World of Warcraft - Patch 3.1.0 (Part 1)

Well, it's finally here... World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King Patch 3.1.0 Secrets of Ulduar. This patch has been hyped up and in the works for a while now, promising many things. Hundreds of changes minor or major have been made to the game for the purposes of balancing classes, making the game tougher, and even making the game more enjoyable.

Heres the question nagging in the back of the minds of those who have "taken a break" or "quit." Was it worth waiting for? I mean, for all intents and purposes, a patch is basically a miniature expansion for the main game. It adds new content that is supposed to appeal to players and keep them from setting the game down and picking up a new game. So what I'm saying is that WotLK was an exspanion we all waited for during the Burning Crusade, and well, hell I've been bored since. So to answer the previous question effectively, it's best to anaylze the updates, and personally ask ourselves if this is what we wanted.

I myself have been playing a Warlock for three years, raiding for 2 and a half, and actively leading and organizing major raids for the past year, prior to the expansion and transfer of course. So, the main things that are important to me are updates to the Warlock class, the major general changes, and changes to raiding/end game content. So lets take a crack and list and grade as we go.

-Raiding/End Game Content Changes-

Raid Dungeon - Ulduar

Now, I haven't gotten the time to blast into the instance guns blazin'... yet, so my knowledge is based off of what other people have said. The content was "supposed" to take much longer to clear through, but it is hard to compare anything to it. 11 of the 14 bosses have a "hard" mode to them. That is, the abillity to change the encounter difficulty by doing the main pull differently. The best way to explain for those who do not understand is by explaining the Sartharion fight.

While clearing the trash, there are three minor drakes that have a significant ammount of health (depending on the ammount of people in the raid) and are usually killed before pulling the boss. This is called Sarth-0 Drake.This is the easiest and most basic encounter of the fight. Now, if you decided to pull the boss without killing the drakes, that would be Sarth-3 Drake, or the "hard" mode of the encounter.

Now, in Ulduar, they have put 11 of these bosses in as I have said before, allowing you to change the difficulty, and from what I've been able to deduce, going through the instance with the basic pull is, decently difficult seeming how Yogg was downed yesterday. Congratulations to Ensidia a from a EU server named Magtheridon by the Way. I mean it took SK-Gaming 2 hours to clear Sunwell when it was released. Overall, I think they did a nice job turning up the heat on end game content. I'll be into it more this weekend, and get back to it.

-Warlock Class Changes-



Affliction PvE Warlocks were hit hard, but it's yet to be seen as an improvement or nerf. They basically took out 2 DoTs from our rotation, but added the abillity for DoTs to crit. In my oppinion, they took our identity of being a DoT class seeming as how a shadow priest has a rotation like ours now. Oh, did I mention that when WotLK was released, they tried to strip warlocks of the Shadowbolt spam DPS, and now they five us an incinerate spam spec that seems to DPS the best? WTF!!!!! Overall, Blizzard screwed this one up bad for affliction warlocks, guess I'm respeccing back to Destro... oh wait Dual specs... I can't even rank this im so perplexed by this that... I need to stop talking about this before I get angry. :)

-Dual Speccing-

So for a small fee of 1000 gold, you can purchase the abillity to switch speccs for free between two different specs. Sounds great, except for, it seems kind of worthless for us "pure" classes who don't respec to tank one day, and heal or dps another. Now, if you raid and PvP, its a no brainer to get, I used to blow through about 400-500g a week back in Season 4 respeccing for raids and then respeccing again to do 2v2s in the 1900 bracket. So right now, I'm giving this a solid "upgrade" to the game, no matter how you play, it will affect you in some way.

-General Changes to the Game-

-Vanity Pets-

So I've been collecting these for god knows how long, before the expansion was released, I had my 50 achievement. I got my skunk, which I was unimpressed with and kept asking myself,"why the hell would I have this out when I've got 25 better ones?" But now they've added about 21 new pets, so seeming as these will be easy to get, I'll be able to get the last pet achievement I know of and get the Salt Lick. This, sadly enough for me, is a "MAJOR UPGRADE" to the game. This'll give me something to do for a day or two...

Well, I'm running out of time here and this is becoming monstrous, just the like patch. So heres part 1, expect more to come in the following days.

Good Luck! Mgrigs signing off.

World of Warcraft - Status Update

Quite recently, I have taken a break from playing World of Warcraft. While the game has been fun for the past three years that I have been playing, it seems to have lost that factor with me. A lot of people have asked why and I've had to give them very non detailed answers, so here goes a few major reasons for my hiatus.

1. I had recently transferred off a small server were I was very well known and had "pull" with a lot of people. As being a high ranking officer in the best alliance guild, I was pretty well respected by everyone. As for raiding, I was one of the best geared and highest dpsing warlocks on the server. A large part of our guild decided to transfer off when recruitment went stale and people kept quitting the game. I eventually followed a week or two after only to find that everyone had joined separate guilds.




2. Wrath of the Lich King - The expansion that was highly anticipated turned out to be a cakewalk in raiding, and a completely unbalanced PVP system were DK-Pally rules the brackets. There was one thing that kept me playing, and it was leveling characters. Going from 70-80 was the only thing relatively close to the Burning Crusade. I say this because raiding in Burning Crusade, the game was difficult when you raided, Karazhan used to be hard, with Serpent Shrine Cavern, killing Vashj made you want to quit, Archimonde being the same way in Hyjal. Now though, the end game content was cleared within a month of it coming out, and even though PVP wasn't completely balanced in Burning Crusade, it wasn't as out of control as it is now.



To wrap this up, I feel the game has been geared more towards the casual player, even though there base, and most devoted fans have a mindset more geared to the hardcore play style. Gold is easy to make, gear is easy to get, PvE is a breeze, and PvP is unbalanced, but I guess I should take advantage of it before they change it and I'm left behind.

Hopefully, the new patch will fix most of this, with the release a new end game instance is coming out called Ulduar, and it will be on the same difficulty scale of how the Burning Crusade used to be. I'm back off to Azeroth, until next time...

Good Luck, Mgrigs Signing off.