3.0.9 Articles

3.0.9

3.0.9: Minor patch

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Released: 10 Feb 2009 (1 year 4 weeks ago)
Expansion: Wrath of the Lich King (3.x)

World of Warcraft Client Patch 3.0.9

The latest test realm patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/test-realm-patchnotes.html

The latest patch notes can always be found at http://www.worldofwarcraft.com/patchnotes/

Druids

  • Ferocious Bite: This ability now only uses up to 30 energy in addition to its base cost.

Hunters

  • Kindred Spirits (Beast Mastery): This talent now grants 20% pet damage at max rank.
  • Serpent’s Swiftness (Beast Mastery): This talent now grants 20% pet attack speed at max rank.
  • Pets
    • Lava Breath now reduces the target's casting speed by 25%, down from 50%.
    • Poison Spit now reduces the target's casting speed by 25%, down from 50%.

Mages

  • Arcane Power now increases damage and mana cost by 20%, cooldown reduced to 2 minutes.
  • Arcane Power and Presence of Mind now share a category cooldown. Arcane Power causes a 15 second cooldown. Presence of Mind, once consumed, causes a 1.5 second cooldown.
  • Arcane Flows now reduces the cooldown of Presence of Mind, Arcane Power and Invisibility by 15/30%.
  • Presence of Mind: The cooldown has been reduced to 2 minutes, (down from 3.)
  • Slow (Arcane): now increases cast time by 30%, down from 60%.

Paladins

  • The duration on all Seals has been increased to 30 minutes and can no longer be dispelled.
  • Divine Plea: The amount healed by your spells is reduced by 50% (up from 20%), but the effect can no longer be dispelled.
  • Sanctified Seals: This talent no longer affects dispel resistance, but continues to affect crit chance.

Priests

  • Inner Fire duration has been increased to 30 minutes and can no longer dispelled.

Rogues

  • Hunger for Blood (Assassination): Now increases damage 5% per stack, (up from 3%.)
  • Mind Numbing Poison now reduces cast time by 30%, down from 60%.
  • Mutilate damage will now do 20% increased damage against poisoned targets, down from 50%.
  • Slice and Dice (Rank 2): This ability now increases melee attack speed by 40%, up from 30%.

Warlocks

  • Curse of Tongues: Now increases the casting time of all spells by 25% (Rank 1) and 30% (Rank 2), down from 50% and 60%.

Dungeons and Raids

  • The Obsidian Sanctum
    • Changed the color of the fissure in the Obsidian Sanctum to be more visually distinct.

User Interface

  • The " GM wishes to speak with you " alert/button, at the top of the screen, has been changed so that addons do not obscure it.
  • A clickable chat message has been added that duplicates the GM alert/button.
  • When a GM wishes to speak with you the Help Request minibar button will glow.
  • For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros forum .

Bug Fixes

  • Fixed an issue where players using nVidia 3D glasses were unable to see spell cooldowns.
  • Fixed a software mouse cursor bug that was causing the mouse curser to disappear from view when over certain UI elements.
  • Fixed a player movement error in which other players were appearing to move erratically when traveling beside them.

Fire versus Arcane in 3.0.9
by Kyth on Tue, 03/10/2009 Add a comment (Comments: 13)

I recently switched from Arcane to Fire and I've been asked "why" a lot.

First off, realize that I rarely hold myself to a single spec. We have a loot system that encourages offspec gear, so I'm always gathering up unneeded gear in case I need to respec some day.

I still have my arcane gearset and if, for example, Sarth3D were still hard, and I wanted the burst of damage for Tenebron, I'd be arcane. That said....:

DPS

The thing is, on paper, Fire and Arcane do about the same DPS (arcane is ~50dps higher). Arcane can whore innervates and do more, of course, but the specs are pretty balanced on paper -- and that's the problem.

Designing a spec so it does more DPS with more effort? Awesome design. Changing that spec for pvp reasons one patch later so it doesn't actually provide more DPS but still requires better timing and more effort? Not so much.

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Mage 3.0.9: simulation results
by Kyth on Wed, 02/11/2009 Add a comment (Comments: 10)

Interested in a tutorial about how to play Arcane and get high DPS without going out of mana?

Check out: StratFu: Arcane Mage guide

Vontre is a good friend of mine, even though he abandoned the mage class to play a DK. He gave me permission to reproduce these results of his here.

There's some very interesting stuff here.

Full credit for this post goes to Vontre of Mal'Ganis, author of MageGraf and DeathGraf.

Gentlemen.... behold!

Are you ready to rock!?

Well actually, I pulled up Manly's gear and did a lot of testing in magegraf. I fixed the coefficient, put in the new AM glyph, nerfed the timer stacking, etc. What I came up with was very interesting. There are a couple of ways to play arcane spec, mainly, an easy way and a best way.

Rotations

First I tried fixing the rotation at ABx3 AM. Now, using this, each time you use Arcane Missiles there's a 49% chance that the AM will be affected by Missile Barrage. Hmmm.

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Mage 3.0.9 - Redux
by Kyth on Wed, 02/11/2009 Add a comment (Comments: 2)

So the stealth change is 10% less spell damage on ABarrage. And yeah, that's a big one.

On fights where you have a lot of mana, ABarr is about 17% of your damage, making it around a 1.5% nerf. On fights where you had less, however, you used the spell a lot more and it could've been 20% or more.

Rawr puts fireball (18/53/0) at 0.9% behind the new arcane. Asuming you do ~5500 dps, that's a 550 dps difference -- generally well within the variation for lag, etc.

So on the one hand, you can play arcane, which requires a lot more work and attention, will require using AM (and channeling spells are such a pain when you have random lag like I do), and ideally will want to suck down innervates in order to remain top DPS.

Or you can spec fireball, which is a rotation you can do in your sleep with zero effort, and require Vigilance and Hand of Salv to do competitive DPS.

What a set of decisions....

Anyhow. The new rotations are:

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3.0.9 update (mage changes)
by StratFu on Tue, 02/10/2009 Add a comment (Comments: 27)

Interested in a tutorial about how to play Arcane and get high DPS without going out of mana?

Check out: StratFu: Arcane Mage guide

Servers are now live with 3.0.9

The summary is that arcane is in pretty good shape, because MMO-Champion wasn't completely correct. It's probably a DPS-neutral patch for pve, although it may be a slight buff (or a slight nerf) depending on fightlength and how the cooldown-stacking numbers work out.

Assuming all the number crunching is correct then: if you were happy with arcane in 3.0.8, you'll be happy with arcane in 3.0.9.

We're all raiding tonight though, so we'll know more in a few hours.

As a side note: If you trust the Simcraft theory tool, rogues are now 200 dps over arcane mages.

As your "todo" list for pre-raid tonight:

  • Swap your AP glyph for AM (Arcane Missiles)
  • Remove PoM from your arcane cooldowns macro, and bind it so you can still use it
  • Expect to use AP+IV, then AP on its own, then probably (probably) holding IV again until AP is back up

This last point isn't based on simulations, it's just an educated guess. But it's what I will be doing.

The following information is confirmed:

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Commentary on 3.0.9 Mage changes
by Kyth on Mon, 02/09/2009 Add a comment (Comments: 3)

Interested in a tutorial about how to play Arcane and get high DPS without going out of mana?

Check out: StratFu: Arcane Mage guide

Update 2/10: Please see the Updated Mage 3.0.9 post for the DPS impacts, etc. Some of the information below turns out to not be correct (MMO-Champion had the wrong information)

This post is still a good rant about the impact of pvp and pve, so I'll leave it up.

These are the relevant changes, the full list is at MMO-Champ:

Mage Skills

  • Arcane Power now increases damage and mana cost by 10%, cooldown reduced to 1 minute. (Incorrect: actual patch has 20%/2 minutes. See Updated Mage 3.0.9 post for more details)
  • Arcane Power and Presence of Mind now share a category cooldown. Arcane Power causes a 15 second cooldown. Presence of Mind, once consumed, causes a 1.5 second cooldown.
  • Arcane Flows now reduces the cooldown of Presence of Mind, Arcane Power and Invisibility by 15/30%.
  • Presence of Mind: The cooldown has been reduced to 2 minutes, (down from 3.)

Glyphs

  • Glyph of Arcane Missiles -- Increases the critical strike damage bonus of Arcane Missiles by 25%. (Old - Increases the range of Arcane Missiles by 5 yards.)

Everything else is just tooltips or pvp-only.

It's not a huge pve loss. Estimates from EJ number crunchers are:

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