Foederati

Echoes of Doom seems to be a fairly appropriate name for patch 3.0.2, not because of the impending release of Wrath of the Lich King, or because of the massive changes to game play, but more due to the massive cries of “foul” from the player base that I saw in General chat as I logged on for the first time after the servers came up.

General Chat

As a general rule, I have General and Trade chat turned off due to the “Barrens chat” effect that tends to overflow those channels. However I also usually clear out my Interface and WTF folders by moving them to a back up and rebuilding my UI during major patches as it gives me the opportunity to remove the old unused stuff and start off fresh. The downside of this is that it sets my channel settings to the default, which opens me up to seeing General and Trade chats again for the 15 to 20 seconds it takes me to remember to type /leave 1 and /leave 2.

Last night was no exception and right off the bat I saw all sorts of cries about Ret Pallys (Welcome to the plight of the Resto Druid) and how Blizzard had destroyed this or that class. Many of these people probably hadn’t even tried out the changes on the PTR so that means that they are complaining without even first trying stuff out. This always frustrates me to no end.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve done my fair share of complaining, both <here> and in the <beta forum>s. But I do try and refrain from going off on something with out trying it first. The devs are trying their best to please as many people as possible and keep the game as balanced as possible. They are human and sometimes they make <mistakes>, but often times they get a lot of flak for no real reason at all.

Impressions

So what are my impressions of the Echoes of Doom?

Having played in beta for a little more than a month now I had a pretty good idea of what we would be seeing in the way of spells and talents. Overall I’m happy with current condition of Resto Druids. I do have concerns, one of which is what I still perceive as the unnecessary weakening of lifebloom, and the decision by the devs that Druids don’t have enough to worry about all ready with the healing game, that they had to add in the mana management game, which many druids have openly opposed. I do see the devs point of view on part of it… mana is like money, you never feel you have enough of it no mater how much you actually have.

The graphics changes to the game seem to have made the game run a tad slower on my computer and given me a drop in FPS of out 5 to 10. My computer is starting to show it’s age but I’ve been running WoW with the settings maxed out for the better part of two years now, so having to tone it down a hair and skip some of the new higher end stuff, isn’t that bad, out side of the fact that I’m probably going to be shopping around for a new video card, at the minimum, around the time of the next expansion release, which I’m guessing will be closer to mid 2010.

I dropped Herbalism on Amradorn and started leveling inscription. I had originally planed on waiting until level 80 to pick up inscription as I was going to use my leveling in Northrend to collect herbs there but I’ll just flat out admit it that I got caught up in the excitement and threw caution to the wind and went for it. Two days after the patch and I’m just over 330 in inscription. I’m out of Outland herbs now for the Ethereal Ink so I’m going to work on leveling Rastain who is at 375 Herbalism and level 63. That should both allow me to take advantage of the new lower xp requirements for leveling him to 70 as well as get me the herbs I need for Am.

I am a bit disappointed with the in-game calendar system. Instead of creating an event that your guildies can sign up for you create the event and then you have to invite them to sign up for it. There is a mass invite button which allows you to just invite everyone in your guild which would be great if it weren’t for the fact that there is a limit of 100 invites to any one event. While this may work for some guilds it doesn’t work for Foederati as we have almost 500 characters in the guild and well over 100 accounts. This leaves me with choosing 1 of 2 options. Either reshuffle the guild ranking structure so as to put all of the active raiders into the upper ranks to use the mass invite buttons rank filter option, or simply create a base event and just include the active raiders in it. Either way leaves out those folks in the guild who don’t necessarily like to raid often enough to be considered active but occasionally want to sign up but now can’t using the system that we thought would allow it. /sigh Fortunately I think there are most likely a lot of other guilds, especially end game guilds, that are in the same boat, and maybe have enough pull with Blizzard to get this changed.

So that’s my initial impressions of the patch. I’ll leave everyone to make their own minds up on spells and talents, and class balance. Regardless if you’re a member of the Doomsayer’s club or a fanatic that believes Blizzard can do no wrong, this patch is definitely a game changer (damm those sports/political catch phrases). I’d recommend sitting back and letting it all soak in before jumping on the soap box. Go out and explore the new things your character can do.