4.0 thoughts

Its been almost a week now since 4.0.1 dropped and now that most of the bugs are ether sorted or being worked on its about time I gave my thoughts on the changes.

First thing I am sure everyone noticed is literally every addon broke, while this is not new for anyone who has been through a patch of this size it is not often that addons fail in this magnitude.
Some addons were able to be deleted out right such as our once required Pally Power. I know most people hate it mostly because we needed it but its been a part of the class so long it was a bitter sweet moment when I hit that uninstall button. I will miss the addon just not why we needed it.

Some addons have just not been updated. Most of these are addon-addons like Threat Plates and some Button Facade mods, addons that will be updated in due time. Others are like Questhelper who have seen a decline in use since Blizzard made their own copy and as such have been made redundant. The last lot are addons like XPerl whose authors for whatever reason have just not updated and have said they probably never will.

With any big patch and the work the the developers are having to do on their addons many have taken it as a time to make improvements. Because of this it is the perfect time to tweak your UI and make improvements of your own. I have put a lot of time into reworking my UI to streamline it and will post a pic of it when I am done with it. Some of the changes include; hiding my main ability bar, more use of PowerAuras including some custom made Auras and some custom editing on the Pitbull 4 LUA. This will also be the first time I have ever done anything with addons outside of their default settings.

With addons as sorted as they could be I spent most of my first day in cutting gems. I had a stock pile of about 100 different gems waiting on a bank alt and with 4.0.1 out I quickly cut them all and listed them on the AH. The gems were selling like hotcakes, some gems which I had brought for 80g pre patch were now going for 300g in the upper limits I was even able to snap up some extra gems from people still listing at he old prices and resell them for a decent profit. I got 1.5k after the first hour and over night another 8.5k, the following days have brought 1-1.5k a day as well. While the JC moeny is good Glyph money is even better, sadly I have no Inscribers but I could have done as others had and brought out glpyhs pre patch for 5-10g each and sold them for 40-100g each after. I have read of people making 30k+ in one night with Inscription.

The rest of my first day was spent fixing my spec, playing with the rotation and marveling at just how amazing the water looked. I have to say the simple work of changing the water has made a huge difference to the game. I can't wait to see how the changes to SW etc will look, I will be beautiful.


On Wednesday I finally got around to running a Heroic and testing out this new Paladin. My first one was Violet Hold and I cannot think of a better instance to test it out in. The alternation of single mobs and AoE packs in a random fashion was great for testing the two rotations and let gaps between them showed clearly how the new model was far Superior in mana management. My second run was UgK and that was a little more un organised with our mage always attacking the wrong target, we defiantly have lost a lot of threat on the targets we are not actively engaged with.
Overall I am quite liking the new rotation, its quite easy to learn an remember and its always great to see 10k+ crits poping up on your screen every few seconds. I have yet to use Word of Glory much in an instance but I am sure that will change once we enter the new Cataclysm instances.


Finally this week I jumped on my Priest and re did her talents. I must say Chakra is really fun and Holy Word:Sanctuary is awesome. I have also had a brief play as Disc on the Dummys and might have to switch to if for an instance just to play with Evangelism and Archangel a bit more. After teaching my partner the basics of the Pally rotation we hit the randoms and It is defiantly easier to heal her now that Defence is not an issue. After finding my groove again and with the ease of tank healing I found myself helping DPS far more than ever before, which leads to more desire to switch to Disc.


Over all I am really liking the changes the 4.0.1 has brought, while there are still things that need work I think this is defiantly a step in the right direction. I just can't wait for the Cataclysm and the next set of changes.