Patch 3.3.5 came yesterday. The realms were down till about 20:30 which is one of the longest break they had for some time. Maybe longest patch break since the beginning of whole expansion? Anyway, it came up and as Kormac had raid planned, we went to VoA, weekly (Patchwerk) and then Ruby Sanctum. The conditions were rather unlucky, late start, worse composition, one undergeared tank and healer, the other tank getting disconnects right after pull. We did not killed him but considering what we saw, we should be able to do that soon probably.
It won’t be free loot though, we wiped many times on miniboss General Zarithrian already (sloppy tanking, not knowing tactics). Rest of minibosses and trash is fine once you know what to expect. First phase of Halion is rather easy. Tank and spank, running away from fire and running away with debuff and timelly dispel. This may be a problem without voice chat though – we are going there today with our casual 25 Dusk group, so we will see how big difference can or cannot the voice chat coordination be on this one. Second phase is pain. As the dragon has limited angle where the melee can stand (tail swipe and breath) and as being aware and turning with the globes is critical for this fight, it will need some training. But in general it should not be that harder than Sartharion flame waves once we learn the trick. We haven’t seen last phase, but based on tactics it should be simply the same as previous phases, just with one half of raid experiencing the first phase while the other one experiencing the second phase. Trick in this phase should be the synchronization of dps.
My general impression is that that it won’t be hard boss, the difficulty would be on about same level as Putricide without the dps race. But it will require coordination (voice chat will be certainly advantage) and some time to train.
Another „big“ thing the patch brought us is Real ID. And while the general idea is excellent, there is one glitch that make me very disappointed. For some reason Blizzard decided that the „Real ID“ will be based on real name. My guess is that this decision was made by bunch of Facebook addicts because no sane person could be so blind. It means if you want to get advantage of this system, you have to share your real name with your friends. While it may not look like much, together with other things like armory activity feed you cannot turn off and other „security breaches“ it is pretty big hit on personal privacy. As a parent, I would be strongly against my kids to share their name with strangers. And as old bugger I am, even with that „nothing to hide“ attitude, I am probably going to use it only with friends who would know my name from other sources anyway. I hope Blizzard reconsiders this stupid idea soon and allow people to be identified by some other name that is not connected to their real identity.
