The Documented and Undocumented Changes of the Shattering

Thanks to Asros for this caption.

Yes, the Shattering did occured yesterday and did it ever bring some changes.  Here are a few of the changes that I personally have noticed, some that were in the patch notes and some that were not in the patch notes.

1) I Loled at Noobs in Dalaran - If you were looking for a little bit of entertainment last night, the only place you had to be was in Dalaran.  Oh the bitching and the moaning about the portals being gone.  I even heard one person threaten to go set the Blizzard HQ on fire. (Note:  This is not a threat from me, I'm just repeating what someone else said.)  Oh poor noobs, if only you would do something as simple as read.  The patch notes all along have been saying the portals would be gone.  I talked about it last month on this very blog.  If you can't bother to read the patch notes ahead of time, you deserve to QQ.

2) Flying Anywhere in Dalaran - Did you notice that you can fly anywhere in Dalaran now.  It was kind of nice just being able to take off and fly anywhere in there.  It will be even nicer when we can do it in our home cities.

3) Faction City Tabards - Are you planning on leveling a new toon in Cataclysm? (And let's be honest, who isn't)  Well, now you can raise your reputation with your home cities with the new faction city tabards.  Thankfully, my main is already exalted with all the current cities but it may help my alts.  Also, this will only work for level 1-60 dungeons, not above that.

4) New Fishing and Cooking Dailies - This was kind of exciting.  In Stormwind, there are new fishing and cooking dailies that offer some great rewards.  For doing the fishing daily, you get +1 skillpoint in fishing, some gold, and a bag of treasures.  For doing the cooking daily, you get +1 skillpoint if you are not 450 cooking, some gold, and the new cooking award.  You can look at some of the new rewards for those cooking awards.  There are new level 450 cooking recipes plus you can preview up to 525 cooking rewards.  I did not see the new equivalent of the fish feast yet, but I'm sure there will be some cooking recipe for it.

5) Damn You, Chaotic Skyflare Diamond - If you are a DPSer, you may have noticed a very cruel thing happened to you yesterday.  Your meta bonus did not change but how you activate it certainly did.  The new activation is "You must have more blue gems then red gems."  Now, it seems easy enough.  Just use Purified Dreadstones until you have more blue gems then red gems present.  Hold on.  It is not that simple.  Mix colored gems count for both colors.  So in this case, purple diamonds count for both red and blue.  So if you thought about changing to Purified Dreadstones, you better be ready to make one of your red gems a straight blue gem and make all your other red gems Purified, because that is the only way you activate your bonus.  For moonkins, this is especially terrible because the only blue gems are + Spirit or + Hit, which for us are the same damn thing.  So what did I do.  After wasting gold buying Titanium Powder to get the Purified Dreadstone recipe since I'm 450 jewelcrafting, I decided to use the Tireless Skyflare Diamond, which is +21 intellect plus a minor run speed increase.  Since I'm mainly PvPing with my moonkin, having a little extra speed never hurt anybody.  Plus, it is a much easier meta to activate.  Also, get ready for metas in Cataclysm, because they are just as complicated.

6) PvP Grouping - If you have been running organized 10/15 man battlegrounds in anticipation of Cataclysm's rated battlegrounds, prepare to be disappointed.  Apparently on non-rated BGs, you can only group up in groups of 5.  So if you were hoping to get practice with your guild for 10/15 man PvP, sorry.  It is kind of hard to tell if this was a bug or intended, but I have a feeling it was intended.

7) Hunter's Pets Remember How to Dash - In what may be in my top two pieces of humor from the patch notes, Blizzard noted that hunter's pets won't forget how to dash anymore.  I could just see before this that a pet was just sitting there being very lazy.  Then the hunter says go get him and the pet just walks over leisurely, says "O Hai" to the mob, and starts biting it.

8) Warlocks Get Shattered, but Only for 12% - I can't take credit for the title, but I found it funny.  If you looked at the warlocks notes in the patch notes, they probably took the brunt of the nerf bat.  Ever single one of their abilites was reduced by 12%.  I have a warlock alt in the 60s and I'm not happy about it either.  It is just funny that it was 12% across the board.

9) Seige Vehicles Move Really Fast - The gnomes and goblins must be competing who can come up with the fastest seige vehicles because the speed on these things have been pumped up.  Another premade group I was running with won Strand of the Ancients in less than 2 minutes.  Yes, we were better coordinated than most, but even that is ridiculous. 

10) Can't Mount in Druid Forms - Apparently, druids can only mount up if you are in caster form.  Not moonkin form.  Not bear form.  Not even cat form.  I really hope this is a bug that will be fixed but if not, this sucks.

11) Wintergrasp is Kind of Boring Now - I don't know if it was just everybody so excited to go see the new areas or what, but we didn't even field a group of 40 last night for Wintergrasp.  We defended the keep still, but it was really disappointing. 

12) Mages Are Being Too Nice - The mages on my server were giving portals for tips.  I wanted to take every single one of them, shake them, slap them once, and then tell them what mistake they are making.  Mages could be charging 20 gold per portal per person right now because people can't fly there yet.  Plus, people leveling professions still need to get to Dalaran as well.  Count in the fact that Pilgram's Bounty is going on and you could make loads of money with portals right now.

13) Stormwind = New Barren's Chat - Now that everybody is in Stormwind, I heard discussions in regular chat that I never want to hear again.  If you are in Stormwind, please for the love of God, stop.

14) New Cultural References - Near the new fishing daily, you can hear the conversation of people talking about fishing.  Someone said their dad could catch more fish than this other person's dad.  The girl who spoke said, "He would have to cross streams to fish.  I  have heard crossing streams isn't good."  Great Ghostbuster's reference.

15) Hearthstones - This may have been a bug for me only, but check where your hearthstone is set.  I set all my current character's hearths in Stormwind Trade District.  I logged on to my druid and found my hearth had been changed to Teldrassil.  Again, may have been a bug, but it wasn't game breaking.