Surprise! Unannounced WoW 3.09 patch goes live this week

A previously unannounced patch for World of Warcraft will go live this week, bringing the game to version 3.09. This will bridge the gap between the current version, 3.08, and the significantly more massive 3.1 patch, which is far from release.

3.09 includes a few major changes, namely:

Paladins:

• The duration on all Seals has been increased to 30 minutes and can no longer dispelled.
• Divine Plea: The amount healed by your spells is reduced by 50% (up from 20%) but the effect can no longer be dispelled.

Mages:

• Arcane Power now increases damage and mana cost by 10%, cooldown reduced to 1 minute. (Note: The spell is actually different in game and increases damage and mana costs by 20% with a 2 minutes cooldown. However it would probably be better to wait until servers are online to confirm that.)
• Arcane Power and Presence of Mind now share a category cooldown. Arcane Power causes a 15 second cooldown. Presence of Mind, once consumed, causes a 1.5 second cooldown.

MMO-Champion has a full breakdown of the changes, but the Divine Plea and AP/PoM changes are huge nerfs for Holy Paladins and Arcane Mages, which appear to be well-deserved in light of current PVP standings. Holy Paladins are by far the best PVP healers due to being clad in plate armor, while Mages have, according to many players, the single most ridiculous burst damage in the game.

With 3.09 in effect Wednesday, Mages no longer have 11,000 or more burst damage on hand with a single click, reducing their obscene damage significantly.

We’ll see how this all plays out as the weeks follow into 3.1, but it seems Blizzard is serious about balancing the huge amount of PvP DPS running around after all.