2.4.3 is Live!

Well, how do I?

I didn't get a chance to take a look at the new patch changes first-hand. I had overtime yesterday, and didn't come home until 8pm. It took a while to download the patch, meaning that I had spent most of my available time yesterday doing SSO daily quests. I'm at about 20k/21k revered, meaning that I'll be able to ding exalted sometime this week. More on that in a future post.

So yeah, didn't get a chance to experience the new changes, as small as they were. But for the hell of it, I wanna go over the ones that are somewhat relevant to my interests:

General
-Dispel effects will no longer attempt to remove effects that have 100% dispel resistance.
-Mounts at 30?! Yes, it’s true: Apprentice Riding and mounts are now available at level 30. Training costs 35 gold.
-Alcohol cooldowns have been rolled into Drinks: All 10-second cooldowns have been removed and replaced with the 1-second Drink cooldown.

OK, pretty cool. No more wasted 20% base mana on spellsteals that never had a chance to hit in the first place. That extra mana can go to freezing face with a Blizzard or something else.

Level 30 mounts are quite nice, because I'm always considering levelling up another mage alt hordeside, simply because I want to experience new content. Cheaper base costs also makes that prospect quite enticing.

Alcohol cooldowns aren't really that important, but I can always dream that one day mages could conjure booze.

Mages
-Frost Armor, Ice Armor, Mage Armor, and Molten Armor are no longer Magic effects and cannot be dispelled.

Warlocks
-Demon Skin, Demon Armor, and Fel Armor are no longer Magic effects and cannot be dispelled.

Cool! I can imagine that in PvP this would be beneficial. But I've heard in some circles that priests really have more efficient ways to kill mages than dispelling our armor, especially since their range attacks aren't affected by Ice or Molten Armor. Against pallies, however (do they even have a dispel technique? I forget), they're just going to have to deal with getting frozen 15% of the time they try to hit us. Hooray!

Oh, and I added warlocks because of the SSO daily quest that requires you to kill Dawnblade Warlocks. I always spellsteal their Demon armor when I get the chance, and this announcement sorta makes me sad that I can't do it anymore. Oh well, there goes my 2 minutes of fun =(

Magister’s Terrace
-The Stun component to the Sunblade Mage Guard Glaive Throw has been removed and the Bounce range reduced.
-Vexallus’ damage caused by Pure Energy has been decreased.
-Kael’thas’ Arcane Sphere has had its visual size increased. His Arcane Sphere attack has had its range decreased and the damage/second of Phase two on Normal mode has been decreased.
-Sunblade Warlocks have had their damage reduced slightly.
-Fel Crystals in the Selin Fireheart encounter have had their health reduced slightly.
-Warlord Salaris and Kagani Nightstrike have had their damage output reduced slightly.

Glaive Throw stun is extremely annoying, especially considering that a caster-class NPC uses it. Imagine the chaos on the class forums if blizzard gives the old glaive throw to mages in Wrath. Beautiful, sign me up!

The Vexallus fight isn't too difficult, but some may argue that it's the most difficult fight in Magister's Terrace. Particularly because of the pure energy damage. I know that Bashertin simply cannot handle the adds alone because of his relatively lower HP compared to other classes that normally get assigned to adds (ie, hunters, rogues, DPS shamans), so i'm glad that I'll have a better chance at staying alive at the end of that particular fight whenever I get assigned to right or left side for the fight.

Kael'thas is a surprisingly easy fight for frost mages once you get used to phase 2. It's nice to see that the arcane sphere is more visible, because I always end up doing blink tricks to get out of the way of those spheres. Considering our class' squishiness, this should be a welcome change.

I don't know how to react to the warlock change, since I'm always sheeping them first on pulls. I guess that means I can sheep the nexus guys instead.

Selin Fireheart is an interesting fight. All the PUGs I've done always go for the crystals, and more often than not, are always a sliver of HP away from actually getting to destroy them, before getting owned in the face by Arcane Explosion. From the way it's described in the patch notes, this is a very good adjustment. No more need for the "straight DPS on Selin while Ice Blocking through the AE" strategy.

I don't have access to wowhead at work, so I'm assuming that Warlord Salaris is the Naga add in the priestess fight, and that Kagani is the rogue class add. Those guys are incredibly bursty with the damage, and I always end up sheeping them for the duration of the fight if one of them show up. If the damage reduction is reasonable, I might be able to sheep the caster add instead. Salaris will still have that strange random aggro behaviour, so I might still sheep him first anyways =/

User Interface
-The new stopwatch feature can be accessed via the /stopwatch, /sw, or /timer slash commands. Inputting a time into the slash command will make the stopwatch count down. For example, /stopwatch 1:0:0 will make the stopwatch count down from an hour, /stopwatch 1:30 will make it count down from 1 minute, 30 seconds, and /stopwatch 30 will make it count down from 30 seconds.
-You can no longer click the minimap to cast ground targeted spells.
-Invisible players with Hunter’s Mark can see the hunter that put the mark on them.

Cool, no more need for clock mods. I can even time myself doing solo dungeon runs for lowbies. It's little mental games like these that lessen the effect of the pre-expansion blues.

Wait what? I used to be able to cast blizzard using the minimap? Say it isn't so! /cry

This one time, I was actually in alterac, and used invisibility, and got hunter's marked. Didn't go so well. I don't see how this will make it any easier for us to run away from arrowy/bulletted deaths, lol.

Bug Fixes
-The mage spell, Counterspell now shows in the combat log.
-The quest, "Into The Scarlet Monastery" is now available to players of the
appropriate level for the instance.

Great, now I no longer use the false denial method when I get yelled at for not interrupting the boss's major heal spell.

More Scarlet Monastery quests mean more people willing to pay for lowbie runs, meaning more money for mages. Hooray!

That's about it for 2.4.3 commentary. Next time on FitNB, "Dinging Exalted with Style."