Tuesday (12 Oct) - And This is only a Patch!

Tuesday (12 Oct) - And This is only a Patch!

I must say up front that the improved graphics look wonderful. The colors are brighter and the image is sharper. Nice work. I'd also have to say that for such a monstrous upgrade the number of nasty problems have been relatively few. I've been able to login with no trouble, and have been disconnected very few times. Blizzard ran three rolling restarts during the day, two of them unannounced, but there have been no hard crashes that I was aware of. And most everything is working as intended, with a few exceptions that haven't hurt the Wild Family directly.

The troubles that I have had are with my addons. Testing addons is a time consuming process, and I am still far from complete. Wild does have a working interface now, although it is not the interface I had before the patch. Problems that affect raiding are the most serious for Wild, so it was pretty disappointing when the raidframes addon Xperl did not survive the move to the patch. The addon authors are working on it, but as of yet it remains broken. Wild is going to be forced into testing the standard Blizzard raidframes, updated for the patch, but still a bare bones shell of what I have (had) with Xperl. I hate the way the standard raidframes look. The boxes for each player are too big and have laughably inadequate resizing capability and can't be moved. But it will have to do at least for one night of raiding. Fortunately, my button/bar addon, Dominos, is working with no issues. My pre-patch Dominos profiles actually worked (where Xperl's failed). I'm also stuck with the standard Blizzard chat boxes again - another outsized, can't resize it properly thing. The addon Chatter is badly broken and the one fix attempted so far locked up my computer. Going to avoid that one for a couple of rounds of fixes. Many other helpful but not critical addons I've ignored until I'm comfortable with what I do have.

All that said, Wild reached a point where I needed to test all this stuff out to see if I could actually play effectively. Wild signed up as a healer for a random five man Heroic. I had to wait a whole 50 seconds to get a group. Healers get groups fast. I can't recall the dungeon, but I remember one of the bosses was Ingvar the Plunderer. One of those viking style dungeons. I was using the standard Blizzard raid frames for the party/group frames, a new feature from the Patch that I really like. It's the same bare bones setup, but for a five man group it was more than adequate.

Druid healers no longer heal in our Tree Form. That went away with the patch, may our tree of life rest in peace. Druid tree form is now a special ability usable once every three minutes and lasting 15 seconds. The rest of the time Wild will be in his every day caster gear. I'll get used to it, I guess, but it sure seemed strange. Wild must have long forgotten the early days of druid healing when we'd never heard of tree of life.

Stats were also completely changed and the numbers were eye popping the first time I saw them. Pre-patch Wild's health was 20,977. After the patch, in the same gear, it was 31,987. Honestly, though, it doesn't mean much, as the damage we take will be that much higher, so in my view it basically evens out.

What I wanted to know was how my spells worked when I healed and how much mana was I using. On the test realm folks were saying that mana was not an issue, even though a specific goal of Blizzard's with the changes was to force healers out of the "spam heals on everyone endlessly because I never run out of mana" style of healing. A five man heroic won't tell me much about that, but it would at least give me one measure of the impact.

So, here are my immediate thoughts about healing after the patch:

1) Holy cow, my Nourish spell takes FOREVER to cast! Spells with longer cast times now take even longer before they hit their target. Pre-patch Wild never had to wait on a spell. It was cast and forget (and maybe a quick peek to make sure it had finished). Now I found myself WAITING for the spell to finish, anxious to get another spell going. That was not a good feeling. Wild started his day with 24.52% haste (which speeds up spell casting), but after seeing how long those casts were taking I plan to push my haste numbers up a lot further. Already Wild has used the new reforging ability to change +crit to +haste on both his T10 shoulders and a ring. It's now at 25.98% and I have more work to do on that. A least I have Nourish down to slightly under two seconds to cast, which is awful but not unbearable.

2) Mana was a non-issue. Wild never got below 97% mana the whole fight, even when our tank died. Well, the silly tank ran off and left his group. He was a paladin, so I guess he figured he could tank and heal both, but guess what, he needed Wild and he left me behind. Wild and the other players arrived just in time to see the tank fall and see all those mobs turn against us. We had a DK, though, and he picked up the adds and we were fine. That paladin didn't leave Wild behind after that.

3) It's possible for Wild to pull aggro again. The paladin tank was competent, but several times Wild's heals got the attention of mobs and Wild took some hits. Wild found he needed to wait another heartbeat or two before dropping that first heal to make sure the tank had firm control. Paladins have been complaining loudly about what they feel are nerfs to pally tanking. IF that's true then Wild got a first hand look at that problem.

It was an easy romp and Wild got some practice in. I felt a little more on edge, but I think that was because my interface is very different and because I didn't know what to expect. Looking at the healing numbers afterward didn't tell me all that much, either. They were about the same as pre-patch numbers in heroics, but then the mobs and even the bosses die pretty fast, so it's hard to make a comparison.

Thinking about tonight's raid, I'm betting we will give ICC a first shot instead of the safer (and probably boring) option of Naxxramas. But we'll see.

I have also been laboriously working through all my other toons. Poor guys and gals are getting ghetto talent trees as I am not spending a lot of time researching the "best" specs, particularly when there is still a lot of disagreement on what "best" is now. It's a pain having to find a trainer for each and every one of them, not to mention seeing profession trainers as well. DER and Sis have already heard Philly's lamentations about issues with her Inscription profession, which in total is an improvement on a pretty broken profession, but still has a ways to go.

Enough. I need to get back in there!