Holding Pattern

It's Saturday.  The 5.0.4 Patch hit on Wednesday, so I've been trying to wrap my head around all that has changed.  This is the pre Mists of Pandaria patch brining with it pretty much everything but the new MoP content.  So talent changes, spell changes, UI changes, all of that stuff. 

Of course this means broken add ons.  Some add on writers are kind enough to use the beta to write their changes and so release them the day of the patch, some can't or don't either due to not being sure if the live is going to be exactly the same as the beta or simply not having the time.  I'm not sure if anyone makes a living out of writing add ons but many are written by players who just found one day they like to be able to do this or that, therefore I'm not griping about the lack of updated add ons I surely couldn't write on.  However, a quick mention of one that I miss more than any others - Powa aura's, please Mr Writer update it I love it so much.  I'll write a full blog about add ons and probably power aura's will need one of it's own, I find it that useful.

Over the past couple of days, there has been little point in doing anything in game, given that everything is just going to be zero'd come 25 Sept, and we'll be replacing all those hard earned raid epics with greens.  If you fully kitted out in Heroic DS gear then you may get to 86 or 87 before you have to replace but you'll be replacing with quest gear or dungeon drops, so what's the point hammering away at content that is months old. 

Having said that I'm quite enjoying some new experiences in WOW and playing just for fun.  The main thing I have been doing is PVP, as a paladin healer.  For years I've been a big fan of tanking PVE content.  However during the break I played Star Wars: The Old Republic, for a couple of months.  The PVP in SWTOR is one of the things they did get right, I may write a full comparison about SWTOR and WOW someday but not right now.  Anyway through this rather convoluted route I found myself quite enjoying PVP and so I've decided to respec my old retri spec into a Healer and give healing in WOW a go.  I did this a few months back and jumped on every so often to give it a go and see if it kindled my passion for the game again.  I enjoyed it but not enough to get back in full time.  Now I'm back and giving it some more gas though.  Firstly the Pali healer in this halfway house, between expansions, situation seems a bit over powered.  I'm lasting a long time with 4 - 5 Players trying to beat the crap out of me, and my gear is much less than average, mostly consisting still of crafted blue PVP items. 

This maybe to do with the new resilience changes that have been implemented, giving everyone a base 30% resilience and then whatever gear they have on top of that.  If so I like the change if it increases 'Time to kill' one of the main things that made SWTOR so compelling was the long time to kill people in PVP.  I hope WOW is taking some of this and this remains.  I don't think that Healers should be able to last forever with 4-5 people on them but a longer time to kill will definitely be a good thing.  Whether all this will last when people are at 90 and have arena gear with lots of PVP power (a new stat that increase your power in PVP only) on it remains to be seen.  Hopefully me and my Girlfriend can get some Arena going.  She is a Hunter and we've steer away from arena in the past due to the limitations on hunters with minimum range, but that also has been removed from game now, so here's hoping.

The guild remains quiet, as we are in this holding pattern.  An old officer of mine and Real Life mate, has gone to the dark side and is playing  EVE, I've known for a long time that he wasn't going to return he made this official last night with his blog, he is truly lost to the black.  A shame cos he got me into WOW in the first place, but there you have it.  Come the expansion recruitment will have to start in anger and I'm sure it will as many people return , some to dead guilds some deciding what they want to do with Panda's.  Watch this space…..