More First Impressions of 3.2

The Paladin changes are overall pretty fantastic.

The change to Exorcism has taken away one ranged pick up ability, and some of the damage/threat output, but from the instances I've tanked so far - several heroics and Naxx 10 - it won't be a big issue. I'm surprised at how quickly I've gotten out of the habit of hitting the key for Exorcism (I replaced it on my action bar with Sacred Shield) when trying to grab adds.

The change to Blessing of Sanctuary is fantastic, but also bugged. No longer having to choose between the additional health of Kings and the mana return/damage reduction of Sanctuary is great in 5 or 10 man groups where I'm the only Paladin.

Between the changes to Shield of Righteousness and Seal of Vengeance, I think Prot Paladin single target DPS is about the same as it was before - possibly a bit higher, I haven't really looked at numbers. I'll have to look at the damage I get tanking Emalon adds to have more of an idea how much difference it has made.

The removal of the duration on Righteous Fury is fantastic, though I noticed that the mana cost hasn't been removed. I was hoping for a 0 mana, toggleable ability similar to auras. Righteous Fury contributes a large chunk of my buffing mana consumption, which becomes a serious problem when being combat ressed during boss encounters (I have just over 5.5k mana, buffing costs me a large percentage of that).

The Ardent Defender change is fantastic. It saved my ass on the Kel'Thuzad fight when we were finishing off Naxx 10 (I swear I was out of that void zone), and seems like it will help a lot on fights like Mimiron and General Vezax where there's the potential to take a large amount of damage quickly that healers may not be prepared for.

The only new content I've seen so far is the 5 man, Trial of the Champion. I ran it on both heroic and normal (losing a roll on the new tank trinket), and was overall very disappointed with it.

Having to use mounts and joust for the first boss(es) is a neat idea, except that I HATE the jousting on WoW with a passion. It seems clumsy and awkward, but that might just be because I'm no good at it, I don't know.

After that it was just general tank and spank trash, no seemingly great challenge. We wiped once on the first boss (on the jousting part), but after that we only had a couple of deaths from people pulling additional groups before the second boss fight. Maybe I'm just too used to Ulduar at this point, though.

I might see if I can DPS some heroics later today to see what the changes are like from the Retribution point of view, then possibly try out the new battleground. Holy Paladins are, from what I saw in Naxx last night, now insane. I think the Paladin we had (who isn't even geared well enough for Ulduar) could have solo healed a large amount of it.

First Impressions of 3.2

Because everyone else is doing it.

It took me ~35 minutes to download the patch, only to have problems with installation because "WoW.exe couldn't be found." I had the bright idea of moving the downloader file for the patch over to my World of Warcraft folder (where the WoW.exe file is located - makes sense, right?) and running it - only to find I had to download the patch again. ~60% later I finally remembered I'd already downloaded the patch into another folder, cancelled the download and copied the files over. Same error.

The fix? Right-click, "Run as Administrator" on WoW.exe then run the patch install again. Fuck you, Vista.

The patch is now installed and I've spent half an hour trying to log into a server that went up nearly an hour late (thanks Blizzard). I'm getting as far as "Retrieving character list" before finally being disconnected.

At this point I haven't even seen 3.2 in action and I hate it already. Will update when I can actually login.