Friday, September 7, 2012

Mists of Pandaria: Thirk F2P returns? Quick tips for your return to the bracket!

This is going to be the first blog post in almost a year. In the past 12 months, the Free to Play bracket has had a lot of turbulence. If you're coming back because of MoP like I am, read this post for my very basic balance and change overview. After that, continue down below for general changes that will affect the bracket.



There's a new chest enchant in town. Rather, an old one that's suddenly gotten much more useful. Lesser mana, which was previously something to laugh at, is suddenly much more useful. Because of the change to mana, this enchant is the only way F2Ps can increase their mana pool. But 20 mana? No, not 20. All healing specs get access to a 400% mana pool increase, or 5x their base mana. This makes the enchant give you 100 mana, or an extra sixth of your total pool. While it may seem like healers never OOM, in a serious premade situation this will now be clearly best in slot. And it seems like this enchant is Horde only since it's bought from two Horde only vendors, so Alliance is out of luck for once.


The resistance cloak enchant has been completely grandfathered. If you had a scroll in your bank, it will have disappeared. The stat no longer shows up in your character tab, but the effect remains. The only way to get resistances now with gear is via rings, as they still seem to drop. Outside of this, any new source of resistance in the F2P bracket is effectively gone. While this shouldn't have a major effect on the bracket, it will likely impact premades.


If you're newly leveling enchanting you will find yourself lacking Magic Essence, and no easy way to get it. After all, only uncommon weapons will have it. Luckily, there may be a quick fix for you. Check here for a list of weapons sold by vendors that you can quickly DE. They're mostly in Northern Barrens, and a few of them are located directly in the major cities. Come back to restock every once in a while, they don't take long to appear again.

The future of the bracket remains to be seen, but it's looking awfully optimistic. Blizzard has been quick to nerf Holy Shock's damage and tossed out a blanket nerf to PvP healing. With this response to PvP, I can only anticipate good things for the bracket as a whole. Looking forward to seriously restart this blog.

Until next time,
~ Thirk the Hallowed