Patch Day (v3.3) Recap

So patch day came and went, yet I fared better than most.

I logged on early Tuesday morning to find that the patch had gone live... and that my background downloader hadn't done that great of a job. It had only downloaded about 120 Mb of the 680 Mb patch. So, it spent the next 2 hours downloading. It finished installing just after 11:00 am, at which point I tried to log in and found that daylight savings time had struck again, and that Arizona is an hour off from California where my server was based. So, I had to wait till noon.

Maintenance was extended by about an hour and a half, so I read the patch notes and some patch 3.3 stuff while I waited. However, twitter was a great resource for finding out when the realms were coming online without having to constantly be typing in my password over and over again.

I finally got logged on at about 1:30 pm and started in on the random dungeons. The powers that be decided that the first dungeon would be Heroic Occulus, which everyone in my group throught was pretty lousy. However, patch 3.3 just nerfed Occulus a bit, so we went at it. We had zero problems with it, and it was actually pretty enjoyable.

I'm sure though that once this tapers off a bit, you could easily get grouped with a bunch of noobs who have no clue what they're doing in Heroic Occulus, and that it could go very, very wrong. My groups have all been wonderful through the random dungeon system so far... I'm not sure of the algorithms behind it. However, I have been selected as Healer every time so far, even though I always select Healer and Damage. I guess there's still a shortage there. I don't think there's anything in place for keeping out undergeared players, but I suppose you could always /votekick them.

The second dungeon that was randomly selected for me was the brand-new Icecrown Citadel wing. We pounded our way through those, even though no one had ever been there before. We assumed tank-and-spank on every boss, which proved to be efficient. I was a bit let down with the lack of complexity of the boss fights, especially for heroic. But then again, I was most likely playing with the hard-core WoW'ers who signed on as soon as the realms came up, and not the 12 year olds who were still in school. My group made it through the first two, but then the authentication server went down and we lost 3 out of our 5 group members before Halls of Reflection.

I was able to go back and do my dailies by myself while 90% of the WoW population was stuck offline. I considered myself lucky to be able to play at all.

Once the authentication servers came back online, there were all sorts of trouble with the instance servers being too over-crowded, and not able to launch more instances. Boo. Anyhow, I still came away with many more badges than I could get before, and a few frost's too.