So the biggest World Of Warcraft party starts today in Cali. Yep, good old Blizz-con is this weekend and unfortunately the GeekJock has to work, so no trip for me. BUT, I remain anxious to see what big announcements Blizzard has in store for us loyal followers of everything in their brand.  Every year they surprise us with something awesome and I am hoping that this year is no different. However, looking through the schedule of today’s events there isn’t a whole lot of places I think an announcement will take place. Today we look at the opening ceremonies (any general announcement could be here… Top secret MMO? Doubtful but you never know). The next possibility is during the noon hour where they have Diablo 3 game play slotted on the main stage. This is where I think they will reveal a ton about D3, possibly a class, and hopefully a release window. I doubt the release thing since it won’t be announced for sure till they know it’s DONE. But I think we will get a ton of game play and a class today.

The rest of the panels today are WoW. Wow dungeons, lore and then a Live Raid. Honestly, I can care less about these things and the bunch of Starcraft that will be on display too. It’s not that I don’t want to hear stuff about WoW, b/c obviously I do. This last patch has me reinvigorated for the game and I played a ton last week. But the thing is, I know all I want to know already about these. We all know a ton about Cataclysm already and frankly, I can care less about watching someone raid. If it’s one of those take the best guild in the world and throw bosses at them like last year well… YAWN… and if it’s Cat related then I don’t really want to see it anyway. I have been reading up on enough to be familiar with things for the expansion but I have been purposely avoiding the multitudes of beta invites I have gotten/been offered b.c I want to experience the finished product. I don’t really want to test it when I want to play it as bad as I do. It’s not like some other games where open beta is the preview before you buy so to speak. I am already sold, I want to play the finish product, and not pay them to help them test it basically. So like I mentioned there is not a whole lot of optimism for any big announcements today. I bet we get 2 right away with the opening ceremonies and the D3 hour but after that it will be all smoke and mirrors to make people oohhh and ahhh over stuff we already know.  I won’t go into my thoughts for day 2 until tonight when hopefully they will have proved me wrong and I can be stoked about what is to come on the final day. Either way I am looking forward to hopping on the computer when I get up from sleeping this am to see what we got for news!

Ok now onto my thoughts about the big patch drop last week… 4.0.1!!!!

Unless you have been living under a rock, if you play WoW you know a week and a half ago they dropped the bigtime patch that changed all thing talent related. We got the new trees, focus for hunters, new shard mechanics for Warlocks, and the the “holy power” mechanic for pali’s.

Before I get into the class opinions I want to talk quickly about the change to emblems. Blizz took all the raid and dungeon type emblems and made everything a ton easier by simplifying them to just Justice points and honor points. When I logged into my toons what I found was a decent amount of these Justice points and even some higher honor points numbers (I am not much of a PVPer so those #’s have never been very high). On most of my 80’s I had anywhere from 1000 to 3300 points. Being that a Tier 10 piece is roughly 1100 all of my guys found themselves with anywhere from 1-3 pieces of T10 gear right away! This was pretty solid b/c for one my Death Knight went from a hodgepodge of T9 and others, he now has 4 pieces of T10 and is raring to go. Now if I can only get 100% handle on the blood tanking stuff he’ll be all set, but more on that later when I get to DK. The only problem I see with the points thing is we are going to get another type of points once the Cataclysm dungeoning and raiding occurs so again we will be back to square one with a bunch of different currencies which is just plain dumb to me and the whole reason they are trying to simplify it all. Hopefully this wont be a problem but who knows.

One thing I have noticed since the patch is everyone seems to be OP in heroics. There could very well be an explanation for this and I have my own theory. I think that Blizz wants us to know that if you are geared out in all T10 gear that things in heroics SHOULD die real quick. You will basically be out gearing the content by then. So what we are seeing now is the majority of the people still running heroics are decked out in either all T9 or T 10 or a miss-mash of the 2. Either way they know the fights and have the gear, which makes for some over killing at lightning paces. But hopefully this means that if a group were to go into heroics with all 200 ilevel gear or just below that it would actually be a challenge to them. Probably not but hey a man can have his theories…

Next up we have all the class changes. I won’t talk about everything b/c not only do I NOT know everything, I don’t play everything and all specs. So I will only give my opinions on the classes/specs I have either played or come accross in playing. So you will get no bones answers to the specs I like and don’t like.

First off is my main from the beginning, my Hunter. I went primarily with Survival (as usual) as my first choice. Surv really seems to be the better of the two primary shooter specs. I didn’t really play any BM but I am sure it’s fine as well, but Surv was ablast to play and get used to. The only real times I played any BM were the last 8-10 or so levels while leveling in northrend (but not in dungeons). I have heard it’s still as fun as it was back then so I doubt anyone will be avoiding this spec at all. As for MM, I tired it out but I just didn’t see it as much fun right now and the DPS to me seemed a bit lower. I am sure this changes when you get cobra shot at 81, and that’s likely where it changes over to the powerful side of things.  The big change as any hunter by now has heard, is that mana is gone and focus is the new way of paying for shots. Just like our pet generated focus and basically just like how power regenerates for rogues, it starts off at 100 and each one of your special shots (arcane shot, kill shot etc) costs focus to fire. It basically regens on it’s own or as you cast steady shot it will regen at a quicker rate. The biggest problem right now is that everything dies so fast in the heroics that it’s hard to get a grasp on how much of this you will need to do and the best roation. Sure everyone can theory craft the hell out of shot rotations but until we get harder dungeon/leveling fighting challenges, things will just continue to die quick and not enough time to work steady shot into the regen rotation. The next huge change is VOLLEY IS GONE. This will take a bunch of people by surprise and most of us will go looking for it when we get the 1st heroic pull and realize it’s not on our bar from before and lo and behold we don’t have it in our spell book. WTF?? Well now they have made multi-shot basically our AOE shot. Problem is for everyone other then Survival hunters it’s basically a big fat waste of time and focus b/c it doesn’t do enough damage. For surv we have a few talents to make it worth it. First we get one that applies Serp Sting to each target and then another which does some immediate damage from each of our SS shots. (I am not 100% sure if this applies the immediate damage when it’s applied via Multi shot but I have to assume it does. But still all the write ups say only use Multi for 3+ targets. As usual we hope for Lock N Load procs and kill shot for all the main DPS we get. Bottom line is hunter has been REAL fun and not all that hard to get used to if you have been playing one for a while.

My next toon I went to was my Death Knight. This was a bit more of a challenge. In the past I was primarily a Frost Dual-weilding Tank. Admittedly, I knew that Blood spec was going to be the only one for tanking as of Cataclysm, but I didn’t care. I just wanted to keep doing what I knew, and I knew I would have plenty of time to get used to the new spec and roll from there. The other problem with enjoying both Tanking and unholy, is one spec almost always suffers from lack of gear since you are not going to spend emblems/points on 2 separate types of Tier gear. So for me I have 4 T10 and 1 T9 for tanking and basically a rag tag set of heroic DPS gear. Which prolly isnt so bad now that all the stats like DEF and such have been eliminated, b/c I can just use a few of the old/new tanking gear. Which seems to work as a good enough stopgap while I run heroics for DPS gear and more justice points to use on DPS. The re-vamped specs themselves are real fun as well. The blood tree doesn’t seem too much changed so most old blood tanks won’t have much of a problem with this. The big thing from the unholy tree that I liked is the talent Dark Transformation. This spell can be activated after 5 stacks of shadow infusion are on your ghoul (they get applied after death coil casts either on mobs or to heal). Once you get to 5 you get the ability to transform your ghoul into a lumbering tank doing 100% more damage. A nice dps machine with the usual other pluses you get from other abilities etc. It’s just plain fun to use as well. Making the little guy into a lumbering beast of death is awesome.

I haven’t used frost at ALL so I cannot comment on it. The problem with tanking in 4.0.1 has been that they have seemingly removed some of the big threat generators out of most classes. That and the new talents, coupled with the buffed gear, has made for some threat issues. It’s not a major issue with talent mind you, but it seems now that you have to try a bit harder initially in fights to grab as much aggro as possible b/c not to many DPSers are smart enough or patient enough to wait that little bit for you to get aggro. SURE, this was the way we all had to do it back in the day but people are just too damn impatient with the content they have flown thru a thousand times. Even with all that I haven’t had much problems in heroics holding aggro but I can’t say when everyone is blowing cooldowns at the beginning of some boss fights that I have been flawless. I have lost the odd DPS in a fight b/c they got overzealous and got 1 shotted by the boss. But eh they haven’t complained at all. I think they know the golden rule of fights now…. If you die b/c you pulled aggro IT’S YOUR FAULT. Plain and simple. I am a DPS minder player 1st and it’s one thing I keep in mind in all fights. As for using my unholy spec in heroics, it’s been fun like I said but my DPS is still down a bit. As hard as it is to try and get a couple of diseases on targets and spread them as a tank, it’s that much harder to use them as rotation as a DPS. So it’s still been wing it rotations and so so DPS (like  I said some of that has to do with crap for DPS gear).

Comming up later I will finish with talking about my Warrior, Lock and Pali and hopefully the info is out and I can give some opinions on today at Blizzcon.

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