I know I’ve been on the prowl for the official word on what’s going to be in World of Warcraft’s next patch. They finally posted the page with info here. To sum up:
- There is a new area called The Gates of Ahn’Qiraj where there are two new high level raid dungeons. Whoopee. Not appealing to a non-level 60 like myself. The interesting part is this: “Players will have to complete a world event of massive proportions before they can open the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj on their realm.” The idea that we have to actually do something to open up the area instead of it just showing up is really neat.
- Linked Auction Houses! This is great. All the major cities will now have an auction house. As before, there are three actual auction houses with content - the Horde have one, the Alliance another, and the neutral cities like Booty Bay have one accessible to both factions. This should be nice for my server where we just don’t have enough stuff in the Horde AH since there are 2.5 times as many Alliance! Tanaris was really tough to get to, but Booty Bay is very accessible. Should be much more effective to trade between the factions now. Interesting to see what it’ll do to the economy. There are some items which are simple for one faction to get and hard for the other (or impossible, like this leatherworking pattern) that end up selling for buckets of gold more in the neutral AH.
- Multiple Battleground Queues - Yeah whatever. Where are the cross-realm BG queues? This is ok, it let’s you queue up for Arathi Basin and Warsong Gulch and just enter the first one that becomes available. Not too exciting
- Paladin Talent Revisions - I have one character who is a Paladin, so this could be cool. They don’t mention anything on this page, but some of the news that came out after Blizzcon indicated that they’d be giving the Paladins mass buffs to help out in raids. I can’t seem to find anything that talks about that now… Looks like it was all pulled down? Hmm.
Into the future, one of the Blizzcon articles mentioned they’ll be introducing weather into the game. Looks like that’ll be in a later patch though. I’m looking forward to the AH feature the most. I spend way too much time travelling across the world to sell stuff. It’s ridiculous. This should help eliminate the wasted travel time since right now, if you’re on the Eastern Kingdom continent, getting to the AH in Orgrimmar is a good 30+ minutes of travel at worst.