[3.1] Ulduar Preview - NOW WITH PATCH NOTES

[Ratman_tf]

I'm holding off on updating my addons until saturday when my guild is "officially" running Ulduar 25. I hope by then most of the kinks with addons and the servers will be worked out.

[Evil Elvis]

Made the mistake of trying VoA again.  Same shit happened.

Maybe I'll just stop playing for a week or two.

[Paelos]

My Ulduar run isn't starting until the 24th. I figure by then the severs will stop sucking and possible strategies will be out.

[WindupAtheist]

Argent Tournament, fun or just more dumb vehicle shit? Not sure yet.

[Ingmar]

We had Vault lockup fail two nights in a row also. I'm pretty willing to overlook server instability on patch day, but they usually have it pretty well ironed out by the next night. 

[bhodi]

So far it's locked up every hour, every 10/25man on the server. No change from yesterday. Got one attempt in at that new Arch boss. Getting kind of tired of this...

[Rendakor]

Sigh, I avoid the forums and miss the memo about VoA being broke as a joke. My main is now stuck there. I've also go a belf alt that's missing 3 talent points, unable to spend the remaining points, and unable to login. All this for a crummy new raidzone and a fistfull of nerfs? Thanks assholes.

</nerdrage>

[Paelos]

Dual spec is totally borked. Swapping is an exercise in figuring out which talent points magically vanished. If they don't have this figured out by the weekend with the world server dumps, the VoA nonesense, and the dual spec crap, they are going to actually start losing accounts over this patch. I usually don't say that, but this is the first time I'm really feeling like they've stopped giving a crap about the game. Given the time that went into testing this patch, and given the patches of the past, this is just getting progressively more ridiculous.

[Fordel]

Dual Spec did the opposite for me, bonus talent points!


Best patch evar. 

[K9]

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.

They added a resell function in 3.1. If you're buying an item with alternative currencies (armour tokens, arena points, honour etc) you have a two hour window to sell the item back if you feel you made a wrong purchase. One of the features that I missed in the patch notes, but it's kinda cool. The only limitation is that you cannot resell stacked items (gems, badges, orbs).

Sigh, I avoid the forums and miss the memo about VoA being broke as a joke. My main is now stuck there. I've also go a belf alt that's missing 3 talent points, unable to spend the remaining points, and unable to login. All this for a crummy new raidzone and a fistfull of nerfs? Thanks assholes.

</nerdrage>

Post on the customer support forums, I got my main fixed in about 20mins doing this.

Argent Tournament, fun or just more dumb vehicle shit? Not sure yet.

I'm not a fan of vehicles, but this is better implemented than most from what I have seen so far.

Other cool new stuff I discovered:
 - Holding down Alt while mousing-over an item in your character screen shows all the alternative items you could equip in that slot which you have in your inventory
 - Pre-designing talents. I don't know why this is set off by default since it's brilliant. You can find the option in the Interface Menu, under.... display I think. It allows you to preconfigure your talents before saving, avoiding those 1-point misclicks you occasionally make.

[Rendakor]

Posted on the customer service forums; got me a copypasta response and a lock within 2 minutes. Took about 2 hours for instance servers to come back up and I could finally hearth out. No GM reply at all, about either the crashes or my alt's missing talents.

I really can't believe how buggy this patch has been. Ulduar and VoA are both broken, dual specs randomly steal talent points or reset your spec completely, the various world servers crash hourly, vehicles fall through the world, etc. Everything Blizz changed, they broke; and that's with a month of testing. They could easily have split this patch into two (3.1: Dual Specs and Class Changes, 3.2: Ulduar or vice versa) or more patches; but instead they release one huge buggy mess that breaks the game for everyone.

[Hindenburg]

Is the game at least running better? Framerates have suffered a significant drop since wotlk came out, and those frames never returned.

[ClydeJr]

So far I've had barely any issues at all. After getting the addon mess straightened out somewhat, the only thing that's happened while I was on was we had the Northrend world server go down for a few minutes. I play on Chromaggus which is a low-med pop server which may be why were having less issues. My prot warrior now has a 2nd spec in Arms. God its fun, even in my crappy gear. Really GCD limited though.

[Ratman_tf]

I don't know why this is set off by default since it's brilliant.

So people don't have to confirm every talent point as they level up.

[Vash]

Is the game at least running better? Framerates have suffered a significant drop since wotlk came out, and those frames never returned.

Well, they've added a lot of additional spell effect, texture, and other graphic improvements for people with high end machines, and added even more in 3.1, so you may need to do some tweaking with your graphics options to turn all that stuff off or put it on low and get something close to your old framerates back.

In other news, Yogg has been killed by Ensidia already, prepare for some "the game is still too easy" QQ to start flying from hardcore players anytime now.  

[Paelos]

My server is a release server, and it's a mess with the world dumps in primetime. Also, framerates were so bad in Dalaran I'm running the game on minimum specs just so I can get around there.

Also, Yogg isn't the real raiding boss test for Ulduar. All the bigtime raiding guilds went the pussy route and chased after the fastest kills without any hardmodes. If they kill Alagon during the next reset though, well... 

[K9]

Ensidia did hard-mode iron council. Also judging from the issues reports it seems that hard-mode leviathan isn't getting extra HP like it should, so it's not as hard as it should be.

Posted on the customer service forums; got me a copypasta response and a lock within 2 minutes. Took about 2 hours for instance servers to come back up and I could finally hearth out. No GM reply at all, about either the crashes or my alt's missing talents.

Ah, I posted into the sticky thread and it got resolved.

So people don't have to confirm every talent point as they level up.

Fair point.

[Hindenburg]

Well, they've added a lot of additional spell effect, texture, and other graphic improvements for people with high end machines, and added even more in 3.1, so you may need to do some tweaking with your graphics options to turn all that stuff off or put it on low and get something close to your old framerates back.

Oh, I'm well aware that they added a lot of bells and whistles. The thing is, given equal resolution, maxed textures, view distance and character details, and having everything else turned off, it's running (and most certainly looking) worse than AoC. I've a bit of trouble coming up with an excuse for that.

[AutomaticZen]

In other news, Yogg has been killed by Ensidia already, prepare for some "the game is still too easy" QQ to start flying from hardcore players anytime now.  

But what can they really do with the current mechanics?  All bosses are either gear-checks, or skill-checks.  Skill-checks mostly boil down to "stand here, not there".  The pain is raiding is getting everyone there in the first place, and then getting them to stand in the right spot and hit the right button.  Past that are there really any new mechanics they can challenge us with?

Vehicles maybe?

[Vash]

Well, the point is that nobody got to test Yogg on the PTR and it didn't really slow them down too much, although a US guild had like a 7 hour head start on Yogg and didn't beat them to the kill.

As for hard modes and Alagon (which only has a hard mode and is basically the Sarth 3D of Ulduar), I'm assuming from what Blizzard has been saying that if these are tuned properly they will be pretty heavy gear checks and require most of the raid to be in 25 man Ulduar gear to succeed.  They even mentioned that guilds may want to do Ulduar 10 man hard modes to gear up for 25 man hard modes since 10 man hard mode gear is slightly better than 25 man normal mode gear.

If they are truly tuned to be that much of a gear check it makes sense that top guilds would just race for world firsts right as the patch hit, then worry about hard modes once the raid has some better gear and more experience with the fights.  E-peen bragging rights is always a good reason too  .

[K9]

You are also talking about a guild that has, through recruitment and mergers, assembled the most obsessive and dedicated group of raiders possible. These guys are to regular players what Chelsea FC are to your pub footbal team, or the Yankees are to little league. Any content designed to hold these guys is is going to be borderline impossible for the other 99%. These guys are dinosaurs anyway, relics of now-dead design philosophies; what Blizzard have done well is realised that people don't really care how quickly the pros clear content, it's how logn it takes everyone else that matters, and that's why they are doing better than ever.

[Ratman_tf]

Well, they've added a lot of additional spell effect, texture, and other graphic improvements for people with high end machines, and added even more in 3.1, so you may need to do some tweaking with your graphics options to turn all that stuff off or put it on low and get something close to your old framerates back.

Oh, I'm well aware that they added a lot of bells and whistles. The thing is, given equal resolution, maxed textures, view distance and character details, and having everything else turned off, it's running (and most certainly looking) worse than AoC. I've a bit of trouble coming up with an excuse for that.

I'm running it on my brand new (for me) ATI 3870, and I'm getting good performance with settings turned nearly max.

[Hindenburg]

Even in Dalaran?

[Ratman_tf]

Even in Dalaran?

I've had one lockup when flying into Dal, and the usual chop from having tons of player there, but nothing out of the ordinary.

[Rasix]

Is the game at least running better? Framerates have suffered a significant drop since wotlk came out, and those frames never returned.

Yesterday, I had my first lock up since the expansion released. I'm blaming it on QuestHelper.

Dalaran sucks but I don't have problems getting around it. Framerate problems really only come into play during 25 man raids if I forget to turn down spell effects. Even then it can get a little dicey.

Independent of the overall problems of the patch and more due to the new content, I'm getting that feeling that I might be done.  Last 2 times I quit were when BT and Sunwell were released.  New content depresses the hell out of me in my playing situation.

[Nevermore]

All for mods I use had updates I applied yesterday (including QuestHelper), and I didn't have any problems with them last night.  QH just takes a long time to load.

The servers, on the other hand...   

[Simond]

Is the game at least running better? Framerates have suffered a significant drop since wotlk came out, and those frames never returned.

Drop your draw distance by half. WotLK approximately doubled how far out the client renders, so halving it puts it back to TBC standards. Oh, and turn off vsync if you don't need it.

[Khaldun]

I'm not having any serious technical issues (so far). We have had guildies who have dropped talent points mysteriously and so on. VoA's second boss is, so far, unpuggable: your average pug breaks down crying in the first few seconds of the fight. We're planning to tackle him soon in-guild. We had an unplanned half-hearted 10-man ad hoc try at Flame Leviathan last night, got to about 10 % two times without reading any strats. Now that we've seen it, I think not much trouble. It's kind of fun.

[WindupAtheist]

I'm running the repair utility right now, as I've had to do every couple weeks or so ever since WOTLK hit. Now it's telling me the game is "seriously damaged" and has to be reverted to a previous version and repatched. Blizzard has lost some of their quality control mojo, yes.

[Merusk]

But.. but.. but everyone said that merger with Activision won't affect them at all!

[Selby]

For those of us who have been gaming with and buying Blizzard products since 1997 and the original Diablo, this is nothing new or surprising.

[Hindenburg]

I'm running the repair utility right now, as I've had to do every couple weeks or so ever since WOTLK hit. Now it's telling me the game is "seriously damaged" and has to be reverted to a previous version and repatched. Blizzard has lost some of their quality control mojo, yes.

You should keep in mind that they tend to forget to update the repair info after a major patch hits.

[pants]

Well my guild that has had 10-man Naxx on farm for a cuppla months went into 10-man Ulduar armed with little more than a couple of quick reads on Wowwiki.  The result.

Playing with vehicles at start:  'This is fun now, but I can see the novelty wearing off soon'. 
Leviathan:  Dropped him first go!  Woo! 
Razorgore?  The flying dragon one: Woah, lots of raid damage.  Lots of raid damage.  Ow.  Lets try Ignis. 
Ignis Trash: Hey, two fire giants.  Just like at the start of MC.  Lets pull this trash, see how much more uber we are these days.....  <raid sitting at GY> Hmm, yep - just as successful as our first run into MC. 
Ignis:  Holy Mary Mother of God, what the fuck just rolled straight over me??? 

So not impossible, but they've definately upped the difficulty.  Lots more having to pay attention and move intelligently, spatial awareness etc - even on trash.

[Merusk]

Fuck, time to find a new guild for me, then.  We didn't get farther than the trash before the instance crashed last night but our druid healer is a goddamned flake.   She was laughing in that bubble-headed idiot way as she said "Oooh, this is too complicated, it makes my head hurt." and  "All i want to do is follow people and heal."  I took that as a bad sign to begin with. 

[Malakili]

Given the crappy server stability isssues, my guild has only gotten in a couple hours tops so far this week (though I don't know how tonight went, was busy), got 2 bosses down so far though.   I'm just getting back into the game after a long break, so I'm not raiding with them at the moment, but we are a decent guild.  From what my mates have been telling me, it definitely is a upgrade in difficulty from Naxx 25, but not so hard that it is some significant sign in a change of design philosophy or anything.  My guess is that even average guilds will be able to complete this content before more is released.