After my first full day to dive into the latest massive content patch of World of Warcraft, I must admit, I’m finding myself a bit underwhelmed. Admittedly, a fair portion of my general disposition to the patch is a result of the abundance of glitches, bugs, and other (hopefully) soon to be fixed issues.
My main toon, a Ret/Holy Paladin is lagging so bad I can’t get a legitimate test of his new skills and damage capabilities. On the other hand, the 7 frames per second cannot be the only culprit in dropping 70% of my damage. My ungodly lag seems to be character based, as without any different addons, my Paladin on the Thrall server and my Warrior on Vek’Nilash both lag horribly, yet my Druid and Shaman on Vek both play just fine. Of my 6 level 80 toons, my opinions of how the patch affected each is as follows:
Paladin:
Significant damage and minor overall healing nerf. Holy’s new abilities and talents look fun, while so far, Retribution’s talents and new abilities feel more clunky – possibly just from the lag though. Not impressed.
Death Knight:
It’s pretty hard for me to judge my Death Knight’s new talent trees and such because of the massive change. I was blood spec dps and frost spec tank, now I’m unable to play either since blood is tanking only and frost can no longer tank. Purely from a dummy test, 2-handed frost pretty fun and probably similar dps to what I could produce as blood. Probably alright.
Warrior:
The only spec I’ve played my warrior is fury. Fury has taken a decent damage nerf that I anticipate seeing fixed either soon or at cataclysm launch. The new abilities and procs are a little more engaging though. I’m looking forward to seeing him perform better. One of my good friends has gotten a chance to play test Arms spec and the dps is competitive now, which is nice for warriors to have another PVE option. A little excited.
Druid:
Balance druids hit HARD. All-in-all, I’d guess a 15-20% damage increase from what I was previously doing. The new eclipse system is a little easier to understand and plan out which could possibly make it more useful while questing or in dungeons. Feral cat damage plummeted comparatively and feral bear form lost armor. Although I haven’t tried tanking on bear yet, I’m hearing good things. Suspicious.
Shaman:
I must confess, I don’t like my enhancement shaman much. It doesn’t feel like it changed much from before 4.0.1, so if you liked the way they played, you’ll probably still enjoy them. As for me, I see myself switching to Elemental or Resto pretty soon. Damage output has stayed about the same as far as I can tell. Unenthusiastic.
Hunter:
I’m pretty nervous about taking my hunter into an instance. The new focus system isn’t as rogue-ish feeling as I had worried it might be but, it’s going to take a lot of getting used to. Damage looks good and many of the new abilities, such as the new call pet/stable, seem like pretty good quality of life buffs. Hopeful.
Well, that’s my 15 minutes for today. Tomorrow my alliance rogue will hit 70 and I’ll talk a little about PVP on him and how I’m making a killing on selling glyphs.