ZAM offers a brief guide to the most important changes that yesterday's patch 3.3.3 introduced to WoW

DUNGEONS AND RAIDS

The latest patch brings only a few changes to dungeons and raids, but they're welcome conveniences, like the ability to finally skip the long-winded Culling of Stratholme introductory dialogue. Weekly quests will now reset during each server's scheduled maintenance instead of a fixed global time, and all "holiday boss" encounters are now accessible via the Dungeon Finder tool.

Instead of heading into the Scarlet Monastery to activate the Headless Horseman encounter, for example, players must use the Dungeon Finder to queue up for access. Once the party is formed, it will be transported inside the dungeon at the direct location of the holiday boss encounter. The best part of this new mechanic is the removal of previous summoning criteria; according to the patch notes, "players can queue up for and fight each World Event boss as many times as they want for any standard loot that they may drop."

On the other hand, ultra-rare holiday loot like The Horseman's Reins "will have a chance of being found in holiday-themed loot troves which will drop once for each player in the party no more than once per day, in the same manner that doing the Random Dungeon daily quest will provide a specific reward the first time it is completed in a day," according to the notes. This means that players can fight each holiday boss as many times as they want, making it easier to score all the loot they want, with more convenient access. However, the drop access of really special holiday boss loot—like mounts—will still be limited each day.

PROFESSION CHANGES

Several professions received a little love in yesterday's patch; crafters should notice a substantial reduction in the number of Runed Orbs required for various patterns, and most Inscription recipes now call for just one ink instead of two. The cooldowns following the creation of Titansteel Bars, Moonshroud, Spellweave and Ebonweave have been removed (including the location requirements for the cloths). On the flipside, crafting Glacial Bags now results in a 7-day cooldown.

Lastly, the Engineering vanity pets Pet Bombling and Lil' Smoky are finally no longer Bind-on-Pickup, so now everyone can learn to summon these cool little guys. The Monsterbelly Appetite fishing quest is quite a bit easier as well; the objective location has been moved outside the Violet Hold in Dalaran, so players don't have to fly all the way down to the southern sea to catch the man-eating Monsterbelly anymore.

AUCTION HOUSE, UI AND MORE

We've covered most of the significant, class-independent features introduced in patch 3.3.3, but there are dozens of smaller tweaks, enhancements and fixes worth reading about in more detail in the patch notes. The WoW developers are continuing their trend of gradually lessening the need for third-party add-ons by improving various game elements themselves, like the new auction house features added yesterday. The most substantial improvement is advanced item-posting; "Entire stacks of a specific item type can be placed in the Auction frame and several options have been added for choosing how to list auctions," according to the notes.

The Dungeon Finder and Quest Tracker also received several improvements and fixes, and the World Map can now display "different levels of a multi-layered dungeon, zone, or city." Players will also notice an advanced set of filtering and sorting options in the Objectives frame now, as well as the ability to Shift-Click on a quest objective or check the Track Quest box on the Map to track a quest in the Objectives Frame.

Finally, patch 3.3.3 introduced dozens of class-specific tweaks and addressed a handful of bugs. For details about class and item changes (including a few Glyphs), check out the "Classes: General" and "Bug Fixes" sections of the official patch 3.3.3 notes.