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.