Friday, March 4, 2011

Catching up & Looking at 4.1

So I took a few weeks off from WoW to prepare for Naka-Kon. Before that, I'd joined the guild I'd mentioned previously, that I'd raided with before being bitched at by the GMs of Legions of Azeroth. Now, I'm a member of Guildbook on Stormreaver. I raided with them for one week before Naka and we beat down the first two bosses of Bastion of Twilight pretty quickly. That was more bosses in one night than in two months with LoA.

I then took two weeks off, and upon returning last week, we again downed the first two bosses and wiped a few times on the Twilight Ascendant Council. This week, we beat them in just a few attempts, before heading on to Cho'gall where one of our raid members decided to afk for 30 minutes without telling anyone. We pulled without him and wiped fairly quickly and no one felt like waiting for him, so we called it there.

Still, I managed to get myself a new healing neck. I also won the roll on some healing boots but passed them to one of our healers since I'm main spec shadow (why this guild doesn't do main over offspec, I don't know, but we're all cool enough that it's worked out fine).

So I'm currently quite pleased with how the social dynamics and progression in game are going for me right now. My real life friend quit last month to go back to playing Everquest (and subsequently quit that too), so I'm out one friend on there, but another friend just rolled up on my server and we've been playing together quite a bit the past few nights, keeping things fun outside of raiding.

But in upcoming news, Blizzard has announced some of the things coming for the 4.1 patch. Probably the biggest news is that Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub are being retooled into heroic 5 man dungeons. I'm not a huge fan of simply retooling things, but similarly, I wasn't thrilled about ZG being taken out, if for no other reason than I really wanted the damned mounts! The week before Cata hit, I got the raptor, but I'd still never gotten the tiger. Similarly, in ZA, my guild had gotten to the point where we could manage to get the Armani War Bear, but I always lost the roll and eventually, it was no longer available. Thus, I'm excited that similar mounts will be available again, even if they're not the same ones.

Of course, with patch comes class changes. Not much is changing for us priests. The biggest change I see, is that our mind sear damage will again be increased which will hopefully, again, make our AOE respectable.

My hunter is also now 85 so I glanced at their changes. Again, not much, but our multi-shot damage is getting a huge buff. That will be swell, but given that hunters already have good AOE, I don't know that it will stay that way.

I recently started leveling my paladin again to help tank instances as he levels. Currently, she's at 81 so possibly 85 by the time 4.1 hits. Again, not many changes here. We get a holy power when our Grand Crusader pops and we use our Avenger Shield. But given holy power isn't a huge issue for tanks, it's not something I'm jumping up and down over.

So that's where I'm sitting currently. Cool story.