Patch Day Report

Patch day is the very definition of the term “mixed blessing”.

The week AFTER the patch?  Fantastic.  The day of the patch not so much.  It’s like waiting to open Christmas presents, FINALLY getting to Christmas, and then getting beaten with a stick whenever you get near the presents.  Perhaps I exaggerate.

Personally it was quite an odd patch day.  I was able to log in shortly after I got home (west coast time), and after checking my “load out of date add-ons” box I logged right into Dalaran.  The only thing that didn’t seem to work was Bartender, and that was only because the menu section was missing.  I assumed it was due to the Dungeon Finder change, and a new button there or some such.  That was something I could work around with keyboard bindings, so I decided to wait to update it (I’m sure every add-on provider was getting slammed last night).

I decided to try the new “Looking For Dungeon” dealy right away, so my buddy Deluxa and I teamed up and got in the queue as two DPS.  I was curious how long it would take for us to find a tank and a healer, I figured not long with all of the people on last night.  Sure enough, we got a full team rolling in short order.  Getting into the dungeon though…a different story.

Pre-patch when our server was having problems with “additional instances cannot be launched”, messages, at least you could bang your head into the instance portal and see your screen.  In this new level of hell that was the dungeon finder you would stay at the loading screen, with no progress bar filling mind you, for what seemed like an eternity before getting kicked back out.  Only then would you see that minutes ago one or more of your groupmates decided they were going to go jump off a building or hang themselves rather than wait to get in an instance.  The best part of all of this is, as soon as the first attempt was made to enter the instance, it would trigger your 15 minute cooldown, your lockout for joining another group such as this one.

Eventually Deluxa and I were able to get into an instance, and I was pleased to see the other members of my party (minus the healer) were pretty well geared.  We were tossed into Utguarde Keep, and with this group I knew we were going to demolish the place.  We rolled through the trash to the first boss and made short work of him.  Unfortunately at that point, the instance made short work of our party and not only kicked us all out, but disbanded our party for us as well.  All of a sudden I’m back in Dalaran, out of the group, trying to decide if Deluxa convinced the rest of the party to use the new “kick” option to punt me out (Deluxa is quite the character, but in this case it wasn’t him).

At that point, Deluxa and I decided to try our hand at the three new dungeons, so we loaded up a guild group and set off.  Aside from the inability to get into the dungeons right away we actually had very little problems.  I heard from other guildmates that said they were lagging out in the new instances unable to do anything, and then their characters would remain trapped online and in said instance for up to 30 minutes, during which time they would hop to alts and send themselves angry whispers expressing their displeasure.

We slowly worked our way through the three dungeons, only encountering problems heading from one to the next, until…

We finished the last fight of the last of the three dungeons.  Slight spoiler:

The loot chest for the last fight is on an airship, which is “parked” on the edge of a cliff, with stairs leading up to the main deck of the ship.  Any time any of us would set foot on the steps we would get disconnected.  We were struggling to find a way to reach the chest when someone else mentioned that levitate was working for other people trying to get up the stairs, so we tried it, and voila!  We didn’t alll make it, but eventually we got one person up there to pop the chest and then we were at least able to roll on loot.  HOORAY!  Some leather dropped for me that was at least interesting enough to look closer at later, and being the only leather wearer in the party I rolled on it and won it.

We then messed around a little bit trying to race up the steps on mounts with passengers, but to no avail.  A few of us died falling through the stairs when we lagged out, so we decided to claim victory just in getting to open the chest and roll and decided to call it there.  Only later did I notice:  Though I won the boots, I never received them.  I opened a GM ticket, which I expect to hear back from sometime around the release of the next expansion.

At the end of my night a full group of guild members decided to give the random dungeon finder one more try, so we hopped in a 5 man group and queued up.  We wouldn’t get anything for having a pug person in the party, but we didn’t care.  We got Stratholme, and we attempted to use the “Port to dungeon” option but to no avail.  One thing we did discover however:  By actually physically running to the instance opening and slamming heads into it a few times, we were able to get in almost immediately.

We started our adventure into Stratholme, only to discover the NPC you need to talk to to trigger the starting events was….not there.  No way to complete the instance.  We hopped back out, waited for our debuff to drop (again) and tried again, this time getting Gundrak.  This we were able to get into by again physically running someone over to the instance, and this time we got in and were able to plow through it in short order.  Two more Badges of Frost later and I was off to bed.

All in all patch day could have been worse.  Not perfect, but still fun.

How was your patch day?