Patch 2.2.3 went live this morning. It’s primarily a bug fix patch for a number of sound-related issues introduced in Patch 2.2.0, although it also covers a couple of gameplay bugs I’d never heard of. *grin* Full patch notes will eventually be in the normal location, although as I type this they aren’t up yet — and neither are the servers. *sigh* One of the drawbacks of being on the wrong coast …
In the meantime, here’s the notes from the patch download this morning:
Most of the Brewfest clothing — the funny hats, the regalia, the boots and slippers — is bound on pickup so that you can’t buy it with tickets on one character and then give it to another. Presumably this cuts down on alt-farming the one-time quests for tickets to outfit your main. But either because of a bug or just because Blizzard likes dresses, the Brewfest Dress is not currently bound on pickup.
So if you want to save all your tickets on your main for the mount, but you also want the dress, you can buy the dress with an alt. Personally, I wish all the clothing was un-bound — I really want a funny hat.
Nethaera, a Blizzard Community Manager, posted a nice full set of details about the upcoming leveling improvements in Patch 2.3 on the WoW general forum today.
The post is pretty detailed and you should check it out if you have a chance, but here’s a quick summary:
I need help figuring out why this blog exists. I need your help figuring out what I should be posting. I want you to tell me why you read this blog.
I added a minor new feature to Petopia this evening. Now if you search in the Pet Database for qualities that are shared across an entire family and only qualities that are shared across an entire family, the results you get will be in terms of families, not in terms of the individual pets.
For example, if you search for pets that eat bread you will no longer see the 144 individual creatures that eat bread. Instead, you will see a nice simple list of the 5 pet families that do. But if you change the query to include any pet-specific terms — for instance, if you search for pets between levels 55 and 60 that eat bread — then you will see the 11 pets that meet those requirements.
It’s difficult to explain without looking at the page, but in operation I think it’s pretty intuitive. Give it a whirl and tell me what you think!
In addition, the Special Pets pages for Rare Pets and Spawned Pets are both now static pages that I generate when I update the database instead of being live DB queries. Hopefully this will knock just a little bit of wear and tear off the DB. And thanks to the illimitable Ket Shi (as well as some other very helpful readers), I added a whole bunch of untameables to the site.
A reader (who didn’t give me a name or server) wrote a few days ago to let me know that the black carrion birds in the Blasted Lands, the Black Slayers, have been renamed. I finally got a chance to run down there this evening and discovered that it’s slightly more interesting than that — some of the Black Slayers remain, but some have been replaced with Bonepickers.
Bonepickers look exactly the same as Black Slayers and, like Black Slayers, do not know any skills when they are tamed. But they occur at levels 49-50 (at least from what I saw), whereas Black Slayers are levels 47-48.
Not an amazing change, but interesting nonetheless. Why would they both putting just a few higher level carrion birds in the Blasted Lands? And when did this happen, anyway?
The past few days I’ve put all my other WoW goals on hold in an effort to get a Brewfest ram mount for Mania. It hasn’t been a smooth process. Let me tell you about my travails, and then I’m going to rant about the target audience for seasonal events. (If you are looking for anything even vaguely pet-related, feel free to skip this. This is all rant.)
As I mentioned at the end of the last Kaet entry, I largely wrote that entry before I took a two-week trip cross-country to a new home. I haven’t had much chance to play lately as I get settled in, although I have managed to sandwich in a few hours of Kaet around the edges — but I haven’t been keeping my normal notes on her progress. Which leads me back into my normal state of affairs with characters when I don’t make an explicit effort to keep track of them (and one of the big reasons I am trying not to play several alts at once): I lose track of where they are and what they are doing.
I was briefly very excited today when I got an e-mail inviting me to join the Wrath of the Lich King beta. “All right!” I thought, “Someone at Blizzard noticed me!”
But no … two seconds and a minimum of attention revealed what I should have immediately guessed — the links didn’t go to a Blizzard site and the entire thing was a phishing expedition to try to get my account info. My brief flash of excitement was quickly doused.
This, plus my inability to get the Pink Elekks on Parade quest, has made my morning overall quite disappointing.
The Public Test Realm was taken down this morning. Patch 2.2.0 took so long on the PTR, and Patch 2.2.2 followed so closely behind it, that it seems like forever since I didn’t have a PTR to play around on. I’m going to miss it terribly.
On the other hand, there is hope that Patch 2.3 will hit the PTR this week. And while the Harvest Festival is over, Brewfest starts on the live worlds today with Hallow’s End following soon after.
