The View From Down Here

Patch day blues…

Well, we’ve got the changes that we’ve been waiting for. The 3.0.2 talents are nice, and though server stability was a bit hit and miss yesterday, it’s better now.

Last night’s Black Temple raid was called off because lots of people were having trouble getting online and staying online, not to mention the addon hell that many people were going through (Having tested everything on the PTR helped me immensely on that front).

In order to play with our new talents, then a group of us went to Kara to find out how we’d fare against a familiar environment. And the answer is, as far as I’m concerned, a little too well. The entire instance was clear in under 90 minutes, and that includes a lot of waiting around for people who’d been disconnected, replacing them if they got stuck offline, and general fiddling with addons (at one point my action bars decided they were going to page out mid-fight. Eek.)

Anyway, the answer to the question “How well can a Protection Warrior AoE tank?” is “Very well indeed”. Depending on how on the ball I was with my abilities, I was able to hold my own against my co-tank, a protection paladin.

Warrior threat sucks when you’re not being hit by bosses, as you might expect, but it’s still better than it was before.

After we destroyed Kara, we moved on to Zul’Aman. To be honest the nerf bat hitting the instance really hit home here. With the same group, we managed the timed run with several minutes to spare, even though we’d done the bosses in a completely non-optimal order. That too was clear in about an hour, accounting for people swapping characters after the timed run. Zul’Jin was laughably easy compared to how he’d been before, too.

I’m expecting similar for Black Temple this evening. This is a huge disappointment, as having faced Illidan once before the patch, it annoys me that we won’t be able to kill him in his original state. Ah well, roll on level 80, where I’m hoping new bosses will be back to being a reasonable difficulty.