5.2 is here and we've all had time to absorb the changes to our classes, the new raid, the new dailies and the whole host of other features the patch brought. Sadly, I've been working since the patch dropped so my playtime has been rather limited.
That said I have still managed to get a good feel for the patches highlights. My first experience was literally the raid as after arriving home from work, patching up and updating all my addons I was already 5 minutes late and after logging in was summoned straight into the instance. The first set of trash is rather nondescript but there isn't much (unlike Heart of Fear) before the first boss. Despite hitting him almost unprepared, and being rather worried that my 2 minutes reading the icy-veins strat led me to believe there was a major DPS race ahead we had the bugger down to 27% on pull no 1 and had him dead in 4 mins 34 seconds on only our 6th pull. The next trash was interesting to say the least and will be a killer in LFR.
Before the patch landed I was really concerned about disc being a worthless spec with mastery not being applied to Spirit Shell, and hitting the raid in a mastery heavy focused I was really worried that our resto druid would whoop my ass, not only because he is a better healer than me but because of the massive buffs resto got. I was really surprised to find out that I managed to top the healing meters (see above) on our kill attempt. This to me is proof enough that disc is still very viable and extremely competitive even if like me you're running without any tier bonus, bad luck on Sha of Anger and raid drops all being druid/rogue/death knight/mage for our guild all barring 3 drops iirc.
The dailies themselves don't seem so bad but boy are there loads of the buggers and they take an age to complete and this is only the first phase. Heaven help us if the island is truly Isle of Quel'danas mkII as we'll end up with about 30 dailies there and spend about 2 hours doing them. The good news is the way I do my dailies now is to get valor capped each week then stop doing dailies and most weeks that means 1 day a week although this week I have yet to cap despite having done the dailies every day, working does suck!
The island itself is awful though, a dark gloomy place full of annoying placed obstacles preventing direct route running between most points. Although I must say I like the no flying there. The other issue I have is that flying out to Shado Pan Garrison and then having a portal is frustrating but it is forcing me to do the Shado Pan dailies again which ultimately will mean less time spent on the god forsaken Isle of Thunder each week.
Farm ownership sounds great but actually for a main toon is almost pointless. The benefit of work orders is worthless to a toon exalted with all faction barring the Black Prince, Shado Pan Assault and the Kirin Tor Offensive. Which annoyingly you can't do work orders for. For alts, the rep would be awesome but first you need to get exalted with the Tillers, which for me is the 2nd last rep to focus on with an alt as they have no gear to make the rep grind worthwhile. Having the hearthstone on the farm would be great for an alt too rather than my main but by the time I can get it there the need will have gone. Maybe its the way I play the game.
Also the rep gain from running random dungeons and scenarios seems almost worthless at 500 max a day as that is just under 2 daily quests worth of rep. It also feels like a horrible solution put in place to save Blizzard's pride at not just giving us the tabards back . Surely they could have had the same rep gains and given us tabards at friendly?
There is still loads for me to discover but that will happen tyhis weekend as I'm now off shift until Wednesday. What should I look for next?
About the Author
0 comments: