Wednesday, October 15, 2008

It's Here!

We downloaded patch 3.0.2 last night and installed it. I actually had to make room on my hard drive to accommodate it. This thing is big! Then we joined the millions of people around the world as we signed in to the server and....waited to retrieve our characters. And then we waited for game to load. But hey, we got cool new loading screens to look at.

Actually, it took so long we set the laptops aside and started watching the TV show Chuck from Monday night. We got about halfway through it when we noticed that our characters got logged in. Of course things were buggy, our addons didn't work (so we disabled them), and everywhere you went was really crowded and thus our frame rates were low.

The first thing I noticed were the new achievements since as soon as you log in you achieve a bunch of stuff. Then my first thought was click my pets and mounts and make them the spell items and free up some bag space. As soon as I learned my first vanity pet I got the achievement, "Can I keep him?" Very cute. Of course, everyone and their dog has that achievement.

It was about this time that we got booted. So back to watching TV and waiting to load again. We got back in and it was immediately apparent that the pets and mounts we had just learned were no longer in our spell books. Oh, and we didn't have the items either. /panic. Apparently we were not the only ones affected, and we saw later on that it was a known problem and had something to do with display issues. I'm still waiting for the hot fix to this. I want my hippogryph back!

With that out of the way, Lal and Elionene headed to Darnassus to learn new abilities and talents. We chose Darnassus because we figured it would be the least crowded. Throughout all this, we had gotten on vent with a couple guildies and were talking back and forth about things. A few people in the guild were grinding their inscription ability. One of our members made it to 350 last night. He's crazy. Lal kept her Discipline/Holy build, moving a couple talents around to grab some of the new talents. Elionene stayed Beast master and went 51/10 into Marksman. I have the extra points for my pet and the ability to tame exotic pets, but for now I'm not sure which exotic pet I want. Another hunter in the guild made his way to Azuremyst Isle to tame the newly available core hound, The Kirken. He collects all white pets and mounts, so I was excited for him to get the only white core hound in the game. He's still deciding on a name. In homage to the mob and his quest, I would call him Kirkenstocks.

Salthier logged in and specced 51/10 Feral. I had to give up omen of clarity, but I really wanted to try out the new Berserk talent. It looks pretty crazy. I'll just have to grab omen when I get to level 71.

After doing all of this, and exploring the new Stormwind Docks, and seeing the hole where Dalaran used to be (and picking up the Going Down? Achievement by falling into the crater) it was already getting way past my bed time.

I heard through the guild forums that the server was still buggy. People were getting kicked every 30 to 60 minutes. And all of our addons are still a little finicky. Some work, but others some cause problems. Outfitter is especially MIA.

The other thing I really wanted to check out was the new calendar option. I really like how it looks, and that you can create your own events, but it's lacking in its ability to allow people to sign up. You can't just post a raid or event and have the whole guild see it. You have to invite people individually. There is a Mass Invite option that was always grayed out for me, so I'll have to take a look at that again. If you're interested in knowing more, Gun Loving Dwarf Chick wrote a fantastic blog post on it. I'm hoping Blizzard adjusts it to be more useful in the near future.

Tonight I'm hoping to try out my new talent trees in some dungeons or quests or something. We have a guild meeting, after which we are going to pub crawl and try and pick up the achievement to drink 25 different beverages. Should be fun.

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