Wednesday, December 06, 2006

Aftermath

As expected, the servers were down for much longer than initially stated. I think overall, the patched introduced some very good concepts:

The Good:
Arenas: Haven't tried, don't PvP so no real opinion
New Talents: For the most part, the new talents were very good. I didn't actually get to experiment too much except on mage.
Empowered frostbolt is a tremendously awesome talent. I was criting so much with spells, it was rather surprising.
Water Elemental seems like a very good "offtanking" pet sorta deal. It actually does very good damage with the waterbolts it was tossing (~500 average, ~800 crits) and has surprisingly decent tanking ability.
Additional Bank slots are now capped at 25 gold. This is just awesome as storage has always been a problem.
Balance druids got a major boost in this patch. I was watching Molridia in action, and only with a paltry amount of spell damage (~110), she was doing ~400 wraths (700 crits) and ~800 Starfires (~1300 crits). Plus the INSANE mp5 from Dreamstate (10% of intellect) helped keep her mana from going down rapidly. I believe we may have to rename the "Oomkin" to the "Pwnkin".
Purchasable "book" skills: The skills that were previously only available through books are now fully trainable from trainers. I am SOOO glad I didn't pay those ~200-300 gold buyouts for the new skills.
Armor upgrades: Most plate pieces had their AC significantly boosted. Items that add to defense, also had this increased by quite a bit. While I think this is because the formula has changed and you need more defense to mitigate criticals, it's still a solid boost.

The Smern (Bad):
Threat Reduction nerf: I am not sure if this is a bug, or if 20% less threat is just THAT significant. But I was easily pulling agro off the MT with frostbolts. I could usually start dps with 1 sunder and if the tank continued sundering, I could dps the entire time (crits included) and not pull agro. However, last night in BRD, I would start dps at 3 sunders, and if the first hit was a crit, I would instantly rip agro off the MT. This happened many many times.
Hunter Agility->RA normalization: 1 point of agility only gives 1 ranged attack now. This was actually quite a severe change as now, my hunter who previous had around 1100 RA has been dropped down to ~ 980. This makes items like tarnished elven ring not nearly as good as they used to be. +Agility enchant effectiveness is also effectively cut in half.
AQ20 loot: The only real reason to run AQ20 was for the class books. The loot for the most part is pretty lackluster. I am hoping Blizzard ups their loot tables.


The Ethereal Tabard (Vomit-inducing):
Addons: As expected, this patch broke just about every addon. While some have already been updated, many very useful mods remain incompatible: Gatherer, SmartAssist, SmartBuff, Lockbox, Decursive, Itemsync, Theorycraft just to name a few.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

You flatter me, sir. :) But yeah, I do need better gear. :P

The new talents have definetly done wonders for the balance tree. I'm thrilled. :D Maybe the moonkin won't be completely useless in raids afterall... :P

Velius said...

Well, they were never "completely" useless, just "mostly" useless. I propose we have a all mage group with Molridia in the next MC run. We could be team pewpew.

Anonymous said...

I heard about this giant UI breaking patch thingy. Everyone in my hallway is complaining about it. At this rate, pretty soon I will know as much as you without actually playing ;0-)

btw.. not on IM these days?

Velius said...

Well, haven't really been logging onto IM from work since there really isn't that many people to talk to since yours stopped working. Outside of that, I mostly just chat on Vent. You should come onto Ventrilo and chat, don't have to play the game, just chat about randomly useless things like we used to =p

Anonymous said...

What he means is...

You should come on vent to chat so we can hynotize you into playing once the expansion comes out.

We got tanking and healing all covered so you could play whatever you want!