Thursday, April 16, 2009

Patch First Impressions

I really need to update more.

Servers were pretty unstable on Tuesday, but seem to have stabilized last night. We killed Flame Leviathan and then banged our heads against Ignis for a few hours. Good times.

Lots of little things I like in this patch. In no particular order:
  • Swimming mounts are great! No more getting randomly dismounted.

  • I really like the changes to the Quest tracker. Being able to use quest items--as well as opening the quest log by clicking on the tracker--is extremely nice. As well, allowing multiple Achievements to be tracked is great.

  • Previewing talents is awesome! If you haven't enabled it yet, it's in Interface Options -> Display -> Preview Talent Changes. This allows you to play with your talents before locking them in. Sadly, I forgot to enable it before doing my initial spec, promptly made a mistake, and had to pay 40g to fix it.

  • I like the changes to fishing, especially the daily. Always catching something makes it a lot smoother than before, and using bait to catch better fish just makes sense.

  • The Argent Tournament is pretty neat. I'm rather terrible at jousting, but it's still fun. I really like the shield graphics. Using vibrant colours and graphics in that manner was excellent work.

  • The Exorcism and Shield of Righteousness changes are very useful for Holy soloing. I still haven't scrounged up the gold for dual-spec, but being able to use Exorcism more is a god-send.

  • Also great is moving the page forward/back on the AH to the top part of the UI. Having to scroll down all the time was annoying.

All in all, it looks to be a pretty good patch. Blizz just needs to resolve the server performance issues, and everything will be fine.

As for Ulduar, the only thought I have is that there seems to be a lot of raid damage. We went in there with 4 Holy paladins, a Disc priest, and 2 Resto druids and it was pretty painful until we added a Resto shaman. As well, Flash of Light is almost totally useless now. It isn't even strong enough for raid healing! I was half-tempted to just remove it from my cast bars. Also, I really miss multiple Sacred Shields.

8 comments:

  1. Part of the instability may be everyone jumping in to see the new stuff. It's happened a lot of times before, and will die down again soon.

    I'm liking the heavy damage coming in on tanks. It's good to feel like I'm going to have to pull something from the land of where the sun don't shine to help my guild get through a fight.

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  2. Dual specs are filling me with joy. I'm switching constantly now. The only downsides are the talent bugs that seem to pop up, though that seemed to be mostly yesterday.

    The various buffs to ret are great: SS working with sheathe (or is that a bug fix?), RV on CS, buffed haste (though I suppose that's a general physical DPS thing, still, it's nice).

    I agree with the tournament being fun despite being bad. Er, you know what I mean.

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  3. I like the new content but I just wish I were able to heal it better =T

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  4. ya shammies did good on the raid damage for sure.I agree with ya on the FoL spam...it ain't gonna cut it when the tank is getting hit for 37k,and who else do pallies heal on the important fights ya know.

    I am completely feeling the effect of the change do Sacred Shield.I had it macrod and I would always have it up on myself and my focus frame regardless,and also additional targets.I miss it.Bad.=(

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  5. I'm getting used to memorizing both of my specs, since switching it has a low but very realistic chance of wiping out the actual talent points. Since I do my dailies in Retribution, and tanking in Protection, I switch a lot.

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  6. I am liking duel spec, but I would really love to have my equipment change over when I change specs. Yesterday I switched to tank spec while still wearing my holy gear. I crit a lay on hands for over 50k

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  7. Can you tell me how you can HL all day and not run out of mana in a boss fight?

    I specced holy as my off spec, I have relativly good gear (not naxx 25... but maybe naxx 10 eqiv)

    Sure the HL heals are excellent but hugely mana intensive. Maybe 10-15 of those and I'm looking at close to OOM.... that's not enough in a boss fight.

    Any help would be appreciated.

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  8. Tom, you want lots of Intellect and Crit. Use the Badge Libram that reduces the cost of Holy Light. Use 4-pc Tier 7 to further reduce the cost. Use Divine Plea every time it's up. I macro Divine Favor and Divine Illumination to trigger with Holy Light.

    With Replenishment, you cast Holy Light for a very long time.

    Also, we do things like Judge, Sacred Shield, and Beacon. It isn't pure Holy Light spam.

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