Lo-Quality WoW

Well, Blizzcon happened, and the announcements concerning the next expansion Cataclysm. I know I’m still digesting all the information coming out about it. Sounds very interesting, although the main thing that’s worrying me is the fact that hunter’s will go to a focus based system rather than mana based. I’m not sure how that will work out.

I guess it mainly depends on how much each shot costs and how fast the focus regenerates. For instance, on my rogue, I’m often doing two or three special attacks then I spend seconds waiting for my energy to recover enough to do something else. And as much as I’d love not having to worry about flipping into Viper, if I’m blowing through my focus so fast that I spend long (granted seconds, but still “long”) periods waiting until I can shoot again, it’s going to be annoying. My whole rhythm will be off. And after a couple of years playing my hunter in a particular way, it’ll probably be difficult to change. I’ll reserve making a final decision until I actually try it though.

A lot of other things with Cataclysm, but that’s my main concern. I definitely look forward to a reworking of the quests early on and making it interesting to travel through the “classic” areas again. Worgen should be a fun new race, except the only “spare” character I wouldn’t mind getting rid of to replace with a worgen version is my Shaman, which the worgen can’t be. I’m thinking I might make a worgen hunter, but keep it strictly Beast Master, which I never played. Guild leveling will be interesting, although the PKT will still be behind quite a bit of other guilds unfortunately. I’ll talk about it more as I figure out what’s going on.

Otherwise, the weekend was busy, yet not much got done otherwise. The Agency had extended their Ulduar lockdown and got to Yogg-Saron, but stalled out for most of the week. My guildmate was with them last night when they finally beat it. I was in on a few of the tries earlier in the week though. It’s a fight where a single slip up can cause havoc. For instance, in phase 1, you need to kill adds when they are near Sara and stay out of clouds which spawn additional adds. Usually it takes one person lagging, or not paying attention and then you have adds all over the place. And if there’s multiple adds up, it’s sometimes hard to focus fire correctly. The tank tried to mark but in the middle of it said “okay, just hit the hunter’s target. The one with the big arrow pointing at it!” Not too much pressure on me, eh?

The few times we got to phase 2, the guys going in had a hard time. For a while, they had me go in as well but half the time I had trouble getting to the portal in time. But it was otherwise a very long exercise in frustration and quite costly from constant wiping. I’m glad they finally finished it though, we’ll see how the Ulduar raid goes this coming week.

I didn’t get to do too many Heroic Trial of the Champion. The one I did earlier in the weekend was mainly notable in that when the Confessor pulled a memory out, she pulled it out of Mudgie! I didn’t know the pets could be a target for that. Still waiting for that memory of Hogger though…

The one I did last night however was very irritating. They brought me in on the second fight and we wiped when the tank managed to pull two groups of mobs, which meant there’s two priests healing everything and each other. The other hunter and I combined to a little over 5k dps and the third dps was close to 2k himself, so we had quite a bit of dps. Then on the confessor herself, we died a few times. Then we finally beat her but I was still running back so I didn’t get to roll on the loot which pissed me off a bit. Then on the Black Knight, we started wiping again. Either the tank would die or the other hunter and I were spending so much time keeping things off the healer that we weren’t dpsing the Knight himself, especially in phase 2, or the healer just wasn’t keeping people alive. When I die during the first aoe attack in phase 3? It does around 2k damage and Key has close to 20k hp unbuffed. So I have to be way far down on health for that to happen.

Last thing that really happened was a couple of Heroic Utgarde Keep runs. Not much of interest really, it’s our “default” milk run at this point. Although we did find out that our main tank had apparently never done it on heroic before since he got the achievement for completing it. 3 emblems for around of 30 minutes of playing? Not bad.

Otherwise, I spent most of my time playing with my Mage and Druid, with a few tries on my Death Knight, still trying to get used to it’s mechanics. I know the guild Naxx run didn’t happen since most people didn’t show up. I know I didn’t because my buddy just came back from Kuwait and wanted to catch a movie and that had a little more priority than WoW. Sorry but as active as I was on WoW this weekend, not much really happened.