Four Point Oh Point... Whu?

I am going to amuse myself now. You're welcom to come along with me, but you are warned - it is amusing to me to complain about things that probably don't matter to people who don't live in my head. Blizzard finally patched in the anticipated Pre-Cataclysm patch last week. The patch that promised to re-vamp the talent system, making leveling more engaging, create less fuss and muss between talents and buffs, rebalance characters around a level that is currently unobtainable, destroy PvP, further trivialize content, make Inscribers filthy rich, break all your mods, and probably introduce several game-crashing bugs. Thankfully, they managed all of this and more.

I've been playing off and on in the past week and a half (the patch went in last Tuesday and the servers were even playable that same day!), which is unusual for me of late. My WoW playtime went from "arguably an addiction on paper" to "about as often as I wash my car". However, Cataclysm and it's pre-patch promised a few things that were of interest to me. The new spec system, where you get several abilities/modifiers at level 10 that make you more "fully" your chosen spec seemed brilliant to me. As I have said several times, only Warrior really felt like they were suddenly given the tools to do their "role" at a low level all at once... if you wanted to tank. Being handed shield block, taunt, and sunder in rapid succession made you feel like a fundamental shift had taken place. No other spec had that, but now they possibly all would.

Second was the concept that "hey perhaps healers should be effective at damage, too, but not overly so." Now, this was promise in the TBC -> Wrath switch, and it was met to a degree. Healers were given some tools to more properly DPS, but really it was all in the "healing and spell damage are no longer separate stats, it's all spellpower now" change. With the exception of a few wonky outliers due to bugs and patch hilarity, leveling as a healer remained Godawful, but just slightly less so. The changes proposed this time around actually meant to give synergy between dps and healing talents, to actually encourage healers to shoot things and given them the tools to do so even in groups. My God, I thought - the power of the Sun. In the palm of my hand.

Above: Tuesday night ICC run.

So, after downloading everything and spending about three days figuring out what Glyphs to use, what new talents did what, and wondering why I got a sick, unnamed sense of dread after I put my Druid's offspec back to Feral, I decided a few things:

- Shadow spec for Priest was completely over the top, and would get severely nerfed. In order to save my heart the inevitable pain, I went from Holy/Shadow to Holy/Disc. I didn't notice (and more about this later), but apparently my body was at that time suffused with a bright glow and my hair went yellow and spiked straight up.

- Retribution on my Paladin felt kinda... dumb. I had piddled on the PTR with it some, and while I don't miss the BOP-EM!!! style of play chasing random cooldowns, going from that to hitting a button every 2-3 seconds felt... weird. Also the loss of magic removal from Cleanse pissed me off exactly as much as I thought it might. However, my Paladin has been Ret or Prot (or both) since December of 2005, which meant I only chose my spec by figuring out which was the most damn annoying. Thusly, I spec'd Ret. Also, I heard the damage overall was horrible, only fueling my desire.

- Holy, on the other hand, was hi-lar-i-ous. No cooldown on Exo? Shocks hitting much harder and more frequently? 

- Balance was pretty much the exact same thing it was, with a couple of tweaks to the rotation. I was a bit underwhelmed since I do enjoy my Moonkin a great deal. She was the only character I had that went through extensive ICC25 experience, and the spec has all the right mix of aoe, dots, and direct damage that make it interesting to me. But given how wildly Paladin and Priest shifted, finding out that Balance's changes were "now just keep ALL your DoTs up, Starsurge when it's up, also your Nieblung is now even less good" on top of the same ol same ol.

- My Warrior will likely gather dust now since Ret/Prot Paladin and Arms/Prot Warrior feel way, way too similar. 

- My Resto Shaman pretty much just got a straight upgrade of awesome. 

- My 77 Demo Warlock is now extremely complicated, which... I dunno. On one hand I enjoyed that Warlock had a bigger toolbox to play from than Mage, but on the other I just son of a bitch fucking seriously how many buttons do you want from me, Blizzard. HOW MANY.

After taking some time to read various information sources - blogs, official forums, crying men on the corner near Best Buy - I decided that I was probably gonna try and focus on just a few of my characters - the Paladin, Priest, and somewhat on the Shaman. My Shaman was really there because I wanted to test out his current power level, but mostly he seemed unchanged like Balance. So after this past week and then this weekend, I'm gonna see how it all plays out.