Tuesday (12 Oct) - Patch 4.0.1 is Here

Tuesday (12 Oct) - Patch 4.0.1 is Here

It took two hours this morning (Tuesday) to download the last piece of code then install the full, several gig patch. The new Launcher looks cool. Of course, that's all that I can access right now, as maintenance will continue at least until Noon, and almost certainly for longer than that.

Update #1 : Blizzard is now saying the realms will be up at 2pm. Uh huh. Sure.

Update #2: Blizzard is now saying the realms will be up at 4pm. I have some more tidbits culled from various sources. Hunters, who can only use three general use bags because the 4th bag slot had to have a quiver of arrows or an ammo pouch in it, can now use that 4th slot once again since arrows and ammo have been removed from the game. Hunters get the last laugh, too. Not only do they get their 4th bag slot back, the gear slot that used to bold the ammo being used has been redesigned to hold a special, hunter only bag in that slot. So, instead of having only three bags, one less than everyone else, they now have five, one more than everyone else. How about armor? Pre-patch there was no penalty for a player wearing gear of a lower type than the best type they could use. Wild, for example, can wear cloth or leather, leather being the best all other things being equal. Well, Wild does wear some cloth gear because the overall stats on that gear are better, Well now that will hurt, since wearing your best type gear gives a stat buff to the gear. If Wild wears cloth, he won't get the buff. I just heard about that today. Sigh. Ok, now about Glyphs! Glyphs are buffs that go in six special slots. Scribe make them and sell them. The glyphs are consumed when used, so if you want to change a glyph you have to buy them each time. The patch changed all that. Now there are nine slots to fill, and now you only have to buy a glyph once, and you've learned it and can use it as many times as you want. That seems to suck for Scribes. However, the catch is that once you've put glyph into a slot it can only be removed by using a special dust - dust that is made by scribes. Those scribes (Philly!) are going to get their once of blood - I mean gold. I'm going to like this new method, I think. Better hope I can get logged in at 4pm, or I'll be hunting around for more things to talk about.

Update #3: Blizzard is now saying the realms will be up at 5pm. This is a game we play every single time there is a significant upgrade. Blizzard pretends they have a clue and we dutifully try to login each time knowing that the servers will still be down. But what if they are up?

Monday night I prepared for the incoming patch by cleaning up the user interfaces of all my toons, clearing old addons that I don't use anymore, and basically doing the housekeeping chores that I have been neglecting. I checked my addons for updates, and there were very few. I'm not sure if that is a good thing or a bad thing. The only major addon that has an upgrade for the patch is Xperl. I saved Xperl profiles for all my toons and I hope that will be good enough so that I won't have to recreate a lot of time consuming work when I install the upgrade. My UI can survive almost anything except a failure with Xperl or Dominos.

After logging off for the last time I also made a thorough backup of all of the critical folders in case something goes very badly wrong.

Part of this morning has been spent building new talent trees for Wild and Philly specifically. Talent trees underwent a massive overhaul and have to be rebuilt from scratch. I dithered over Philly for a bit. She is still main spec Shadow for ranged DPS, but I wasn't sure what I wanted her off spec to be. I love DISC healing spec, which is her current off spec, but I have never really gotten comfortable with it and as a result she just hasn't been a very good healer. Holy priest healing is a lot closer to druid healing, even more so now with the changes in the patch. I'm going with Holy off spec.

DER's extended family has already completed their research and are ready to go the instant they can get in game, according to Sin during Monday night's dungeon crawling with Java and Esor. I'm afraid the rest of Wild's family is going to get overhauled in bits and pieces over the next several days, and will have to be fit in around Wildshard, who will have priority. Philly will get some time, too, but her early in game time will be spent on glyph making and gem making duties as needed by Wild and everyone else in all our families as we restructure our gear to meet the new requirements of the patch. I hope Philly has enough materials to meet the demand. They are likely to be extremely pricey for a while.

The three of us did run some dungeons Monday night, primarily the Scarlet Monastery (SM) graveyard, but also some Razorfen Kraul. We then attempted to tackle the Houndmaster in SM with just the three of us (or four, counting Sin's combat pet). That was probably the most fun of all, even though we were badly outnumbered and out leveled by the mid-30s elite mobs. In two and threes we could handle the attackers, even though the three of us were only level 28/29. The Houndmaster, though, is boss level difficulty and has elite hounds to help him. Esor tried to tank first with all of us doing DPS. We died. Then we tried tanking with the combat pet (a bear) and Java healing. That was actually working, but Java ran out of mana for healing halfway through the fight. We died. We tried kiting the Houndmaster out of the area, hoping to separate him from his hounds. No joy. We died. But it was hysterical fun anyway. We hung around for a bit to see if we could get into a pvp battleground, but it was closing in on midnight, when the servers would go down, and most of the server population had already logged off. A great way to ring in the patch. With friends.

I will continue to update this throughout the day, assuming I don't get swept in so deep I can't extricate myself.