Anticipation

The title of this post is either a reference to Carly Simon or Rocky Horror, I can't decide which.

So more and more information is coming out about Patch 3.3 and each tidbit is making me more and more excited for various personal reasons. I'll cover some of the highlights, but first, I wanted to give a brief update on what I've been doing in game lately.

My rogue continues to be my favorite class to play, but lately the guild has been struggling with an overflow of raid-viable players and all the standard pitfalls that such a bloat encompasses. Currently the only scheduled raid is the weekend ToC-25, and now that we've got a large number of players of varying skill, the GLs have been trying to sort through the ever-growing list of bench-warmers to figure out where everybody stands, both in terms of gear and skill. What this means to me is that I've been sitting out a lot of fights. I don't mind this so much, as I understand what's happening, but it's left me with some time to kill.

So I've allowed my altaholism to kick in, but with a more focused approach - I asked the question, what kind of classes does the guild need? The answer came back, and the challenge was issued - make a Demo Lock.

For those of you who don't know, currently the Demonology Warlock fills the role of taking a back seat in personal DPS in order to provide Demonic Pact - a raid buff that, when packing enough crit to have a high uptime, and enough spellpower, will override a shaman's Totem of Wrath. I've always been interested in taking the utility rolls. When this was brought up, I was warned that my DPS would be pretty abysmal to everybody else, but my response is - I have a rogue. I'm good on the high DPS satisfaction.

And from the looks of things, changes to Molten Core, Decimation and Demonic Pact itself should see my DPS looking at least a little more competitive - I mean, I don't want to just be a walking totem, now.

So I dusted off my old ex-Horde Warlock, freshly faction-changed and kitted out in the latest clothy heirlooms, and have been powerlevelling my way through Outlands with my friend on his rogue. Ironically, with him playing Subtlety spec, and me going with Demonology, we've both taken hits on our DPS for survivability. But it's nice to do all those group quests in Terrokar and Nagrand without any fear of death.

Meanwhile, we lost a tank, and as such, there's an opening of sorts for anybody willing to man up and don his shield and defense rating. I've been sitting on my warrior for some time now, boggling at being a member of a guild that actually has a tanking surplus. But now that the door's open, and I've learned that a number of our tanks are only doing it to help out at the expense of what they'd rather be doing, I'm seeing the opportunity to really focus fire my way into good enough gear to be competitive.

So now I'm looking at three alts that I'd like to get geared for ToC and ICC in a relatively short period of time. That's why I'm absolutely ecstatic about the new LFG and LFR tools coming out. Here's a breakdown of the highlights:

- Cross Server LFG means more players for whatever you want to run. Obviously Oculus is still going to be at the bottom of the list (One day I will get Ruby Void. One day...) but overall, increasing the population of potential PuGers means a better chance of running something RIGHT NOW, as well as better chances of getting a good group (or a bad one - but that will never change.)

- Random Dungeons will let you re-run the same Heroics. I always hated the heroic cap. Not the concept - I agree that it would be unfair to reward players who work from home or are on summer vacation or whatever the ability to farm heroics non-stop all day. But the fact that you were saved as soon as the first boss was down, only to then wipe repeatedly on the second or third and finally give up, and be prevented from running the dungeon again for the rest of the day. That bugged me. Now it is gone. If you're willing to throw caution to the wind and take a chance on random dungeons with truly random people, you won't be punished for a bad group. Also, if you want to be really psychotic about it, it means that you can farm more than the 50-some emblems a day, provided you have the stamina and a hefty supply of Mt. Dew.

- Emblems of Triumph for everyone. Some people are crying about the welfare epics and easy modes and whatnot, but as a gamer who has struggled to make WoW fit into his life and still feel some sense of accomplishment, the normalization of Emblems is a huge relief to me. Any frustrations I've had over either missing out on the weekend ToC runs due to RL commitments, or just being benched that week, are mostly about the emblems. We all want to go and get a chance to roll on gear that drops. But it's just a chance. You learn to lower your expectations. But not getting to go to ToC-25 means that's 15 emblems of triumph I don't get this week. And that stings. With EoTs being the currency for some of the best gear in the game now, knowing that I just lost a huge chunk of progress on them has been bitter to the taste. Now I have more control of my own advancement, and it makes me extremly optimistic for the future.

There's also a lot of talk about the Chill of the Throne mechanic. I won't get into it, this post is long enough as it is, but my summarized thoughts are that I understand and agree with Blizzard on why they're doing this, but the software engineer in me disapproves of the method. It's a hack. Their system didn't hold up to their balancing methods, so they hard-coded a fix on the bosses in ICC to work around it. It's not elegant. But it will work. So no biggie.

Also this paladin thing. Now I feel like I should roll a pally just to see what all the fuss is about, but I think I've got enough on my plate for now. Add to that the fact that I'm basically taking the next week off from WoW, and I'm going to be plenty busy with things once Patch 3.3 drops. And if it drops next week I will be sad, but ultimately happy.