Thursday, October 28, 2010

4.01


I had stopped playing hardcore World of Warcraft back in April of this year because there was nothing new to do. Raiding is fun but since November of last year it has been the same bosses every week. We defeated the Lich King and had done hard mode on about half the bosses. Cataclysm was on the horizon and I wanted to do other things so I had just stopped raiding altogether. Now its almost November again a full year after they released the last patch and I have got the itch to play again.

Two weeks ago they had dropped 4.01 that changed the talent trees and play style of almost all the classes. As far as paladins go we got a whole new resource to manage that drastically changes the way we play. Also the Blizzard philosophy has changed to make encounters more challenging so ret is no longer cooldown based abilities and Prot has lost the ability to aoe tank well. With protection spec paladins we had a set 6969 rotation where you always knew what ability to use next. I grew to memorize this very easily throughout wrath and having a bit of a tough time adjusting to the new 4.01 model. The problem is it extended the cooldown on a lot of our abilities and it gave us 2 buttons to press and I can't find a good keybind I like for them.

With 4.01 they converted all our different types of currency down to either honor or justice points. I am severely over both caps and while I don't loose any right now I can't gain anything either. I was over 5600 justice points on bladez and once you go over 4000 you can't gain anymore. I went out and spent as much as I could to drop me below 4k but there isn't anything I really need or want. While I am excited to play there is no drive to do anything with bladez so I find it hard to even test my abilities since things die quickly. Outside of the Headless horseman event I find playing WoW pretty boring right now.

I am really excited for the release of Cataclysm and I find myself checking MMO-champion and WoW Insider any time I'm bored and on the Internet. Usually there aren't many updates but I can't stop looking at them. I am nervous about the changed to the paladin class because I just don't know how well they will play out on the way to 85. As prot the nerf to our AoE makes me nervous, and our threat generation doesn't seem to be holding up as well as it should. Retribution seems OK and it will be fine for leveling because things die quick enough that there really won't be much time where we are waiting to hit a button.

December 7th can't come soon enough. I was hoping for some world events to happen so I would feel like I would have some stuff to do but the last 2 weeks have been uneventful. The gnomergon event could be completed in one sitting and it wasn't repeatable. Luckily I have had other things to occupy my time. The new fall lineup of TV shows is out and they have been pretty good so far. Also the holiday releases of video games have also arrived so I have been on my Xbox 350 and Wii more often. Plus between going to the gym, keeping my girlfriend happy, and working overtime I have plenty of stuff to keep me busy. But while engaged in those things I always have warcraft on the back of my mind.