Patch 3.1 - The Guild Leader's Boon

Large Patch eh? Yeah I agree. So what is in it for us? No, I'm not talking about our classes (every class blogger is going to be all over that anyways), I'm talking guild leaders.

Typically us guild leader types don't get a whole lot to be excited about come patch day. I think the last major thing we got was the in-game calendar back in 3.0. So what about this time? Did we get something awesome?

In a sense I would say we got more this time than we have in quite a while. Here's the changes that I personally, as GM, am excited about:

- Talent respecs. Now that everyone gets all these changes and now that people have had some time to refine their specs this gives a fresh restart on peoples specs. Now there is no excuse for people to complain about the 50g respec costs to get their spec done. And to boot the new interface option which lets you set your spec then double check that it's correct before it goes into effect. This means you can actually put all your talent points in before you waste that precious gold.

- Dual Spec - Ok if you haven't heard of this then you've been on vacation.. For about 3 months. This will let you pay a one time fee (1 thousand goldaroos) so you can learn another talent spec. Then, you can switch between these specs at any time you want (barring your not in combat, a BG, or an arena) for free with just a push of the button. Not only does it switch your talents, it also switches your glyphs AND your action bars. This is by far the most anticipated and most welcomed changes to WoW in a very long time. My guild is personally looking forward to this changing our raids real soon. We can carry less people while still getting things done.

- The Love Fool - Now my endless logging in to get my final candy and thus the achievement but getting hosed in the end has finally righted itself. Since I had 7 candies and I only now need 6 I will get that hard earned achievement done!

- 30 Minute Hearthstones - While they took out both forms of ghetto hearthing (group mate queuing for BG then leaving once you get into it and leaving a group after zoning into an instance and it porting you to your hearth) at least they backed it up with a faster hearth stone. Of course all those Shammy's are a little pissed, but they are still the only class in the game with a highly needed buff unlike every other class which got their buffs shared with other classes.

- In-game Calendar updates - New we can invite our guild as a whole. While it's still no replacement for the far superior Group Calendar it is an improvement.

- Mini-map changes - Now instead of one single colored dot o the mini-map you can see your guild in full color. That means all your druids will show up as orange on the mini-map and all your priests as white. Important maybe only to pvpers and raiders but still a nice addition.

- Class roles added to the LFG window - again, minor but it can help when you are trying to fill a group. Sure beats being asked to heal a million times when my comment says tank.

- New buffs, new debuffs, new talents, new glyphs, and new nerfs - While my class is getting a nerf at least I have comfort in the fact that other, less broken classes are also getting nerfs. Some of them are getting some fairly extensive ones (*cough*DK*cough*).

- New Noblegarden - Because there's nothing like celebrating a holiday which means so much to so many different people around the world two weeks late.

as a raider:

- Ulduar - Of course! This looks to be the largest, most advanced raiding instance we have seen yet. I have had a few chances to see some of the content in this raid instance and it was fun. And the instance is so huge that it has ports and a tram all to itself. We will be in this instance for a while now and it it so going to be fun for most of it. 14 bosses, 11 hard modes, a new legendary, beautiful backgrounds, and tons of achievements will keep the challenge in the game for many months.

- 5 minute recast on Heroism/Bloddlust - Recently we have had an issue where only one Shaman has made it to raid a few times. This really hampered our time spent on new content which ultimately led to the fact that we didn't get the final content (S3D) down before the patch. Since they aren't giving any other class an ability as strong as Heroism to themselves at least they are making it so that if we are short Shammys again and we wipe we don't have to wait 10 minutes in between attempts.

- Flasks now stack to 20 and only last an hour. - More bag space and for a guild that raids 3 hours this is great news. Now people are more likely to flask up for the whole night rather than to try to time it to start later on in the night.

- New instance maps. - While not all raid instance will have new maps Ulduar and Naxxramas will. This will greatly aid in figuring out where someone is and where they should be. It's a minor upgrade but still something that I think will be used more then people expect.

- Saved Instance Confirmations - A new window will come up asking a player if they want to be saved to an instance. This will greatly aid in people not getting saved when some asshat decided to run an Archavon group even though he cleared the instance 3 hours ago.

and as a Bear Druid:

360 Degree Swipe!! Suck it Pallys!

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