Patch 5.3: Escalation

So Blizz have finally announced a date for 5.3, tomorrow! I'm sad it wasn't a week earlier so they did something on my birthday but hey I'm not one to complain about new content.

What am I looking forward to most in 5.3? Well to be honest the patch hasn't interested me until today so what follows is my initial views of the content without having seen any of, so things may well change!

New battleground and arena venues are always a welcome addition, it gives me some more achievements that I'll not stand a hope of hell of getting and gives me something to whine about when trying to keep up in the achievement race with with Artherion, damn him and his PVP prowess. 

Then of course we have some new scenarios and some heroic scenarios too, as a healer though I am worried that there may be no place for me in these heroic scenario groups unless I choose to go shadow or want to be missing out on the challenging times/goals they have built in. I must admit when I heard of scenarios coming to the game I was over joyed as I thought these would be a replacement for the old epic quests we had way back. Sadly my hopes were dashed when they arrived and were basically little more than 3 man dungeons for level capped players. They could be so much more if they were available to players of all levels. I@m hoping things may change as time passes but for me they leave a lot to be desired.

There will sadly be no more 5 mans this expansion, I am saddened by this especially as I was hoping for some extra challenge mode dungeons. I guess they will come in 6.0. While talking about Challenge Modes, there is now a Fail Bag as a reward for doing the daily quest. This item has a chance to drop ilvl 516 items like Immaculate Pandaren Wand or just the usual 28g.

The storyline continuation is of great interest to me and I'll be heading off to the Barrens to see what the heck is going on there. Having max level toons on both factions I can get the full story although being primarily Alliance I think I'll be on the weaker side of that story for most of the time. 

The continuation of the Wrathion questline is also of great interest and I'm hoping that it actually starts to get interesting rather than more "go get lucky in LFR with drops to get the next item". Why can't we have more questing like we had with the Lion's Landing back in 5.1? Here's hoping for something along those lines in 5.3.

There are, as always, a whole load of class changes, the generic one of interest is that intelligent heals will now prefer the most needy players and pets will have a lower priority than players. I will be doing a separate post on the priest changes tomorrow.

The biggest list of changes though goes to Pet Battles. The notable changes are are:

• Pet Battle dues can now be watched by non competing players;
• Battle pets' recent ability loadouts will now be saved when pets are swapped in and out of battle slots;
• New pet drops in the Throne of Thunder, the Thunder Isle and Northrend;
• New pet drops in Burning Crusade raid dungeons;
• Pet Battle daily quests on Pandaria, Beasts of Fable and Spirit Tamer quests will award experience, valor, and Lesser Charms of Good Fortune;

Loot drops in Raid Finder can now be assigned to an off spec rather than the spec you have queued for. This is great especially as it means I can now queue as healer on Evlyxx and get DPS drops for my off-spec. I guess the theory is that hybrid classes are more likely to queue as healer in order to get faster queues, so expect a whole load of under geared healers in your Raid Finder groups.

Then there is the fix to one of my biggest bugbears in this expansion random loot drops and the bonus roll which is going to be weighted so every time you fail to win anything on a boss you're more likely to win next time than you were before. With my track record on world boss kills (including bonus rolls) of 44 chances of loot on the Sha of Anger and 8 chances on Nalak and I have only won 2 items (T14 legs on the same kill of the Sha after I had purchased 522 legs from the Shado Pan Assault) I'm hoping to get some success at last and get a tier set bonus active.

In PvP there have been massive changes. Resilience has been removed from all armour and players nw have 65% resilience regardless of armour worn. However, items that previously had resilience now have extra PvP Power. I am really not sure how this changes anything as PvP will still heavily favour those folks with gear as PvE geared players will still have their damage nerfed hard compared to PvP equipped players, but lets wait and see before we condemn it. Also when entering a PvP arena all gear will be scaled down to ilvl 496 (gear of lower ilvl will NOT be scaled up though).

The Brawler's Guild has had a few more levels added to it, /whoop I don't know of anyone that partakes in this anymore most folks got their pass and a few levels then stopped way before they hit max level. Maybe the mount reward will motivate some more folks to try it out and stick with it.

The void binders are back which means more upgrades for your BiS items this only affects PvE gear as PvP gear is capped at ilvl 496 anyway although the old Dreadful and Malevolent gear can still be upgraded but to be honest, the honor is better spent buying new gear that will be of higher ilvl than even the upgraded items.

Lastly, the best additions in the patch are that the experience to level from 85-90 has been reduced by 33% at each level and the Golden Lotus rep gate has been removed. Finally the expansion is looking alt friendly.

My final words, are concerning the change that we didn't get. Motes/Spirits of Harmony remain soulbound, why the heck aren't these Bind on Account yet. I have loads of them on toons that have no use for them and none on toons that do. Damn you Blizzard!