Patch nooooootes. (4.1 update)

I’m still sadfacing at the lack of Firelands in 4.1. Not because of the lack of raid, because of the lack of new dailies. Not that levelling alts is a bad way to spend my time, but… pfft.

On the other hand, I may be the only one who believes Blizzard’s “Firelands weren’t ready and we didn’t want to delay the rest of the content” stance. This is how it used to happen back in vanilla days. Then TBC started the large gap between patches with bigger chunks of content and WotLK followed suit.

(I’m not saying I’m 100% confident they’ll get it right. It’s quite possible that in a short while they’ll go “whoopsie, Firelands still isn’t ready, please hold”. But I like the idea of not holding content back just because Every Patch Must Have A Raid In It ZOMG.)

Anyway!

A dead player can now be resurrected by targeting them using the Party or Raid Frame even if they have released. No more hunting for corpses.

Finally. It was so bloody annoying to have to hunt for somebody’s dead body to res them if they had released. Especially considering the occasional bug where their corpse would be invisible. Especially when somebody releases and you need to battleres them and argh.

The Dungeon Finder now attempts to avoid putting damage-dealing classes with the same armor type in a group.

I thought it already did that? Ah well. Good change. On the other hand it sounds like I’ll still get rogues in my group as a tank druid, and shadowpriests, mages and warlocks in my group as a healer priest, but hey, this is an improvement already. Gift horse, mouth, and all that.

(hunter pet changes)

Considering all the happiness system did these days was irritate and frustrate low-level hunters who couldn’t yet get the Mend Pet glyph, and therefore would find themselves with a pet doing less damage than expected (especially if they had no idea what the happiness system was), I can see the reasons for the change.

Funnily enough, the thing that worries me the most about this change is that most probably, the Pet Emote addon will break and need reworking, since it has emotes that change depending on the pet’s happiness. And I love that addon probably more than I should.

I do disagree with Gavendo that this is the “Hunter pets made easy” patch, though. Back in vanilla our pets would run away if they were unhappy too long! And we had to level our pets from whatever level we tamed them at! Uphill! Both ways! In the snow! You young ‘uns have no idea! *shakes cane*

Glyph of Mend Pet is now Glyph of Greater Proportion, which increases the size of the pet slightly.

And all hunters will now have slightly larger pets. I mean, what else are you gonna glyph? Aspect of the Pack? Scare Beast?

(Some patch in the future: “Glyph of Greater Proportion is now [Some More Useful Minor Glyph]. All hunter pets are slightly larger by default.” Just you watch.)

Priests now innately have 100% pushback protection from damage while channeling Divine Hymn and Hymn of Hope.

Thank you. This makes those two spells much better panic cooldowns. I was just lamenting yesterday how annoying pushback while hymning is.

The direct damage portion of Holy Fire can now trigger Evangelism.

That’s interesting. Looks like it might change the smiter disc priest rotation around a bit (from “smitesmitesmite” to “HOLYFIRE!smitesmitesmiteHOLYFIRE!”). Might even make it worth it to use Glyph of Smite.

And that’s that, I think!