[3.1] Ulduar Preview - NOW WITH PATCH NOTES

[Merusk]

Actually it says "Maybe around 8pm."

Gee, large patches don't implement easilyl. Whoda thunk.

[Ratman_tf]

JESUS GOD CHRIST AN EVENING WITHOUT WOW!

[Evil Elvis]

PVP's pretty fucked atm.

Wintergrasp on Stormreaver is bugged, and won't end.  Horde lost on def, the relic is exposed, but no one actually controls the zone.

Every time I try to enter AV/AB, i get stuck at the loading screen and have to alt-f4 to get out.  Sometimes I get hearthed out, and I hear some people are falling through the world when they try entering.

[Fordel]

Sounds like patch day to me!

[Rasix]

Dual speccing is pretty slick and Dominoes works with it already.   

xperl is kinda boned at the moment, but usuable with a beta update and a bug squasher.

[kildorn]

Aside from the lol worthy world and instance servers, patch seems pretty keen so far. I like most of the changes in solo practice, I need to check on them in raid and pvp situations still. They did well on three trash pulls we managed in the comedy vault attempt!

[Dren]

I logged on late enough that I only had to wait for the patch.  23 minutes this time.  Dual specced my Pally Ret/Prot, so now he can heal, dps, and tank.  We controlled WG and went into the vault.  Took the original boss down no problem and then started to try the second *new* one.  Big fail there, but it was late and everyone was running without a stitch of add-ons.  I can't remember a time where we went after a boss without having some spoilers ahead of time.  We aren't used to getting to new content this quickly!

Dual-spec without outfitter is .... quite hard.  The pally now has 3 entirely different sets for heal/dps/tank.  I'll be working on updating add-ons tonight (hopefully they are patched.)  Dual-spec is going to be my new mini-game from here on out.  I really like how it was done.

[Drubear]

Dual-spec without outfitter is .... quite hard.  The pally now has 3 entirely different sets for heal/dps/tank.  I'll be working on updating add-ons tonight (hopefully they are patched.)  Dual-spec is going to be my new mini-game from here on out.  I really like how it was done.

Mundocani (Outfitter author) has released a 3.1 version on Curse - didn't see any explanation but there are a lot of "Welcome back!"s.

[Merusk]

Dual spec is nice as I now have a PvP spec and a PvE spec.  The ability to rape people even harder than I did before as a DK makes me understand all the whines now as I blew people apart last night in WSG.  Thanks Howling Blast/ Frost Strike/ Oblit!

[Selby]

The new boss in Vault is... interesting.  We hit him a few times to see where we would get.  If we tanked the 4 adds near him, we died.  If we tanked them considerably away from him, we would still die.  He randomly overcharges one and it seems to hit the entire raid for over 17k nature damage.  If you kill one, another on spawns quickly to join the fight.  It was fun trying to figure it out without any spoilers or wiki entries on how to do it.

[ClydeJr]

The new fishing daily sent me to fish at River's Heart in Sholzar. That turned into a big pvp-fest (OMG world pvp) since the area you had to fish in wasn't that big. It was fun (unless you were actually trying to fish). After killing and getting killed for a while, I went off, did the Oracle dailies, came back to find the place had civilized and no one was bothering each other. Got a Bone Fishing Pole in the reward sack. Perfect fishing pole for my Forsaken.

[Merusk]

Yeah I'd missed the changes to fishing earlier.  As a DK who has only managed to get up to 200 skill so far, I'd like to say FUCK YES!  I always thought it was stupid you could only fish in certain areas.  (And prior to that, having to fish in certain areas just to get a skill up)  Requiring a certain skill level to catch specific fish types makes a lot more sense and it a lot more fun.  No more "Summon me from IF when raid starts, I'm going to be skilling up fishing."

[Soulflame]

We downed Flame Lootviathan before the instance server went KABOOM!     Assuming the instance servers don't melt down again, and Blizzard fixes the other bosses, we'll try some more tonight.  Hooray for new raid content.

[kildorn]

The new boss in Vault is... interesting.  We hit him a few times to see where we would get.  If we tanked the 4 adds near him, we died.  If we tanked them considerably away from him, we would still die.  He randomly overcharges one and it seems to hit the entire raid for over 17k nature damage.  If you kill one, another on spawns quickly to join the fight.  It was fun trying to figure it out without any spoilers or wiki entries on how to do it.

It's an interesting fight, but sadly one of those "MUST KNOW INSTANTLY WHAT THE BUFFS DO OR RAID WIPE" fights.


edit: new Armory is keen, but broken. If you want comedy specs, it's got some new tree/old spec points thing going on where you wind up with 5/3 in random talents.

[bhodi]

We also downed flame leviathan on our first real attempt (the first was an unintentional start as someone got too close), and got the no-stun achievement because the guys who got up there couldn't figure out how to PUSH BUTTAN to stun the guy.

We went down to razordrake (?) and got two attempts on it before the servers shit themselves for the night. We pretty much fell apart on it, though, people dying left and right because they aren't running fast enough out of those blue clouds.

I was chosen to get the shards as apparently they form into a healing mace, which tethers me pretty tightly to the game. Exciting times! I'm just happy for new content.

[Lantyssa]

The fishing changes were nice.  Skilling up from level 1 was easy and I made more money from junk than I'd get throwing all the fish away.

I can't mess with the dual spec stuff due to a lack of money, though my Druid is the only one who would really benefit from it at this point.  Hopefully all the frogs from Darkmoon will go off the market soon and I can dominate the market for a few weeks while selling herbs to all the returning people.

[Nevermore]

There should be a very good market for herbs for a while with all the glyphs people are going to need.

[Nonentity]

Herbs are selling strong.

I made 500 gold overnight, just from scrambling to put up the pittance of glyphs I had in my bank on my druid. I made sure I had a good 80+ glyphs on the AH before I left for work. I'm trying to ensure that my druid will be able to buy her own dual spec, without dipping into my warrior's cash stocks.

[Rasix]

Maybe this is a good time to sell the roughly 30-40 stacks of Northrend herbs I have sititng in the bank.

I imagine it'll be a week before my guild gets any solid shots at Ulduar 10m content. Seems like about half the active players didn't bother even logging on yesterday. 

How is Ulduar 10 tuned anyways?  Does it assume you're in mostly Nax 25 gear?

[Ingmar]

How is Ulduar 10 tuned anyways?  Does it assume you're in mostly Nax 25 gear?

Supposedly not, they claim the intended progression is Nax10->Uld10. I sure hope that is true, since I am going to be tanking it in ilvl 200 gear mostly, and it could make for some long nights if I'm getting gibbed by virtue of not being in 213+ stuff! I have all of two pieces of 213 stuff, the Maly-10 quest necklace and T7.5 gloves.

[Lakov_Sanite]

Maybe this is a good time to sell the roughly 30-40 stacks of Northrend herbs I have sititng in the bank.

I imagine it'll be a week before my guild gets any solid shots at Ulduar 10m content. Seems like about half the active players didn't bother even logging on yesterday. 

How is Ulduar 10 tuned anyways?  Does it assume you're in mostly Nax 25 gear?

I went in last night(10man) with my guilds a-team and we were fully 25man geared.  We cleared leviathan,razorscale,xt,iron council, kolgarn, auriya, hodir in about 4 hours. It's definitely not a faceroll since there were many wipes but 25man gear makes it a LOT easier. We were actually able to get a few achievements as well.

I do find the difference in bosses staggering. Razorscale on 25man is a huge dps race and even my guild which is the best on my server(this is not saying much) could not kill him in 25man and yet on 10man we one shotted him.

It's definitely a step up in difficulty and I would put ulduar25 on par with black temple in terms of how hard it is.

[Lantyssa]

There should be a very good market for herbs for a while with all the glyphs people are going to need.

Good point.  Looks like Ky is going herbing on Thursday.

Any know which will be in most demand?  About 300 skill, so will Duskwallow, Feralas (can get thick hide as well), or hellfire be most useful?

[K9]

My hunch would be the herbs that make dusky pigment (Stranglekelp, Swiftthistle, Briarthorn, Bruiseweed and Mageroyal), and golden pigment (Liferoot, Kingsblood, Wild Steelbloom and Grave Moss). These two pigments make up for about half or more of the glyphs in the 1-300 skill range. Outland and Northrend herbs should be good too.

[pants]

Drama!  Curse and WoW Interface have banded together to stop third party addon updaters from getting addons from their sites.  Apparently their main target was WoW Matrix (which I hadn't heard of), but WUU doesn't work for those sites either.  You are now forced to either use WoW Interface's non-existent updater, or Curse's bloaty updater, or do all your addons manually.

It looks like wow interface forums are broke now, else I'd link the fantastic thread where you get to decide who you like less, the "I demand you give me addons" crowd, or the "I write addons for me, and I don't give a toss about my users" crowd.

[K9]

I am grateful to anyone willing to spend their time writing an addon I can then use to improve my gameplay experience.

My main is now stuck in hc UK, waiting for some type of GM action, but not holding my breath.

[Soulflame]

Grid is not working, xperl is reportedly somewhat broken.  DBM will KILL YOUR CLIENT or something similarly dire.

I installed pitbull, and then spent a lot of the rest of the night fiddling with it.  My overall impression of it:  Soon as grid is fixed, I'm ditching pitbull.  Very configurable, but damn, I just want an interface that shows people's health, and allows me to click on it.  Not something that defaults to "swallow your entire screen".  Which then took me probably close to an hour to figure out what needed configuring where in order to reduce the size of the bars to something reasonable.  Mostly because we were fiddling around with FlameLeviathan trash, and then an absolutely comical wipe to "all four towers still up" hardmode attempt.

[Rasix]

Along the same line of conversation, but is there anyway to turn off Blizzard's party frames when not in a raid?

[Soulflame]

I don't believe there is.  I've looked enough times to believe such a thing, anyway.

[Evil Elvis]

VoA froze up for my entire raid today, and now no one's able to log into their characters.

Edit: 3 hours later, I finally got out.  I'm hearing that all instances are fucked on my server atm.  Oh, and the AH just died.

[Rasix]

Yikes. I think I'm staying the hell out of raids for a week.  Of course, this impacts me less than others. *grumble grumble*

[Soulflame]

VoA froze up for my entire raid today, and now no one's able to log into their characters.

This happened to us last night in Ulduar.  Some were booted to Dalaran, where they fell through Dalaran approximately 10000000000 times before hitting the ground.  Apparently the sheer number of bodies under Dalaran was 100% epic.  Some fell through the world... forever.  Others were stuck in Ulduar without any way to get out, although I'm told if you log out for more than 40 minutes that you'll be booted to the nearest graveyard.  I was one of the lucky ones stuck in Ulduar last night, I'm very excited* to discover where exactly I wind up when I log in tonight.

* actual level of excitement may be very low.

[Merusk]

Awesome bug with the dual speccing.  It will randomly not assign all of your points if your server is lagging. I discovered I was missing Scourge Strike and Unholy blight after switching back from my frost spec, and I had 2 unspent talent points in my bucket.  Switching back to Frost I had one unspent point.  Awesome.

[K9]

My main was unstuck about 20 minutes after a post on the customer support forum, so well done there Blizz.

Did the new fishing daily, got the weather-beaten fishing hat for my troubles. The new fishing system is definitely a vast improvement over the old. Still not perfect, but far more tolerable.

As far as addons go, Grid seems to be working in the sense that I can interact with it, but it's reporting aggro and debuffs wrong. Quartz is working except for the cast-bar. Pitbull seems buggy as hell, but I don't think I updated the right version, so I'll have another go with that. Bartender4 is working perfectly, supporting dual-spec and everything very nicely. I haven't loaded DBM yet, but I'll see when we do Naxx/Ulduar tomorrow.

[Oban]

Awesome bug with the dual speccing.  It will randomly not assign all of your points if your server is lagging. I discovered I was missing Scourge Strike and Unholy blight after switching back from my frost spec, and I had 2 unspent talent points in my bucket.  Switching back to Frost I had one unspent point.  Awesome.

Ah ha... I was wondering if I had done something wrong, but every time I switch between combat and hat spec I somehow end up having to put ten points back in to hemo, lolstep and hat.

[Evil Elvis]

The only bug I've had with grid is with aggro alert; I just disabled the module.  QuestHelper's been extra flaky though, and the waypoint arrow doesn't display correctly.

Aside from the numerous bugs, it feels like the pvp survivability on my disc priest has gone way up.  I bought the wrong gloves today, so I'm not getting the +50 resil bonus (I didn't realized satin and mooncloth items can't be mixed for set bonus'), but at 655 with 20k health and the new changes, I can actually last more than a few seconds when I get focus fired.

I had a poorly geared warrior, dk, and hunter all on me while I was alone at the beach at SotA for a good 2 minutes.  I managed to shake off the hunter/dk, and was about to kill the war when we won the game.  Self penance + stacking grace + inner fire glyph + super cheap shields = win.