It was revealed a few days ago that Patch 3.2 Crusader’s Coliseum would go live today and here we are in a period of extended maintainence, the European servers should be up at 15:00 server time (14:00 BST), so what are the most significant changes?
Well, there’s a huge amount, but here are the ones I think are the most significant, with a little analysis:
- Trial of the Crusader
- Isle of Conquest
- Battleground Changes
- Emblem Changes
This is the new 10/25 man raid instance, this can be done on normal and heroic mode, offering loot from ilevel 232 (10 man normal) up to 258 (25 man heroic), you can find a full loot list here. It’s interesting that this is the first instance that has 10 man heroic mode and 25 man normal mode as well as the standard 10 man normal and 25 man heroic, it will be interesting to see how this shapes up, and if as I suspect the normal modes will correspond to previous instances and the heroic modes will be basically set up as hard mode always on, instead of having to set up hard modes through various means as in Ulduar.
A brand new 40v40 battleground! This appears to be a cross between Alterac Valley, Arathi Basin and Wintergrasp. I’m excited to try this out, but I’m almost equally excited about the general battleground changes that they have made…
Experience gains in battlegrounds! This is an interesting change and though I can only imagine so far that the experience is token it will be interesting to see how viable levelling via battlegrounds is on alts. There are tweaks to every battleground to make them shorter, with the points to win for Eye of the Storm and Arathi Basin reduced to 1600 as well as flag pickup/capture time reduced to 8 seconds from 10 (Sap+cap yay!). Warsong Gulch has a maximum duration of 20 minutes now, this is definitely a good thing from a playability point of view, but makes me feel a little nostalgic about those epic 3 hour hard fought games with double premades. Strand of the Ancients has also had the start randomised, I play alliance so it’s not so great for me when we were winning but really it’s a long overdue fix. Wintergrasp has now got a 240 player limit which should supposedly reduce lag, I hope that this is the case and seems like a good change!
Emblems of Conquest are dropped in all Heroics! 
This will make getting alt’s geared up in T8 pretty simple, farm heroics and naxx and you could get this done in a week! The daily heroic awards Emblems of Triumph which are the new top level badges which seems a little odd, but I guess everyone will be running daily’s again.
I’m sure there is plenty more to write about too, but for now I have to disenchant 90 stacks of Titanium Ore, I’ll no doubt be posting more about 3.2 soon!
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