I managed to give the 5.0.4 patch a spin tonight. Most of it was attempting to adjust my talents and figure out how to maximize the glyphs that were still available on my toons. I have to say that the talents and glyphs are practically useless. Talents overall seem more geared towards PVPers while glyphs don’t have any real function. The minor glyphs for the most part are visual effects and probably can be skipped entirely.
Originally, I was going to play my priest a bit because she is pretty close to acquiring a new trinket. When I went to the former valor point vender, I noticed that the priest trinket did not show but instead was displaying a tanking one. It turns out that they have a filter on items so this is obviously bugged. Still, the interface somewhat discouraged me from pursuing my priest’s trinket.
Instead, I switched to my rogue to give LFR a spin. Morchok was weird because my rogue took significantly higher damage than before, especially with the stomps. Previously, my rogue used some talent points to boost up her armor contributions. Not sure if that impacted the damage reception from Morchok. Damage output was higher as we seemed to slice through Morchok, etc. fairly quickly. If anything, the only difficulty was making sure my rotation still held. At least with the rogue, everything seemed okay. I did check out Noxxic to check on the rotation. There was a talent that supposedly could impact my rotation but I ended up ignoring it. Bottom line for that was the talent tree appears more cosmetic than anything truly useful.
The loot system was more frustrating though. I do feel as though I scored more money potentially, but it’s hard to say because I never sat down to calculate the exact amount. Now, just like in older instances, you get a loot bag. If you’re lucky you get an item. However, if you get an item that you don’t need, you cannot trade it as all items dropped by the bag is considered soulbound. So really you’re at the utter mercy of the cruel RNG gods when it comes to loot.
Another subtle change was only allowing people get 150 JP for a single LFG run. You can still run LFG but the payout for JP will be lower. If you’re still not 85 yet, that might hurt slightly although you will be able to purchase 397 gear with JP. As a result, it really becomes up to you with regards to effort for gearing. You could run HoT Heroics all day and completely gear up your toon with the max JP gear.
The loss of the range/relic slot was fist shaking frustrating, especially for my hunter. I managed to get the polearm and bow. But the polearm in itself was a pain to get for a while. The fact that Blizzard trivially got rid of that slot altogether is a huge slap in the face to players who grinded for months attempting to fill out all their slots.
Going back to LFG, the rotation issue surface as a result of no add on working at the moment. It was somewhat confusing having to deal with Blizzard’s piss poor base UI system in figuring out which buffs/debuffs you have. So hopefully, these developers for 3rd party add ons will quickly deploy updates. It might not be worth it though considering how close we are to the real expansion.
On the side though, I saw many guildies login briefly. It felt as though people were eager to check out the updates. However, once they saw the mutilation done to their toons, they pretty much quit. I have a feeling that this expansion will cause even more players to quit. The main problem is simply the unnecessary revisions done to toons. Honestly, why fuck around with something that was working before? It really feels like the PVPers QQ’d so much on the forums that Blizzard ended up bowing to them for an entire expansion.
I think the only way this upcoming expansion will succeed is if the content is satisfying and engaging enough to retain people’s interests. For myself, I tried the beta and didn’t see anything that really compelled me to spend that much time. The only thing I did pretty much was check out the talents (which obviously were a huge disappointment) and wandering around the new continent.
I have a feeling that the content itself won’t be that great. The only features that might be interesting are the pet battles and the new landscape. The remaining stuff is just more of the same. I feel that Blizzard is just out of touch at this point with World of Warcraft and their focus on forcing people to grind is wearing everyone out. Each expansion it feels as though Blizzard is killing its legacy and that the wrong people are running the show.
Well, hopefully Blizzard can end WoW on a more uplifting note. Right now, the future is pretty dim.
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