Logging Into 6.0.2: Impressions on Live

There are many tid bits of things I want to talk about but I will lead off by saying I did not really do all that much because there was just so much to do.  I did however manage not to get sucked into going to the blasted lands and if anything that is thanks to the fact there was so much I wanted to do otherwise.  I am keeping track of all the gold I get mailed to me, when I am done opening all my characters mails I will surely share that.  Personally I am wondering how much gold I will end up with from the removal of valor and justice.

The Character Screen:

Of course my hunter would be the first character I was going to log into.  It is my main after all and as such it would get the majority of my attention.  But I wanted to take a look at all my characters new faces before logging in.  While some of them I have seen because of character transfers on the beta others I had not seen what they were going to look like until just now.

Some of the new faces were not exactly what I would have liked.  They do not even look remotely like what they are supposed to look like.  My gnome mage looks like a meth head, my human warlock looks like a celebrity but I could not place who it was, but it most definitely looks familiar.  My priest looks so sad, almost depressed and that is depressing for me.

Other characters looked fine.  Of course my hunter I was already used to.  I had been playing with that face on beta for a while so there was nothing really to get used to.  My druid, paladin and shaman all look fantastic, better than I had expected.

So with pluses and minuses the character redesign face wise was best described as "eh".  It wasn't great over all and it wasn't bad over all.  I can most definitely see the people that put more stock into what their characters look like being extremely upset with some of these but the only one that really bugged me was my gnome mage.  Being I do not look too closely at the faces I can live with it.

I did however visit the barber shop for some plastic surgery on my gnome mage as it was the only character I felt compelled to do so on because he looked that bad.  Sadly after surfing through all the gnome male faces one by one and taking a good look at each one and trying to figure out which one I would like most I came to the conclusion I would just leave it as is.  There are no faces that even remotely resemble what my gnome looked like before.  So instead of wasting gold for a face change from one horrible face to another horrible face I will just leave it as is and consider a race change instead.

An Unexpected Surprise:

When I logged into my hunter not only did I get the achievement that awarded me the shado-master title, because shado-pan monastery gold, which I did not manage to get, was removed from the meta requirement.  Being I was on the beta I expected that would happen, even if I was still trying to get groups for gold challenge modes.  One thing I did get I was really not expecting however. I managed to get 3 new mounts mailed to me which I will say must have been a bug but it was one I will admit I did not report and will not report.

When you completed all the challenge modes on silver you got an egg you could turn in for a phoenix mount, which is really pretty.  You only get one egg which means you only get one mount.  Now maybe this was not a bug, maybe they mentioned it somewhere, but I never saw it.  When I logged in the other 3 phoenix mounts were in my mail box.  So now I have all the challenge mode mounts on one character.  Pretty cool if you ask me.

If it was a bug I hope I get to keep them, I like the mounts and I am a mount collector, if it was intended and never mentioned anywhere that is a pretty cool little unexpected gift for having all silvers.  If it was mentioned somewhere that we would get them all anyway and I completely missed it, whoops.  Either way, I like my three new unexpected mounts.

I Hate Typing Delete:

I logged into my hunter first, of course, and immediately went to my bank to open my reagents tab.  I hit the deposit all option and then started to organized things in there.  First things first, I took my spirits and motes of harmony back out.  They will all find their way to my tailor which will in turn make cloth and bags.  I like bags.

I had had a 36 slot herb bag filled on my hunter, as he is an herbalist, and it worked out to be 7 spaces in my reagents tab.  The beauty of a 200 stack, I am really going to dig this. 7 spaces taken up is so much better than 36 spaces taken up.

After I did that my intention was to switch out my herb bag with one of the royal satchels in my bank.  It would give me extra herb space in my bank and extra bag space on my character for traveling.  Being I can craft directly from the bank now I no longer needed to carry around herbs with me for when someone asks if anyone had a flask or some potions.  I can just craft them from my bank.  So this means carrying around an herb bag on me is wasted space.  It used to be required when raiding, now it isn't and I like that change, but feel a little slighted that I have a "wasted" profession bag, but no worries as I will surely find a use for it.

To do the switch however I needed to clear out my bags first, and there was so much to be cleaned out.  First pass through my bank bags was cleaning up and taking out my challenge mode / proving grounds gear as well as some other gear I had been saving "just in case".  You know, that extra warforged belt with hit in case I needed more hit so I could switch it out, the chest piece that I might switch out but do not need because I got the mythic one some time ago and there is no way I would switch out to a heroic one after that, things like that.  I took all of that stuff out first and vendored it off, no need for that clutter any longer.

Then I went back to the bank and being I have a second slot of void storage that means there is more stuff I can put in there and more rooms in my bags.  I pulled out things to throw in there and once again cursed blizzard for not allowing me to put gear with the "unique" tag in the void storage.  Either way, that cleared up some more space.  And correct me if I am wrong, but I could have sworn that on the beta it cost 1000 gold to open the second void storage tab.  Well, on live it was free, and on live it is now nearly half full already.  And just think, I am not one of those people that is a transmog freak and I use that much space.  I feel bad for the people that love to mog.  They could probably use 10 tabs of void storage.  Well, if they keep this rate going, maybe you could expect a new tab every expansion.

Then back to the bank and toy box time.  I got a toy box achievement when I logged in from toys they automatically put into my toy box for me.  That was kind of cool, well, actually that was really cool.

See, what blizzard did, to help the people that had deleted quest related toys or archeology toys, was they did a scan of your character and if you had ever discovered the toy while digging or got the toy from a quest marked complete, it automatically put it in your toy box.  That way, even if you had thrown it away, you got it back.  Good looking out blizzard.

But one side effect of that was that I still have all these toys and I can not actually just throw them away.  I need to type delete each time I want to throw them away.

So while it was a great thing blizzard did automatically putting those things in our toy boxes the side effect was I needed to type delete at least 200 times yesterday throwing away toys on all my characters that were already in my toy box.  First world problems of course, but still slightly annoying when there is so much more I wanted to do and this did eat up a fair deal of time.

Dungeon Time:

Of course after a drought of over 2 years with no new five man content people wanted to do the new dungeon, even people that needed nothing from them.  I figured, as a tank was needed, I could use this as a change to grab a few items for my tanks that actually needed stuff from there.

I was suffering from major lag spikes, as in moving every other second.  My latency was fine home and world, it was just jumpy.  I did not bring my druid, monk or DK because they all have okay gear and really do not need anything but my warrior and my paladin were a different story all together.

The dungeon was easy enough but I did wipe us once.  You could even say I did it on purpose.  When I got to leeroys room I ran in yelling leeroy jenkins and pulled the whole room.  We killed most of the mobs but did end up wiping.  Whoops.  But hey, this is about fun and I had a lot of fun doing it.  If the damn things did not chain stun me we would not have wiped.  Live and learn, or die and learn as it may be, but it as fun none the less.

I manged to get my paladin a 550 ring to replace the 496 one it was wearing.  I also got some gloves for my paladin because even after all this time and so many world boss kills none of the celestial bosses or ordos was kind enough to cough up any gloves so those 550 gloves were a nice upgrade to 535 timeless ones.

My warrior wanted the two handed weapon because I wanted to test out one of the OP DPS specs for warriors now and I did not have a weapon for it.  Almost bought the 489 one with timeless coins the other day but didn't, now I am glad I did not.  I got the 550 two hander my first time in there.

So my paladin nabbed 2 pieces it needed the first time in there and my warrior one piece it needed its first time in there.  Seems like today was my lucky day.

Lucky Day:

So I figured it was time to pop back on my hunter and test out that apparent luck I am having, and the stat squish with soloing old content at the same time.  Maybe if I were to do some of those old raids for mount drops I might get one today.

A guild mate was leveling, on a day like this I might question that, but he asked me if I could run him through a dungeon quickly, and of course I said okay.  He was in northrend and I figured I could run him through and then hit up Maly and VoA if the alliance owned it.

After I ran him through the dungeon, which was as easy as ever, and managed to bug out one boss because I killed it too fast, I dropped him off at a questing hub and headed over to give maly a try.  I dropped group, switched it to 25 man legacy raid, and entered the eye of eternity with no expectations really, as I have been doing this for a while and on multiple characters each week for months now.

I could see the buff when soloing older content working for us, big time, because while I usually get maly to 4% or less depending on the character I am on before phase 2 starts, this time around I had him at 1 heath while he was doing his little speech before even flying away to start phase two.  I actually had to double check to make sure I was on 25 man because I thought maybe I accidentally put it on 10 being I almost killed him before even even started his little role play speech.  So yeah, the buff does make us stronger, not like I needed it for this one, but it is nice to see it in action.

I went through the motions and when we got to the mounted part of combat I hit 1 once and he was dead.  When I flew over to loot the gem I had no expectations.  When I saw the azure drake in there I was so happy.  Once less fight to farm for a mount and one more thing to cross off my list.  That makes for 4 new mounts on patch day.  It has been a pretty good patch day for me.

I did VoA, all four bosses, and knocked out a quick onyxia as well, but nothing to report on that front.  Hey, I am not going to complain, I got one mount I had been farming for a long time and I am happy with that.

Playing With Numbers:

I then went to test out my hunter numbers on the dummy seeing if that 12% boost to survival did anything to help.  I started off slow as in 400 DPS slow and climbed up.  I made it to 3800 DPS and leveled out there.

Immediately I thought to myself, what the hell am I doing wrong.  I know hunters are hurting but they are not hurting that bad.  I know I am not one of the great hunters, but I am a hell of a lot better than that.  I could not even top out over 4000 DPS and it was really sad.

It was then someone told me that I should not use the dummy all the way on the right, it is not the right level.  Well now, that explains a lot.  I see now, it is a ?? mob.  Oops.

I spent the better part of half an hour just pounding away, on the correct dummy this time, and I capped out at 9800 DPS, with no buffs, no food, no flask or no potions of course.  Most of the time I fluttered around 9300 DPS bottom to that 9800 DPS top and I think it would be safe to say that I can do between those numbers with no buffs what so ever.  Still feels as if I were doing something wrong however.

It was sad.  Sure I could kill old content really fast, but seeing those numbers and seeing everyone else sitting at the dummies, in less gear than I, doing 13K and 15K, I decided to just log off for the night and come back tomorrow fresh headed.  I almost felt as if I was drunk from drinking in all the new stuff.

I'll clear more bags tomorrow, I'll type delete another 200 times tomorrow, I try another spec for my hunter tomorrow, and I will raid tomorrow.  But I will try not to dwell on the numbers even if they are upsetting.

Many Questions, Handle Them:

Over the course of trying to do everything for myself and with all my attempts to be completely selfish, and yes I wanted to be, I still ended up answering 100s of questions.  From guild, on voice chat, in trade, in whispers. 

As I said, it was expected that most players had no idea what was going on.  I must have had to explain how to enable out of date addons a few dozen times to people saying nothing worked.  I had to explain to 4 hunters that stampede is no longer baseline and then be yelled at by one of them like it was my fault it was no longer baseline.  I had to explain there was no valor any more at least 10 times.  I had to tell dozens of people "they removed that talent".  I also had at least 20 people tell me, when I said "that was removed", why didn't they warn us.  I said they did, but all those people said they never knew.  As I said, blizzard is beyond horrible at sharing information with their players and times like this are proof of that.

Even if I had intended to keep to myself, to do my own things, I still ended up playing the role of helper.  It is just in my nature I guess.  Even if I am sure I started getting more than a bit surly with my answers as the night went on, from having to answer the same questions a million times.  I think I am going to make another post after this one with a FAQs that I had from yesterday.  Maybe it will help some others.

I was expecting most people not to know what was going on, and I was right, but it seems there were a lot that did know what was going on, at least in part, that I had not expected would be the type to know.

Play the Game:

Setting up my hunters bar and knowing what was gone was no big deal as I had played so much on the beta.  I already knew what was going on, but for most of my other classes it was a case of what did I lose and trying to remember as I was going along.

When I logged on to my characters I would ask on vent, to see who knew the classes best, what ability was I missing.  I logged into my mage and asked, my #1 and #5 abilities are gone, what was there.  On my DK I asked my #3 ability is gone, what was there.  It made for a fun game, and really did tell me a lot of who knows what class.  One of my guild mates, whom I knew to be the most knowledgeable player in the guild, nailed nearly every ability that was gone just based on me saying what keybind they used to be.  When you can say "my shift 3" is gone and someone can say, oh that was this ability, you can really tell they know a lot about the game.

Some abilities disappeared from my bar that made no sense what so ever.  Like mangle disappeared from my bear, but I still have mangle.  Death coil disappeared from my DK, but I still have death coil.  Sometimes things are weird, but there is a reason behind it disappearing from my bar.

Loved all those question marks sitting all over my bars on my priest for abilities I had mouse over macros for that were now gone.  Seeing what I lost and then seeing the addition of things like holy nova make me wonder, what the hell were they thinking.  Spirit shell is ten thousand times better than holy nova could ever be when it comes to usefulness.

It is going to take a lot of getting used to when I play the characters I do not often play and try to figure out what is missing.  It will happen when you use the character.  Like on my warrior, my shift three was missing, and I had no freaking clue what it was.  Can you tell how often I tank on my warrior?  It wasn't until I went to hit it and it was not there.  Ah, storm bolt used to be there.  Oh well, at least now I know.

So for my alts it will be a case of getting out there and playing on them.  Best way to get used to changes is to play with them.   So get out there and play.  But don't forget to clean up those bags too.  I'll be doing more of the same later today.  Lots to do, lots and lots to do.

Sometimes this game feels like it goes from having nothing to do, to having too much to do.  I wish blizzard would release things in smaller bunches sometimes instead of saving everything up for one huge release of a lot of stuff all at once.  It feels like feast or famine gaming, or is it just me that feels that way?