Traveling in patch 3.1
will be changing how we all get around. Travel is usually a bit of a touchy subject, but there are some huge improvements on the way.
If you love Kirin'Tor bling, you'll be happy to note that their transportation rings are getting an upgrade. Should you purchase one, you get a free teleport to Dalaran once every hour.
The Hearthstone that you've carried with you since you day one, unless you deleted it and had to bribe an Innkeeper for a new one, is changing radically. The cooldown is being reduced from one hour to half an hour. This was done partially to appease the whining over nerf to ghetto hearthing.
Ghetto Hearthing is/was the process of dropping your group while in a dungeon and waiting one minute for a free hearth, provided your hearthstone was on a cooldown. In 3.1, you will no longer be able to do this. Fortunately, you can still use the method to get yourself out of a dungeon.
Ghetto hearthing will be less of a hearth and more of a shifting of your virtual person to the nearest graveyard, alive and well. This will stop people from doing things like entering Ragefire Chasm while grouped, dropping, and getting a free hearth.
This may seem like a tedious difference, but it will also really help for quest hand-ins and reputation turn-ins. This way, we can teleport out of the dungeon to a nearby area, without the use of a hearthstone, and without running back through the dungeon manually just to stay in the same area.
One forum poster has even suggested that the ghetto hearth could drop players at the door or the summoning stone, which would be handy for repairs, summoning new players, and would make navigation easier even in unfamiliar areas.
The other means of "hearthing" was an exploit of the battleground queue. If you queue in Dalaran, you can hop over to do auctions in an Old World city. Then, if your hearth is blown, you can jump into a battleground, and type /afk. This will boot you from the raid group and send you straight back to Dalaran, because that is where you queued.
This mechanic could also be annoying. Trying to do dailies while waiting for your battleground to pop, getting partway through it, going into the BG, and then getting dumped back in Dalaran can be a pain. You have to re-queue, and fly all the way back out.
As of 3.1, at the end of a battleground, you'll be dumped at the location where you entered. This means that you can go off and do other things while you wait in queues, and be dropped back and ready for business at the end. Considering you will be able to queue a battleground from any location, you'll never be inconvenienced this way again.
Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar, dual specs, significant changes to all the classes, and more! We've got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1.
