[Wrathblood]

Won't be today, but the new PTR version is marked "release" so it will be arriving soon.

Funny, the change that will probably affect my characters the most is the buff to IT, an ability my Frost DK tank doesn't use but will probably now have to start using, so its going to screw up his rotation. Addition by subtraction by addition, I think. I suspect this change will also make prot pallies now the clear laggards in single target threat among the tanking classes (in ICC gear). wtb moar MDs and TotT.

[Wrathblood]

Looks like d2's 1.13 patch is coming next tuesday as well. While I'm happy both are arriving, it annoys me that both are coming on the same day, at the very start of the longest time I will be away from either game in over a year. I hadn't been shuffling the trip around, trying to avoid the various patches or anything, but the timing makes me grumpy.

[Forte]

Wrathblood, on 17 March 2010 - 08:20 AM, said:

Looks like d2's 1.13 patch is coming next tuesday as well. While I'm happy both are arriving, it annoys me that both are coming on the same day, at the very start of the longest time I will be away from either game in over a year. I hadn't been shuffling the trip around, trying to avoid the various patches or anything, but the timing makes me grumpy.

They're still updating d2? What are they changing? Fixing exploits mostly?

[Wrathblood]

Yeah. Well, its quite a story.

Last April or so, they announced "hey, we're going to reset the ladder and increase everyone's stash size, and maybe fix some bugs. Patch could be out in a couple weeks!" So, everyone was happy and people stopped playing the ladder. Then there were WC3 map exploits to be fixed and some SC stuff (there is apparently one "legacy" dev team at Blizzard which works on all these things) and so time went by and eventually it was November.

However, the legacy team finally had its plate cleared off and they were doing the last few things, but it turned out that the process of combining everyone's WoW and battle.net accounts somehow broke something which made it no longer feasible to increase the stash size. So, they had to go back to the partially completed patch and REMOVE the "increase patch size" coding.

So, then January rolls around, and, a mere 9 months late, they put the new patch up on the PTR for testing, and basically they fixed some dupe bugs, minutely changed the scaling on like 4 virtually useless abilities (tiny, tiny buffs to ele druids and fire bowazons, and a tiny, tiny nerf to hammerdins) and added two new merc names (the list of changes was so sad that this was actually listed as a significant change). And everyone was like "you effectively shut down ladder play for 9 months to do THIS?"

Blizzard then partially redeemed themselves by, at the 11th hour, introducing 1.13c which appears to have eliminated tppk'ing, thus making HC play reasonable again. 1.13 was on the ptr for close to 2 months, which is some pretty amazingly thorough testing for such a tiny patch, but there you go. Its finally done and will be up next Tuesday.