Thursday, November 15, 2007

Pretty Smooth

I'm going to have to say that my patch 2.3 upgrade was pretty smooth.

I run Windows Vista, and there is a little hickup with the Blizzard downloader. You need to run it as administrator, so I never get a background download. To get upgrades, I have to start WoW as administrator, and I usually only do that on patch day, so I had a 281MB download facing me when I got home yesterday. A little shock when it started off telling me it'll be a 4 hour download, but it ended up taking less than 1 hour.

Curse.com seemed to be pretty responsive in the early evening, so I was able to get latest copies of all my plugins pretty easily. The curse downloader did most of the work. I don't know if they added more processing capacity since 2.2 came out, because I found Curse.com to be brutal that night.

I made the switch from TitanPanel to FuBar. Initial feel is pretty positive. I like the Ace2 concept where all the config screens are easy to find.

Gatherer addon didn't have any downloads available in the early evening, and it actually broke and gave LUA errors. Disabled it, to only mild discomfort. Then, wednesday morning, an update was available, so hopefully that'll get me back to efficient gathering.

In the end, I was back to an almost fully functional UI in short order, and then went in to grind and quest.

Herbs
The first thing I noticed was the appearance of herbs. All the herbs I could pick (ok, so I only came across terocone and felweed, so "all" is a dramatic statement and an assumption) had this sparkly appearance or aura around them. Makes them a drop easier to spot. Eh. I kind of liked the challenge that sometimes presents itself when you're standing right on top of a herb location, and your "track herbs" is showing you there's something there, but you still cant find it. Just makes it feel like herbing is actually a skill, and not just point and click. I'll get used to it.

Quests on Mini-map
Then I saw these cute question marks on my mini-map. Very cool, so much easier to work with finding new quests and turning in completed ones. Big fan of this change.

Hunter Dead Zone
After writing up my thingie about the dead zone, I think it'll do better in its own post.

Pet moving behind mob
I'm not sure if I experienced this happening or not. I was only running solo, which means that my pet has aggro almost all the time, and so therefore should not be trying to move behind. I thought I did notice a drop more of the little subtle movements right at the beginning of fights that my pet and a target mob usually do. It just felt a drop more jittery right at the beginning. But, perhaps this was because I was fighting some Warp Stalkers, and they might just be jittery as they cloak/uncloak, warp/unwarp.

More to come on that as I get some instance action and group action going.

Guild Bank
My guild setup a guild bank, and is demising the duckie banks we have. So I think that's cool. I didn't go look at it yet, but the guildies were chattering about it and seemed enthusiastic, so that's got potential.

Although I haven't seen it in action, I'm also a big fan of having tank repairs funded by the guild. Especially for tanks who spec such that farming becomes really tough for them. I want to make it as easy for those guys to fund repairs as they can. I'll have to wait until I see how it is implemented and administered, but my thoughts on the concept are pretty good.

Mail Attachments
w00t, 12 items attached to a single email. Outstanding. I mail so much stuff between Amava and her AH mule, its not funny. Saving me some clicks will add up over time.Video Settings
Tiny annoyance, but they set my video settings and action bars to default settings. Easy fix, just jacked all the video settings back up to maximum, and enabled the action bars which showed back up with all my stuff in the right spot. So this was easy.

I think that's about it for what I've been exposed to in the patch so far.

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

- Glowing Herbs: I for one have found it a pain the "old" process of green herbs on green backgrounds or almost transparent herbs. Was the only gathering skill where you sometimes had to almost "fight" with it to get your loot! Hated those "zoom minimap full, place carefully over the dot, still don't see herb, grrrr, finally!, zoom minimap back to normal"... One less frustating moment removed from game, so I'm 110% for it!

- Quests on Mini-map: 105% for it too! Not 110 because I can't "remove" some that don't interest me, such as PvP or "Cloth delivery for rep" and thus those keep annoying for a bit but hopefully I'll get a feeling for those so as to ignore them...

- Pet moving behind mob: for the short moments I played a hunter to test double-trapping, I've had a bit more of "pet-mob dancing" than I used to, and I was in Zangar and HP so no stalkers there. Then I read on the forums a wide profusion of problems where mobs with their back to the wall totally mess up with your pet... Another case of "working fine on PTR but we mess up when going live: WTF is the PTR for after all if we make changes that only go to live untested???"... Not too impressive with Blizzard on this one...

- Guild Bank: a good idea overall, but don't run any char in guilds so can't speak for it!

- Mail Attachments: another nice change, only missing a "take all" button. Still, I've already eliminated 2 add-ons on this account!

- Video Settings: Yep, same here. Haven't even checked on Video Settings though, only added the bars back up!

Anonymous said...

I just had a crazy idea: get a guild up and running just for myself and alts and, with the help of a friend, invite all my alts to it! Then I could use Guild Bank and drop one or two of my bank chars! ;)

Would also have the added advantage of no more guild invites popping up out of nowhere or even guild charter signing...