Casualcraft A casual blog by a more than casual player.

First Impressions: Patch 3.3

First I must say, what a time to get back into World of Warcraft! By some kind of twist I managed to resubscribe only a few weeks before Patch 3.3, "Fall of the Lich King." After a lot of anticipation, it's finally time to get to a long awaited patch. I decided to take a few days before writing this post, and took some time to gather my thoughts.

Forge of Souls: First thing I did was pickup a few guildmates, find a PUG, and roll into the questline for the new instances. Being ridiculous, our group decided to go strait into Heroics. I'm not going to lie: Some of these fights (Both Forge and Pit) are pretty tough. The Forge feels pretty quick and clean to me. Our group drove without much ceremony to Bronjahm. We quickly engaged and raid warnings started popping up on my screen. Move in, move away, etc. We must have had some good DPS, because as the warnings were going off, the boss was dropping. After a little more trash, it was onto the Devourer of Souls. Most people are complaining about the voice acting on this giant floating face demon, but I don't really give a crap. We rolled into the room and read up a bit on the boss and just went for it. This is about the time that I realized that these new instances aren't playing around. The Devourer sports nearly a million hit points in Heroic. Special Note: If you are DPS, you need to actually look at your screen instead of just spamming your buttons, because Mirrored Soul with kill you in the face. I've done this fight a few times now, and I can say that it's becoming annoying that DPS can't seem to stop smashing their buttons. I can heal maybe one or two people through it, thanks to Beacon. However anyone else might be in trouble.

Pit of Saron: This is going to be my favorite of the three new Heroics. This place feels epic! Pit of Saron includes four bosses with lots of trash along the way. Ick and Krick are a very interesting fight. Your party has to deal with avoiding Toxic Waste all over the ground, which makes me have horrible flashbacks to Naxxramas, and having to rely on my party members to move the hell out of the way. As if that wasn't enough, you also have to run around exploding bombs during Explosive Barrage. And even if you survive all this, there's still a very stout Poison Nova to deal with. Definitely some work for the Healer. Forgemaster Garfrost is the first fight that had me saying, "Holy crap, this is epic!" Permafrost, with its two second ticks is one of the most ridiculous (Not in a bad context) Heroic mechanics I've ever seen. It totally makes the encounter have a sense of urgency. Chilling Wave has a crazy range, and you can nearly guarantee that everyone in the party is going to get hit by it. He's also got an attack called Deep Freeze, which nearly stops you in your tracks. Why is moving slow during this fight a bad thing? Well, let's examine. If you check out some pictures, you will notice that Forgemaster Garfrost has a giant boulder on his back. And unlike Atlas, he's not holding up the world, it's a giant boulder of saronite. Throw Saronite has a really cool mechanic. Raid warnings tell you that it's coming, and your display tells you where it's going to land. It feels really cool that you can move and react to the attack. After this, it's a gauntlet run with a twist. While fighting mobs, ice and rocks are going to falling all over you. Once again there's a cool use of mechanics in the circles that appear, helping you get out of the way. This all leads to a strait up, lore filled fight with Scourgelord Tyrannus. While he's on the ground duking it out with your party, Rimefang will be above you, trying to nuke you.

Halls of Reflection: The first time I tried to run this instance, we ended up bugging and I couldn't log in for about fifteen minutes. Not cool. The next day when it came up in my first random dungeon, I was a bit scared. Let me go ahead and say it: This Heroic is hard. There's barely any time to breathe in-between mobs, with the only breathers coming after bosses. Falric and Marwyn were not terribly difficult, the hard part was surviving long enough to fight them. The lore in this instance is awesome, and I'll be delving into it a lot more in some future posts. One thing I like is that if your party hits a wipe, you don't have to start all over like Violet Hold. Thank goodness for that. I spent a lot of time doing the trash and bosses over and over because of one mistake or death. Then it's on to my absolutely favorite part of the new instances, the gauntlet with the Lich King. I had no idea how this fight went, so running from the Lich King really had me staring at my PC. Watching Sylvanas turn at the end and announce that it was time to stand and fight, I honestly found myself thinking, "Are we really about to fight the Lich King?" Much to my surprise, Orgrim's Hammer shows up to blow the hell out of everything, allowing for a very timely escape. EPIC!

Dungeon Finder: This thing is awesome. As a Healer, I have yet to have a wait time over 30 seconds to queue for a random Heroic. I've seen a spectrum while using the Dungeon Finder. I went to Trial of the Champion with a Protection Warrior with 52k hit points. While this is great, I need to note that he also pulled over 3k DPS the entire time. Pro. I've had a few bad experiences, usually in the form of people going AFK randomly or being grouped with people from the same server/guild trying to run roughshot over the loot. However I have to call this one as a great addition to the game. Not to mention, you don't have to hearth out of Culling of Stratholme anymore, because when you drop group you get teleported back to where you were. Awesome.

The Loot: Thanks to the new dungeons as well as the easy access to Emblems of Triumph, I wanted to note that I picked up a few new items. I picked up some brand spanking new Legguards of the Frosty Depths on my first run through the Pit of Saron. I then turned around and spent 45 well earned Emblems of Triumph on the Shoulderplates of the Cavalier. Luckily, I've already gotten Exalted with the Sons of Hodir (And the Sunreavers and Orgrimmar in the past few days). Somewhere along the line I also managed to pickup another 35 Emblems of Triumph, because I was able to afford a Heartmender Circle. The ease of access to this gear really helps offset the expensive gear that comes from Frost Emblems.

So far, Patch 3.3 has been everything that I could have hoped it would be. Even with a shaky first few days Blizzard has scored again with new content that the players get for no extra cost, once again proving why Blizzard has raised the bar of the MMO world.