Tuesday, April 26, 2011

What's good for the solo-er in Patch 4.1

Making notes on the patch notes(and undocumented changes) for today and wanted to let other solo-ers know about some of the interesting changes taking place today.

CLASS CHANGES

Hunter: Pet happiness is going away. This change to may or may not be a welcome change. It basically means one or two extra bag slots for my hunters. With talents and glyphs, I rarely had to feed my pets, but I kept food around just in case(and several types, depending on which pets I would switch between). The glyph that formerly increased pet happiness will now change the size of your pet to smaller-which is fine by me, I hate huge pets, they are just obnoxious.

Also, all tamed pets will now automatically be the same level as your hunter. I didn't have a chance to test this, but I am hoping this applies to all pets already in your stable as well. Also meaning that they would level up when you do, same as Warlock pets. Very nice if so.

Rogue: Stealth cooldown reduced to 4 seconds. FOUR SECONDS! And with the Nightstalker talent on level one of Subtlety, it is reduced to ZERO SECONDS! Yowza I can't believe how happy this makes my many rogues! Now, Blizzard, please reduce the cooldown for Druids!


NEW MINI-PETS

Wintersaber Cub: Purchased from a vendor in Winterspring

Panther Cub: Quest reward from level 85 questline regarding the new Troll dungeon in Stranglethorn. Does not require entering the dungeon or any groups or any pre-quests other than the questline you start from either Orgrimmar or Stormwind.

Voodoo Figurine and Pterrordax Hatchling: Archaeology projects from Troll and Fossil projects.

It also appears that there are going to be new choices in the Children's Week events which arrive the first week of May(next week!). For Azeroth there will be a snail named Scooter and in Outland, a fenstrider named Legs.

DAILY QUESTS:

NEW! fishing and cooking quests are available in the Alliance cities of Ironforge and Darnassus, and Horde cities of Thunder Bluff and Undercity. Not certain if there is an achievement related to them, but at least I can break up the monotony of the dailies by putting alts in other cities. NOTE: You canNOT do all 3 sets each day; one daily of each kind per day. I suppose you could research daily to see if one of the three is one that rewards more than one skill point or award token and do that one, but not sure if the time needed would be worth it(unless you are a mage!).

GUILD INFO:

For those who are in guilds and for those who aren't.

GUILD FINDER
One thing I hate about looking for a guild on alts that aren't in my personal family guilds is doing the research or interacting with so many jerks to find the diamond in the rough. I am hoping that some of my higher level players can find a guild that fits their playstyle. If not, no skin off of my nose. I have one alt in a level 25 guild that is so huge that there is rarely talking, noone says "grats" and I can be fairly anonymous. The only other guild I have a character in is basically a family type guild where I know most of the higher ups are stay-at-home moms like me. If I can find others on other realms like these, fine. If not, no biggie.

GUILD REP TABARDS:
For those characters of mine in my family-only guilds, there are bind to account tabards are available to effectively double the amount of rep gained within the guild. Not that our level 6 guild has many perks or items unlocked, but being revered or exalted with them would still be nice! And for the alts in the big guilds, well then I can get to the cool stuff even faster(not sure I would ever buy that Scorpion mount though, just too ugly and scary!).

BATTLE.NET ACCOUNT BOUND

All items that were previously "account bound"(and are still realm bound) can now be sent to characters you have on other accounts under your Battle.net account. So I can send any heirlooms over to my daughter's account, or presumably also the Baby Blizzard Bear(which my level 85 Paladin is missing, but I am pretty sure my kid has!) or any Archaeology items I dig up!

WINTERSABER

Aside from the adorable little Wintersaber cub that can be purchased in Winterspring, it is now much easier to get the Wintersaber mount for my Alliance alts! My human mage did this grind about a year ago, and even though the rep had been upped by then, the grind was still a PAIN! It has now been changed to be more inline with the Venomhide Ravasaur questline for Horde. You get a baby Wintersaber, and feed it, train it, and raise it until you can ride it! It takes 20 days if you don't skip a day and then you have one of the best looking ground mounts in the game!



There are a few other minor things that are interesting such as Old Ironforge finally being open to visit, Honor gained being doubled, trading Justice Points for Honor Points(I only get Justice Points when I do Holiday bosses, never enough to buy anything), all cities having all trainers available, and targeted mobs or npcs showing as a dot on your minimap. It's the little things that make me happy!