Patch 3.1 Goes Live – Here Are A Few More Things You Might Have Missed

Well, as we predicted, 3.1 goes live today.  And since the world seems to be riddled with patch note challenged readers, we thought it would be a good time to point out the more interesting leftovers in the massive list of stuff.  Honestly, they were easy to miss even for avid patch note geeks.

Professions

Alchemists Cache – Bosses now beginning to drop recipes again, woot.

Blacksmithing – skill level 1-300 recipes getting big upgrades so people might actually use them.

Cooking – No more flint and tender, No more artisan cooking quest, no more cookbooks.  If you already did the Clamette Surprise thing, drop back over to Gadget for a new recipe.  Not very excited about the jelly recipe, no buff = bleh.

Enchanting – Added level requirements to most enchants – see our last post on twinking.

Engineering – several interesting looking changes to existing recipes, my paladin will observe and report.

Fishing – told you to level this one.  Like cooking, no more artisan quest, but go get a new fishing pole if you’ve already done it.  Fishing is faster, and skill requirements for areas has been lifted.  You might only catch junk, but you can throw the line.  Fishing dailies are back, and there is a rare mount to be had.  Nor more fishing books either, and now Wintergrasp may be some of the best fishing in the game.

Herbalism – more herbs in northrend on average, woot.

Inscription – for the more than 50 new glyph recipes they will be learned from Book of Glyph Mastery, a randowm world drop in Northrend.  Expect prices for those to be in the hundreds of gold, Crap, they should be better than Damaged Necklaces, although probably not as rare I would imagine.

Jewelcrafting – new PvP rings and necklaces, nice.

Leatherworking – now you can turn borean lether scraps into borean lether?  It took this long?  New recipes on Ulduar bosses, BUT unlike the alchemy recipes these will be BoE.

Tailoring – also gets epic BoP patterns from Ulduar.  Many low level items made by tailors improved.

UI

New Quest tracking options, not quite as good as some of the best mods out there, but definately an improvement.

Ultra video mode none of us will probably be able to use (until I get that uber Mac)

Equipment Manager feature lets you manage and equip up to ten different sets of gear, no more scrounging around in your bags for the tanking set.  This was almost required with Dual Spec.

More guild-friendly calendar sign-ups.  And honestly, who else uses the thing?

Better mini map, so they say, hard to tell just how much better it really is.

Warnings before getting locked to dungeons.  Confirmation box allows you to bail before you get locked for a week.

Other Stuff

Ghetto hearthing gone – leaving party in an instance will put you at the nearest graveyard instead of your hearth location.  Bummer, sort of, but with 30 min hearth times we can live with it.

One loot, everyone gets their emblems.  No more having to sit around waiting for 25 over eager people to grab their badge before the LM can give out loot.  Emblems distributed just like cash.

Three new Horde mounts and a couple of new pets.

Queu for a BG no matter where you are, and return to where you were as soon as BG is over.  Not sure how this will work with WG, but it will be really nice for everything else.

Just a few tidbits you might have missed and we’re not going to take the time to belabor any of the points.  I certainly hope you took our advice and stocked up on enchanting mats, prices are already going through the roof, and we haven’t even started the frenzy yet.  Good luck and enjoy patch 3.1!