Tuesday, August 4, 2009

Am I the only one that feels 3.2 has come too soon?

I was hoping the patch would wait a little longer. I didn't feel like I was done. My paladin's arena ratings are middling around 1750 for 3s and 1700 for 5s and took a slight slide for the week (they're still good, but not as good as I think we could have done) and Blizzard hadn't done the usual "it's the end of the arena season!" warning. Does that mean when I log in tonight I'll still be on my teams? Heck, what about the arena points I haven't spent yet? I have enough to buy the Furious legs and I kinda would like them if I don't have a chance at earning anything else.

In other news my feral druid is about 7800 honor short of earning her sixth and final piece of High Warlord Gear (yes, that's how long I've been sitting in that bracket) and I don't know if I'll have the ability to get the last piece while I'm still 59 given that I'll start earning experience in regular BGs and I don't know if there are enough twinks to sustain an active 50-59 bracket. I'm a bit nervous. I'll probably try normal WSG and AB for a bit, just to stick a paw in the water. I have 2/3s my experience bar free for XP so there's room for experimentation.

And last but certainly not least, my main, my balance druid, is still glaring at Yogg-Saron and wishing that we'd had more time on him. We were so close! I think another week of solid attempts and we would have gotten him.

Now the patch is landing, my guild leaders are taking a pre-planned raid break that involves a trip across state lines (so they won't be online), and it looks like I'm in charge of the raid tonight. Good show! The calendar says "Ulduar Fun" tonight, but now it looks like it's going to be Trial of the Crusader fun as we take on a brand new boss without one of our MTs and one of our best healers. I expect that the new raid instance will be as buggy as hell too.

I primed my tanking gear last night on the off-chance I'll need to go bear tonight. I have a surprisingly good feral set on Hana. After I (finally) made the decision to go bear for her off-spec I've been pretty diligent about picking up off-spec pieces and enchanting them. It might not hold up for Trial of the Crusader though, which is probably my biggest concern should we end up short on tanks. I'm pretty sure I'll be fine as an OT in Ulduar.

I figure we'll give some solid attempts on the Northrend Beasts, and depending on how that goes we'll either keep at it or head back to Ulduar and do some clearing. With only one boss in the coliseum a week I figure we'll be making good use of the raid lockout extensions. We don't need much gear from Ulduar 25 anymore, barring the stuff off Yogg and Hard Modes, so we might as well clear to Yogg and just leave a raid ID there until we get him down. I almost wonder if that was part of the reason for adding the extension functionality in the first place, since there's obviously not enough to do in a raid instance with only five boss fights and no trash. Most raid guilds just aren't done with Ulduar yet.

In any case, one of the first things I'm going to do when I log in tonight is take a romp around in my new bear and cat forms. It would have been sweeter with a new moonkin form as well, but I get a kick out of the fact that Hana's new cat form looks like a kinder version of Scar from the Lion King.

4 comments:

Unknown said...

The patch feels a little too soon for me too. I was hoping for about 4 more weeks.

We can still work on Ulduar, because the Coliseum is not fully unlocked, but people's focus won't be fully there.

Dorgol said...

#1 - The Arena season isn't over, though this patch lays the groundwork for next season. I suspect we'll get 3 more weeks out of this season.

#2 - Yes, this patch feels too soon. Checking online, though, it seems 3.1 was release back in mid-April.. that's somewhere around 3.5 months from 3.1 to 3.2. 3.0 to 3.1 was closer to 6 months.

Our guild did manage to take down Yogg25 last week for the first time. Honestly, I'm hoping our guild will just stay in Ulduar for a few weeks, though I doubt that will happen.

Moonbiter said...

Well, I was expecting the patch to come out in August, however it dropped about two weeks before I thought it would. Being that Blizzcon is right around the corner, they want to devote all their manpower to it and have no other internal news conflicting with it.

In terms of pacing, hell... It seems like Ulduar came out yesterday. However, being Blizzard is becoming quicker at bringing us new content to keep us constantly busy in an attempt to minimize stagnation and subscriber dropout, I'm gonna say at this rate the Icecrown Citadel raid will be here in November.

Hana said...

Too many guildies had log-in issues last night for us to get a raid going, but yeah, with the Coliseum not being fully unlocked we'll definitely be working on Ulduar still.

I did see that the arena season isn't over yet, but with the spec changes I'm a little concerned for how my teams will fare. I know Illumination got nerfed for me, and I've been having more mana pressure in recent matches, and it seems like DKs got hit pretty hard and our DK has been one of our toughest teammates. I suppose I'll find out when we do our next set of matches.