Friday, June 13, 2008

June 13, 2008
8
A new WotLK alpha build has been released and it finally includes the rogue and shaman talents.
Also see this and this post on deathknight.info

The new spell list posted on Neograf. Some of these are "highly" questionable however. Such as a "face slap" which stuns forum posters.... Decide for yourself.
There are some new and interesting deathknight, shaman, rogue abilities, and random bits in between though.


The Interesting stuff

No guarantees that all these spells / abilities will be for rogues, but damn nice if they are.

  • Fan of Knifes : Instantly throw both weapons at all targets within $a1 yards, causing $s1% weapon damage.
  • Sap changed : (Rank 4) Only works on Humanoids, Beasts, Demons and Dragonkin. Instead of just humanoids.
  • Cut to the Chase : (Rank 1-5 Talent) : Your Eviscerate and Envenom critical strikes have a $h% chance to refresh your Slice and Dice duration to its 5 combo point maximum
  • Deadly Brew : (Rank 1-2 Talent) "When you apply Instant, Wounding or Mind-Numbing poison to a target, you have a $h% chance to apply a second poison
  • Camouflage : You Camouflage, causing you to blend in with your surroundings. Instantly removes all physical and spell debuffs, and you fade into an improved invisibility state. Camouflage will break after the you deal damage. Lasts $d.

    Some possible changes to mace and fist specialisation:
  • Mace - Has a $s2% chance to increase your melee haste by 10% for 15 sec.
  • Fist - Attacks from your fist weapons have a $s3% chance to reduce the armor of your target by 20% for 6 sec.


    Flying mounts

    Flying mounts will be useable in Outland and Northrend (but we knew this already) :
  • Example : Spell 51960 : Summon Frostwyrm Summons and dismisses a rideable frostwyrm mount. This is a very fast mount. This mount can only be summoned in Outland and Northrend.
  • Headless Horseman's Flying Mount : Summons and dismisses a rideable Headless Horseman's Mount. Looks like the headless horseman is going to drop a slightly different mount next year.

    And the much discussed riding crop enchant :
  • Spell 51320 : Riding Crop (Test Version) Permanently enchant a mount to increase its mounted speed by $s1%. You may only enchant mounts in your own inventory, and enchanting your mount will cause it to become soulbound. Single use.


    Resto shamans

    Resto shamans finally would get a weapon temp enchant that's useful to them.
  • Spell 51730 : Earthliving Weapon Rank 1 Imbue the Shaman's weapon with earthen life. Increases healing done by $51940$s2 and each heal has a 20% chance to proc Earthliving on the target, healing an additional $51940s1 over $51940d. Lasts 30 minutes.


    Latency reduction trick

    I haven't been able to personally verify this one yet (though I certainly intend to), but this video was on our guild forums. Supposedly it details a small change you could enter in your Windows-XP registry that would lower your ms (latency) by a fair margin. This video seems to relate to the same thing, but claims to do more.

    Give it a try i suppose, if it doesn't work you can always revert it later.
    Keep in mind this is for Windows-XP only.
  • 8 comments:

    Sam Hadfield said...

    I've seen that latency reduction trick before, it DOES make your bar go green, but what its actually doing is just decreasing how often your computer counts- basicly giving false readouts on your latency bar.

    bbr said...

    Figured it wasn't likely to work, but yeah. Oh well.

    Anonymous said...

    I'm a software engineer.
    Here's the article describing the registry key value and what it does: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/328890

    It sounds like it will work to some degree (although I haven't tried it ).

    It responds to every TCP ACK packet rather than waiting for two to accumulate (the default value is 2).

    In other words, it makes your network more "chatty". This causes your network to be busier, but it sounds like it probably would speed up the "ping" response. The only problem is that it will slow down your downloads a bit.

    An analogy is, if you need to post lots of letters to a friend. Your normal way of doing this is to save up two letters and post them together in the same envelope - this is important because each envelope costs. If we change the behavior so that we immediately post every single letter in its own envelope as soon as it's ready to go, the letters will get there a bit quicker but it'll cost more. And for bulky items, say a book, I'll be sending each page in its own letter rather than sending the whole book in one package.

    It's an imperfect analogy but hopefully it gets across the kind of tradeoff this registry key is tweaking.

    bbr said...

    Interesting cheers for that.

    Basically you increase the number of message, and since each TCP message has a header and trailer on it as well, you'd increase network traffic by a bit. You might actually be increasing lag, even if your "ms" shows it's doing better.

    It would depend if you're on a fast connection whether you gain any benefit from it. If you're already close to your cap (on like a 512Kb line) you will probably wish to avoid using it. If you're on a faster line (4Mb) it might be worth trying.

    Anonymous said...

    What about standard swedish 24mbit connections?

    bbr said...

    Worth a try either way.

    Tim said...

    I have found the ping hack to work and have seen a print out that accompanies the video which is easier to follow.

    look at http://www.pinghack.com and the blog on this site.

    Tim

    Tom said...

    It worked for me, now i get kicked out because it is too low for the room.