4.0.1: Initial thoughts

Well the first few hours of WoW 4x is done. The game is looking rather stable and the priest class looking rather healthy from my very limited playtime in game so far. Not that I didn't spend much time in game, just not much time playing due to complete addon meltdown, now I am used to addons breaking after game patches but this was simply chaos and I am sure I was not alone. Many of the graphics updates seen in beta have appeared early, the floor textures in Stormwind and the new water textures, along with some interesting display bugs where the reflections in the water are showing as cloned textures rather than reflections, doh! Also noteworthy is the fact that while this has happened my framerate has got better not worse so hats off to Blizzard for making the graphics engine work harder, look prettier and be easier on the hardware.

Back to the experience, I logged in first to my bank alt to check the wealth gained from the expected rush on glyphs, sold a fair number and netted myself enough to cover my outlay on herbs (yes, I'm too lazy to go herbing so I buy them when they're cheap on the auction house) that were used to make the 2700 glyphs I posted onto the AH just before the maintenance shutdown on  Tuesday (I'm EU based remember), meaning the 2600 I have left are pure profit. Posted a few gems expecting the AH addon meltdown and was not disappointed as Auctioneer, Auctionator and Quick Auctions 3 no longer seem to play together nicely as they all wanted their skin to be on the same layer, a complete mess that was. Disabled Auctioneer and QA3 and used the mass post feature on Auctionator and it works as before just posting automatically no confirmation box at all, result! I was still getting spammed with errors from many addons (I run around 100 addons (inc modules) but decided that the time was ready for me to test Evlyxx's ability to be played.

Logging in and instantly the alrm bells rang, I had no Grid. This means that my ability to see other raid/party members health and debff status is gone. Worse, Clique was broken and seemd to have assigned Healing Touch to all my options. I'm not a druid you stupid addon! I logged out and disabled a few nice to have addons to see if that fixed any issues, logged back in to find it had slowed down the rate at which errors were flooding in but still I was unable to heal they way I heal using Grid, Clique and mouseover macros. It was now that I noticed that my macro addon, SuperDuperMacro, was also broken.

Someone suggested that I check out the new default raid unit frames so I disabled Grid and enable the default one, after spending 2 mins figuring it out and messing with it in a Battle Ground I must say I like it lots. It is a small step backwards from Grid but right now it works and the worst thing about it is that I cannot display my groups horizontally and it does not seem to show special raid debuffs without trying to show all debuffs. Quite big problems for me but it just means raid members will have to react faster than they may have done in the past with stuff like the ice blocks on Sindragosa.

A Clique update came out which fixed that and some tweaking of the macros meant that I was able to get them down to the standard 255 characters so I was able to get Clique and macros enabled on the new standard raid frames. Now all I had to do was give Evlyxx a healing talent build and I could go healing stuff again, not bad after 3 hours in game. Damn Blizzard for breaking the addons and the necessity for them for us healers (and damn me for being so dependant on addons in general).

Other addons that I noticed were broken beyond hope:

• QuestHelper: Abandoned by the author recently and broken by the patch 
• ItemRack: long term friend (I'm talking 2006) and long since neglected by the author finally stopped working so i have finally gone to the standard Equipment Manager;
• Multi Raid Alert: a lovely little addon that provides you with a movable panel with several sets, each made of 1 to 12 configurable buttons, this beast saved me many macro slots, praying that EvilOz will fix or I may need to learn LUA;
• Auctioneer: along with the modules that comes with it - very broken ands it doesn't look like Norganna has a beta release ready of the Cata version for us just yet;
• CowTip: seems unable to retrieve information on mouseover trying out TipTac as a replacement which works fine.

Lessons learned? Well I have dramatically reduced the number of addons I have installed as Uncle Blizz have put some nice features in the UI that means they are no longer needed. Sometimes patch days can be hell because of addons being broken by the game and/or each other. Also, it has reminded me how dependant the Warcraft player base is on a few individuals that devote time to writing software and then giving it away free and that they in turn get no thanks (the author of QuestHelper even got attacked in forum threads because he had quit the mod and was still taking donations as a result of his work)