3.3.3 Patch Notes

Hey 3.3.3 goes live on European servers in around... 1 hour (probably), so here are the massive changes for Shamans:

Classes: General

• Several raid buffs have had their ranges increased to 100 yards, up from 45 yards, to prevent select buffs from repeatedly getting applied and removed during highly mobile encounters. Some buffs, such as paladin auras, totems, shouts and Blood Pact are intentionally meant to have shorter ranges and remain unchanged.

Curses, a 100 yard totem range would be... most welcome.

Shaman

• Flame Shock: The damage-over-time component of this ability can now produce critical strikes and is affected by spell haste.
• Talents
  • Elemental Combat
    • Elemental Oath: This ability is now always on as a passive aura.
  • Enhancement
    • Unleashed Rage: This ability is now always on as a passive aura.

The dot changes to Flame Shock give a very small DPS increase according to Enhsim, but this is bigger news for Elemental Shamans. The passive aura changes are welcome, but my Unleashed Rage uptime was around 99% before, so again no big DPS boosts here.

Luckily no other changes which will make me need to relearn which buttons to press, so thanks for that.

Shaman Tier-10 4-Piece Elemental set Bonus: This bonus has been slightly adjusted to account for the fact that haste now modifies Flame Shock's periodic damage ticks. The bonus now makes the shaman's Lava Burst cause Flame Shock to tick at least two additional times before expiring.

Ummm... go read an Elemental blog for more details ;)

The rest of these notes are not Shaman only, but are of interest to me, so off we go...

All weekly quests will now reset during each region's scheduled maintenance, rather than at a single global time.

A "makes sense" change, the raid locks all reset during maintenance, so why did the weekly raid quest reset on Tuesday in the EU? This lead to many people unable to do the weekly raid until Wednesday because they were already locked. Having said that, it worked to my advantage as I don't raid anything other than ICC, so I could PUG the weekly on Tuesday when it was new and enthusiasm (and bodies) was high. Now I shall be back to trying to PUG it on Tuesday when its about to reset and only 4th alts are left to do it. Thus my respeccing to healing on my underused off spec for a better chance of getting in. I'm only healing Naxx and Flame Leviathan though!

Frozo the Renowned has moved into the Dalaran Magus Commerce Exchange and will be trading your Frozen Orbs for various other trade goods.

The biggest news of the patch, causing Frozen Orb speculation on a rampant level. Will they go up? Will they stay low? Will Eternal Fire go up due to demand for Titansteel items? Will epic gems crash because honour from battlegrounds has been increased by 100%? It might be a good time to stock up on under-priced frost lotus.

Engineering

• The Pet Bombling and Lil' Smoky non-combat pets are no longer Bind-on-Pickup.

Big news for pet collectors, now we can get these two engineering-exclusive pets for some amount of gold on the AH. The cost will obviously depend on how many Engineers list them, the mats are quite obscure and take effort to get, so I wouldn't expect these to end up being very cheap. Myself, I gathered the mats for my own a few weeks ago, so I just need to get a-crafting.

Other miscellaneous changes are: posting in multiple stacks on the AH (like Auctioneer does), being able to widen the quest tracker (like MonkeyQuest can) but yet no making the font smaller (like QuestHelper can), Dungeon Deserter buff up to 30 mins (no quitting those slow dungeons), and Frozen Orb rolls in dungeons are now Greed or Pass only (wth just after we all got used to Needing them).

Now where does that Celestial Steed come from? My money is on some sort of Blizzard store item, which if its Bind On Account and scaling, would be a killer. I am not sure why they would add it to Algalon at this stage (the obvious match), and they have added non-combat pets for old bosses before (Lil KT & XT), so is this the first mount in the Blizzard store? The only other reason I have is that some new boss will drop it, but that would need to be something Algalon-like and that doesn't fit with the dragon theme going on in the Ruby Sanctum. Or I suppose it could be a TCG loot card reward :(