Wednesday, August 5, 2009

Patch 3.2: First Impressions

It was a pretty typical patch day for me. Lots of lag, broken addons, and I even had a short queue when I logged in. You may not be real happy with my first impressions. My guild doesn't raid on Tuesdays, so I didn't experience the new raid and I didn't even get into the new 5-man. That does not mean I was not busy on my first day. Here is what I was up to.

New Eclipse:

It felt very odd at first. In fact, I had forgotten about the change while I was running a 5-man and it kid of shocked me at first. We were working on a boss and I was going through my normal rotation and all of a sudden Solar Eclipse proced on the first SF cast after the buff. It just felt way to soon and just strange. It will be interesting to see how it feels tonight when I get in a raid.

Goblinish Activities:

I don't claim to be a goblin, but I am trying to make more money off the AH and take advantage of temporary situations. The only pre-patch position I took was to buy several stacks of Titanium Ore, to try and capitalize on the Epic gem feeding frenzy that was going to take place when the patch was released. When I looked at the AH when I got home from work, my position seemed like it was going to pay off. Gems were selling for 350 - 400g. Stacks of Ore were selling for about the same. The big question I had was do I sell the Ore or do I prospect it and sell the gems.

I ended up prospecting the or and got a decent haul. I put all the Gems on the AH and most sold. Oddly enough it was the blue gems I had the biggest issue with. In the end, I've made a little bit of gold. I wish I had taken out a larger position, but this opportunity has definitely past. Gem prices have already been cut in half after the first day feeding frenzy.

The other funny thing I saw was that in all the chaos people seemed to forget about other parts of the market. For example, there were no Chaotic Skyflare Meta gems on the AH. I put several on the AH at way above market price and most of them sold. The Flask prices on my server also rebounded a little bit.

All in all, I didn't make a lot of gold, but it gave me great experience for the next patch and gave me a little more confidence to take some positions.

Isle of Conquest:

When I was buying gems I noticed that I was just a few hundred shy of being able to buy another gem with Honor. So, I took this opportunity to try out the new BG. For those of you that don't know IoC is kind of a combination of several BGs that have come before. The best way to describe it is AV/AB + Vehicles, and I had no idea what I was doing. It has the Cap and Hold aspect that you find in AB and EoT, but it also has the Kill the Boss aspect that you find in AV. Of course, I knew none of this since I paid very little attention to the PvP aspects of the patch before release.

That said, I did have fun. It was very lagging, and I didn't know anyone in the BG, but Alliance won and I got the honor needed to get a new gem. It's not going to spur me into a lot of PvP play, but I think it is something that the PvPers will enjoy.

Daily Quests:

I'm not exalted with The Silver Covenant so I didn't do any of the new dailies, but they did change the old AT dailies. They basically made them a little more difficult to complete and it makes me wish I had finished this up before the patch. First off, the two scourge quests are now different, so you can't just kill 15 mobs and complete both quests. The second thing was they changed the number of commanders you have to kill in the jousting quest. It may have been the lag and the number of people trying to complete them, but it took forever to kill 3 commanders. I can't wait until I am done with this whole thing.

I also did the Heroic daily which was Drak'Tharon Keep. It was a pug with what seemed to be a bunch of casual players. I didn't expect it to be hard but it was beyond easy. The hardest part about it was getting into the instance. Everyone and their mother was running instances last night so it took us 10 minutes to zone in. If it had been a guild run with chain pulls I'm sure we could have completed the instance in 15 minutes. Now I just need to do it for the next week or two straight so that I can get 25 EoTs to get the new idol.

Addons:

The biggest disappointment of the night for me was how few of my addons were updated. I usually log in and most of the main ones have a new version out, but I think I updated 30% of my addons at most. Hopefully this won't present a big problem for raiding tonight.

Toon Update:

Graylo - Our raiding has hit a little bit of a snag. Like most guilds, we are having a lot of absences due to vacations and such which is slowing down progress, but we've also seemed to have lost some of our focus. The good news is we recognize the problem and the guild leaders are taking some steps to try and correct the issues.

Other than that Graylo has been trying to complete the AT dailies and get ready for raid. I am in the process of updating all of my gems to epic gems. Thank goodness I have a large stock pile of emblems.

I am also thinking about dropping herbalism on him and picking up Inscription. My original plan was to level Grayvik up and make him my herbalist/inscriptionist and have Graylo pick up jewelcrafting instead of herbalism. With the changes to jewelcrafting that doesn't seem to make sense anymore and I was unsure what to do with Graylo's second profession.

After thinking about it a little bit I think I am going to keep Grayvik a herbalist/skinner and have Graylo pick up Inscriptions. I already have most of the herbs to level it up, and I don't really do any farming anymore, so it wouldn't be a big loss to not have Herbalism on a level 80 toon. I may make the switch over the weekend. Please let me know if you know of a good way to power level inscriptions.

Graypal and Grayfel: These guys are really just profession mules for me at the moment so not a lot has happened. I do need to try and get Graypal into the new 5man though to try and pick up some more gear.

Grayvik: He is now in Outland and progressing quickly. I went into the zone at level 58, and wasn't able to pick up some of the quest when I wanted to but after a couple of quick runs through HFP and BF I was back on track very quickly. The funny thing about it right now is being able to fly. I didn't buy the epic land mount when I hit level 60 because I new it would be cheaper when the patch hit. So, I went from the slow land mount to flying in a day. Its just a little strange.

Graybel - I used up all of my rested XP on Grayvik so I put a little effort into the shaman. I started leveling him using Brian Kopps guide, and I'm now trying to level him up using the Zygor guide. The problem is that due to all the rested XP I am way ahead of both guides, and they are very different in the beginning. For example, the Kopp guide has you going to level 20 in the Draenei starting area. The Zygor guide has you only going to about 12. So, switching from one guide to the other has been difficult, but I think it is all worked out now.

Final Note:
So that is my experience with the patch. Let me know what you guys think.

25 comments:

lyrics said...

Yeah. I'm feelin' ya on most of the things in this post. Lag was insane last night, and I also wish I had finished the Argent Tournament before 3.2, the new dailies are kind of annoying.

My UI was mostly effed up completely for the most part, and the new Eclipse kept throwing me off. Its going to take a little getting used to it, especially remembering which spell to spam during the other Eclipse's CD, especially if you are trying to pay attention to other things or lead raids.

Filppula said...

My guild went into the new Coliseum raid on 25s and the Northrend Beasts encounter was pretty easy. I highly recommend looking at Matticus' Guide to the encounter to get you ready. We also split into 10s and did the Northrend Beasts encounter. One of our groups ended up downing it after a few attempts, but both groups had issues with the Burning Bile / Paralyzing Toxin debuff. 25s are lot more forgiving it looks like.

On a side note, we went into Ulduar and found out that there are lots of bugs popping up. Specifically, XT was spawning a ridiculous amount of adds - we had a dozen Bomb Bots, 2 pummelers, and at least 40 scrapbots after the first phase. Reports on the WoW forums suggest to do Hard Mode to combat this. Also, the sticking to one side of XT's room does not work anymore; the nearest piles will spawn adds now. I heard that FL also had an issue with still getting buffs from towers that were destroyed (we did 4 towers so it didn't affect us). Hopefully, these will be hotfixed before raid time tonight.

kingfelix said...

Have you noticed the change of balance of power talent? The tooltip says that it increases your chance to hit by 6&, but testing my dps on a dummy with 211 hit rating from gear (8.04%), FF on it and that talent I still miss. Maybe an error?

Phil said...

Well, like every patch thus far it killed my modem. Once second log in one sec crash. I forget to log out in a area rathern than a city when patches are comming... I dont know why this happens but my lat was up in the 2ks and i didnt get a chance to see the framerate... for soemone whi is used to 80fps on the advrage I dont understand why this happens... So I wait till morning direct connect my internet to the hardline ask a GM to move my toon from an alt that is somewhere not populated, and I am off to the North. The new 5 man was fun though I did forget to re-arm myself after the mounted phase.
I did some heroics and found that not all the bosses drop the new Emblums, weird. All and all it's just another Bliz atempt to keep us on our toes. Can't wait for the next patch, prob comming out next week to fix this one. Oh, and we found a bug but didn't exploit it, perhaps we should have. ;-)

~Gargen of Vek'nilash

Dawni said...

Overall im pretty happy with the moonkin changes, it really seemed my DPS noticeably increased during 10m TotC even before doing the gem upgrades. The new Eclipse does take some getting used to but overall a good change.

Devon said...

Hey Gray. This'll be my first time responding to a post of your's, but I've been a reader for quite some time.

I agree with most of what you said concerning the patch. As for me, our guild does raid on Tuesday nights.

We entered the new raid instance, the 25 man version. I guess we aren't able to attempt heroic mode until having completed each fight in the normal mode first. It was rather easy. We wiped once on the twin snake-like things due to some confusion on what to do when getting the Paralyzing effect (hint: those on fire should run to those paralyzed to get rid of the debuff). There were 3 "bosses," the last of which turned out to be a fun little fight. He dropped a very, very nice caster Dagger that I was hoping to upgrade to.

The new eclipse effects turned out to be a bit... awkward, at first. And to be honest, I didn't see that it increased my total Boss DPS that much. I did notice, however, with a Twisting Rotation, I go OOM much quicker. Then again, I've ditched any and all Mana Regen talents, as I never needed them. I might have to rethink that decision.

Luckily my old version of Squak&Awe worked just fine, showing each new Eclipse duration and such. I was expecting trouble with it. I don't like the newer version, so I've stuck with the old one that still works just fine. Like you, though, only three or four of my addons had been updated... it felt very odd, as usually for a major patch, there's tons of updates to all addons. Luckily I only use a few addons to raid, and the ones that weren't updated, worked just fine.

I used to use Starfall during the internal cooldown of an eclipse, but now I just use it every time it's up - no point not to. I have to get used to the new rotation, and such. I only had one night of testing, and I still ended up ontop of the Damage Meter, but felt as though I should have been higher.

Also, can confirm the Ulduar FL and XT bugs.

Vaenor said...

I got to raid the first night of the patch and found myself regularly at the top of the caster dps and damage done and was fighting our rogues for the top spot most of the night. I got in a fair amount of practice on the ptr so the improved eclipse felt natural to me.

I'm interested in why you are so interested in pursuing inscription. Is it simply because you have so many mats already? It's decent for income, but doesn't compete with tailoring for dps increase (tho I have limited info on the embroidery in 3.2, so this needs to be confirmed).

Graylo said...

@Vaenor

To be honest, I hadn't noticed the change to the embroidery that came in 3.1. My Tailor is not a raider and I hadn't really paid that much attention to it.

That said, when I look at some of the theorycrafting posted on WoWhead regarding its value, it is obvious to me that they are overestimating its value to some extent.

The main problem they have is that they don't differentiate between uptime and effective uptime. They are just dividing 15 by 45, 50, or 55 and saying that is the up time. That may be true but not all of those 15 seconds are going to be effective. The spell that procs the buff probably doesn't benifit form it so there goes 1 second. Your going to lose some time on the end so there goes another half a second or more. On top of that you have all of the buff thats going to be wasted due to movement or other game mechanics. I've used this type of analysis before but I also try and keep in mind that I am over estimating.

Second, most of the calcs ignore the fact thatyou lose 23 haste to use the enchant. Haste isn't a huge stat for a moonkin that is over 400 already but it still has some value and there are a lot of us that are not above 400 for whom haste is of much greater value.

The Embroidery is probably a little bit better, but it isn't as much as some people seem to think.

The primary reason I picked Inscriptions is because I don't have a high level yet and I want to be able to craft my own stuff. Plus, I do have a lot of the mats.

Talaesin said...

Hi Gray,
I'm Oceanic, and I raided last night without any preparation for the new eclipse. I found that I tended to lose mana more quickly. I felt I was casting more Wraths, so that may be why: solar procs so easily and lunar procs less easily.

I was doing a trial run with another guild, with a bunch of current guildies, and against my dps-ing guildie I was doing insanely better. He's a hunter and usually is all over me in the meters, but last night I was ahead the entire time. Additionally, it turns out that it was the guild's top DPS-er (ret pal) I was challenging hard, at about 3.7 - 4.1k dps for the night. I'm in 4pc T7, he was in 4pc T8.
So all in all, I think that this has given us a significant advantage in DPS.

Re: Uld we had the bugout with XT but FL was fine and we did it with a lame 0 towers.

Unknown said...

Sooooo many lag. But I got to see the new instance and new Eclipse. I just get one after the other. I almost dont have time to nuke out of eclipse.
So far, I'm refreshing dots on both lunar and solar untill around 5 seconds on lunar and 3 on solar. That plus the new gems and the t8 i finally got, buffed my dps pretty well.
And I liked the new eclipse so far.

Krystallus said...

So now that we don't have a set rotation, think we should start using the IS idol from Kologarn until we can buy the badge one from triumph?

Kheldar said...

yeah as usual yesterday on a patch day the servers were down til 2pm, although i struggled to login at 3:30pm. I'm on an EU server....

Not as much lag as other patches unless you were in Dal.

I ran the daily heroic and got my nice shiny new 2 EoT's. Also ran Drak and Gun and got a dozen EoC. All in all very happy with the badge changes and looking forward to getting my first EoC upgrade.

Took a quick look at the new 5 man on heroic - but unfortunately we had not realised it was going to be jousting/pvp 5 man rather than a normal dungeon.

A couple of people including our guildie tank hate pvp and have done none of the Argent Tourny dailys so after wiping on 3 Ally jousting bosses people wanted to leave and go somewhere else !

I'll go back as will some others in the grp as i quite enjoy some jousting in small doses and with 5 of you doing it i found it fun as long as we had co-ordination on the bosses.

The changes to the Tourny daily's I also did not know about - the 3 commanders for Citadel took the pug grp of 3 of us by surprise and yes took us ages to kill given the amount of people doing it.

Plus the changes to the ones you could do at the same time killing the 10 or 15 scourge. So i am big time happy that I already have my Crusader title and put in the effort for it, which i only got a few days ago !

We struggled to enter heroics like other people have said and we saw a few bugs inside them, like floating mobs and 3 extra non elite mobs in one place in Gun.

Guildie DK tank was very unhappy with the new/changed talents saying he now has to take worthless/needless talents to get to ones he used to have and wants again. He seemed to do ok in the heroics although the healer did comment he was taking more damage. So not sure about this yet he needs to play more i guess and maybe even change talents again in a few days.

I cant say i noticed anything different for my oomkin - but as i dont raid i've never used Eclipse and dont have the talent.

hoping to run the new 5 man heroic tonite as i've seen some of the loot and it does look nice for a non raider.

Xaktsaroth said...

Im on EU side of the game and a late night raider. So when we started up at 23.00 Eu cest time yesterday it all worked fine.

After some testing on the first raid encounter in the trial I found out something that seemed to up my dps by quite a bit.

2x wrath, 1x starfire repeat until the first eclipse happens. Since it does not really matter wich eclipse you get by chugging like this I many times managed to have of the spells almost done casted when the eclipse procc came for the first time or if both was off cooldown.
Maybe with a bit more haste you could chug 3xwrath im kinda low on haste only have 339 at the momemt
//Xak

Selphë said...

The new cycle eclipse is boring. ;(

Serawyn said...

On my server (should mention that my server was amoung the last to be put back up) we had no lag, no instance or dungeon crashes or glitches, and 0 of my addons were broken. Dethecus is by no means a wonderful or miraculous server.

Got to try out the new Eclipse over the course of the new 5-man, 10-man, and 25-man which were all disappointingly easy. Somehow regular modes don't feel "right" anymore; I feel like their should be fire and biting cold debuffs hounding me...

The new Elipse change doesn't assist in Lunar Eclipse proccing any quicker. Sometimes you'll spend that 15s just trying.

It sucks that we have to wait for the rest of the instance to get released before we can even TRY the heroic mode for the 'actual' tier 9 set tokens.

Phil said...

I must be screwing it up, my dps is 500-1000 less than pre-patch. I do my norm rotation then spam the other nuke till proc...so FF, MF, IS, Wrath till proc, SF spam keeping DoTs up till next proc, then switch... maybe we are just killing crap too quickly for the rotation benfit to matter, I have only done the new content and 5 mans after this patch thus far. Maybe i'll try it on Patchwork or some thing more stable.

Anonymous said...

@Phil:
Your hit rating is over the cap even for a 25man raidboss. You have BoP, Imp. FF and 339 hit rating, way too much. It should be 237 if you have a draenei in your party, or 263 if you don't have heroic presence. Well, that shouldn't cause the drop in your dps, but it sure affects it negatively.

Ludakirt said...

Graylo,

With regards to INSCRIPTION, DEFINITELY CHECK THIS OUT;

http://www.elsprofessions.com/inscription/

Has saved me SO much time leveling inscription on my toon!

El is AMAZING!

Unknown said...

Inscription is very intuitive to level up. You train new glyphs every five levels of inscription. So make five of those glyphs, train again, make five more, etc..

The biggest issue is you will not have any of the discovered glyphs at the start if you are trying to be 'goblinish'. But you can get to the point where you get the upgraded shoulder enchant for raiding very easily.

I have a maxed inscription toon and haven't picked an herb myself in Wrath. Don't worry about not having that gathering. With just a little work and one or two add-ons you will have as much gold as you care to spend time in the AH with insciptions.

Lothildin said...

I want to add something. Flame Leviathan is madly glitched.

Unknown said...

mana is a bitch now and the rotation changes barely fix anything. with great rng you can pro out charts. sometimes its a seamless transition between eclipses but sometimes youre stuck on either one.

one thing that might help would be the new idol which will take a little bit to get. 300 crit rating would be huge with procs and insuring more crits during your solar eclipse which really helps push your dps.

overall its not bad. not great but not bad. keep dots up at all times but make sure during each rotation you HAVE to have the correct corresponding dot at all times or you'll lose out on tons for DPS.

Unknown said...

I want to add another thing. I was getting a little bit of problem with mana, but with the new innervate I just started to use it whenever. Our healers hardly go oom to need it and when they do, half bar is enough to keep them going.
So, for any moonkin having mana problems, remember to use Innervate whenever you need.

Ah, the new raid sucks so far. The only "different" thing is the trample the thirs beast do. Other than that, pretty boring stuff

Phil said...

Okay, I did a Naxx 25 man run the other night and everything is great. Little low on the mana side and I have to inervate myself instead of a healer but my DPS was back to top.

@ Anon,
thanks for the advice in regards to hit cap. perhaps I should look at all the caps and re-asses my gear choices. I have my main bank screen full with epics from runs all with slightly diff stats. I think my feelings just did a 180. The patch is okay but not great as it is harder to get high DPS on the small stuff. I was #6 on the chart in 25 man Ul and #2-#1 in 25 man Naxx. (I think I am better in naxx because you don't have to move as much, eg eyebeams/ blueflames...)

~Gargen of Vek'nilash

Anonymous said...

Have you ever considered running Tailoring for the Back enchant? It's actually quite nifty since the patch. A nice little DPS boost, like a 3rd trinket.

Lazurturkey said...

Sorry, didnt read the instructions above.

Have you ever considered picking up tailoring? The enchant to back is almost like having a 3rd trinket. It's actually quite nice and better than inscription IMO. 70sp 15crit versus 295sp proc for 15 seconds. Most would choose the latter. And most boomkins I know run tailoring and the 2nd profession would either be JC or Alchemy.

I'm currently running Inscription/Tailoring and am working on gathering mats for JC.

Lazurturkey - Antonidas