Thursday, October 16, 2008

Patch day madness.

I couldn’t miss out on being in the wave of people to comment on their experiences with patch 3.02, so here I am! Be warned, this is a long winded post, and most likely will crit your face with a wall of text!

As I let my patcher download a little after each gaming session over the last few weeks, I was ready to go long before the servers were finished patching, so I sat on Teamspeak with about a dozen other guildies, as we waited. We had fun playing silly net games, discussing interests, and I even managed to direct one guildy to an old heavy metal night club I used to go to back where I went to university!

The servers opened one at a time. Our server was not up anywhere near the start of this process, so we all flooded onto the server me and Ama transferred from originally – where our first year or so of WoW was spent. We invited people to the guild, tinkered with some long-abandoned characters (between world server crashes and lag-outs) and at about 4pm (two to three hours after intended launch time) we were all able to flood onto our own server.

Laggy. As. Hell.

The first thing I done was mail my priest the first batch of her inscription materials, and start milling. It was a slow and painful process since I had to manually craft every single item that I couldn’t leave auto-craft (such as the inks). With a 20 second pause between each action completing and me being able to start the next, it was indeed, very painful. I took about 3-4 hours to get to 250 inscription (thanks to an issue with a shortage of the golden pigments I had to go herb a stack of Mage royal.) After this I dished a load out to the guild, and stored the rest via mail.
I took a time out to heal an underbog run with Asterra. I went with Ama who respecced boomkin and was thoroughly squealing with glee at how much fun they were. The rest of the group consisted of a 64 Shaman, 64 warrior and 65 feral druid. We didn’t mark, we didn’t use crowd control, and thanks to the Glyph of Renew, all I done was stick a renew on our 3 tanks (yes, it was just a hectic speedy mash through, it was so fast and easy now…) and put a Prayer of Mending out and I could proceed to DPS, chucking in a glyphed Flash heal if someone took a bit too much damage. Even on Bosses! My renew with 750 spellpower (formerly 1400 + heal) is ticking for 750-800 without trinkets on the go. I also equipped the Glyph of Flash Heal - which if I remember correctly reduces the mana cost of Flash Heal, meaning I am able to spend more time doing DPS, with the other heals flying, and spam it out if needed.

Glyph of renew reduces the duration of Renew by 3 seconds, but increases each tick by 25% so it basically crams the heal into a shorter period. It does not affect the amount of healing done in any way, just applies it quicker. (15s duration reduced to 12s which is a 20% reduction in renew duration, but 25% increase per tick. Take away that final tick and it’s the same healing, but quicker.)

After the run I quickly ground the last bit of Inscription to 300, before logging off at 1am. I had been on since about 4pm, milling and crafting. The lag being pretty much the sole reason.

I am now left with an abundance of glyphs. (I mailed them to an alt then “returned mail” so I could access them to give out to guildies or auction. I have about 8 mails with 12 items each sat there…) As a general rule of thumb, anything I had more than 3 of goes to the AH till I only have 3 in stock. The prices of Glyphs on the AH are ridiculously cheap, especially in comparison to the herbs. I actually feel a little foolish at grinding this when I could have spent 60G and gotten half a dozen glyphs, and sold the herbs for enough money to get the epic flyer skill…

I actually managed to spend Asterras bank balance (60g) on training and parchments for inscription. Thankfully I managed to sell a couple of rarer Glyphs on the AH and almost make this money back so I can continue to grind later :p. I left about a dozen glyphs on the AH overnight. In the off-chance they sell I should have another hundred gold or so to get up through the outland herbs I have, failing that I need to go grind out some dailys because it is costing a fortune for parchments and training.

There was various cheers and griping over Guild chat and Teamspeak. The loudest complaints were over the achievement system, and the spamming of guild chat with people completing various achievements. The guild master almost lost her mind as me and two other people simultaneously completed the fall 65ft without dying achievement, at about midnight after a hard day of people getting battleground achievements, dueling achievements, pet achievements…

The most popular hunters pet by far seems to be the Son of Uvoros – they are everywhere! Its fantastic! Apart from the screen shake, we don’t like the screen shake as we try to sort through our mailbox and an army of them run past…

The second most popular pet I see is Kurken – the white core-hound. This one seems to be a favourite for a lot of people, and I think he is the one I shall be aiming for aswell!

Other complaints were generally in the region of warlocks complaining about being nerfed a bit, rogues complaining about being extra squishy in the battlegrounds, and anyone that tanks finding their stats had reduced slightly… only to find that its ten times easier to do their job even so.

A fresh-70 holy paladin went on a Kara run and cleared it in less than 3 hours, 4-manning prince from 50% health. (two healers, two tanks and one DPS!) This is madness, I have to get in on it soon! Damn you inscription grind! Making me miss all the fun.

Never mind, its almost done – and then I can play with everyone else :D

I hope your transition to 3.02 was a smooth one, and that it has brought nothing but joy. The fun-factor seems to have gone through the roof, and I have not seen so many people in ironforge since before the BC expansion. Lagforge once more, ah, memories.



-Velk

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