This post could just as easily have been entitled “Surviving the pandamonium” or “A taste of things to come”. The first referencing surviving the patch to start Mists of PANDAria (see it was a deliberate spelling mistake), the second because of all the blog topics I now have in mind.

I remember when the world changed for Cata. I was excited to see the changes and annoyed at the bugged exploring achievements (which were never fixed). However, the patch was just an exciting event and I wasn’t really affected by it. I just logged on and played like I always did. This time it was very different, and several hours later I’m still not at the stage I was when I logged off Tuesday night.

The talent system has changed, abilities have been changed/removed/added, glyphs are all different, rotations are different. I’ve not even got this set up right yet on my protection paladin, I haven’t even done my ret offspec yet. I have an alt of every class so some might not get set up until Mists at this rate.

I also run a fair few addons now. I decided to wipe the slate clean with Mists and deleted all the addons, and the wtf folder (after backing it up of course), to clean it up. I’d had a custom ui on my paladin and so I decided to rebuild that and then roll it out to all my characters. Addons, even updated ones, and patches don’t tend to mix so I’ve still not got this properly sorted on one character, let alone all of them.

Addon misery
You’d think with starting from scratch that you wouldn’t have addon trouble. Even with updated addons you still can have a lot of trouble. I started off with jerky lag while moving and horrendous combat lag. I fixed the movement lag by capping my fps back at 60, which is what it is normally, for some reason it had more than doubled up to 120 or 140. I figured that was what was causing the problem and it might have been – partly. I then had to go through each addon to see what was causing the combat lag, thank Lothar for Addon Loader which made doing so a lot easier.

It turned out to be a combination of addons but the only one I couldn’t do without was Tell Me When. Fortunately for me it got another update and that fixed all the problems I had with it. I use Tell Me When to track buff/debuff time which I find invaluable in so many instances, as it tells you when dots are about to drop, or the best time to use a buffed ability.

Talent me up
As I mentioned at the start I have an alt of every class, all but two of which are level 85 (those two being 80 and 74 respectively). All of these need talents, glyphs and the ui set up for them. Now it’s one thing to do it on a class you know really well, where you understand what the differences are, and what replaces what etc. It’s quite another to delve into it on a class you don’t know very well at all. In a way I have to relearn and re-educate myself about every single class.

This is going to spark a series of posts about various classes. Where I’ll share what I learn, and discover, as I get to know the classes, and work out what my playing alts will be in Mists. From playing on the beta I have a hypothesis of what I think I’ll like. However, live is very different from beta even if the class changes are the same. Now I have a lot of alts, and I like to have an alt for every situation. So if I want to go to a raid or a dungeon with my friends, I always can because I always have what is missing from the group. Now my main is and always will be (as much as you can say always about anything) my paladin. In cata it was main specced healer, off spec tank for most of the expansion. At the end it has become main specced tank, off spec dps and this is what it’ll be in Mists as well.

However, my alts in cata looked like this:
– Melee dps = kitty druid
– Ranged dps = mage
– Healer = priest
– Tank = death knight

In Mists they will break down a little differently:
– Melee dps = monk or warrior, possibly but unlikely to be death knight
– Ranged dps = hunter, with a side order of warlock whenever I level it to 85
– Healer = undecided, likely still priest
– Tank = death knight or warrior, maybe even monk

I love tanking and so it’s difficult for me not to spec, every class that I can, as a tank. Bear tanking has always annoyed me as it uses the same gear set as kitty, but optimised a different way. Now, it’s easy to think that you just collect a second set of the same gear but when you already have the upgrade, and then it just refuses to drop again, it gets really frustrating. With the changes that they’ve made to tanks in this patch, the dps has gone way down, which makes questing as a tank even worse than it was before. Maintaining off specs is a pain but I can easily see that whatever I choose to spec at endgame, for warrior/death knight/monk, I will have to have a dps spec for levelling.

The point of this
This whole post is basically an introduction. I will be making a number of posts about various things. I’ll do a post about my ui with how it’s set up, what addons I use, why I made the changes I did etc. I’ll be posting about various classes and the talents and how they play now. All this comes before Pandaria and they’ll be so many posts about that. I don’t even care if I’m the only one that reads them. I like to write about this game, put my thoughts into words and formulate what I truly do think. I used to spam twitter and sometimes still do, but 140 characters is much too limiting.

Happy patch day … all I want to do is play.