Recent changes in lieu of the Cataclysm coming!

So this past week I logged into WoW for the first time since before the BIG patch - the pre-Cataclysm patch - and boy was that a nightmare!

I'll be honest, I hate BIG patch days and especially the big one right before an expansion comes out. Having played since Vanilla WoW, this is now the 3rd time I've gotten to "enjoy" this.

Logging in in Dalaran was a bad idea - the lag was HORRIBLE. Now the patch been out for like 4 weeks - you would have thought by this point they would have worked out the laggy-ness but nope. I asked a friend that was online about it, just to make sure it wasn't just my system lagging and they confirmed that ever since the patch that lag has been horrible.

I then had to login to each of my regular toons I play and respec/glyph them and find a trainer since they tweeked some minor things. Considering I have 3 80s, all with dual-spec, and a low-70s rogue alt I'm leveling, this took a bit of time to do - I'm talking like between a half hour to an hour. 

In addition to respec'ing my hunter, I had to respec all her pets too. I do like that you can "carry" multiple pets now though instead of only having one and the rest stabled - I tend to use my kitty while questing and 5 manning, but my wolf for raiding thanks to his piercing howl or whatever special buff wolves give dps.

For my druid, while my main spec is Balance (aka Moonkin/Boomkin), my offspec is Resto (aka Healy). Previously, Resto druids got Tree Form to heal in, where you  looked like a tree with arms like in the Wizard of Oz and this improved your healing spells. Now though, while they still have a Tree From, it's a talent that has like a 3 minute cooldown and you're only in it for 30 seconds - talk about a bummer!

Specc'ing my rogue was by far the worst though. Ever since I leveled her, she's been Subtlety hybrid spec - having the majoring of her points in Subtlety for the awesome ambushes, premeditation and preparation talents while the rest have been a toss up of helpful things in both the Combat and Assassination trees. Now though, the way they have the Talent Trees set up, you have to pick a main tree to spend 30 points in before you can put points into any of the other 2 trees. As you can imagine, this was difficult for me as I couldn't spec her the way I always have. The Subtlety talents were nice for questing and PVPing (which I did quite a bit of on her during Vanilla), however for dungeons and raids, they're pretty worthless as you can only get an ambush off at the start. I decided to go Combat with her and spec into the other trees after the 30 points for other good talents. It's working out well so far, but I do miss my awesome ambushes and premeditation!

Anyways, my latest adventures... as I've mentioned, I've been leveling up my rogue lately, hoping to get her to 80 by Cataclysm, which comes out in a month (Dec 11). I finally got her to level 73 and I've finished the boring Borean Tundra and the leveling guide/addon I use has me moving on to Howling Fjord which I like much better.

Since I'm lazy and haven't had a mage or lock get me into Dalaran prior to level 74, I hearthed to Shatt and went to Stormwind to fly to Menethil and get to the boat to go to Howling Fjord. While in Northrend, I picked up a quest to talk to a person in any of the major alliance cities, so I stopped to check it out in Stormwind.

Turns out, there's some new guys in Old Town called "Doomsayers" who tell the worried Stormwind citizens prophecies of doom and the coming end of Azeroth!

I went into the Keep and there was Officer Anton with a slew of quests for me to do which included infiltrating these Cultists of Doom and find out what they were up to. I don't want to give away the surprise, but it was pretty neat! I also got sent to Ironforge to help out with a minor elemental problem as well.

It was nice XP and got me a decent way through level 73 - I'm almost halfway to 74!