Wednesday, October 6, 2010

WOW: The Pre-Patch Jitters

The Cataclysm release date is now December 7th, a full month later than I was originally hoping for. But, considering what I've heard of the beta, another month to fine tune and test the content is probably for the best. I'd rather have a stable Cataclysm release (like Wrath's) rather than the annoying, unstable BC release.

Unfortunately, this means yet another full month of Wrath. I'm still raiding. But it's pointless and I'm only doing it to try to maintain a raid slot. I'm not alone in that. Everyone is feeling it at this point--ICC just isn't that fun and it's been out too long. And there is still a full 2 months to go. Blah. On the plus side, I've completely caught up on gear and DPS. I'm now almost always within the top five overall, and on most bosses. I've been frequently given more responsiblity in raids, and I'm pretty much a full-time member who almost always has a raid spot.

But, now Patch 4.0 is upon us. I think there was a chance that we could have seen it this week. But next week is much more likely. And at that point, who knows what is going to happen. Most everyone in the guild is expecting raiding to take a dive when 4.0 comes out, and I wonder about that. I wouldn't mind if the guild made all 25-man raids optional until Cataclysm comes out. And at this point there are only a few pieces of gear that I'm interested in: Heroic Tier 10 tokens (I STILL have not gotten one...and I HATE that Blizzard made them so rare), a necklace, and a cloak.

As a Mage, I (and probably the vast majority of the mage world) am planning on switching to Fire. The mechanics look very nice, from what I can tell anyway, and genuinely different than before. Arcane has served me well since Uldaur...but honestly Arcane is mind-numbingly boring and I'm sick of all of the spell knockback hurting AM DPS so badly (especially where there is so much raid-wide damage in ICC). The problem is, I haven't really spent any time with it yet. Burn out has really kept me from reading too much about the new changes. I've watched some videos, and it looks cool. But those videos are more 5-man related, and I'm still curious to how well it performs in raids. I'm also wondering if Frostfire will become competitive again. I really liked Frostfire back in the day, but haven't heard much about it in 4.0 and beyond.

Of course, I'm not entirely sure how well my current gear is going to translate into Fire DPS. I'm very heavy in Haste (1350), and while my crit rating is about 40% (higher in raids), I'm still wondering just how well my gear is going to transition there. Especially since I'll have to make up several more points of hit (and gear wise that's not going to be quite so easy now). If my heavy-haste build works, though, I'll be happy. And who knows, I might even try frost! The only mage-spec I'm NOT interested in at this point is Arcane. I don't really like the mechanics they've created for it, so I'm not going to use it unless I'm forced into it just to stay competitive.

One other downside...I was figuring that Blizzard would make it easier to level from 68-80, much like they did with 58-60 when Wrath came out. But from what I read that is NOT on the table at this point. It's still on the table for some point in the future, apparently, but I'm betting at this point they are going to wait long after the Cataclsym release.

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