Patch 3.3: First Impressions

I was prepared for the worst after hearing stories about crashing servers and immense latencies, but my patch day experience was only spoiled by one disconnect, and I wasn't lagging at all.

The first thing I did was to respec. I moved my three "filler points" in the prot tree from Reckoning and put them in Divine Sacrifice and Divine Guardian. Otherwise my spec stays the same as before.

I managed to do my cooking daily before someone in the guild needed a tank for the new heroics. I hadn't read much about the instances, and didn't know much more than that they were three and that we were supposed to run behind Jaina's skinny behind most of the time. Even though we had a full group, we used the Dungeon Finder feature to be teleported to the instance.

Even though I love the efficiency of being teleported straight to any instance, it kind of takes away the feeling of being part of a "big" world. When you had to fly to every instance, it gave you a feeling that you actually had to travel a distance from your safe haven to get to the place where the vile monsters rip brave adventurers to small pieces. Now you can spend all your time in Dalaran, just waiting for a teleport to the other side of the world (literally), and when you are done, you will be safe back at the inn, with a barmaid willing to please just within arm's reach.

Why would I want a fancy flying mount if I won't be travelling anywhere?

Anyhow, we got the the first instance, went inside, and started pulling. After a couple of groups, I realized that the healer had been AFK since we zoned in, so I took a break and drank some mana tea. Beware of the OOM monster when you tank these instances!

As soon as the healer came back, I pulled a new group, and we wiped. It was a bit surprising to be honest, but shit does happen. After that, we burned through all three instances up to the Lich King himself.

Spoiler alert: The Lich King fight consists of the entire group running away like little girls.

On the last ice wall, I managed to lose our healer to a stray mob, and after that, the Lich King caught up with me and killed me. The rest of the group ran away to safety, and got their heroic achievements, while me and the healer got nada. So I guess I have to run the last instance again just for the achievement...

Even though I didn't lag or disconnect much, there was a VERY annoying thing that screwed up my tanking: All mobs wanted to run through me and fight me from behind. It didn't matter how I pulled, the same thing happened all the time. So I had to constantly move around while tanking, which my rogue and ret pally companions didn't enjoy much. I really hope this is a bug, because it made tanking alot harder and very annoying. I can't even imagine how nasty tanking Anub'arak's adds on heroic will be if they keep running through you and attack you from behind...

After the heroics, I went to the new 25-man raid. I'll get back to that one in a later post.

So far, I'm impressed with the patch. The new dungeons are cool (at least the first time you run them), the Dungeon Finder tool seems nice, and the new raid instance is sexy. My first impression of the patch is that it's much better than the disappointing 3.2 patch. But it's only been one day, so I'll probably soon find something to complain about...