Hooray for Idle Postings!

I haven't posted on this blog since November. I'd like to say that it was because I've been too busy. But I have a confession to make...I just haven't been all that interested or had much to say.

In the WOW Front, patch 3.1 has come out and I took a first step into Uldaur last night. The first boss is/was a joke...we did everything wrong from what I could tell...had multiple people get locked out, and STILL managed to suceed easy enough. Past that, though, things got more difficult. The second boss was hitting like a truck, and after a Uldaur reset caused all the trash to respawn we went on to the second boss. The second boss, Razorgore, seems easy enough, but has a pretty agressive enrage timer. So, Flame Leviathan was our only kill of the night. And people were pretty happy that, at the very least, we weren't just steam rolling everything.

But, this points to what Blizzard has done wrong with Wrath. Now, compared to BC things are much better. But Blizzard made a major mistake making Naxx so easy and providing no clear alternative. Not only was Naxx a remake of an already-existing zone with well known tactics, but it was completely forgiving.

Now, IMO, that's a very good thing. Not only does Naxx serve as a very good introduction to raiding, it drives up interest and brings in new players. Unfortunately, there was no real alternative to Naxx for a hardcore guild to sink their teeth into. Naxx was on farm mode for those guilds the second week of Wrath. And there has been a serious sense of...what now? permeating the game. Uldaur has been viewed as the second coming, and certainly with 14 bosses, 11 hard mode alternatives, and a few other new features, there is more here for a guild to get into.

I think people are going to be a bit shocked by the difficulty shift from Naxx to Uldaur. Not that it seems -that- much harder, but Naxx was just SO easy that a lot of casuals are going to freak out. Of course, I think the intention is to have a better representation of difficulty: Uldaur 10 < Uldaur 25 < Uldaur 10 Hard Modes < Uldaur 25 Hard Modes. But we'll see.

For right now, I've stuck with a cookie cutter FFB build 0/52/18. I did go ahead and purchase the dual spec option for my mage (and also my newly minted druid and DK). For my mage, I'm a more popular fire/arcane build, or possibly a full frost build used just for learning boss fights. Mana, which I was somewhat worried about, did not seem like much of an issue to me last night.

When Wrath came out, I didn't spend much time researching gear, nor was I very disciplined when it came to DKP purchases in the guild. This time I'm planning on being much more on top of things. Instead of making rash purchases, I'm going to be very specific about what gear I'm going to go for and which I won't.