Tuesday, August 11, 2009

Oh... right... 3.2!

I just realized that everyone else is posting their thoughts on 3.2 and I haven't! Shame on me! (Though I was out of town this week so my experiences in 3.2 are somewhat limited...)

Let's see...

Trial of the Champions (that's the 5-man): Fun!
  • The transfer from being mounted to fighting the three champions on foot is really clunky. Your still using your lance, everyone's everywhere, and God only knows who has threat with whom. My core group that I normally run heroics with has done it twice so far. We have nothing but iLVL 200+ gear, and many slots are 213 or higher. Yet on both of our runs we have wiped. I'm sure we'll get better, but I think this could have been more smoothly designed. Maybe not give us a chance to engage them on our terms, but give us a moment to at least get out of weapons, please...
  • The second fights are cute, especially when Argent Confessor Paleteress (BTW, great reference!) summons an illusion of a fight of the past, but not particularly challenging. Got The Faceroller (hee hee!) achievement last night when we killed Eadric the Pure.
  • The Black Knight (oh noes! I spoiled it! D:) is an interesting fight. The first time I fought him I missed out that there was a phase three... so when he died the second time I was thinking "Well there we go." only to have him get up again. It was like "Why won't you die!?" But after that we were fine.
  • One thing I like that they did with this is that all the loot is on-par or better than Naxx loot, which means if you are like my guild and not deeply into Ulduar there are some decent upgrades. Heck, there are even good upgrades from normal TotC5. I plan on doing some PUG runs in the coming weeks.

Really beyond that I don't have a lot of comments. The lack of options for 1H tanking weapons makes DW tanking a non-option to me, so the major change to the Frost tree (my preferencial tree for DKs) doesn't matter.

Changes to other classes are interesting but not overly prevelant to me. About the biggest change is the addition of the Shaman Totem Bar, but that's because my girlfriend plays a shaman and we commonly instance/raid together.

I'm working on getting the Crusader Title and Exalted with the Silver Covenant so I can start doing the new dailies for the island north Icecrown and gain access to the new stuff that you can get for Crusader Tokens (or do you buy them with Emblems?). But I can't do them yet, so it's just more of the same. Woo.

And I haven't touched any of the PvP stuff added. Neither the new BG nor the revamped WG. I'm not really sure what to make of the revamped WG. Preface: My server is very badly imbalanced on the Alliance side of things. Prior to 3.2, when Horde was on defence they were almost assured to lose. One time I looked in the book outside of Arch's instance and the numbers were something like this:

  • Alliance Successful Offensives: 328
  • Horde Successful Offensives: 314
  • Alliance Successful Defenses: 316
  • Horde Successful Defenses: 39

No, I did not forget to add a number to that last bit. Seriously... they would only win when they were on the defense 10% of the time. As for why this happens, obviously because the Alliance can field way more players than the Horde can, even with the bonus granted for being outnumbered, they just get overwhelmed. Now with the sides being evenly capped at 120 per, I'm hoping it's more balanced. I'm just basing my statement on one of my friends saying a few unclear things. Honestly I hope it doesn't become an inverse where we were before, with the Horde winning all the time and the Alliance only able to occasionally take it from them only to have it stolen the next go around. Really, I want a nice balance between who has it and who doesn't.

About the only major change I've made recently has nothing to do with the patch and that was dropping Blacksmithing and Mining and taking Alchemy and Inscription on my main. My guild lacks high a raider who has either, so I decided to take both on my main.

No comments: