I Survived The Patch

I’ve been playing WoW extra-obsessively since the patch, and here’s what’s shaking.
The only toon that I’ve gotten into a playable condition so far is my holy priest. My tank has a spec I made up without consulting anything, and my mage has one of her specs, I reforged her gear and changed her gems, and she’s nearly ready to burninate things. My hunter and druid are too scary, I’ll leave them alone for the moment. My death knight is busy making runes for all the others.

First night, I focused on getting the priest all fixed up. On a mad whim, I changed most of her gems to haste. Rabbits like haste. She’s holy, I’ll deal with disc later, or maybe I’ll try shadow again. Truthfully, I don’t really like disc. Disc is for conservative, stand-by-your-tank types, and holy is for large flamboyant healsplosions and lightning-fast spot heals. And I don’t need a shadow priest when I have a mage; then I don’t have to toggle the healer UI on and off.

I’ve been chasing achievements lately, so I thought I’d go run around doing that to test drive the new improved WoW. I discovered Holy Nova is now faster and – catch me – hardly eats any mana at all. It’s the new spammable instant heal, like Circle of Healing used to be. Plus nothing was doing me much damage at all. So I novaed my way through all my dailies: the puppymen in Scholazar (2 more exalted reps and I get an achievement!) and the stupid Argent Crusade again, after getting all their mounts (I need 2 more tabards, so maybe 9 more days with those guys).

I tried a random battleground and got WSG. Once I got in there, I tried to click a flag to return it and crashed, as in lockup crash, restart your computer because it’s not going to do anything crash. I tried to capture a flag, same thing. I tried to join a big fight and suddenly I got 86’d from the battleground with a deserter buff. Sigh.

My favorite thing so far: I got free flying mastery, because I already had a 310% speed mount, along with my druid and warrior. Looks like my hunter, mage and death knight will have to pay 5k each – for the hunter and dkp, that’s solely because they got screwed on the random number generator for last year’s Halloween loot achievement, despite my efforts. Sucks to be them. But anyway, my priest (and warrior, and druid but big deal because she only flies around in bird form) can now ride any mount at top speed, instead of just the 310% mount, so I’ve been cruising around rapidly on my other flying mounts, like the Azure Drake from Malygos 25.

The next night, I got the tank marginally set up and 2boxed ZG. I’m trying for the tiger mount before it gets discontinued. ZG was slightly tougher, it seemed like the beasties were hitting harder, but my priest has more damage now (thanks to her mighty smite chakra) and they all fell down, without dropping any loot. Troll gods, I will sacrifice 1000 gnomes to you if I get that mount to drop before the next patch discontinues it.

Then I went raiding. Hooray. I sort of even have incentive to raid again because now we get points for everything, like Blizzard DKP, and I’ll probably want lots of those to get new gear after Cataclysm. Before I was just buying primordial saronite and selling it. The raid itself was a catastrophe of sorts, with people crippled by bugs and lack of functional addons. With my shiny new haste gems, I blew away the healing meters. I run out of mana by the time the boss is about 20% from dead, but that’s okay, usually by then we’ve got him, and everybody’s usually alive except for the people who stand in fire.

I’ve been doing heroic ToC every day too, for more tabard credits. The one on patch night was funny. I zoned in to see 4 people from the same server/guild, two with Kingslayer titles. I put on my Kingslayer title. The tank was stuck in the doorway and every time he clicked the lance he locked up, like I was doing with the flags in WSG. Then one of the dps started disconnecting. It took us like 10 minutes to get through the jousting part. Then everything ran smoothly and it probably took less than 10 minutes to finish the rest of it, and everybody was remarkably civilized. And we all apologized to each other for the bugs. Go figure.

Tonight I went raiding again. For some reason I am having major audio aggravation. Wav files will loop, for example, I’ll still be hearing combat effects and the boss’ ranting after the fight is over and people are rolling on the loot. Or, worst of all, the casting sound hangs in the middle and won’t shut off, which sounds sort of like having seventy hair dryers running while I’m trying to play. It’s making me realize how much I rely on audio in this game, the direction things are coming from, what spells other people are casting.

That and I couldn’t get a raid frames addon that works right so I’ve been using the default. They improved the default a little but I still hate it, it’s way too big, shows too much stuff I don’t need to see and not enough about stuff I’m interested in. And tonight they ALL were stacking haste, so I didn’t dominate the charts quite so much, but part of that was also because I was going crazy trying to fix the audio.

And we got a hard mode achievement. Which made me a happy troll.