After three weeks of long, brutal maintenance Tuesday mornings (extending into the afternoons and even into the evenings), today's maintenance is expected to be a normal 5am to 11am downtime. We'll see.
The beta test server for the Cataclysm expansion went live last week. I signed up to be a beta tester, but so far have not gotten an invite from Blizzard. The start of beta is one more step closer to release planned for sometime toward the end of the year.
There were only three things in the last patch, Patch 3.3.5 - the Ruby Sanctum dungeon, Real ID, and an overhaul of the in game text chat system.
I've already talked about why I will not be using REAL ID.
Wild has not been around enough to get into a Ruby Sanctum (RS) run yet, which makes one wonder just how interested in playing Wild is these days. Wild is signed up for the regular raids with MM on Tuesday and Wednesday, and still hopes that the group will attempt RS on one of those nights. Wild could get into any number of PUG raids that always seem to be forming, but he just hasn't been around. Wild lost a bit of enthusiasm for the new dungeon when he checked out the rewards (ie, the loot). In RS 25 man the loot ilevel is 271, which is nice as it is higher than "top end" i264 of current gear (except for Heroic raids). However, neither guild that Wild is involved with has any interest in running RS25. RS10 man loot is ilevel 258, which was a bit of a disappointment, since the last time I looked i258 is lower than i264. There are 12 drops in RS10, but only four of them are usable by a druid. Those four are a cape, gloves, a +hit cloth belt, and a +hit ring. Wild already has a better cape and gloves, so that leaves just two items that Wild would like to have out of RS, both of which would be offspec for Wild and therefore less likely for him to get. It's just hard to get real excited about it.
So, that leaves the overhauled chat system as the only new feature that I haven't talked about yet. Well, it fails. Strike three.
The new chat box is bigger than the old one, and can't be resized as well as the old one. I like to have two chat boxes visible on my screen. One is the usual box where everything said in chat - open channels, party channels, whisper channels, raid channels, everything - appear, and then a smaller second chat box for guild chat and whispers so that I won't miss those in the crowd of other stuff that washes through the main box. Both of those chat boxes fit quite nicely beneath the 25 box raid screen and tank assist boxes and the decurse boxes on the left side of the screen. Not any more. After patch 3.3.5 they no longer fit. The chat boxes overlap the raid screen no matter how much I reduced the size and no matter how much I fussed with it. Frustrating!
So once more Blizzard has made something worse than it was before. That has forced me to go to yet another third party addon. I tested out an addon called Chatter, which completely replaces the current chat box and provides a lot more flexibility - and allows me to fit it into a smaller space. Problem solved. To give you an idea of what I mean, here are a some before and after shots:
Before the patch both chat boxes fit neatly at the bottom left of the screen:
After the patch look at how the chat boxes overlap the raid screen even after I adjusted it as well as I could:
This is what the chat boxes look like now using the addon Chatter. I'm learning to like Chatter a lot.
Lao, level 46, has been bugging Mery to catch up with her level-wise for our Monday night pvp, particularly since Ando is on haitus for a few weeks. Mery managed to get herself in game early on Monday, taking a flight to Feralas to battle the many denizens there and complete a few quests. It was grueling work - not for Mery, but for me. I never have a hangover (really?), but, let's just say it was a rough morning. At least for most of the quests I didn't have to think much and just killed things. Mery made it from level 43 to level 44, and I figured that was pretty good considering how my head kept exploding.
Mery likes to use Sassy as her pet when she solos/quests because the big gorilla is a great tank and Mery rarely has to fend off mobs and can just stand a few feet from the fight and pop away with her big gun. But for pvp she switches to her high damage predator bird, Fleshrypper. Mery swapped out to Fleshrypper to have her pet ready for pvp night, and was shocked to discover that Fleshrypper was only level 39! That's what I get for using Sassy so much. So, it was back to the grind. Mery took Fleshrypper with her into the wild's of Dustwallow Marsh, where the mobs are high enough level that Fleshrypper would get experience but low enough that the bird could hold aggro and save my aching head from having to deal with angry mobs in my face. Pets level pretty fast when their level is below that of their master, but it still took quite awhile to get Fleshrypper all the way from 39 to 43. I figured she'll level to 44 during the pvp night.
I then slept away the rest of the morning (ok, ok, the afternoon, too) and was ready to go Monday night. Lao and Mery lost our first match in Warsong Gulch. We scored the first flag cap, but after that we could not muster up enough offense to retake the alliance flag and lost 3-1. An Arathi Basin match came up after that and, like last week's AB match, the alliance didn't seem to have their heart in it. Lao called for an assault on the Mine when the match first started, and a group of five of us waged a pitched battle with an equal number of alliance also trying to take the mine. We beat them back and then killed them all. Lao and Mery stayed to defend the mine, and ended up dancing with each other when no alliance tried to take it back. The horde soon held all five resource areas and won easily.
Naithipe got her soul essences and had them delivered to Wild, along with some even more rare primal nethers. Wild let it slip that netherweave, heavy knothide, and primal shadows were also involved. When pressed by JB, Wild said Naithipe wanted him to make soulcloth. It turned out that Wild had never learned to make it, and had to go all the way to Silvermoon City to find the recipe for it. No, Wild told JB, he didn't know what she wanted it for.
Too bad Sis gave up tailoring, soulcloth was her specialty. Maybe she could have bribed some info out of Naithipe. Well.. probably not.
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