Patch 3.3 Day

New patch! Woo hoo!

I signed in about 9:00pm last night, which is more or less when I normally get everything at home wrapped up and start playing. The realm I play on is on East Coast time, so quite often there are very few people online. Last night, however, there were a lot more people. Guildchat was full of achievements for people running the new 5-mans for the first time, and for PUGging with 10 different people, and all the other activities that come with new content.

I asked if anybody hadn't run the new dungeons yet and got a few responses. I invited Kathy, Dan, and two other guildies and off we went for our first look. It turns out that none of us had run them before, so it was new and shiny for everybody. We wiped twice, but that's not bad at all for a new team on new content. To be honest, after the first wipe I tabbed out and pulled up the Wowhead.com overview so I could research the boss strategies as we went along.

First, these new dungeons are fun. I had a great time, especially the Halls of Reflection. The whole HoR fight where we're retreating before the Lich King, with ominous music playing and waves of scourge and trying to kill everything while Lady Sylvannus broke down the ice walls trapping us .. it was very cinematic. It also had some lore in it, so it wasn't just running around the arena killing faction champions and the Black Knight.

Second, there might be crowd control again in here. There were very few two-mob trash pulls, and four or five mob pulls were much more common. I had to dig through my spell book and find "Chain Undead" spell to put it back on my action bars. It's been a while since we needed CC, so it was a pleasant change of pace.

Third, it's always a jarring boss mechanic when you have to stop DPSing or healing when they do stuff. Running out of the fire/smoke/poison/magic/bomb/whatever is second nature now, but it's just unnatural to be standing face-to-face with a boss not unloading on him. There isn't much of that, so it retains its weird novelty and that's good.

There'll be more stuff later, like whether or not my priest gets his shadow spec back (he's dual disc/holy at the moment) and how awesome it is that my mage gets to have his water elemental out all the time, but for now it was just great to run brand new content and see brand new stuff and get some brand new shiny shiny lewtz.