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So.. patch 3.3 has been out for a little over a week now and I thought I could talk a little about the new stuff… lots of good things and I’m quite happy how it turned out. Even the server came back online in time.

Druid changes

* Eclipse: This effect will not activate again within 15 seconds of either type of Eclipse effect firing, in addition to the existing 30-second cooldown for each type of Eclipse. In addition, Eclipse now grants a 40% critical strike chance to Starfire and 40% increased damage to Wrath, up from 30%.

I’m pretty happy how all this WiseEclipse addon episode turned out. Personally I didn’t use it beyond trying it out since at the time only thing we were doing was farming ToC and I did not feel necessary I should rely on a mod to increase my DPS. So actually my damage went up a bit with the patch unlike for those who were using the mod. :P And you have to admit.. the way the mod increased your DPS felt a bit like cheating.

* Rebirth: The cooldown on this spell has been lowered from 20 minutes down to 10 minutes.

While it’s a good change I can’t say I am 100% happy about this. If someone dies you should not kinda get away with it so easily. Ressing is annoying too… eats your DPS, mana and screws up your Eclipse.

* Force of Nature: Health on the treants has been increased.
* Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Good! There’s nothing more annoying than boss 1-shotting them. PvP side doesn’t matter much to me since I don’t do PvP on druid (anymore).

The Looking for Dungeon system

Woah.. this came out a lot better than I expected it to be. I am not a fan of pugging anything… ever since the early Burning Crusade I’ve avoided it like plague. It’s amazing how much it does when you eliminate the hassle of getting group together to minimum. And if it’s a really bad group the downtime for trying again is very little.

What I don’t like is how the cross-realm activities seem to make some people think they can behave however they please because the other players are not from same server and it does not matter what they think. This is very common in battlegrounds but there it at least was limited to the chat. Now you have to worry about the cross-server-ninjas too. I haven’t had that many bad experiences yet but there’s been a few. One in particular bothered me.. I was doing some emblem farming runs on my rogue and a hunter from one of my servers higher end raiding guilds was there. Once we had finished he need rolled on Frozen Orb and quickly left the group. After I was out I did a /who on him and noticed he was in Ironforge. I even went as far as checking the auction house and sure enough he had put it on sale right away. Now I could not care less about the item but doing stuff like that just isn’t cool. What I think many players haven’t even thought about is when they behave badly ‘in public’ it’s not only their reputation which plummets in the eyes of others but it’s their guilds reputation too.

Another thing what bugs me is the silent players. How hard it is just to say hello at start and thank for the group when you’re done? Seriously. Sure you join the LFD for the rewards and not to socialize but there’s no reason you can’t be friendly while doing it. I had this one pug where I said hello in the start but nobody else said nothing during the whole instance run. That kinda upset me and didn’t bother to thank for the smooth run once we were done.

Okey the last thing.. loot. There is no way in hell I am going for full scale pug, rather not even partial, if I actually need something else than emblems. You never know what kind of people you end up with and I really don’t want to risk it. If you need loot, go with the guild group.

The new instances

I’m just going to talk about the new 5mans… the raid instance(s) valid their own post which will come in the near-future.

Have to say I’m very impressed. The design on all 3 new ones is close to raid quality and they clearly put effort to it. Bosses are really fun too and have nicely varying abilities you have to watch for. Pit of Saron is probably my favorite one in terms of design and for bosses Ick and Krick. Only thing what kinda ruined that encounter is the gnome yelling instructions.. while it was kinda funny it also spoiled figuring out the encounter yourself.

First time I was doing all 3 on heroic we ended up losing 1 DPS just as we came to Halls of Reflection.. and since you kinda have to unlock the instances we could not just ask someone to come and fill in. Soo we 4manned it which was very exciting to be honest.. not had so much fun in a 5man for a while.

And even more HoR fun followed.. this time on normal mode as we 3manned it. Warrior tank, shadow priest and myself on holy paladin. First bit went just fine but for the last one I had to swap on my retri spec.. so we did it without dedicated healing and it worked. Heh.

Lootwise the ToC trend continues with good items and I will be picking up lots of them for my alts. My druid obviously has better gear than what 5man has to offer but I didn’t get completely left out. Aah.. Nevermelting Ice Crystal is just amazing. For some reason dropwise my guild has had the worst luck with caster DPS trinkets. For example the one from Anub’arak didn’t drop a single time. Not freaking once. I could complain about trinkets a bit more but let’s leave it to this…

So the design was cool, bosses were fun, loot was great.. but what I enjoyed most was the storymode that carried through all 3 instances. I can’t say I know every last detail about lore but I do enjoy it a lot and I’m always eager to learn more.

Aaand you got to love the new Jaina model.. hrhr. <3

Random minor stuff

* Arena Set Bonuses: The two-piece set bonus for all Wrath of the Lich King Arena sets now provides 100 resilience and 29 spell power or 50 attack power. The current four-piece bonus will remain, however it also now provides 88 spell power or 150 attack power.

Amazing news for my PvP rogue(s). I kinda like the fact that you get compensated a little more for wearing items that sacrifice a lot of damage for the more defensive stats. There’s a lot of debate about should you wear PvE or PvP armor and this tips it more towards the PvP as it should be.

* Ignore list expanded to 50 to match the friends list.

Awesome.

New ground animations for Hippogryph mounts came out really cute. I’ve had the Cenarion War Hippogryph since it got into game and the lack of ground animation has been kinda annoying. At least the poor bird can stand on his feet instead of hovering around all the time.

All in all I think this patch has started out really well and I’m looking forward to having more fun with alts outside raids and with my main in the ICC 25.