Meanwhile, Back in Azeroth…

I managed to get on last night post patch and get my hunter to level 68.

Actually, I did not have to do much.  Tistann was about 8% from level on Sunday, but when I logged in after the patch, he showed 100%.  A quick ride for some discovery and poof, level 68.  A little bit closer to level cap and being in position for Wrath of the Lich King.

Fortunately I have been logging into WoW fairly regularly, so I already had nearly 2 GB of the patch already downloaded.

The patch notes are a mile long and I did not read them all.  There was one nice item I saw as I scanned through though, a boon for those of us always running out of bank slots and bag space:

New Vanity Pet and Mount changes: Players will now be able to access their non-combat pets and mounts by clicking on the pets tab in the Character Info panel. These pets and mounts will be now learnable much like spells or abilities. Once a vanity pet or mount is learned, the icon will disappear from within a player

Ula will be happy.  She can now have all her pets with her every where she goes.

The achievement tracker was in.  I know this is going to feed the obsessive compulsive need in people.  I was a bit disappointed at how low my actual achievement count was on Vikund, my level 70.

Yeah, I can feel the need to fix that.  Crap, am I back and hooked again already, almost a month before the expansion?

The other item I liked was the new calendar.

You can use it for personal and guild activities, but one of the really nice things about it is that it lists in-game events as well, like the when and where of Darkmoon Faire, which I apparently just missed… again.

And yes, somebody is going to say “WAR has a calendar” and claim that Blizzard copied that idea, as though Mythic somehow invented the whole calendar idea.  When I compared the two, since the Twilight Dandies made level 2 and have a guild calendar as well, I felt that WAR’s was not as polished.  Functional, sure, but designed by the same person who did the auction house I would guess.  The WoW calendar feels better and looks quite a bit better, even if it does take up more screen real estate when open

The one thing that WAR’s calendar wins on is time display.  I believe WAR’s calendar converts to your system time while WoW’s shows the server time, which can be confusing if you play on a server out of your time zone, and doubly so if you play with friends who are also scattered across other time zones.

There were other new things obviously new with the patch like updated load screens, WotLK branding, a new login screen, and such, but I did not spend much time poking around, it being a school night and all that.

There were some issues with the patch that lead to extended downtimes, as reported by Massively, but by the time I logged on (9pm Pacific time) only four servers were still down and our own server seemed stable and reasonably full of people for a Tuesday night.

Otherwise there was the usual patch night follies.  All my Addons were disabled and such.  You really find out how much you use them when they are all gone.

Still, things looked good.  This is Blizzard’s first shot in it’s Lich King arsenal.  Come November I think we’ll find that report’s of WoW’s demise have been greatly exaggerated.