Archive for the ‘Patch’ Category

I popped Budman onto the PTR today, and you can see the results above. Budman specced as a Frost mage upon arriving, earning a Water Elemental in the process. They no longer have a time limit to them, and seem to have monster range on their Water Bolt. I started having RandomPetName (my Water Elemental’s actual name, and no I didn’t name him) pull while I moved and stood some 30 yards from him.  That allowed me space to work when I would eventually pull the mob off of him. It was an odd mechanic, but it worked.

Arcane Missiles were a fun and dynamic mechanic whereupon I would get the above eye catch to let me know I could cast the spell. When it proc’d I could then work the spell into my rotation.

Two changes I wasn’t so fond of were the increased level requirement for summoning refreshments. Level 38?! I never carried food or drinks with Budman and I was out in the field when it occurred to me that I didn’t have my food conjuring spells, leaving me with nothing to easily return my health. The second thing I wasn’t as happy with, also pertaining to increased level requirements, were the teleport spells. I was unable to teleport back to town because the spells – as I found out – required level 24 (and Budman’s level 22).  Dammit.

So the Mage changes are looking good, for leveling frost mages at least. I  can’t say for end-game or fire or arcane mages, so I’ll leave that to the dedicated mage blogs – I don’t want to step on any squishy toes with my heavy plate-wearing paladin’s boots.

‘Gleeve’,  actually my death knight Gleave from live, is  the most recent of my transfers to the PTR I trained him up in Unholy and Frost specs. I found that even against Howling Fjord baddies, the frost spec seemed weak. I died in no time flat which was a turn-off. When I switched to unholy, I was fine. Why? I ‘m not sure.It may have had something to do with my lack of dual-wielding weapons (frost’s specialty) but more importantly I was hardly getting any healing from Death Strike. Of course, that didn’t change from frost to unholy, so credit my ghoul as well. Dark Transformation was fun too, but hard to track for me. I had to select my ghoul to see how many stacks he had which was a pain.

The net result of my testing on the PTR is five good spec changes (ret and prot for pallys, demonology warlocks, beast master hunters and unholy death knights) and one not so good one (frost DKs). The testing continues!

All of the PTR servers went down completely at about 6:19 AM EDT. Good omen? Bad omen? Glitch? We’ll see. I’ll keep everyone posted.

(6:26 AM) Update: It appears that the character copy feature has been re-enabled. Copy while you can!

(6:29 AM) Servers back up. It appears that the down time was to fix the character copy feature. Problem solved!

Here’s ‘Klug,’ Lug’s PTR alter-ego. I found that I love the new Focus mechanic over mana for Lug. I also picked him up a decent bow to replace his gun now that weapon skills are gone, meaning that I didn’t have to train Lug’s bow skill. Pig was in rare form and we killed random mobs even easier then we do on live, but Stridy was MIA. I had a button that said, ‘Call Stridy,’ but it didn’t work. Stridy’s button under the new ‘Summon Pet’ button didn’t work. I’ll have to submit a ticket on that.

Here’s ‘Krayne,’ Crane’s doppelganger.  He trained up as a demonology warlock and promptly got a Doomguard. Wow. Kirashak is powerful, and the new tricks (like the new soul stone/soul burn mechanic) were cool, but what amazed me was my ability to nearly ignore my mana bar.  Normally Crane has to watch his mana bar closely because I’m almost always short but here I just cast away with impunity.

To this point, I really like the patch’s changes, and I can’t find serious a fault so far.

For those not yet privy, the 4.0.1 PTR servers are up and active. This means that you can go try out the new Cataclysm powers, specs and interface (yay!) but not the new beta-centric world changes, races and zones (boo!). In short, it’s the WoW you’re playing now but with new powers and a modified interface. I popped Gavelier in (known on the PTR as ‘Gavalier’ due to a naming conflict) and trained his ret spec as I’d decided I would while toying with Wowhead’s talent calculator. Or, I tried. You see, this PTR makes use of the new streaming feature. That, combined with the 16 GB download time meant that I hopped in before everything was loaded (I ought to be done downloading sometime in October, by the way). This meant that I didn’t actually have all the data I should have and the game glitched. Restart.

Back in, I got my spec set and was ready to test my powers on some hapless mobs in Storm Peaks when I realized I was missing some of my key new abilities. Stuff like my new main damage seal for one (that’s kinda important) and the new Word of Glory heal. Off to Dalaran, and then to Stormwind. Once in Dal I stood for about three minutes waiting for the portal to show up. Once it did I popped through and hopped on my Albino Drake atop the Mage’s Tower… and promptly fell about forty feet straight down. Ok, so no flying in the old world yet (yes, I know there’s a new ability that needs trained, but it wasn’t at the Dalaran flight trainer). It’s actually funny to see folks running around on their flying mounts, hopping up and down with them, vainly trying to get airborne. Anyway I got my new abilities and ‘ported back to the Argent Tournament grounds. Or I tried to. The game froze and I was back at the character select screen. I reselected Gav and sat at the finished loading screen for a few minutes before giving up. Restart.

I finally loaded up at the Tournament grounds and took a few dailies to practice my pummeling on the Cult of the Damned dudes. My first thought was that the game does an awesome job letting you know when a proc’d ability is available. For example, with Art of War my exorcism spell glows so I know to hit it. Very nice. Also, the new holy power mechanic kept my eyes off the battle more then I would have liked, keeping an eye on my new bar so I could know when to hit Divine Storm, Word of Glory or Templar’s Verdict. In all though, I seemed to be doing more damage then before. Of course, without a DPS meter it’s hard to tell for sure.

I hearthed back to Dalaran and took the portal back to Stormwind. Here’s a few more random pics I took while  n Goldshire.

The new stat window is great at telling you what you need to know without you having to do on-the-fly math or looking things up online. It will tell if you’re hit-capped for your level (and levels above you) for example.

Here’s the talent spec window. Nothing fancy but very functional.

I’ll have more tidbits as I continue to play.

For the last eight and a half hours, I’ve been fighting WoW tooth and nail. I, like many players, am struggling to log in. I attempt to load Gavelier, but when I get to the loading screen, the loading bar fills up and then sits there. Forever. You can find more rants and raves in this topic on the WoW forums. I’ll check back in if I ever get back into the game.

On another note, I forgot to mention that after my run through the Old Kingdom the other day, I used my frost emblems to grab the Libram of Three Truths. It seems to have upped my DPS against Cult of the Damned mobs near the Argent Tournament by over a hundred or so DPS. Sweet!

In what can be seen by some as ‘emblematic’ of the casual route WoW is said to be on, there’s a new Feat of Strength achievement to be had in patch 3.3.3: Emblematic. This is an easy achievement, and if you’ve done any dungeon delving in Northrend, you’ve probably got this one. Some would say that it’s too easy of an achievement to be a Feat of Strength, but may I remind them that there are Feats of Strength for just logging in. Argument over.

Another large content patch, another long maintenance session. Of course, no one who’s been through a few of these it surprised. I just hope it’s not as bad as patch 3.1 was. While we wait, let’s discuss the patch.

My biggest draw in this patch? The eased leveling curve for low level toons. Now I may be able to get some of my characters out of the levels 5-10 range and into their 20s, where the game starts opening up. Ret paladins aren’t getting nerfed or buffed significantly this patch, which is a nice change. I miss getting a new toy or having one of my existing ones buffed, but I don’t miss getting walloped with the nerf bat. Prot and holy pallys took the hit this time. Wait, I’m half holy! In truth, I don’t see much that’s going to affect my play any.

The big ‘ooh, aah’  feature this patch is the Random Dungeon Finder, which will group you with people to do dungeons, heroics or raids based, bypassing the age-old pick-up group social barrier. It’s allot like queuing for a battleground in that you sign up for an instance, and once a group is formed you teleport straight to the dungeon. When you are done, you get ported back to wherever you were when the instance started. Via the random dungeon system, you can actually run heroics more then once a day.

In any case, my server is up now, so I’m off to test the waters. Adieu!

Well, I’ve been playing around in Azeroth for the last almost dozen hours, and I’ve come up with some opinions on patch 3.2.

For one, whoever decided to put the Steam Powered Auctioneer in Dalaran, THANK YOU! lol It’s a big help, not having to hike back to Ironforge to do business (I have a bank alt, but it’s easier to just wheel and deal on Gav). I’m also really happy with my new Wormhole Generator. I’ve used it twice; once to Storm Peaks (it put me just outside Ulduar), and once to Borean Tundra (releasing me about a quarter mile in the air above a lake). It’s only useable every four hours – like the other engineer transporters – but as with the changes made to the old ones, it’s not a trinket and can be used right from the bag.

The Northrend Children’s Week quests were unspectacular but fun. I went with the Oracle orphan and got an Oracle vanity pet for my work. I also went to the Argent Tournament grounds, which were – as expected – packed. A couple guildies ran the normal version of Trial of the Crusader, but I didn’t go.

Finally, my thoughts on Wintergrasp. For one, it’s nice to be able to fly over it now. However, ‘fly over it’ is a misnomer, because you can fly anywhere in the zone, land and take off at will, so long as there’s no battle taking place. Once a battle starts, flying mounts are no longer allowed. The queuing system was no big deal, and it grouped us all into a large raid automatically and was easy enough to understand. We lost a defensive battle, though, due to being incredibly disorganized. That’s the Alliance for you, I guess.

I did head into Heroic: Violet Hold again to test my DPS, and it wasn’t real pretty. I wasn’t far below my old average, but I started every fight with my DPS dropping greatly until I got Seal of Vengeance fully stacked again. On non-bosses, I was at best a distraction. I ranked second on overall DPS, but I was the second best geared player in the group, so that was no surprise. Looting a couple Emblems of Conquest was nice, though. There’s not allot you can do with just three, however.

Well, problems (if you can call it that) are already creeping in for patch 3.2. Blizzard is extending it’s maintenance another four hours or so, from 11:00 AM PDT (2:00 PM EDT) to 3:00 PM PDT (6:00 PM EDT). Let’s hope this isn’t a harbinger of things to come.