Patch 3.1, Ulduar, dual specs, too much!

I am overwhelmed by all the changes. Every time I log in, someone says: "Hey did you notice X or Y or Z?" And my response is always: WTF THAT IS AWESOME. Its quite a thrill to be playing WoW at this time. Despite the raid instances being down for 90% of our raid times, we at least got to kill the first boss on 25 and 10 man modes. Its a complete pushover and requires no strategy at all really. Run from the boss and shoot at it. Hopefully the servers will be cooperative soon and we will get to dive into the actual instance.

There are so many small things that get added that make you think "wow, how have we lived without this?!" which could mean a few different things. One is that Blizzard has a long list of things they know we would love, but only trickles them out to keep us playing. This is called marketing and its a good way to make money. Another reason could mean the Blizzard developers actually play the game and figure out creative ways to make the game more engaging and interesting.

One of the big additions in 3.1 is the Argent Tournament. Finally, a daily hub! The dailies are not super fun, but they yield very cool rewards (mounts/pets/tabards/etc) if you put in the time. I calculated it will take 5 months of dailies once you hit champion (which takes about 2 weeks to get) to get all the rewards. This seems excessive, but it will probably be enough time to clear ulduar and be getting ready for the next big patch.

Another is the improvements to the LFG interface. I am not an advocate of pugging instances, but if I were to do so, I would be a lot happier with the current interface. It allows you to specify your role (or roles) so it is much easier to gauge what sort of group you could get instead of trying to decipher comments like: KIN HEAL ORE TANK LOL.

So there are new dailies, a new instance, dual spec, new/streamlined talents and all sorts of new things to collect. Its an exciting time to be playing World of Warcraft, but it would be much moreso if the instance servers did not crap out at 9pm every night on the dot.

Some 3.1 thoughts

For those of you who are World of Warcraft players AND not living under a rock (which ironically some would say all WoW players do, but thats another article), you are aware that a huge patch is incoming. 3.1 will bring lots of changes to lots of classes. My own class/spec (Ret Paladin) is getting all sorts of changes which will change my playstyle quite a bit. My gearing will change completely (sort of) and I have a new rotation to learn as well as a new skill to weave into said rotation. It is very exciting for us paladins, in good ways and bad. Paladin changes aside, the game itself is going to change a lot because Blizzard's new raid progression plans for WotLK will come into play. Naxx and sarth were a joke of course and Malygos was tricky for a few weeks, but nothing was too difficult. Sarth +3 drakes was cleared in mere days or a couple weeks by the best players in the world. This is to be expected of course, while some pugs still wipe in Naxx 10/25 weekly.

This brings me to my point. Blizzard wants players to progress through raids, much the way you progress through jobs. You start out entry level and get promoted based on experience (quite literally in WoW while youre levelling at least) and achievements (again, puns but hilariously relevant) you obtain while working in a given position. My guild cleared naxx10/25 and sarth+0 within a week of Wrath. We were all-stars of the mail room. The big boss noticed and a few months down the road he gave us a new uniform (best in slot everywhere to be seen) and promoted us to Privates in the Ulduar assault squad.

I, for one, am excited about the prospect of wiping on new bosses. All the new paladin changes have ironically made me want to stay in Naxx for a few weeks to clean up some unfinished business with the terrible loot gods. Blizzard has decided that we should not be farming Karaxxramas forever. I agree with this. I hated that I had to farm heroics (even new and exciting ones) or Karazhan for a year because they kept giving us new badge gear. Cant get into 25 man raids? No problem, just run that easy instance youve cleared 18 times. Cant get into t6 raids? NP NP, hit up that heroic MgT. You get t5 level gear + badges for t6.

This was rediculous to me. I appreciate that Blizzard does not want this. I agree and I think its a great change. I am, however, worried that Ulduar will not be as accessible as they think it will be. I have no doubt I will be clearing Ulduar within a few weeks, then moving onto hard modes soon thereafter. My guild rocks and Im not humble about it because theres no need. There are so many guilds better than us, but we raid less than them so we have a good excuse.

I seem to be rambling, but who cares right? Blizzard wants us to time out of instances and move forward. I have a few theories about what will happen when ulduar drops. The first of which is that every Tom, Dick and Harry will think their naxx10/blue gear will be enough for Ulduar non-hard modes. If this is true then Blizzard has failed. If not, then they need to get more gear from 25 mans, but this too seems like a failure. Blizzard wants people to be able to only do 10 mans if thats all they can muster in their small guilds. I do not believe people will be running Ulduar 10 in naxx10 epics. Why? Because anyone still in this sort of gear (spare alts of course) probably is aweful and doesnt care about raiding. I do not mean to say people who dont raid 25 mans are automatically bad, but I do mean to say that at this point in time if you care about raiding you are doing 25 mans for that gear/experience.

The people doing 10 mans are the ones who play once or twice a week for maybe 5-10 hours and pug naxx10 and get half of it done. Thats fine and dandy, but spider and plague wing unfortunately do not carry the same loot as the rest so you end up missing out on a lot of good stuff from the "hard" bosses. The folks who care about raiding and really enjoy it either get frustrated wiping with pugs on 10 mans or move on to 25 mans. The trend right now is to go 10 man then 25 man, but this is not the plan for blizzard. I plan to do both Ulduar 10 and 25 until I get all the achievements for both and claim my shiny new proto drakes.

I think that B has the right idea when they want us to move on from Naxx and only do it on alts or on offnights for fun. Its been done (twice now) and its time to move on. Thats great. What I think they do not understand is that in general, most good players do 25 man raids right now and will not stay in 10 mans forever. This leaves the scrubs to do 10 mans only and wipe endlessly on easy bosses. The other thing is that once Ulduar comes, noone will have any reason to run naxx 10/heroics anymore. Naxx25 will be so easy with ulduar gear that we will be 15 manning it for fun in 2 hours. And we will accrue an inordinate amount of badges that are useless. All those heroic badges you are getting will be worthless. They dont want us to do the same stuff forever, but what else is there to do? Argent tournament dailies? I guess.

I think Blizzard is on the right track by not forcing its players into the same dungeons, but at the moment in time, thats what we are used to doing. We all ran kara countless times in BC and we had fun really. It was a great instance. People just are not going to know what to do when Ulduar comes out. Are you geared enough for Ulduar? Maybe? Noone really knows and pugs will try it the day it drops, guaranteed. And they will complain and complain and it will get nerfed. Then it will be naxx all over again. This is equivalent to getting demoted to mailboy and doing the same thing everyday. Which is fine and pays the bills...but even if you get paid the same (new gear that increases with standard of living changes every year), its still boring to have no stimulation. I hope they keep the difficulty up with Ulduar and dont bitch out and nerf it. I want to wipe. I want pugs to be discouraged and run naxx25 instead of complaining about Ulduar for months to come.