Patch 5.1 recently went live on the PTR, with many of the changes being discussed in Legendary Episode 97, but many of them just couldn’t be fit in. These are the ones that didn’t make it to Legendary, but that you should still know about.
1. Crowd Control Pane: There is a new feature on the UI being tested right now in Patch 5.1 on the PTR, which is a marked improvement in the on-screen representation of crowd control in WoW. Currently, unless players are using an addon such as LoseControl, crowd control effects on them simply show in the debuff area to the left of the minimap. This doesn’t make them particularly easy to see or respond to, so this UI change is a welcome feature to improve the current standing. The new crowd control pane, which can be switched on or off, works in both PvP and PvE. When your character is affected by a hostile or friendly effect that affects your control of it, a pane appears, informing the player of the type of effect, for example, a fear, horror, stun etc., as well as the duration of that effect. Datamined strings indicate that this pane could also serve to inform players about interrupts or invulnerability effects.
2. New Achievements: There are a few new achievements which have been discovered so far on the 5.1 PTR. Two of them relate to pet battles: Seek and Defeat tasks the player with hunting down and defeating eight legendary pets, while I Choose You requires that the player defeat Zen Master Aki. The latter achievement rewards a solid 3,000 gold. There is also an achievement for collecting 150 mounts: We’re Going to Need More Saddles, and two feats of strength: They’re Both Footballs, where you need to have both the Winter Veil 2012 Pigskin item and the Foot Ball; and WoW’s 9th Anniversary, which simply requires that you log on during the 9th anniversary period.
3. New scenarios. Apart from the Black Temple scenarios discussed in yesterday’s Legendary, there are a few others which have been discovered. There’s not a huge amount of information about them just yet, apart from names and maps, but two of them, Horde Beach Scenario and Lion’s Landing would appear to relate to the escalation of the battle between the Alliance and Horde. The others, A Little Patience and Vol’Jin Scenario, don’t reveal much, but smart money would be on the latter having some association with trolls.
4. Pet Battle Changes: Apart from the new achievements mentioned above, there are further changes to Pet Battles. The Patch Notes describe the changes as follows: A new item has been introduced that can be used to upgrade the quality of Battle Pets: Battle-stones.
- Battle-stones are available in two basic types, general purpose Battle-stones that can be used to upgrade the quality of any pet, and family specific Battle-stones, which can only be used to upgrade pets of a specific pet family.
- Battle-stones are available in two qualities: Flawless Battle-stones can upgrade pets directly to Rare quality, while Polished Battle-stones will upgrade a pet to Uncommon quality.
- Players will have a very small chance to obtain a general purpose Flawless Battle-stone after winning a match against wild pets; defeating higher level opponents increases the chances of obtaining a stone. These valuable items are not soulbound, and can be sold on the Auction House.
- Family specific Flawless Battle-stones can be found in the Sack of Pet Supplies obtained from performing Pet Trainer quests, and are Bind on Pickup.
- General purpose Polished Battle-stones can be purchased for 1000 Justice Points.
There have also been several changes to the pet journal, allowing players to view quality of pets directly from icons, and improvements to the tooltips of wild and vendor pets to show whether the player owns them already. There have also been new pets introduced, two of which can be found on Darkmoon Island, and players can now own up to 650 pets, more than double the current limit of 300.
5. Datamined Cinematics and sound files: Two new cinematics have been discovered, one for the Horde and one for the Alliance. The two are very similar, showing a fleet of ships arriving at a beach. There are also a large number of datamined speeches appearing for the new patch, including ones from Jaina Proudmoore and Anduin Wrynn. These are definitely spoiler-heavy, so listen with extreme caution!
Loading ...
