Wednesday, October 15, 2008

One pebble less in my shoes!

While we’re waiting for the European servers to go up I’m thinking about what I will face once I’m able to get online again. There are lots of huge changes of course. And there isn’t much I can say that hasn’t been covered much better at other blogs. For mages I highly recommend Critical QQ and Spicytuna for some decent theorycrafting.

But do you know what makes me happy about the patch? It’s not the hairdresser (hey, who needs a hairdresser if you’ve got beautiful pink pigtails?), it’s not the achievement window (still raiding and really haven’t got time or energy to care) or the new profession (another great expense, not looking forward to grind mats or gold to get those glyphs).
No, what I’m looking forward to are the details, those gems hidden in the wall of text of patch notes. I’m talking about the small fixes of stuff that annoys you. Those changes won’t make the world turn upside down. It’s rather like when you finally get rid of a pebble hat have slipped into your shoes and has been annoying you for a while. It’s been a part of your life so long that you hardly notice it anymore, but at a subconscious level it lowers your mood.

The gem fix
For mages I’ve found one sweet little gem that will make our lives a little bit simpler. Yes, I’m talking about the gem issue in a double sense.

Non mage readers probably don’t know what I’m talking about, but mages do. You see, a while ago mages got some improvements to our mana gems, so that the biggest one didn’t only have one, but three charges. Wohoo! That was sweet. The only problem is that when you’ve used one charge you’ve got to trash the gem and make a new one to have it fully charged, for instance before a boss fight.

You can imagine how annoying this is after a wipe, when the raid leader is expecting a quick recovery. You’re already in a hurry, dealing with the mana issues when you get drained after self buffing and buffing the raid with intellect, desperately trying to get back to 100 percent quickly. You also have to mess around with your bags, trashing an almost working mana gem, making a new one, while everyone else is wondering what takes you so long.

I know some people made a macro to make the procedure go a bit quicker – I never got around to that myself. But this will soon be a distant memory. We don’t have to litter the floor around with half-used mana gems anymore! We’ll recharge the ones we already have by conjuring it!
And as if that wasn’t enough: the gems won’t disappear from our bags when we log out. This too means a little less time spent on drinking to compensate for mana losses. We still have to start every gaming session with conjuring bread and water, but the gems will already be there in our bags, ready to be used.

Rogue pebble
So there’s one pebble less in the shoes of my mage. And the rogue will get rid of one too – no more mixing of poison, yay! I always managed to buy the wrong vials or reagents, ending up with bags filled with rogue stuff but never the poison I needed. Now the risk for mistakes is smaller.

Is everything fine, now that the pebbles are gone? Well, to be honest I expect to find some new stones in my shoes pretty soon. That’s what happens when new features are brought into the game. Everything isn’t perfectly polished and smoothly working from start.

But right now I choose not to think about it. I’m looking forward to meet my new gem-trashing free existence in Azeroth.

Oh, happy patch day!

8 comments:

Cassini said...

The gem change is indeed a nice one. I'm sure there will be other little things buried away in those patch notes that we'll enjoy too when we find them. :)

I'm too busy qq'ing to my guild that the ghost hit from EP has been removed to notice them yet though! ;)

Anonymous said...

My biggest surprise is that they made raid bosses easier already. I hadn't read about that before today.

Altough I am happy about cat charge and potion munching in animal form. Mebbe a little trim of my hunter's beard as well. Something like Blackbeard's style.

You should also remember that your herbs are now more worth Larisa, as inscriptions use those. So it's time to give up your drug peddeling and start vandalizing people's gear.

Gevlon said...

Don't forget that buffing the whole raid will be one action, not 5. Also a great difference.

If only they would make a reagent version of amplify/dampen magic...

Anonymous said...

@Cassini: I know there are a few things to mourn about, such as the lost 2 T5 bonus... Farewell to arcane spec for a while... And now the insane search for spell hit again.. but still... I try to enjoy those small nice details.

@Grim: stupid little gnome as I am I've dumped herbalism. Probably no good timing... but I'm levelling it on my litte rogue alt. Perfect skill for an alt and perfect for a rogue that can sneak to the herbs and snatch them.
They're forcing me to give up a bit of my drug dependency with this new potion sickness stuff. Bah!

@Gevlon: oh, it will work that way? That's GREAT. If you're just one or two mages in the raid and you need to rebuff after a wipe, not only int, but also damplify, it really is a pain as it is now. Once you come to the last one it's almost time to renew on the first one...

Gevlon said...

Another little gem: there is a "create all" button on the enchanting interface. How much time I wished for it!

Fish said...

I posted about this already, but DPS for tanks is awesome. I had all but stopped playing my warrior because it was just too tedious soloing with him. Now with burst damage and some AOE, he's more than viable.

Anonymous said...

@Fish: that doesn't sound lika a pebble, it's more like.. a rock! But I'm glad to hear it. More happiness to warriors = less shortage of tanks.

krizzlybear said...

How convenient that you can actually hide the lower ranked spells in your spellbook, thus only showing the highest rank of each spell you have. Saves a BUNCH of time clicking through trying to find whatever spell you want to use at a particular moment.