Historically, new patches for World Of Warcraft have always come out on Tuesday morning, following the weekly system maintenance period. Today, Blizzard released the patch for version 4.1.0.13914 of the game client. In addition to a variety of bug fixes and balance tweaks, there are four big additions to the game with this version.
The Guild Finder Tool
There’s a new GUILD FINDER tool, designed to help match up people looking for a new guild with guilds looking for new people. It’s sort of like a little guild application where players can specify what they’re looking for in a guild and provide some idea of what they have to offer.
Once you specify a few attributes like your class role and availability, you can browse through a list of guilds that match your criteria. If you find one you like, you can submit a request to join. The guild leader will receive your request and act on it as they deem appropriate. They may want to interview you, or visit their own guild website to fill out an extended application, or they may just shoot you an invitation directly.
Dungeon Finder: Call To Arms
The Dungeon Finder tool was a great addition to the game, but it help demonstrate the fact that most players are playing DPS-oriented characters, and relatively fewer play healers or tanks. A single DPS player who queues up for a random dungeon can easily wait for half an hour or more, because there aren’t enough tanks or healers in the queue to form complete groups.
The new Call To Arms feature is designed to lower those long queue times by offering rewards to players to join the queue and complete the assigned instance. Strictly speaking, the rewards might be offered to any class, but as a practical matter it’s going to be healers and tanks in most cases.
Upon completing the instance, players who were so enticed will receive a goodie bag that contains some combination of gold, gems, potions, pets, and even mounts.
This sounds like a great idea, but I do note that it seems to depend on the idea that the required players are actually available, but just not queuing up for dungeons. I’m sure that’s true to a certain degree, but it remains to be seen if it’s true enough that this new feature will really make a difference. In fact, I’m thinking that some players may hold off on entering the queue until they are offered the reward, which would really negate the purpose of the feature to a large degree.
Guild Challenges
The next new feature is Guild Challenges . This is basically a sort of random guild achievement for completing a particular dungeon, raid, or PvP battleground with a guild group. Completing one of the current challenges will result in a gold reward to the guild vault.
Anything that puts gold into the coffers isn’t really a bad feature, but I can’t see most guilds getting too excited about this.
The Return Of Zul’Gurub & Zul’Aman
One of the big changes in the initial release of the Cataclysm expansion was that the Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman raid instances both went away. With patch 4.1 they return as high-end, heroic only, 5-player dungeons. Both require a minimum average item level of 346 and they contain a wide variety of new epic gear, mounts, pets and other goodies.
Things start off with a new series of level 85 solo quests in Stranglethorn Vale that give you a preview of the various Zul’Gurub bosses. Once you complete the solo quests, you’ll be ready to hit the instances. The new version of Zul’Gurub has 5 bosses that you’ll encounter every time, plus one more from a choice of 4 additional bosses that you’ll see only if your group includes someone whose Archaeology skill is high enough.
In the far-away Ghostlands, the Zul’Aman instance makes its return as well. Compared to the major overhaul of Zul’Gurub, there are fewer changes here from the original, but the mechanics of the fights have been updated to make sense for a 5-player group instead of a 10-player raid.
Both of these new and improved instances require a minimum average item level of 346 and offer rewards that are item level 353. So they fit right in between the original Cataclysm heroic instances and the original Cataclysm raids. There are also a variety of mounts available.
Happy Hunting!
Here’s the official Blizzard video for the new patch:
VIDEO
Call To Arms , Dungeon Finder , Guild Challenges , Guild Finder , Mounts , Pets , Stranglethorn Vale , Zul'Aman , Zul'Gurub
