2.4 is a GO!

In case you haven't heard, 2.4 was released. The marquee item is of course, the release of Sunwell Plateau and the Shattered Sun Offensive which allows all to grind more rep for yet more loot.

Of course, for now, all this means little to me since we're still working our way out of the 20s (I mean, improved gains in weapon skill is great, but...), but it's good to see what else is waiting for me at the end of the road.

A complete list of the changes can be found here.

Some thoughts on the changes.

Spell Haste: Spell haste now reduces the global cooldown on spells, down to a minimum of 1 second. This change does not apply to melee and ranged abilities.
Sounds good on paper, but from initial blue comments, you are going to need a bucket load of Spell Haste to achieve the 1 second GCD. Might make Spell Haste worth a second look for lock, though.

Resilience: Now reduces the magnitude of mana draining effects by the same amount that it reduces critical strike damage. The Tooltip has been revised to reflect this.
Will severely nerf Mana Draining in Arena. Basically, at 70, every 39.4 Resilience will reduce your amount drained by 2%. With 'welfare epics' providing 300+ Resilience, you are looking at the reduction of upwards of 15% in mana drained.

A very dedicated team of Mana Drainers might still work, but I think the top teams would have moved on from this.

The Daily Quest limit has been increased to 25.
The thing with having so many alts is that I could barely finish the 10 quests on each character. However, for those who are more 'dedicated', and with the introduction of so many more daily quests, this makes perfect sense.

Improved Mend Pet now has a 25/50 chance to remove one Curse, Disease, Magic, or Poison effect, up from 15/50%.
??? Was there a point to only one point in IMP?

Turn Undead(Rank 3):This spell has been reworked and has been renamed to “Turn Evil”. It will now work on Demons in addition to Undead. Turn Evil is subject to diminishing returns, and lasts 10 seconds in PvP.
Useful for PvE at the high levels since there are so many demons in Outlands. In PvP, good against warlock pets. Not game-breakingly good, but better than nothing, I suppose...

Sap mechanic changed from “Incapacitate” to “Sap”. This will allow more humanoids that were previously immune to Sap to be vulnerable to Sap, but still immune to Gouge. Note that anything that removed Sap previously will still remove Sap after the change.
Nice buff for PvE Rogues... As if they needed any... But since I've a Rogue, goodie... :)

Ritual of Summoning can be used to summon players into instances if they meet the instance requirements.
Wow... This is BIG! Unfortunately, it'll bring back the Taxi days for locks... Just when I thought it's safe to remove the spell from my UI...

Diminishing returns on honor for kills is being eliminated.
Honor will now be instantly calculated, and available for player use.
More Honour available NOW = more welfare epics faster! Whoppee...

Alterac Valley
Captain Balinda Stonehearth Stonehearth can no longer be interrupted, silenced, or have her spells slowed. In addition, her water elemental cannot be banished, and does increased damage.
Vanndar Stormpike and Captain Balinda Stonehearth have had their health totals reduced to match the health totals of Drek’Thar and Captain Galvangar...
Warmasters/marshals in Alterac Valley now increase each other’s maximum health and damage by 25%. This is a stacking effect.
Horde players will now start the battle closer to Drek’Thar and Frostwolf Keep.
There is now a Join as Party option
So Balinda is no longer a pushover (or so it seems...). The map is now equalised to what the Ally have been crying for so it remains to be seen if the Horde can up their game to match.

To allow pre-mades, means PUGging AV for honour will be tough. But get a good group together could mean oodles of honour in short work!

A new jewelcrafting recipe has been added to transform many green quality gems into a single random blue quality gem. This recipe is available from grandmaster jewelcrafting trainers.
Depending on whether there is a CD for this, it'll help in getting rid of the huge stores of green gems you will accumulate via drops, mining & freebies from the Consortium.

Increased the skill up potential for most smelting recipes.
This will help in getting 60s to 300 Mining to transit to Outlands, which some reported having problems with. I might be ok, since my two miners will need to be mining overtime to meet the demands of Engineering, Blacksmithing and Jewelcrafting...

Dungeon and Group Quest Experience: The amount of experience awarded for dungeon and 5-person group quests in Outland has been increased in almost all cases.
Not so much whooppee to faster leveling, but hopefully being able to hit 70 with even lesser quests completed. This leaves more quests for money grinding purposes...

Elemental creatures are no longer explicitly immune to poison and disease effects. Elementals with nature school immunities will still be immune to nature-based poisons, however.
Good for the Rogue & Hunter (Serpent Sting & Isis' Spit). Not huge, but nice.

Gems obtained through Heroic difficulty instances are no longer Unique-equipped.
If the new badge loot doesn't inspire more Heroic farming, this should. Although, badges will also give you access to BT-level gems... Hmmm...

Loot dropped by Doomlord Kazzak and Doomwalker has been changed to Bind on Equip. In addition, the cash dropped by these bosses has been significantly increased.
This will probably just result in the higher-end guilds treating the two world bosses as money pinata.

Nether Vortex are no longer Bind on Pickup and can now be purchased from G’eras for 15 Badges of Justice!
This will now make available all those BT-level receipes to non-raiders. For my BS pally, if I stay ret, & grind Heroic Dungeons forever, Stormherald is a possibility...

The best part is that even if my druid or my pally is the only one who raids/run heroics, I can buy the Vortex and transfer it another toon.

Players can now only carry 80 Conjured Manna Biscuits at a time.
No more raiding the table!

Primal Nether are no longer Bind on Pickup!
This is nice only because it means even if only one of my toons go for heroics, the nether can be transferred to another who needs it for crafting purposes.

The Ratchet bank now has access to the Guild Vault.
Seeing the amount of time my toons spend in Barrens these days, this is a god-send. It was annoying that to get to the GB, I had to fly to TB or Org... :p

Splintertree Raiders will now respawn with Torek if Duriel Moonfire and her guards are killed while the Raiders are still alive.
Bah... They fixed this after I finished the quests... At least Tris will benefit...