Patch 4.0.1 – the first week

When a new expansion is launched there is always a major patch to the game. However the changes for cataclysm include changes to how all the classes play. For those that use addons it is especially stressful, many players look upon some of these addons as being part of how they play. Nearly all addons did not work and some will not be replaced in their current form. For these reasons the first week or so after the patch were always going to test players, anyone who visits the official forums cannot help but see the complaints (or QQ) about the various changes. Fans of Player versus Player (PvP) were especially dismayed because as the developers admitted the patch temporarily unbalanced PvP.

For an altaholic, such as myself, it is a big challenge simply because I play so many different classes. I am actively playing four classes (Death Knight, Hunter, Druid and Warrior) all of which had to pick talents from the new smaller talent trees and learn how to use my spells/abilities after the changes. In addition some classes had the way their resources (Mana etc.) altered so that the old play styles would not work.

I didn’t log on until the evening after the patch, because my work means I only get a little time during the week to play. Although I had played without addons in the Beta, I hadn’t been using the auction house either and this is somewhere where I heavily rely on a few addons. I was too tired to be honest to do lots of manual calculations to make sense of things so I left it for another day.

Next up was my hunter. I had been farming the Gnomeregan instance on my level 42 Orc hunter so this was a good chance to see if things were better or worse after the patch. First I had to deal with being unable to either summon my pet (a gorilla) or train a new one. Instead I had to find a trainer to learn the new ability of call pet 2, my initial pet was in a stable so I couldn’t summon it. At level 42 you can ‘carry’ 3 different pets on you which is useful, this number eventually goes up to 5. Once I had learned all the ‘new’ abilities and spent my talents (Beast Mastery) it was time to return to Gnomeregan.
My instance runs are quite short, no more than 45 minutes, and only take me as far as the Clean Room. Because of the new focus resource and that volley has been removed I had to play around with my rotations before finding one that worked. Hunters can no longer use aspect of the viper to regenerate (mana/focus) and instead I used steady shot to regenerate focus when it got low. Multishot now hits all enemies within 8 yards of the target and is a good enough replacement for volley, in fact the changes made things easier. Once I had re-learned how to play my hunter the run seemed easier than before.

Later on I switched to my main character, a level 71 death knight (DK), I had been using the blood tree but not wishing to be forced into tanking in instances it was time for a change. Because I have two death knights I could try out both trees, another option would be to dual spec which is now very affordable at 100 gold – down from 1,000 gold. I choose to use the Frost tree and change from a 2 handed weapon to two 1 handed weapons. It was at this point I started to miss another addon, DrDamage which shows information on each spell/ability. The addon author is in the process of updating it so until then I will have to work things out by trial and error. Eventually I did work out a rotation that worked for me, which went even smoother once I realised that frost presence is better than blood presence now (without it I found myself low on rune power). Over the coming days I levelled my death knight to level 73, the only issue being when attacked by multiple mobs – Frost cannot tank or at least I cannot.

I also had a brief look around on my gathering characters, ore and herbs now give XP – the amount depends on your level. However there is a bug with newly created characters that mean herbalism has to be re-learned every time you log on (or hit a loading screen?). There was a similar bug with fishing in the beta so this should be quite easy to fix.

In future I will try to post every few days, although many of these posts will most likely be shorter in nature with the occasional longer more detailed post.