6.1 Impressions, Observations, Opinions and Gripes

6.1 was released and as I mentioned yesterday I had a lot of plans on what I would check out.  Sadly the most important thing to me I was not able to do.  Boo, bad form blizzard.

Profession Traders:

Don't know what it was like on your server but the only profession trader anyone on my server had was the fur trader.  Sure I know the idea now is to get people to make "friends" and if they do not have the particular visitor they want they can go to a friends garrison to get it.  My tailor did not have the fur trader which meant I needed to visit a friend.  Of my seven level 100 characters the only one to have the fur trader was my warrior.  How many warrior tailors are there out there?

Bad form blizzard, seriously bad form.  Sure random is random but how can no one on the entire server have the ore trader or the leather trader?  I was really looking forward to upgrading my ring and gun as soon as I logged on and was told by blizzard "sucks to be you".  Not a good feeling at all.

Personally I believe there should have been one trader that sold all items and it should have been in every garrison.  Being that did not happen, the least you could have done is not make it share a spawn with the raid quest giver, dungeon quest giver, relic hunter quest giver or world quest giver.  Every garrison should have had some vendor of some sort and they should have not all been the exact same one, fur vendor in my case.  Once again I must say, bad form blizzard, bad form.

If they were going to have the vendor appear in only some garrisons it should have sold all the patterns.  That is my opinion on the matter.

Missions:

I got my BRF mission on my main after getting 2 characters to 660.  A few others in guild told me they had the same experience.  So it seems you need 2 of the appropriate item level to trigger it.  I can live with the change, not a huge one, but I think it would have been better if they left it at only needing one.

Two of my other characters however did not get a BRF mission at all.  Maybe I needed to raid to get it?  I did not need to raid to get the HM missions.  Sure if I wanted better gear on those alts from those missions raiding would be advisable but at least I still got those missions.  On two characters I got at least 2 followers to 660 I did not get a BRF mission at all.  Can we say bad form again?  Apparently it is either bugged or you need to raid to open them up.  Kind of defeats the purpose of having them to help my alts that are not raiding if I need to raid to get them doesn't it?

I should note for some that might not have noticed but you can over level garrison missions as well.  My three 660s on my main only had a 92% chance to complete the mission but when I upgraded them all to 670 they had a 100% chance.  So even if it advises 660, having higher does help.  This is certain as I saw it yesterday.

The work rush order missions appeared on a few of my characters.  Those are nice little additions.  For those that are wondering, if you are on the legendary quest line using the rush order can get you items toward its progression.  I will repeat, yes you can get legendary pieces from the rush orders.  I did.  Now that is good form blizzard.  Finally a plus one for you.

The archeology missions are a nice way to get some quick fragments, I like them.  My main did not get a selfie camera mission but two of my alts did.  So that is 2 out of 7 got the camera mission, so I guess it will not be a first day thing.  One character got a mission for savage blood, one got a mission for 20 primal spirits, one got a mission for a bag of spec specific augment runes, these are all new missions and a nice addition.  I am sure there are other good ones out there, can't wait to see them all.

Pets and Pet Battles:

I could have sworn I read somewhere they were making the pet battles easier?  Not like they needed to be as I personally have a team that can beat any trainer usually with little or no trouble, so I figured this would make them easier.  Boy oh boy was I wrong.

Pet battles have been made harder.  Since when does harder mean easier?  Maybe in blizzards bizarro world harder means easier.  I'll give just one example. 

The trainer in the vale was always a great one where you could level up a new pet, even from level 1.  Have your idol put up sand storm and your level one takes no damage.  Don't work that way now apparently.  No more leveling level one pets that way.  Thanks blizzard, that surely made pet battles easier.

I did not get to try any of the raids for new pets yet but I do have one new pet to report.  After buying the new cooking patterns I went and made myself over 300 of the multistrike food and finally managed to get the lil leftovers pet.  Woot woot, go me.

A free level 25 pet thanks to a stone?  I don't see how anyone would not like that.

Jukebox:

Okay first things first.  Why is this not account wide blizzard?  Seriously I can leave this as the entire comment on this topic and it would say it all but you know me and I won't.  I am quite long winded that way.

I can see needing to go through the beginning quest on all characters to get it on your garrison, I am fine with that, but why are the scrolls not account wide?  Haven't you learned that things which could be considered collections are better off being account wide.  Pets, mounts, heirlooms, toys.

It would have been nice if they did not make the same mistake they made with the blue prints from the garrisons and make them a per character thing.  Guess they did not learn from that.  Even simple little collections like this would go over better, in my opinion, if they were account wide.

I really do not want to travel the world and waste my time on every single character to change the music in my garrison.  I will do it on one and I might even use it, but I am not going to waste my time on alts.  I will do the opening quest just to get the damn quest marker off my screen but the collecting scrolls can go screw itself.  I am not collecting this on every single character blizzard, and I should not have to.  Bad form blizzard, bad form.

I also wonder what is with blizzard and trying to promote PvP with things like this. The alliance need to basically go hug the banshee queen whereas the horde need to stand in front of tyrande and hope she is in a forgiving mood for their intrusion.

Does blizzard really think this is a good way to get people into PvP?  Sending them into an area where they are sure to be slaughtered just for something silly like a song to play in your garrison.  People doing this either want the song or are completion nuts like me that just want to have them all.  They do not want to get into PvP.  If anything I think this would leave a bad taste in someones mouth in terms of PvP having to go into enemy territory and get slaughtered for something like a song.  Seriously blizzard needs to stop adding PvP into things like this.  It has no place what so ever.

Heirlooms:

I cycled through my lowbie characters until I had enough for the 35 heirloom achievement and then stopped looking for them.  I am currently at 40 and I know I have many more once I get around to them.  I think most veteran players like myself will probably have no issue getting the 35 achievement.

Love the mount, it is funny having someone drive you around.  Sucks it does not scale with mount speed, really no use using it outside of that pre 20 level.  But still a fun little mount I guess.

Did you see the prices to upgrade that stuff?  I feel bad for the people that did not have most of it already.  Ouch.  I bet there will be more people that will be siding with me now saying they want the return of justice points.  It will cost someone a mini fortune to get all those things if they wanted them and never had any.  Hope you are good at making gold my friend.

Stacks and Numbers:

It was nice to see stack sizes increased greatly on many things like primal spirits.  That was a great update.  I do have one request however, how about making all warlords based crafting materials stack to 1000 as well.   It is needed, really really needed.  My mains bank is filled with herbs, my secondary alchemists bank is filled with herbs and my third is just starting to fill his.  And that is not even counting the stack or so every other character hangs on to in case it is the trading post material of the day.  Yes, stacks of all warlords based crafting materials being increased to 1000 would be most welcome.  You did it with some things, now do it right and do it with everything from warlords.

Have you noticed that now when you go to craft something it does not show your commodities listed like **/20 but 8.7K/20.  That is freaking awesome.  I love it.  Such a simple change and it really made my day to see that.  Little things matter and this one was a great change, one I did not even see mentioned.  Please do not tell me that I am the only person that notices things like this and the only person that loves the change as simple as it is.  Someone else out there has to be a weirdo like me.

Work Orders:

There was one major change to work orders.  A button to do all at once instead of hitting it over and over and that is a good change.  Nothing else to say there.  Or maybe there is.

You can now get missions that reward you rush orders to rush complete 5 orders.  You can also buy rush orders for garrison resources if you happen to have a fair deal of them.  This too is pretty nice if you happen to be flush with supplies.  Even more so knowing you can get some of the items needed for the legendary quest line through rushing, but still at the very low chance, so it is not really a reliable way to do so.  But it surely is something worth doing if you happen to get the rush orders for free from a mission.  Don't know if I would ever go so far as buying rush orders trying to move the legendary quest alone.  Unless of course I ended the week needing one.  Then I might.

Twitter:

What is this twitter you speak of?  Best thing I have to say about this is that I never even noticed it was added to the game and that is absolutely fantastic on every level.  Not only did I not notice it was added but at no point ever while playing did the game try to push me to activate it or even let me know it was there.  Nice move here blizzard, not shoving stuff like this down our throats.  I appreciate that a lot.

BRF LFR Wing 2:

While not actually a part of 6.1 as it is 6.0 content being time released slowly but being it came out at the same time 6.1 did I will comment on it here.

We are back to the days of LFR being a nightmare.  Sorry folks but blizzard learned nothing from HM wing 1 where everyone, including me, loved the LFR and was willing to do it because it was as it should be, face roll even with horrible players.  We are back to nightmare city.

The last boss should be receiving a nerf soon, very soon, I can sense it.  Actually I would not be surprised if they already nerfed it and being I did not check before writing this I had not noticed it.  We wiped and wiped and wiped.

I must admit our first wipe was my fault too.  I own up to my mistakes and I made one huge mistake.  But it was not just me, it was a few others as well.  When we all got grabbed I had myself positioned in a good place for maximum barrage coverage.   Just like a good hunter should right?  Well, not in LFR at least.  I hit barrage and broke out nearly everyone almost instantly and wiped half the raid.  Who knew the hands would shatter so quickly if you sneezed on them.  I apologize to everyone that I was in that raid with.  It was not my intention to kill you all.

We wiped because of that phase multiple times.  After the first time I behaved myself.  I knew I could break people out easy so I did not attack until his cast was almost done.  Sure I broke people out quickly, but we all still died because apparently this LFR is like all others and carried on the backs of healers and the healers could not keep us up taking the constant damage in the hands.  On well, determination fixed it.  That is the only reason we got it down.  Had to wait until determination was high enough for the healers to help us survive that phase.  The first time we made it through that phase with minimal losses we finished it.

Yeap, this needs to be nerfed, huge.  One decent geared player can wipe the group by breaking people out to quick and poor healers will ensure you need lots of stacks of determination before you can survive it.

Bag Space:

I must make a note of another issue I have with the additions.  So many more things to fill our bag space, really?  All the different mission things alone have to be worth 20 or so bag spaces if you happen to have them all.  Blizzard, thanks for all the space you gave us this expansion, but it is already all used, stop giving us more junk to take up space.  Please please please.  Or just give us more space again.

Invasions:

I have not had one yet so I will leave this just as a comment on it and to ask if anyone got platinum and how was it?  Did they increase spawn rate.  I sure hope they did.  Some are hard enough to get gold on sometimes with bad RNG for spawns.

I did a shadowmoon the other day to help a friend and we did not get gold.  I've been getting golds even with 2 weak players since the expansion came out.  What it seemed to be was we had bad RNG.  We had me and two other really strong players.  We were killing things the second they spawned.  The entire run we were all just standing there waiting for things to spawn.  Nothing lived more than 3 seconds when it spawned.  We only managed a 958.  We had killed everything offered to us.  It was 100% impossible to get gold.  We got unlucky with mobs not spawning, no big mobs to attack buildings, and no scared people.  Nothing, so we did not get 1000.

I sure as hell hope they major league increased the spawn rate of the mobs in these things and stuff like that does not happen.  If RNG can keep us from gold, how the hell could we ever make platinum.  Someone suggested to me, next time don't kill them so fast.  Makes sense, but isn't that the idea?  To kill them fast so you get more to kill?  I hope blizzard fixed problems like this otherwise platinum will be more about RNG and not about skill.  It will be "if" you get enough mobs to kill for it and sorry, but that is bad design.

Endnote:

For me the main "content" of this patch was the fact I would be able to upgrade two pieces of gear when it came out.  As I was not able to do so because of the horrible design of the profession vendors as far as I see it 6.1 was a complete failure.  If you can not upgrade your gear when the upgrades come out, seems like a failure to me.  My opinion only, I will get them in time and I don't really need them now with the content I am pushing, but it should not have been left up to RNG if I can upgrade or not.  I am so very not happy about that.  I am never very happy with anything that is about RNG, more so new stuff like this that many people like myself were looking forward too as the only thing that excited us with 6.1.