Tuesday (24 Jan) - The End of Cataclysm

Tuesday (24 Jan) - The End of Cataclysm

There was no maintenance on Tuesday, but lo and behold we get an eight hour maintenance on Wednesday, a day out of sync. The rumor is that Blizz planned to release patch 4.3.2 on Tuesday, but discovered a massive bug and had to slip it a day.

Patch 4.3.2 is now officially here. It's a small patch with some minor class tweaking. The big announcement with this patch is the ability to form same-faction raids across multiple realms among Real ID users. Yawn. They also fixed a raid loot problem when two pieces of the same loot drop. Players were able to roll and win both pieces. Now, you can still roll on both, but if you win one you become ineligible for the second one.

Finally, this patch will also bring the nerf stick to Dragon Soul. The bleeding will be a bit slower than in past raid nerfs, an expected 5% reduction in the health and damage of the denizens of DS. DS will continue to be regularly nerfed another 5% periodically. Guilds that want to combat DS at full strength have the option to turn off the nerf stick.

And that's it for the patch.

The really big news on the heels of this little patch is that Patch 4.3.2 is the LAST PATCH for Cataclysm. There will be no more new content between now and when the next expansion, Mists of Pandaria (MoP), is released "later in the year."

At the time patch 4.3 came out, I wondered aloud if there would be new content between then and MoP, opining that Dragon Soul would be a stripped carcass long before MoP arrives. Apparently, we will all have to feed off the DS corpse longer than we wanted.

For Wild, grinding random Hour of Twilight raids and dungeons through the finders is more fun than the morass of Cata Heroics that Wild hated (and hates), so Wild will likely continue to grind his valor points and improve on his gear.

The nerfs didn't bother Wild with Icecrown Citadel, since it was the only way Wild would get to see the content with his raid-challenged guild. Wild's raid group never got anywhere with Firelands. Wild was forced to get his fix through another guild. Wild got to see 6/7 bosses in FL, leaving out only the end game boss, Ragnaros. Wild just shrugs that off. Wild has defeated Ragnaros before, in Molten Core.

Things are different with DS, though. Wild has already seen all of the content through the raid finder runs. Wild has killed the DS end game boss, Deathwing. Ideally, Wild would love to conquer normal mode DS at it's full strength ... however, it's not realistic. Wild's guild is still sitting at 2/8 bosses in normal mode DS. We'll need the nerfs to bring down the rest of the content and get our i397 gear, which will likely be mandatory to succeed in MoP.

The end game boss story suddenly struck me:

Icecrown Citadel's Lich King - Nerf sticked to the max, but our guild grimly kept after him, going toe to toe 70+ times before killing him. We never gave up, and we brought him down. A grand accomplishment.

Fireland's Ragnaros - Dysfunctional raids, warring guilds, and absent raid leaders made a mess of things. Ragnaros never fell even though the Mf raid still tilts at that windmill once in awhile. A failure.

Dragon Soul's Deathwing - Dead on the same day Wild first stepped into DS via the raid finder. As for the guild raid, it's hard to see how either raid group will be able to beat even the nerfed content, or whether the guild will even care.

Wild thinks about what it would be like to be in a guild where raid progression was something to get excited about.