14 DAY TRIAL // Blizzard has just released the 3.3.2 patch for World of Warcraft, and the highlight of the update is, without a doubt, the addition of the Frostwing Halls of Icecrown Citadel. The much-awaited final confrontation of World of Warcraft's third expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, has finally been released, and considering how long it took the first player to reach level 80 when the expansion was first released, the Lich King has been defeated several times by now.
A lot of other instances in the game have been tweaked as well, but the next big thing that draws our attention from the official patch notes is the launch of the Season 8 of the PvP Arena, including the new tier of rewards. The other mentioned PvP change is the decreased efficiency of all healing abilities, including potions, by ten percent in the Battlegrounds, Arenas and Wintergrasp.
As far as individual class tweaks go, the Druid's Earth and Moon talent now provides more of a damage boost, just like the Shaman's Shamanism talent. Further on, the Warlocks Shadow Embrace now stacks three times, but its healing effect has been scaled down, his Demonic Pact talent has received a further boost in damage, a boost that doesn't apply to the raid buff. Conflagrate's DoT damage has been increased to 40 percent, up from 20, and the Empowered Imp and Improved Shadow Bolt have both been upgraded to provide more damage.
The warrior tank has also received a few tweaks, with all the affected talents being the ones from the Protection tab. Concussion Blow lost half of its damage, but generated pretty much the same amount of threat. Devastate now does a 120-percent weapon damage, Shield Slam does less, but its threat has been increased by 30 percent, and the Warbringer talent will no longer allow players to break free from roots and snares with Charge and Intercept.
There's also a technical detail that should be mentioned. The game client was initially limited by default to using a 2 CPU core, with the cvar 'processAffinityMask,' but since this proved to inflict serious performance issues on some systems, Blizzard has removed it. The old behavior can still be restored by "updating the Config.WTF file by adding: SET processAffinityMask '3'."
The entire list of patch notes, like the rest of the Dungeons & Raids modifications, as well as the ones brought to the UI, can be found at the usual place, on WoW's official site, here.