As the clever title implies, patch 4.3 will soon be tested on the PTR.
The complete notes can be found here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3608419
A few spots are missing information, particularly mages, but there are some goodies available to commence QQ or celebration.
Patch notes for PTR builds are subject to much change, so don’t shoot me if none of this applies with the next test release. I won’t cover everything, I’ll focus on the general and fun/WTF stuff.
(There was also a nice blog post from the crab about some of these changes and even a few that didn’t make it to the patch note page: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3615095)
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General
Transmogrification and Void Storage – Nothing new here.
Reforging – Old reforging NPCs being removed, look for reforging ethereals with the ‘mogging and void storage NPCs. Odd, and completely unnecessary, change IMO.
Outland and Northrend quest flow – Experience required for 71 to 80 reduced by about a third. Many group quests retuned to be solo quests. Most dungeon quest givers moved in to dungeons. Good change.
North American realms no longer permit letter with accents in character or guild names. Existing characters/guilds will be unaffected. – On the one hand, I understand why they are doing this; a lot of complaints about people unable to replicate the special characters. But on the other hand, who cares? If you want to report a player, you can do so directly from the chat pane, no need to retype their name. If you’re reporting a player of the opposite faction, just explain it in the ticket, “Character by the name of ‘Dickhead’ with a funny letter I.” They can figure it out from there. If you want to invite the player to a group, again, it can be done directly from the chat pane – if they can’t be bothered to whisper you or give you the alt code then don’t invite them. Non-existent problem has been solved.
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Classes: General
All raid and party buffs which grant 10% increased attack power will now provide 10% ranged attack power and 20% melee attack power. – They know there is a problem with many of the current and planned fights favoring ranged. They were already talking about adding a buff in the Dragon Soul raid to increase melee effectiveness. Is this on top of that proposed buff or in replacement of? Either way, flat damage increase all around for melee. Buffs affected include: Abomination’s Might, Blessing of Might, Runescroll of Might, Trueshot Aura (I will laugh if huntards use this as an excuse to melee), and Unleashed Rage.
Vengeance redesigned – Again. I don’t really get Vengeance yet, but this seems to be a buff. Let me know.
Threat generation for tanking classes in active tanking mode increased from 300% of damage done up to 500% – Ummm…. didn’t this already happen?
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Death Knights
Death strike redesign – DS will no longer refund runes if it misses, but the healing portion will always fire.
Blood changes – Blade Barrier passively reduces damage, Bone Shield up from 4 charges to 6, Veteran of the Third War reduces Outbreak CD by 30 seconds.
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Druid
Wrath has a new spell effect – Yay? I have a druid. I cast Wrath. I can’t even tell you what the spell effect is now. Is it the big beam of light? I’ll have to pay attention next time so I can properly QQ when the change is made.
Restoration change – Wild Growth healing reduced by 20%. Could this have something to do with druids absolutely dominating the healing charts?
Random Glyph changes – that don’t mean anything to me as none of my druids are high enough level to use glyphs. You’re lucky I included druid stuff at all.
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Hunters
Coming soon.
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Mages
Coming soon. – Bastards. Gief me mah mage updates!
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Paladins
Bunch o’changes. – Many seem to be directed at mana regen and there is a redesign to Holy Radiance. My highest level paladin only knows how to make glyphs so this was a bunch of blah, blah, blah.
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Priests
Divine Hymn – Now affects 5 targets, up from 3. This seems to be a common theme in the patch notes; several AoE heals that had a fixed number of targets have been increased. While not particularly effective in a 5-man environment, this increases healing effectiveness in a 10-man raid by roughly a gabillion percent. (Plus or minus a few billion, of course.)
Discipline – Atonement will now be useful on BIG mobs such as Ragnaros and Al’Akir. ‘Bout fucking time. I will probably still keep my non-Atonement spec for fights where I’m focused more on raid-healing and don’t have time to Smite my little heart out. Divine Aegis has a new spell effect. I *really* liked the original effect. I would stand around and Renew people just to hope for a crit tick and a pretty, shiny bubble. This new effect better be pretty or I shall pout most severely. Be warned, Blizzard!
Holy – Spirit of Redemption has been rebuilt to be less fucked up, but no changes. I’ve never been a fan of the talent, so I wasn’t aware of any functionality issues that needed addressing. State of Mind redesign. I have no idea what it does now so the change means squat to me. But it affects Divine Hymn, which I might actually use more often now with the increase in affected targets.
Circle of Healing Glyph – Now also increases mana cost by 20%. Um, why? If I recall correctly, they glyph makes the spell affect 6 people instead of 5. Disc priests are blowing Holy priests out of the water in terms of sheer output in AoE healing (yeah, it’s sort of twisted and a bit sad). Why take a signature Holy spell and make it worse for AoE healing? (After reading GC’s post this makes a little more sense as there is a reduction to the mana cost of PW: Sanctuary that wasn’t in the patch notes, so perhaps it all evens out.)
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Rogues
Coming soon.
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Shaman
Stuff. – Sorry, none of it applies to me so I sort of glazed over here. I never claimed to not be biased or fair. The explanation post from Ghostcrawler covered quite a bit about shaman, including some things they are doing to increase their effectiveness as healers in PvE.
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Warlocks
Shadow Bolt has a new spell effect – OK, was the art department getting bored? This is at least the third new spell effect. Now I’m expecting the mage changes to be new icons for half our abilities.
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Warriors
Coming soon.
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Dungeons and Raids
Dungeon Journal – Updated for new 5-mans and Dragon Soul raid.
Bosses in Ruins of AQ now drop a key to open some coffers – My last (and only) experience in AQ involved a group of us dashing about blindly killing anything that skittered. I have no idea where these coffer things are or what might be in them, but I am intrigued. Not enough to actually research it, but if someone knows and wants to share, that would be awesome.
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Races
Orc Racial – Blood Fury increases spell power instead of spell damage. Rejoice, healer orcs. Do they exist? I don’t think I’ve seen them. I mean, they CAN be shaman, but I never see a resto orc.
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User Interface
Archaeology – Areas of interest will now display on the mini map as well as the big map. Huzzah!
Bag Search – Search your bags. Where was this years ago when we had to wait 30 minutes for a certain druid to rifle through his bag to find his Essence of the Bronze Dragonflight in his fucking bags in Occulus?
Guilds with inactive leadership can now usurp the leader under specific conditions – Hopefully this never applies to me, but this is a great idea. Now we’ll see how it actually gets implemented and wait for “zomg my guild got stolen” posts on the forums.
Reforging interface – Updated and improved. Apparently, ethereals are just more efficient.
Quest tracking areas or points of interest will now display on the mini map as well as the world map – Spent all that time adding an animation for looking at the map and now we won’t have to… but nice change. Now if only we can “pin” the map and have that appear on the mini map.
The World Map now displays expected character level for each zone – OK, so we do have a use for the world map after all. I am a huge fan of this change. One of the big things I missed about Cartographer was this feature. The bulletin board in the capitals has helped, but as I have found out, it’s possible to outlevel your next assignment before getting back to the board.
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General Bug Fixes
Coming soon.
clearcasting 
I’m mostly happy with the class changes so far. A bit iffy on the judgment change for holy paladins. I’m not good with math, so I’m not clear on whether it’s a nerf or a buff, but it feels like a case of fixing something that was never broke.
On the other hand, I really like the holy radiance change. The old version was quite boring to use (I likes button mashing!), and it will be very helpful to have an AoE heal that doesn’t require everyone in the group to stand on top of us.
Shaman stuff seems mostly good. Yay for less clunky AoE. Oh, and for the record, my Orc shaman has been resto since he hit level 10, and it always bugged me that blood fury didn’t affect heals.
One thing is making me angry, though, is that apparently you will need to do the Dragon Soul raid (on normal mode, presumably) to even access the quest chain for the new rogue legendaries. Now, I’m all for the actual legendary weapons themselves being limited to the elite few, but I was hoping I could at least do part of the chain so I can experience some of the lore. This makes two epic, world-changing storylines in Cataclysm I’m going to completely miss out on because I’m not a hardcore elite raider. Not cool, Blizz.
Also, they better dang well include some buffs for fire mages and/or nerfs for arcane, or by the Sunwell, tables will be flipped!
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4.3 cant complain too much really.
The changes to Holy though are not enough to make me pickup a holy spec, especially with a Holy pally, disc, resto druid healing comp. It’s a step in the right direction, but the chakra mechanic is clunky and the Holy Words themselves are in one word: BAD.
Mages I feel will get some major changes, frost will be nerfed again, as will arcane, firemages wlll get some sort of buff. Cause on fights I can destroy other DPS, but RNG must be in my favor. they really need to make fire a little RNG based. Maybe have a self buff on a 3 min cooldown to increase crit or something. Because the arcane rotation…puts me to sleep…:P
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wrath is the green fireball thingy
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Wrath = lightning bolt = shadow bolt. It looks like the art team is just replacing anything with that animation wholesale, unless there’s something I missed still using it. Not a bad plan, since it’s a bit… well… it’s aged poorly.
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I have to disagree with you on the Northrend group quests being nerfed. I am a mostly solo player but I LOVED the group quests. I always enjoyed trying to beat them alone with my Heirlooms and stuff.. and I would grab some people off chat if needed and use them.. it was one of the nice “challenges” to the game, that was not required to continue leveling but it was fun to try on different characters like priests and DKs and huntards to test my mettle a little bit.
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Just remember that your “fun to try” meant a lot of people on deserted servers were unable to complete the quests due to the phasing in Northrend. The Outland quests weren’t so much of a problem and most people could probably nag a guildmate to help out, but in Northrend you were SOL if there was no one in the same phase. Not everyone is trekking through the game in heirlooms and for them (or even some in heirlooms), a group quest is just out of their ability to solo.
Even though the quests may not be required to level, they are part of the storytelling and are required for many achievements. It’s really similar to how raids get nerfed so that eventually everyone can participate in the story.
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Agree with Arioch. I just took my shaman through Northrend (going as slowly as I could and doing chains in nearly every zone), and I didn’t find a single person for any of the group quests in all that time. Not even easy to access ones like Amphitheater of Anguish. Granted, I had an enhance spec and a few heirlooms, so I was able to solo most of them, but it was still annoying.
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Yeah… those quests award some of the best gear that anyone with heirlooms will never need. (that sentence sounded smarter in my head but I’m sticking with it)
I dislike playing with heirlooms, and even with ’em there are some quests that simply aren’t soloable until you’re so outlevelled as to make them irrelevant.
The worst offender has to be Dragonblight, though. If you haven’t got someone to give you a hand then you’re going to find that the sheer number of group quests gating any decent rewards makes the area massively unfriendly, and there is no alternative levelling zone for the dragonblight range that I’ve found. Not everyone wants to level in the dungeon finder for the millionth time.
Speaking of the finder, putting quest NPCs in the dungeons is an awesome move, especially for Outland where you need to trek through some really arb stuff to get the actual dungeon quests.
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