So this patch has been met with a wide range of reactions, from “BEST THING EVAARRRRR!!!!!!11!!!!11OMGBBQ!!!!!!!1!” to “guess it’s finally time to quit.”
- (YAY) Garrison Campaign catch up mechanism – the ability to pay garrison resources to get quests that I haven’t gotten yet is a pretty solid win for me. I’m not a heads-down 1 toon kind of player. So ALL of my toons are behind on the garrison campaigns. Perhaps I can get them all caught up to where they have to wait for the next round.
- (YAY) Raiding with Leashes III – my warrior is currently farming the warglaives. So perhaps I can make a buck or two from pets acquired.
- (YAY) New Heirloom Collections Tab – THIS!!!!! SO MUCH THIS!!!!! No longer do I need to have an heirloom bank toon. No longer do I need to remember to send my trinkets or weapons between characters when the itch hits me to play a lowbie. If I want 2 copies of a weapon, cool. If I want 2 copies of the healing trinket, cool. The new necklace heirloom is pretty nice too (dat self-heal, YO!). Plus, I was only a couple heirlooms from the chauffeured chopper. So I padded my collection a bit. So the couple of sub-20 toons I have will be able to get around quicker now. WOOT!
- (meh) New Character Models: Blood Elf – I still run with a dog-ish computer, so my graphics are at the lowest possible settings. To be honest, I haven’t seen any discernible difference in ANY of the models. So this ranks nowhere with me. A couple friends are in love with their BEs now. I expect to see many a selfie with these folks.
- (meh) Twitter Integration – I have disappeared from all social networks. So this also ranks nowhere with me.
- (meh) Selfie Camera – I think my previous 2 bullet points sets the tone here. Nowhere’s-ville central.
- (meh) Garrison Boombox – another feature that was not aimed at me. The only time I care about sound is when I’m fishing or raiding. Any other time, Pandora is the only audio vibratory physio molecular transport device filling my ears with sonic happiness.
- (meh) Followers – At first, I was pretty stoked that we’d be able to pick up missed followers. Then I logged in and saw 5K price tags. So that would be a whole lot of “NOPE!”
- (meh) Garrison visitors – every day, you’ll get a garrison visitor. Might give you a raid boss, might be a profession vendor, might be a pet battle, might be a quest. Some variety to what has become most WoW Players’ daily chore list might take some of the drudgery out of garrisons. We’ll see.
So, as you can see, I’m not overly enamored with this patch. I’m not saying that we should lynch the folks at Blizzard. I’m just hoping that we see something that has a little substance to it soon.
Bodhi Rana 