I probably won’t do UBRS, it’s grayed out since I don’t have the gear. How good is it?
I actually like the new faces/expressions on the Taurens.
Any my troll’s trihawk is just more awesome overall.
The Taurens came out well in the “MOAR PIXELS” visuals upgrade.
Orcs? I used to think of my orc hunter as a pleasant, even-tempered chap with a nice neutral expression. Now I scowl. All the time. And I look older. Thanks, Blizzard, I needed a reminder of real life.
And, as someone pointed out in trade channel in Orgrimmar last night, orcs run like they have Down Syndrome. Not flattering, and maybe not literally accurate, but a good encapsulation of the awkward rolling side-to-side high-speed waddle Orcs call “running” now. :mad:
Humans were the big winner in the visuals upgrade, IMHO. All of a sudden, the faces of human toons are expressive. The human hunter girl I rolled up for my 8-year-old daughter has freckles!
The pretty races got prettier, with the (temporary) exception of blood elves.
The Draenei are actually impressive now. I can see how they were supposed to be imposing blue space alien heroes, rather than hairless Tauren.
I have no idea. I LFG’d but kept getting “cannot find instance” errors trying to port into the instance.
WTF, Blizz? You put me into a group but you “can’t find the instance”? How do you lose an entire instance?
Patch day. It is a bitch.
I faced the stat squish with trepidation as I gripped my want tighter in hand and ventured back into Serpent Shrine Cavern to face the wrath of Lady Vashj. Sweat beaded on my forehead as I noticed I no longer had more health than the random trash mobs. Would I be able to take on 5 at once when each one had 4 times my health.
Throwing caution to the wind, I charged in and applied a shadow word pain to all 5. They screamed… they writhed… they died. I stopped and stared in awe at the carnage I had just unleashed. I kissed my wand and with more confidence proceeded to the chamber of Lady Vashj.
TLDR; Soloing old content just got easier. The bonus you receive for creatures below your level far exceeds any lost combat function from the stat squish.
But alas, still no Coilfang Stalker. 4 months of farming and nothing.
Blizz messed up mightily when scaling down the squish. Healing was broken as of last night for my level 65 disc priest, and I read numerous similar complaints on the priest/healing forums. Maybe it’s broken at max level too, but I didn’t have time to do a LFD queue on my 90. So I dunno. All I know is healing on my alt last night was harder than after the Cata nerf. I queued into an Auchindoun 5-man (which I did 2 days ago without struggle) and healing was literally impossible. I had plenty of mana, but throughput was not even enough to keep up JUST the tank on a boss fight. I tried every spell in my arsenal, including pain supp + bubbles + penance on cd + flash heal spam–I even tried just spamming holy nova the whole time. But he was slowly whittled down to dead.
Fights are also taking way longer than they used to, due to decreased damage output. I don’t care about the absolute numbers, but the relative damage being done post-squish is pathetic. It feels like vanilla again. And, despite what the nostalgia-mongers would have you think, vanilla farking sucked.
I’m no slouch–I finished all Challenge Mode golds and have the <Proven Healer> title. I’ve been playing WoW since vanilla, and healing full-time since BC. This isn’t player error. I’m hopeful that a hotfix is incoming. If not… welp. Guess I gotta lot of questing to do now. >:[
New models are tits, though. I will say that. I rerolled Alliance after being Horde for a very long time, and I’m incredibly happy with the female human changes. 
Well, dammit, there is absolutely no point to the Isle of Thunder any more, outside of killing rares/Nalak. With the demise of Valor, the PvE dailies no longer award VP, the just award 2 Arcane Troves and a handful of Lesser Charms of Good Fortune. And, likewise, the PvP dailies award exactly the same thing. No more Honor for the quests.
Good point. The many obsessive grind-fests in MoP seem to have no (or less) point now.
OTOH, quest design is as classically bad as ever. The new portal quests are a great example:
“Kill x warriors and blow up y siege machines”. Waaaay over there? /shrug Ok.
“Good job, now go peek through a telescope so we can show you a WAY COOL cinematic.” Sure.
“Now kill x scouts.” Um. The ones right here surrounding us? The ones that were surrounding us 15 minutes earlier when you sent me out to kill the warriors and blow up the siege engines? You might have mentioned that at that time. Whatever.
“Now kill x executioners, freeing their captives.” Um. great. Hey, these guys are a bit sparse, and frankly hard to find with all the heavy competition. Yaay for flying around looking for quest NPCs.
If Blizz’s intent is to recreate the feel of vanilla WoW, they succeeded. They resurrected the worst elements of classic WoW quest design. So bravo for that.
It’s very good. The boss fights were fun. I was fairly well-geared before the patch (ilvl 550 or so) and now I just feel OP as hell. Even the mobs in UBRS weren’t a challenge; I could 1 or 2 shot them all. Had I not had decent gear, I might have found UBRS to be more challenging but it still would have been fun.
Yes, I had fun healing UBRS this afternoon - nice to actually have to strategically heal, knowing that I can’t simply keep all players topped up to 100%.
I’d love to play some more, but the EU servers appear to be having login issues. 
UBRS was pretty challenging… but there was no loot! The bosses dropped nothing! The second boss gave a personal loot item (some level 550 gloves that were inferior to what I already have) and there was no achievement for finishing the dungeon, either.
Weird.
Yeah, I’ve run thru it twice now and both times seemed to be the only person who didn’t get loot other than cash. Thankfully, all but one of my slots are already 550+ so it wasn’t a big deal except as a kind of “Heyyyyy! Wait a minute!” moment.
PvP queue seems to be broken still. I was in queue for over an hour this morning and never got in a game.
What? They carried forward the LFR “failbag” personal loot scheme to new-n-improved UBRS? WTF?
Most of my crap is 550+ as well, so I guess I’ll run it for the experience, not necessarily the loot. But I usually do it for the (futile hope of) loot.
I guess it’s pretty broken. Last night I heard massive complaining in every city about broken BG queues.
I wonder how long it’ll take to get 'em back on line, considering the sizeable population for whom WoW is primarily a PvP game.
I don’t think they’ve made any announcement, but apparently it’s not just UBRS, all WoD dungeons run through LFD will use personal loot. You can thank the ****s who roll need every chance they get.
In other news, I don’t know what they’ve done, but in tonight’s raid I saw some massive fps improvements, before the patch my fps would drop from 60 to 20-25 every time a boss fight started(without running any damage meter). But tonight it didn’t drop below 40, and that was with Skada running.
Protectors was so much easier with 40 fps and the bosses not being an amorphous blob of spell effects. 
Have they changed something with regards to how the realms are “linked”? Usually the Argent Tournament grounds are deserted, with maybe 1 or 2 other people jousting, but today there were dozens of jousters milling around. It wasn’t that crowded even back during WoLK times.
Also, the servers all seem to be down at the moment - with the “Incompatible” realm population message.
…whatever the hell that means.
I just popped in to check some things out and I am NOT seeing any changes in character models that I can distinguish. Everything looks just like it always has. They didn’t even change the female troll non-blink stare!
My human priest now has a slightly worried expression.
Thing is, PvP dailies have been my favorite way to gear up, given that I don’t really enjoy group play. And I utterly suck at PvP. I think I’m just too old for it. I don’t have the reflexes, and I can never keep track of my opponent in the scrum.
Open your menu, and select System -> Advanced. There is a checkbox there, which should be checked by default, that “turns on” the new character models. Perhaps your box is unchecked for some reason (The checkbox is there for people who either don’t like the new models at all, or who find that the new models negatively affect their framerate.)