Patch Day! 3.3 Headaches!

Well. As everyone knows, the long awaited patch 3.3 has landed! Having pre-patched, I only had to wait forty minutes for my WoW to patch.

Upon getting in, I got asked to go do the three new instances on Normal. They're interesting, to say the least. A bit more challenging than what we're used to, I want to say, as there's not so much as real damage as there is the mobs casting a reflecting shield, and your party members killing themselves on accident if they don't pay attention. Still, though, rather interesting.

Afterward, my regular twenty-five man group decided to test the waters of ICC.

That was painful. A few wipes to trash, a few to Lord Marrowgar, and too many wipes to want to think about to Lady Deathwhisper. We managed to get the Lord down, but the Lady... she conquered us. It's not a real friendly fight, we discovered, and even worse on classes that use both melee and spells [such as my Enhancement shaman, the only character that raids 25s]. We ended up recalling that, on new boss fights, our raid leader likes to talk. A lot. A few points during the explanations our group [consisting of melee] all came to the consensus of the fact that none of us have comprehended a word said in the last two out of three hours of raid. And that Lady Deathwhisper's fight went to the effect of "blah blah blah mana shield, blah blah blah adds" and something about killing things. Basically, kill things, avoid other things, and kill more things (adds). That's all the DPS had to know about both of the boss fights we encountered. Of course, it's the same on every other fight, but still. Our attention spans could have been likened to that of an ADD six year old. At best.

Raid time ended after what seemed like eternity, and everyone was pumped to leave and go do something else. Something else being the new instances, that was... except, Blizzard had other ideas. Three minutes looking at a load screen, get kicked out, rinse and repeat. For an hour or so. Until boredom and that good ol' ADD kicked in and alt tabbing just wasn't cutting it, and tiredness was starting to creep upon people.

The expectation of things not being broken on patch days has never been met. It's understandable, naturally, but still a source of frustration to the player base that had been waiting with baited breath for new content to play with. Instead, they're faced with headaches as instance servers crash, shiny new features broken, and incredible lag. I did, however, notice that the effects on the character selection screen -- the backgrounds -- were brighter and were a touch more active. Cheers, Blizzard. Our greatly anticipated day became a day of frustration and realization that the patience was rewarded by a prettier character screen. Until things are fixed, anyway.

Guess there's always tomorrow.

And the next day.

It's not going anywhere, and it can only get better.

So one can hope, anyway.