I know this is a little late, but I've been busy with the new dailys and with RL stuff.
So I was out in Nagrand and noticed an air cloud, which I promptly swooped down and sucked up. To my surprise, I no longer looked like a wannabe shadow priest. Seems they've put in a new animation for it, and it's pretty dang cool!
Well, the patch has dropped!
I waited for the usual extra downtime, then hopped on good ol' Argent Dawn. First thing I did was log onto Emelyn to see if I'd got enough honour for my new gloves. I had, but what was waiting for me on my character sheet made me boggle.
I WISH I'd got that much in one day. I actually got around 5k. I hopped into AV later on with Nax before I went to bed, and the new instant honour thing is really nice. So is the join as group feature. Putting the Horde staring area a whole three feet further back hasn't changed a whole lot from what I could see, though.
After that I hopped on Aly and did the new daily fishing quest, which sent me to Stormwind. Took me about 15 casts but I caught a baby crocolisk from the canals and handed it in for my reward, which was some gold, a grey, and some fishing lures. Woot!
Then I pottered around a bit, fending off "come heal for me at Sunwell" requests until Mega got online. We formed up a group consisting of Maxinos (warrior), Autumntail (rogue), Kertatha (mage), Raecrister (healing-type pally) and myself on Emelyn.
The new instance is fun! We purposefully went in there without having read any strats. Kertatha had done the first two bosses on test, so he kept quiet except for when we had some trouble.
The room above was a lot of fun. The first couple of pulls involved me and Kert giggling madly as we AOE'd and then died horribly.
Kael'thas was a challenge, took us about five tries to get him down. The next-to-last try was exciting, I was the only one alive when he got to about 13%. Between my DoTs and life siphon/life drain, I managed to get him down to 1% when I misjudged one of the arcane spheres and died, with a howl of "NOOOOOOO!". We got him down the time after that.
Then me and Mega did some of the dailys, then gave up on them because there were just toooooo many people. It's all pretty good fun though, and I'm looking forward to trying all the rest of the new stuff.
I did make some brilliant glass on Eledith, and got a dawnstone out of it. It's on a cooldown though.
I'm loving the new mana regen. Intellect now gives you extra regen, the more int you have - the more regen you get per point of spirit. That coupled with the mana-cost reduction of regrowth ... oh man. I was in tree form, spamming regrowth on Mega to test it, and I felt like a paladin. I think with full raid buffs, I'll be able to spam regrowth all day without my mana going down much at all.
So, 2.4 looks pretty exciting. I've been reading the news on the new dailys, the new dungeons - both the 5 man (can't wait to go) and the 25 man (that I'll not get to see until I'm level 80). The new faction looks pretty cool.
But what is it that has me squee-ing?
Vanity pet bags!
According to this article on WoW Insider, there are gonna be bags just for vanity pets. I really hope this is true. Since we got keyrings, I've been wanting this.
No more will I have to leave my poor whelps and miniwing in the bank! No more will they be abandoned and alone!
Of course, it also means that, if true, as soon as the patch hits I will be going on a Pokemon-esque rampage in search of new vanity pets, and those that I never got because of limited space.
While drinking my "morning" (mid-afternoon because I was up until 6am tanking BM for a guildie) coffee I browsed the notes from patch 2.4 on the test realm.
http://www.wowinsider.com/2008/02/08/2-4-patch-notes-up/
A lot of the instance notes seem to be aimed towards making the 25-man instances more accessible and easier. Such as the loss of attunement needed for Hyjal and BT, being able to fight Vashj and Kael'thas without downing the rest of the bosses, and it sounds like Mags is getting whomped with the nerf bat.
Is this a good thing? I think there's two sides to it. It's a good thing because it should allow more guilds to get through these dungeons quickly and perhaps actually get to experience Hyjal and BT before the WotLK. It's also obviously designed to help more people along to being able to see the new Sunwell raid.
However, all of those guilds that have been struggling with Vashj and Kael'thas to get their Hyjal attunements are bound to end up feeling a little superfluous. And along with whenever content is speeded up, some guilds might end up in Hyjal or BT well before they're ready for it, just like how we were seeing >70 characters asking for heroic instance runs.
People who did the quest will get a nifty new title, though! They'll have something different from "Champion of the Naaru" to display.
All I know is, I'm going to keep pushing to get our guild geared up in Kara, and then go see how much easier the Mags event is. Hold onto your tail, mister pit lord. We're coming for ya.
