World of Warcraft News and Raiding Strategies

Here you'll find a list of hotfixes that address various issues related to the recently released World of Warcraft: Cataclysm patch 4.1: Rise of the Zandalari. Hotfixes are updates we make on our end without requiring you to download a new patch. Some of the hotfixes below will go live the moment they are implemented, while others may require your realm to be restarted to go into effect. Please keep in mind that some issues cannot be addressed without a client-side patch update. We will continue to update this thread in the days ahead as additional hotfixes are applied.

Patch Information and Support

• Patch Notes (updated 4.27, 5:50 p.m. PDT)
• Known Issues
• Customer Support & Service Issues
• Technical Support & Troubleshooting
• Mac Technical Support & Troubleshooting

April 27

General

• Disconnecting immediately after dying no longer causes players to lack a Release Spirit button upon logging back in.

Classes

• Spells or talents which provide pushback protection should now be functioning correctly (i.e. Burning Soul for mages or Suppression for warlocks).

Druid (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)

• Predator's Swiftness being active will no longer prevent Omen of Clarity Clearcasting from being consumed when it should be.

Hunter (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)

• Marked for Death is now applied properly to the target of Arcane Shot or Chimera Shot, allowing for focus macros (i.e. /cast [@focus] Chimera Shot) to apply Marked for Death to the focused target and not the primary target.
• The Recluse Hatchling can correctly be targeted, attacked, and killed by players and NPCs after being tamed.
• Serpent Spread was only affecting targets closer than 38 yards to the hunter. It now affects all targets hit by Multi-Shot.

Priest (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)

• Holy Word: Sanctuary should now properly benefit from Echo of Light.

Warlock (Forums / Talent Calculator / Skills/Talents)

• Dark Intent no longer incorrectly procs off critical direct damage spells. It still functions correctly on damage- and heal-over-time critical hits for both the warlock and the target of Dark Intent.

Dungeons & Raids
Blackwing Descent

• Obnoxious Fiends should no longer despawn erratically during the Atramedes encounter. Their behavior is now only appropriately obnoxious.
• Summoning combat pets/guardians should no longer cause any issues with the Omnotron Defense System golems becoming activated.
• Poison Bombs that Toxitron summons correctly prioritize ranged targets over melee targets first.

Zul’Aman

• The range on Amani'shi Flame Caster's Fireball Volley has been reduced to 35 yards (the tooltip still says 40 yards) and should no longer pull additional creatures when used by a player.

Zul’Gurub

• Gub will no longer cast Knock Away, as he was evading when knocking the tank into unfortunate locations.
• Toxic Link (High Priest Venoxis) now has a 100-yard range, down from infinity.
• Zul’Gurub Bind on Equip items can correctly be mailed, traded, sold, and bought back.

Items

• Flask of Battle should now correctly grant 450 base Stamina.
• Pygmy Oil should correctly be turning players into gnomes, not funky error cubes.
• Trinket procs should no longer persist indefinitely.
• Zul’Gurub Bind on Equip items can correctly be mailed, traded, sold, and bought back.

PvP

• Players are now awarded 180 Conquest Points for an Arena win up to the weekly cap, up from 135, and 400 Conquest Points for a Rated Battleground win up to the weekly cap, up from 335, regardless of rating or matchup. More information can be found here.

Tol Barad

• Attempting to use the "Have Group, Will Travel" guild perk while the Battle for Tol Barad is in progress will now provide an error that states "You can't use that here." After a battle concludes, the guild perk works as intended and summons party members to the caster's location.

User Interface

• A bug was causing the addon chat filtering feature to not allow registered addon messages to come through. Addon chat filtering has been temporarily disabled and restored to 4.0.6 functionality.

Led by the wise Sen'jin, the Darkspear tribe of jungle trolls has endured much. Driven from their ancestral home when the Gurubashi empire's tribal hatreds erupted into open warfare, the Darkspears eventually claimed an uninhabited island for themselves and renamed it the Darkspear Island. But although the Darkspears hoped that this new home would be permanent, the fate of the tribe would prove to be far from certain.

"They say the loa gonna take our minds," Zalazane said grimly. "They gonna warp us and twist us around and make us see visions."

"Many tests, I hear. If they find me worthy, I be a shadow hunter," Vol'jin answered. "If they find me unworthy… nothing can save us."

"Oh, they gonna be impressed with me." Zalazane smiled knowingly. "But they gonna laugh at you." He stepped into the mud and ambled over to stand beside his friend. They looked at each other for a moment and broke into wide grins, tusks bared. Throughout their entire childhood in the Darkspear village, this had always been a sure sign that Vol'jin and Zalazane were about to do something particularly stupid.

With a mighty cry, they ran headlong into First Home.

Blizzard Entertainment is proud to present the latest entry in the Leaders of Azeroth short story series: The Judgment!

Legendary Staff might not be the one we thought (See (Possible) Legendary Staff - Preview)
What is that staff? It's data mined. It's not nearly fancy enough, imo.

If you're going to be like that, then the "real" legendary staff had better be at least ten times fancier.
Alas, fanciness is a highly subjective trait. I assure you that, according to my perception, it is at least 78.7% fancier. (Source)

Rated Battlegrounds and Arena Conquest Points change
We saw that Arenas and Rated Battlegrounds were over-rewarding players for the time investment required, particularly compared to point gains in PvE. We felt the change we went live with in the patch was a little bit too low and overcompensating though, so we buffed up the numbers for wins just a bit to 180 (Arenas) and 400 (Rated BGs).

[...] I'm the one compiling and revising those notes. I scrutinize the patch notes beyond what is probably conducive to my own mental health. I push to make sure I'm getting every single note I can, and that each note is sufficiently detailed and concise. If I had known about this change, it would have been in the patch notes. Just the same, the developers did not withhold this change from me so it wouldn't make it in the patch notes.

There are a lot of developers and they're very busy working on future content. On infrequent occasions a change falls through the cracks and is not properly reported to my team for documentation in the patch notes. That's our fault and something we're working to prevent each and every patch cycle by developing new ways of generating the patch notes.

Let the implication that we intentionally misdirect and lie to you go. It's not true and I personally can't stand it when I see a big change like this not make it into the notes I work for months to finalize. (Source)

Stormwind and Orgrimmar portals now exist in Shattrath and Dalaran
We had a number of instances where people were coming back to the game after not playing for a long period, in some cases years, and having a really difficult time finding their way to where they should be.

Stormwind and Orgrimmar portals now exist in Dalaran and Shattrath to help them get to the relevant cities in Cataclysm; one for each faction, and only those two portals exist to facilitate that intent.

[...] Well specifically for BC you could have played the entire expansion and still never purchased a flying mount, and if you timed it right you could have played all of Wrath and never purchased flying there either. That could be quite a bit of running, if you happened to even look up and know where you should be going to begin this whole Cata-whatever-it's-called.

We try to lessen or remove situations where someone logs in after a long time to maybe check out the game again, and sees there's some daunting task they need to begin before being able to really get back into playing.

One that still exists, at least for me, is bag clutter. I'll log into alts, look at my bags and bank, and be so overwhelmed I'll log out. Those types of situations are almost immediate stops to someone's desire to log back in or continue playing.

Anyway, to you or me, yeah it seems silly (how can they not know how to get back to Stormwind!?), to many past players though it's a legitimately helpful change to try to make it a smooth welcome-back experience.

And yeah, you guys can use them now too. Whatevs. (Source)

Prioritizing Bug Fixes
Oh, you mean prioritize tasks? We do that. Of course, some aesthetic issues are very important to players too, and prioritizing tasks is always a balancing act. Simply because something doesn't matter to you, doesn't mean that it isn't important to someone else. Obviously, high profile issues, or those that have the potential to affect the gameplay of many are high priority, but they're not always easy to resolve. Sometimes they can be hotfixed, and sometimes that's simply not an option for technical reasons. Even if they're at the top of the list, they might take longer to resolve because they're more complex. Sometimes there are issues that we'd like to resolve that get set back a bit precisely because there are more "important" things to tackle first. Or, maybe something isn't a bug at all, and requires quite a bit of thought to find a resolution for. Or we disagree that it 'needs fixed'.

One way or another, when they do arise we try to tackle both large and small issues in the most efficient and sensible possible manner. Thanks for the suggestion though, I'm sure it was very helpful. (Source)

Spell Pushback after Patch
The spell push back levels after patch are significantly greater now then they were before patch. No where in the patch notes is it indicated that push back would be increased.
Please note that this is the result of a bug that has been identified and is being hotfixed. The hotfix should be completed very soon. (Source)

Blackwing's Bane Title Missing
You still have it actually. It's a known 4.1 UI bug. I believe there's an actual command that temporarily fixes it during your current login which I can't seem to find at the moment.

In any case, yes, known and likely already set to be fixed in a future patch. (Source)

Mount Bugs
The change in movement of the rider on some mounts is the result of a bug introduced with 4.1. It will be fixed in a future patch. (Source)

4/28

• “The Firelands” Raid Preview
• “A Legendary Engagement” Legendary Staff Preview
• “The Regrowth and Molten Front Quest Hubs”
• BlizzCast 16

4/29

• “Elemental Bonds” Quest Preview
• Tier 12 Teaser

5/2

• Dungeon Journal Teaser