More Overlooked Changes

I mentioned a few things last week that people might have missed due to the lack of patch notes mentioning the changes. But, because they weren’t in the patch notes there was no telling whether or not the list was complete (though you could pretty well count on some things being missed).

I had three things that I was going to bring up today that were missed changes, but I see that I’ve actually covered two of them in the previous post, so I guess you really only get one that’s new. I’ll go over one of the two I mentioned last week just because I have some examples, and then I’ll talk about the new one.

Update: Rare Mobs
I did a little hunting this weekend for rare spawns to see whether or not the increased experience rewards for rare spawns was a fluke or if it was spread across the board to all rares. I started off by going to a few locations of rares that I knew were almost always available, and as luck would have it I didn’t find a flipping one.

So I put the hunt on hold for a bit and went to level my Priest a bit. And just as I started questing with her guess who she stumbled on…yep, rare spawn. I killed a regular level 24 mob nearby and got around 150 experience for killing it. Then I killed the level 24 rare spawn and got 2,100 experience for killing it. I queued for a random dungeon and just before the queue popped I found another rare, so I killed him for another 2,250 exp. I went to the dungeon, found it was SM:Graveyard and what do you know, rare spawn. So we killed him too and got more experience from his kill than we did either of the bosses.

As far as calculations go I haven’t found what the number actually is. For the ones I’ve killed it’s been roughly 15x as much as normal mobs.

There’s something else I’ve noticed about rare spawns as well. Every one that I’ve killed that was below level 15 has dropped a bag. I’ve found 6, 8, and 10 slot bags from them, and every single one has dropped a bag for me. So if you’re rolling on a new server where you don’t have any resources be sure to kill any rare spawns you see for some extra bag space early on. The level 15-24 rares I’ve killed all dropped white shoulders for me, and all 28-36 rares I’ve found have dropped random greens (other than the ones in dungeons which dropped BoP blues).

Cost of Respecialization
Here’s the one you might not have stumbled onto, especially since we all got free talent resets when the 4.x patches were released and we switched to the 31 point trees.

The cost of a respec is now tied to your level rather than the number of times you’ve done it. If you’re leveling a new toon and want to try out a new spec and then find you don’t care for it, you can respec early on for a handful of silver. Resetting the talent points on a level 13 character cost me 11s and some change. Doing it again at level 18 cost me 16s.

I haven’t done as much testing here as I suppose I probably should have. There may still be some kind of additional cost for multiple respecs, but doing it twice on my priest within just a few levels showed no significant increase. Granted, she was only in her teens so it may have been skewed if it’s based on a percentage increase, but you probably shouldn’t have to deal with respeccing enough times for it to matter with dual specs.

But if you’re leveling a toon and find you don’t care for the spec, don’t worry about throwing away “gold” to switch the spec and try something different because the costs are laughable at low levels anyway. I changed my Priest from Shadow to Disc because I was having some mana issues here and there and wanted to give Archangel a shot as Disc. What I found was that Smite healing in low levels sucks, bad. So I changed my spec and dropped the Evangelism/Archangel points and put them into other talents and found that my healing and questing had both improved. But Disc isn’t really what I want to do, so I pushed on to level 30 for a 10g dual spec to pick Shadow back up and have the Disc spec in reserve for dungeon queues.

[Edit: I also did a respec on a level 61’ish Death Knight a little over a week ago and his respec cost either just under or just over 1g. That’s what got me started thinking about it, though I then promptly forgot again.]