes sooner than you think.  For those of you who have been saving up those herbs, your time to profit is almost here.  The public test realm using patch 3.0.2 went live on the PTR Tuesday, which means that the next major patch is just around the corner.

If you don’t read the patch notes, understand that this patch contains so many huge changes that it’s almost an expansion.  Blizzard is going to implement a lot of the changes in WotLK in this patch.  You are going to get all of your training points back since every class has a list of dozens of significant redos.

As a result, there is just no way to comment on all of the class changes at one time.  Even if we broke it down by class it’s going to take a lot of testing and several articles, but you know we’ll get it up here as we play through the new changes.  But there are some things we wanted to cover today, since they apply to everyone.

First, Inscription is going live in this patch to level 375.  That means all your herbs are worth a ton of gold and glyphs are going to be available.  I will try to make sure I get an inscription leveling guide up as soon as I am confident about the progression to 375.  I’ve got a lot of herbs to gather!  You herbalists can expect your services to be in wild demand, so I sure hope you took our advice and powerleveled that profession.

The achievement system will also be implemented.  This interesting panel tracks a whole slew of things you do in the game and represents another kind of ‘ding’ as you accomplish all sorts of things.  There are 749 achievements available in the beta as of today, so if you ever get bored you still have plenty to work on.  A funny one is Friend or Fowl, which requires you to kill 15 turkeys in 3 minutes.

Speaking of achievements, be sure to attend the Pirate’s Day event in Booty Bay on the 19th.  This one time, one day event is sure to land in the world event section of the achievements list so go check it out.

Since I’ve been playing a priest recently (and now have the entire epic PvP honor gear set from all that work) perhaps the most significant changes in the next patch are for casters.  My favorite change has to do with spell cast timer pushbacks and channeling interrupts.

This is going to be a big help for casters vs. mele classes.  The patch notes state that when attempting to cast a spell, the first and second hits will only add .5 seconds to the cast time, and further hits will have no effect!  No more looking at my cast bar and seeing +2.7 sec because some hunter keeps using his instant cast shots on me.  This works nearly the same way for channeled spells in that the first two hits reduce the channeling time by 25%, and further hits have no effect.

Now certainly this doesn’t apply to things that completely interrupt casting like silence, silencing shot, earth shock, shield bash and all those things that just stop casting completely.  But even in PvE, it’s going to make solo survivability for casters a lot easier.  If you’ve ever pulled 4 mobs and not even been able to heal yourself or get a spell of any kind off, this will really be a welcome change.

Next, anything that grants +spell damage or +healing is being consolidated into a single stat called Spell Power.  All gear that grants +healing or +spell damage will now reflect the one stat +spell power.  As a result, your visible bonus healing for healing classes will appear lower, but healing spells will gain more from spell power than damage spells so the net result will be the same.

This is an interesting change that will make gear more usable for all casting classes regardless of whether they are helaers or not.  Healers will always get a bigger buff to their healing spells from spell power, so stacking all that +heal gear will be a thing of the past and respeccing to a damage build will not require a major gear change.

On a lighter note, you will also be able to visit Stormwind harbor, which is pretty impressive.  You can also go see the huge hole in the ground where the purple Dalaran bubble used to be.  Dalaran has already been moved to Northrend as the Kirin Tor make their move.  It turns out that the bubble was more of a complete sphere, so the big hole in the ground might be worth a look.

You will also be able to visit the new barber shops and change the look of your toon if you like.  It seems that they have introduced some new hairstyles for each race, and you can also change your hair color and a few other thing if you like.

And last, but certainly not least the 51 point talent trees will open up as well.  You are going to have new skills to train based on your talents if you so choose, and that means that you’ll have a gob of new tricks to play with.  You can find a link to the patch notes as well as a talent calculator below so you can read about each class and then fiddle with the new talents in the next few days so you have some idea of what you want to try out.

This is a big patch for WoW, and you’re going to love all the changes (although there iwll be some initial balance issues that will need to be played through and worked on).  So check out the patch notes for yourself, work with the talent trees and get those herbs harvested/bought and ready to sell!  Oh, and go hang out with the pirates too - this patch is really going to Dominate!

Patch Notes

http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

New Talent Trees

http://wotlk.wowhead.com/?talent

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