Patch 2.4 Hotfix - 2.4.1
Blizzard pushed out Patch 2.4.1 today to hotfix some of the various problems casued by Patch 2.4. They don’t seem to have updated their patch notes page yet, but here’s what the download itself said was included:
Hunter
- Tranquilizing Shot no longer incorrectly restricts use of other Hunter abilities in specific situations.
User Interface
Combat Log
- Only the last 300 combat log entries are now stored.
- Filter settings are now properly saved.
- Changing zones will no longer reload the entire log
Bug Fixes
- Fixed a sound engine error that was causing lock-ups on exit.
- Fixed a shader error that was causing kernel panics on Mac PowerPCs.
- Fixed a bug on Mac that was preventing the intro Cinematics from playing.
Although no explicit mention was made of the various weird behaviors that some hunters are seeing with pet aggro, initial reports seem to indicate that aggro is better, if not back to normal.
I’d love to hear about your experience of aggro post-hotfix in the comments. To cut down on confusion, though, please do keep your comments to behaviors you have seen since today’s hotfix. Thanks!
38 Comments
I did some research before and after 2.4.1.
After the 2.4.0 patch I was able to see growl being issued in the combat log, however it as always the 4th or 5th action by my pet(cat). It would be one of the following: melee claw melee claw growl or claw melee claw (growel or melee). I have always timed my first shot, serpent sting to arrive just as the pet arrived or shortly after. This resulted in the pet holding argro if growel was issued first. I reviewed some old vidio i have from earlier patches and clearly saw growl being the first action by the pet other than dash. With the growl being very late the mob would come to me with the pet following delivering the melee, claw, melee, bite/claw then growl which would immediately reaquire agro of the mob.
I have noticed that after 2.4.1 I cannot get the growel to show in the combat log at all.
They may have addressed the growel time as cat has been able to hold agro at initial attack. I have not tested with mobs above or at pet lvl of 30 yet.
Also the 2.4.1 patch has clear reversed the pet feeding issue. With 2.4.0 I was having to continually feed the cat every 5 to 8 mins, even in the ah. After the 2.4.1 patch I have not had to feed my pet in the last two hours.
Without having any data to back me up whatsoever, I also agree with the impression that aggro generation for pets seems to be back to normal now. Not that that nails anything down, but, yes, you are not alone in this perception :)
Further research:
After getting growl to now appear in the combat log (had to log/relog) to get changes to settings to take effect.
I killed 40 mobs and analyzed the combat log after each kill: Growl is now always 1st, 2nd or 3rd, never 4th or 5th. I only pulled agro off pet when i would crit with arcane shot.
As for pet feeding, I fed pet prior to 40 mob hunt and he did not need feeding until I finished with the 40 mobs and ran back to astranaar and flew to darnarsus.
I did notice that mend pet during fight would immediately cause me to acquire agro of all mobs engaged.
I believe this may be a changed behavior - any ideas?
Aggro is only somewhat better for me with a 70/6 Ravager. While i never had problems with aggro with him in the past, guildies have mentioned that they’ve had aggro problems with Ravagers before 2.4 came out. Not sure what that’s all about, but i think i’m going to experiment with another pet family and see what all happens. Not looking forward to that loyalty grind, though. :P
I mentioned before, I found no issues this time. The few I did notice before are gone.
I checked every battle I did and came up with Growl being first in every fight except for my Boar (Charge) and my Wind Serpent (Lightning Breath).
*does happy dance*
I was on my Warlock and didn’t pull aggro once. I think things might be fixed :D Or at least better than they were before.
this is off topic but I was not sure how to contact you Mania. I may have seen a new pet not tamable on your board. I was flying away from Skettis (I was on my druid so I couldn’t use beast lore) and accidentally was coming down the mountain on the shadowmoon side not the terrokar side, and on the mountain were tigers with a moonstalker skin.
FirstChAoS: I just updated to Wordpress 2.5 and I appear to have lost my contact form. I’ll see what I can do to get it back. In the meantime, are you talking about the Blackwind Sabercat? They hang out on the plataeu right along the Shadowmoon Valley side and sometimes over the zone boundary, I believe.
FirstChAoS, that sounds like it’d be the Blackwind Sabercat.
I hate to be the bearer of bad news… I just popped on, and it still seemed not great to me… But the hard fact I have, I checked the combat logs, and Growl was not the first cast for my pet (Owl) {and it is the first on his attack bar}. One example I noted, was 1st a Claw, then a white attack, then the Growl third… I had timestamps on, and the Claw and white attack have the same timestamp, but the Growl is a second later…
I saw this pattern a lot in the log (though sometimes the three attacks had the same timestamp)…
K’
2nd data set (same account, same server, different hunter and pet). level 60 Raptor with Growl, Bite, Claw, and Dash (off-auto). Usual order was white attack, Bite or Claw (saw both second), then Growl. Again, the timestamp for the Growl was sometimes a second later… Hotbar is Growl 1st, Bite, Claw, Dash.
K’
MANA REGEN IS BACK TO NORMAL! In Hunters it is decided 100% by spirit again! check your totlip!
Krush: I dont think the order of the pets attacks effect the order that the pet uses them. Ive had growl as last in the line (after I redid my pets talents and trained growl last) and my Ravager used it even before his Gore occasionally which is first in his attack bar.
Re Deathbang: WOO! I thought that I wasn’t getting as thirsty any more! Still needing to pause and drink fairly often, but it’s now every three, maybe four enemies if I’m going through my shot cycle, rather than every two. So does that mean I can go without Viper on 24/7 now? I miss my Hawk.
Re Mania: I can definitely confirm the lack of threat issues. Or at least a lot lessened in my case. My serpent, even with Growl at only level 7, was doing much better at holding on through a couple shots. And at 8, I pracitcally can’t pull them off with a crowbar again. What a relief! Even if it was giving me very good ‘kite’ training.
What bothers me most.. is I did see an improvement, but according to Hortus there was no problem so how did they fix it if there wasn’t a problem? Blizzard would actually gain some customer respect if they said “hey we messed things up but we fixed it” instead of telling players they were doing something wrong. I still say they changed something because it is still easier to pull aggro than prior to 2.4 it just isn’t first or 2nd shot now. 4 SS will pull aggro now even if I intimidate, now granted I crit on 3 of the 4 SS’s all 8 times I tried it, but then I crit a lot and I did prior to 2.4 as well.
I didn’t try multiple mobs last night although it’s on my agenda for today (I didn’t log in my hunter until after I read people were seeing an improvement)
I also seemed (I’ve never taken numbers so hard to say for sure) that I was getting ferocious Inspiration as often as I did prior to 2.4 again which brought my crits back. (granted the lack of FI could have been a fluke run of non crits we’ve all seen stuff like that without a bug I’m sure.)
I’m not sure about you guys, but my mana regen still hasnt been fixed yet.
They either fixed mana regen or they didnt. Its not going to effect some hunters over others lol.
Ive noticed a slight difference. Before in a dungeon, i wouldnt even take viper off to keep whatever mana i could up since our party was flying without any casters and a pally healing us so we hardly stopped to drink. When I ran one last night, I was able to keep hawk on most of the time. It didnt seem AS bad.
Varsar,
What Hortus said was that there was no problem with Growl. Growl is working just fine according to their internal sensors. He did say that there might be a different problem and that he was going to look into that. Then, of course, a large number of people got rude, mean, and insulting.
Ok, guys, as a word of warning when dealing with ‘The Man’, if you will. A ‘good’ cop can bust you for almost anything under the sun. That is, a cop who knows the law and knows how to bend it just right without breaking it. He can bust you for loitering, trespassing, etc. The Blues on the forums can do the same thing. What’s worse, they don’t actually have to have a solid reason to bust your chops if you get insulting or become a pain in the arse.
A few guys have learned this the hard way. If you go in with an attitude and start insulting the guys who run WoW, you can be banned for no other reason than they want to. Not only that, but they will remove every trace of you from the forums. Every post you have ever made will be gone in the blink of an eye, and they are not archived unless you archive every single post yourself. And your only court of appeal is, essencially, to them.
Guys and gals, don’t go in there with an attitude. Don’t go in there screaming and demanding. Don’t insult them or call them names. It will get you banned. Admittedly, it doesn’t happen as often as it could, but if you push the line too often, you won’t be able to post anymore.
I know it isn’t fair, but life isn’t fair. Anyone who says otherwise is selling something.
I didn’t notice an aggro issue myself, but I have noticed a lot more pet dancing with the mobs. It is funny till it happens in an instance or cave then, not so funny
Seidouyumi
I know hortus said there was no problem with growl and yet they made a change to growl without telling us, because it was no longer cast first. then then might have fixed it without ever acknowledging it.
And yes I made a post on the thread and wasn’t at all rude, rudeness gets you no where.
and as to your warning, yes power corrupts. most people given power over others even in a forum will abuse it at times. Like a friend of mine in another game that got his forum and game account banned because he said what they were saying was “B.S.” and that’s exactly how he typed it. abuse much?
I mean if they made some kind of fix would it have killed Hortus to say, “we found it guys, problem wasn’t with growl it was with X. fix in next patch” and it is possible he didn’t even know about the fix.. which is even worse. The more I see of Blizz’s Customer service the less I want to play their games. Think I am done reading forums before I cancel my account.
Varsar-
I know. The big problem with Blizzard is it has gotten kind of big trying to satisfy the needs of this one game. I wasn’t sure if you were talking about Growl casting first or about a lack of aggro. Which is why I responded.
As for the warning, well, it wasn’t meant exactly towards you. I just set it off from my reply to you rather badly. It is kind of meant to everyone. We’ve had a few people vent here that they got banned from the forums for things that they didn’t do. Well, looking back, I usually found that they did some of what they complained about, but mostly they’ve been rude and insulting. I think the strain of dealing with all the rude people has gotten to Hortus and the rest of them and they forget how to deal with the rest of us.
2.4.1 came out so fast after Hortus began testing that it really is possible that he did not know about it, or that there was an error in the code which they hadn’t tracked down prior to the patch and it got fixed accidentally. It isn’t easy to always know what’s going on.
Since the Hot-Fix, I have experienced the following…
1.) 9 times out of ten, I come out of BGs petless now… not a real big issue.
2.) My boar seems to hold aggro a bit better, but charge still doesn’tr spike aggro like it used to. :*(
3.) My Rapid Fire sputters at times. I noticed it last night in AV. It wasn’t a lag or latency issue because everything else was spot-on.
That’s about it. The rest seems fine now. Thank god they fixed that Tranq shot issue. It got me killed the other day. LOL
The Blackwind Sabercat can be tamed, there are a bunch of 71’s there and they are to high to be tamed at this time, but you can tame the lvl 70’s because I had one.
I’ve been having problems with the Rapid Fire puttering as well. In fact, when it happens, the only way to fix it is a reload. When this happens, my ‘escape’ keybinding for the menu stops as well. Not sure if they’re related, or if it’s just my new system being odd, but it’s invariable.
The ‘rapid fire’ thing supposedly happened before (I say ’supposedly’ because it almost never happened to me), but it’s happening much more often now.
I noticed something new after 2.4.1, or maybe 2.4.0. I just made a new hunter (I know, that’s six hunters!), and I always had issues with hitting raptor strike while a mob ran away and it sticking for autoshot. It no longer does.
Oh yes, and does anyone know when they added the direct flight from Ratchett to Orgrimmar?
Mana regen not fixed for Gort!!!
Gort, mana regeneration seems a bit better, but I wouldn’t say that it is totally fixed yet. However, I’m able to go longer between drinks and fight a bit more than I was.
I can’t state for certain about the growl/aggro thing at the moment due to the fact I’m leveling the black & blue armored boar from RFK and it’s only lvl 59 right now (EVERYTHING gets resisted), but I can comment that after a brief test, AoViper is now working, at least compared to post-patch 2.4. It’s regenning pretty close to what the tooltip is saying, but as I only did like 3 ‘tests’, I didn’t really come to any extremely accurate conclusions, other than the fact it IS working now, as opposed to not working at all before patch 2.4.1.
I know that Kurasu said he was experiencing a problem with Rapid FireM since the patch, has anyone else noticed it as well?
From what i have seen over the past few months it almost looks like it is time they did a complete rewrite on the game as there are so many bugs/stuck mobs and other problems, I also think its about time they took out the battlegrounds/arenas ? and made gateways to them as i am sure part of the problems we get are from all the different elements of the game reacting badly together , I am sure if they did rewrite it as separate parts with some way to transfer to the pvp areas a lot of the faults would vanish , As it is every time they change small parts it becomes a cascade of other parts they need to change to get back what was lost ..
All major programs need a complete restart on coding once in a while as they get over-bloated lumbering fault ridden and impossible to improve without creating more faults , To me it seems that is what is happening now…..
Re: Messyah: I meant to say ‘Auto-Shot’, but as I’d been discussing Rapid Fire with someone (re: talenting) I typed ‘Rapid Fire’. So change my above to ‘Auto-Shot’ puttering.
LTT HUNTARD!
Sandralover-
Give a lack of knowledge about how long you’ve been playing the game, I can’t comment if you remember it this way or not. However, I did notice back after the initial run of issues regarding TBC’s release, there were a lot fewer major bugs in the system. It dropped off for a while and then started to pick up again over this last year.
I suspect that we’ll see another server swap out before Wrath comes out where in the entire game on the server will have been rewritten.
However, I’ve been saying for a bit now that after Wrath Blizzard should just create the sequal and rewrite not only the game code, but the entire world again from top to bottom. I have several ideas on how to make this work, and to make the game a lot better to encorporate the three distinct aspects that the game encompases. It’s too bad that I doubt that the guys at Blizzard would listen to someone like me, and the suggestion forums are just full of people who’ll redicule everything under the sun.
Seidouyumi -
I have been around the game for a long time , not as long as many , but around two years of learning how to play against the bugged mobs , i now with my hunters check to see if the mob moves in the correct way before shooting at them , hehe nothing as funny as a level 70 running away from a mob because you cannot hurt them but they are beating on you even when you are out of sight ?? , i get so many weird things going on at times it is almost part of normal play , and yes i remember when i first started there was a tree in darkshore that growled so the buggy game is nothing new .
The biggest pain i get though is major towns , some give me so much lag when they get busy i get 3 fps , i even tried the video options game of trying to help the frame-rate but all i got was a lot less detail and went back to the standard settings so i am guessing it was not my macs 1 gb ram causing the problem but their servers getting overloaded as when it is quieter i get no problems at all.
and yes i agree with you the games parts now have grown so big it is time they rethought how they do it , but perhaps they already are working on that ? , Who knows as they tend not to say what they are up to in any real detail
I know that a few GM,s do visit here and i hope that some of what we talk about is a part of their plans for the future of the game , We can only live in hope…..
I just respec’d to Beastmaster when the big patch hit, so I didn’t experience the whole threat issue — in fact, my pets held agro way better than they did when I was survival. I did notice the mana regen issue, and it is slightly better after 2.4.1. Before reading here, I thought it was just all the ranged combat speed increases from talents and improved aspect of the hawk :P
I briefly looked at (ie not full testing) my windserpent and ravager, and their opening combat was lightning bolt - melee - growl, or melee - growl - gore (after all the sprinting and diving, etc), kinda like they turned on auto attack then started doing their special things when they arrived at the mob. My windserpent also likes to move back to ranged more often now for lightning bolts, especially after an intimidate.
Gwelynora, 70 huntress
Ethora, 70 windserpent
unnamed Ravager, 63 ravager
Sandralover-
I have had some lag issues in major cities if it is too crowded, also. Some of it is due to the end user computer (that’s us) since I did an upgrade on my computer a while ago and had fewer problems afterward. Some of it is a crowding in the servers. I mean, if I hit Xroads durring a major battle, I lag badly.
Oddly enough, and I can’t speak for MAC’s here, but I bought a seperate video card for my PC and things worked out a lot better. It seems that the idea that Pentium floated about integrating video cards on PC’s has caused a bit of a problem when it comes to graphic developement.
BTW, I have a screen shot of a Quillboar shooting my Druid in Barrens. Now, the Quillboar is in Barrens- and I’m in DUSTWALLOW! It was durring one of the server crashes a little bit ago.
From my perspective….
Boar holds aggro no different. My mana regen seems to not have changed. Maybe i have just not noticed but i can say I seem to have to drink juice the same. I have even tried to lay off using stings and what not and still seems just as slow as before.
On an offhand note….. it seems everytime I make a new toon, be it on the same server or another, I cannont do the same quests for during the patches they go from working to broken to working again…. etc. You would figure that they would understand the code well enough by now.
Has anyone else noticed issues with getting Ghost Sabre to spawn. I dont know if they tweaked this but my new hunter has had issues finding this pet. I have pulled 14 of the cat statues and still nothing. One past hunters I made I found it in the first 5 max usually in the first 3? Didnt they remove this as a viable find for us as pets?
Dominia,
I’ve got the ghost saber 6 times now and I’ve had to pull; 18, 12, 5, 3, 37, and 1 statue. While I haven’t tried it since the patch I doubt they messed with his spawn it would be more likely they made him untamable then messed with his spawn.
I was screaming on my horde hunter on a PVP server at lvl 28 and having to pull 37 statues, it was a very stressful time LOL!
Leave a Reply