BfA Pre-patch is here

The BfA pre-patch is here and has brought big changes to WOW.  There is another stat squish, Artifact Weapons have lost all their powers and there will also be some class changes to get used to and lot of little changes too.  Here are my first impressions.

I was excited about the pre-patch, having waited for a long time and having finished the Mage Tower just in time, I was ready for something new.  However, although the pre-patch brought many changes there isn't really anything to do YET!  The new quest line isn't for another week.  Maybe they wanted to give us time to get used to class changes but I was a little disappointed initially.

PVP Changes 

The changes to the honor system are quite significant.  Your honor is now account bound and prestige levels are no more.  Any prestige levels have now been replaced by honor level achievements and all levels on all characters have been combined.  For me I had not really done any PVP on any character apart from my DK so my level was roughly the same although I was only about 500 honor from reaching Prestige 18 which rewards the title '# The Unstoppable Force' and now I am honor level 90 having to get quite a bit of honor to reach level 100 which rewards that title so that's a little annoying.

Finding out your honor level I found tricky as it has moved and now shows on the group finder tab under PVP.

Another change is War Mode.  You are now able to toggle the new mode called War Mode on/off as desired.  Turning on War Mode will turn your server into a PVP server.  There will be new rewards for kills and playing with this mode turned on. War Mode can only be changed in your capital city, either Orgrimmar or Stormwind. 

Collection Achievements
There are some new collection achievements which I got straight away when I logged in including:

80 Exalted Reputations which rewards the title '# The Admired'

There is also a follow up quest for this 90 Exalted Reputations.

For collecting 400 toys there is a new achievement Toybox Tycoon which rewards the battle per Brutus.

 

There is currently no follow up quest after this for toys.

For collecting 800 unique battle pets there is an achievement Pet Emporium which rewards the battle pet Rooter.

There is also a follow up quest for collecting 1000 unique battle pets, Master of Minions, which is not possible yet but will be after the launch of BfA.

Class changes
Every Class has had some changes, talents have changed slightly and been reset.  There has also been a star squish so item level which was previously 900+ is now 200+.  Artifact weapons have lost all their power in the defeat of the legion and will now just level up with your i-level.

Communities
On the first day of the patch the new communities thing did not work but a few days later it is working fine.  There is a new UI for guilds which will take a little getting used to.  There is also a new voice chat option.  You can toggle voice chat on and off in the guild/communities tab and join groups for your guild, for any party you are in and even set up your own groups with just the click of a button, and it works really well although push to talk seemed to be having some issues initially so we all had to go open mic.


There are many other changes in prep for BfA but these are the main ones for me so far.  The new pre-patch quest chain starts next Wednesday (25th) which will be good.