VenusGaming

The maintenance period for World of Warcraft today brought a small patch in the form of 3.0.8a. The updates include only a few bug fixes:

General
Human females Helms will no longer lift off the character’s head during a Special2H animation or during a HoldRifle animation.

Death Knights
Howling Blast : The 5 second cooldown will now display correctly.

Hunters
All Hunter aspects are no longer on the global cooldown that is shared with other Hunter abilities. All hunter aspects are now on a separate 1 second cooldown.

Warlocks
Ritual of Summoning will now function as intended.via Nethaera

Terribly unexciting, I know. A few blue posts to make note of though.

Ghostcrawler has made a comment about the Howling Blast cooldown/nerf:

I believe the cooldown is 5 seconds now, so at least it should mesh a little better with 10 second rune cooldown.

We knew there was a risk in taking the Howling Blast cooldown off. Unfortunately, we saw dual-wield DK numbers as high as ever even with the Killing Machine and Gargoyle nerfs. It typically only happened when the DK was fighting multiple targets, which suggests Howling Blast is the right thing to change.

We still agree that a cooldown makes rotations more awkward, and we will continue to look for an implementation that lets Howling Blast be off a cooldown without all death knights feel like they need to DW Frost or go home.

(And no, we can’t buff other DK specs and other classes to 7000 dps or whatever to compensate.)

On Shadow of Death and Arenas:

Q u o t e:
Why wasn’t this removed from arena? It’s still broken as hell, gg killing 2 dk’s after my healer dies but still having to somehow live through the 2 reze’d dk’s, both their pets, and a garg or 2.

We will be applying a hotfix that will make it so that it will no longer be possible to use this while in Arenas.

And some Arcane changes:

Q u o t e:
1. Arcane Barrage can no longer clip arcane missles for the arcane blast buff (figured this would be fixed soon).
2. Arcane Blast Glyph is apparently only 3% per stack instead of 5%.
3. Arcane Blast Glyph bonus damage is no longer applied to arcane missiles.

1. This change was by design. While it might have been a fun test of skill, the fact is that Arcane is probably too powerful in PvE and PvP and we didn’t want to make matters worse with this little trick.
2. This change was also by design. As many players have pointed out, it was just too good.
3. This is a bug likely caused by the previous two changes. Such is the risk of making changes quickly. We can hotfix this bug out though.