3.1 dropped with about as much stability as we’ve come to expect from major content updates. Servers were down for extended amounts of time with updates every hour asking us to be patient and wait. Stories were filtering in through twitter and various blogs of people not even able to apply the patch. Slowly realms came back up one by one and people began to log in. The gates to Ulduar were opened and raiding commenced after guild logs were flooded with Dual Talent Specialization achievement spam. Life in Warcraft slowly began to creep back to its normal pace. Raids started, on some servers later then normal, and players shuffled in to test out their new shinnies. Some braved the lag at the portal to Ulduar to get a glimpse of the new content, while others were content to hit Naxxramas one last time in the hopes of getting a long sought after drop (looking at you here Zabos!) On some servers, things went smoothly, on others… not so much.
Here’s my tale of excitement and woe.
The day started out fine, I was a little disappointed that it was patch day to be honest, but I schlepped my laptop to work and set my home computer’s vpn up so I could update both machines. The first bit of news I see on my RSS is that WoWMatrix is dead! Now while this isn’t earth shattering, for me it just meant my job pre raid was going to be that much more difficult as I have a lot of mods I use to monitor things. Looking at them while trying to patch I realize I ran between 80-90 mods (now since reduced!). My hopes were restored when people on twitter pointed out curse had released a new beta client for mac, one that hopefully worked. I work full time, getting time pre raid to mess around with mods doesn’t happen often.  I go to log into my system at home and start the patch process when I get an odd error saying it can’t validate my account. I try again, receive the same error. At this point I start digging around and sure enough, battle.net accounts are having a difficult time downloading the patch. I decide to say meh and wait for BigDownload to get it and entertain myself by conversing with people on twitter (thank you guys again for that as always =D)
I get home, get patched up and installed, get everything that has an update updated and find that my server is still down. After about 30 or so minutes, it comes back up. I log in, get myself over to Naxx and get ready to go. Everything was going fine and dandy until Loatheb. We didn’t wipe, but at about 1.2m hp left to go, the instance server freezes. We can still type in guild / raid / say / tell and we can log out and log back in on alts, but we were treated by a lovely scene of Loatheb’s backside. Those of you on twitter got to read my lamentations that quickly rose to comedy. The jokes and statements of my fellow guildies more then enough to lift anyone’s spirits by pointing out the sheer comedic value of the situation. While not the most exciting patch day (think 2.0) it was better then I assumed it would be, and to be honest it had been a lot of fun taking bets on which healer would spontaneously go from tree to crit – chicken or go careening off to smack a boss with their hammer. Stuck in the instance we logged out and back on alts and then out for the night. All things considered it was a pretty fun night for me, got a lot of laughs out of it.
How about you guys? How was your first experience of patch 3.1? Any good patch day stories to share?
Till next time
~Lodur
Feel free to follow on twitter http://twitter.com/LodurZJ And don’t be afraid to ask questions using direct message there or the contact form here on the site!
Not too bad. Waxed two bosses. FL down and Emalon down. Progress on Razor will continue.
Matticuss last blog post..3.1 Initial Impressions or How I Learned to Love the Crash
I attempted to log in to dual spec, was faced with a 2500 person queue, so promptly closed down WoW and spent two hours trialing Guild Wars.
Patch days suck.
Karthiss last blog post..Out of the woodwork
We tried Emalon, but only got a few attempts in before he disappeared (Wintergrasp switched ownership). Got FL down, tried Ignis (before discovering he too was bugged) and then tried Razorscale a few times. But due to the late start time we stopped. Shadow Council was relatively stable: I only remember the server restarting once. (And having to do that Ignis trash again. Oh how I hate that trash!)
We decided to do Naxx as well last night, thinking that Ulduar would be to buggie and that our good old instance would be just fine. Silly me! At the start we all had trouble loading into the zone. About half of the raid was able to make it into the instance, but not interact with anything. The other half were stuck in the limbo of the load screen. After about 15 minutes everyone was kicked and were able to carry on. First boss goes down fine, no problems thus far. Second boss in the spider wing…. we go for the zerg method, everyone on the boss, while the adds are off tanked and sheeped. Down her no problem… see the achievement pop up for new people, and then… lag spike. We all stay in lag limbo for about five minutes, and then we are booted. We come back, and we are at the start of the instance… druids are in different forms then they were booted in… and the boss, with our loots… gone. Bit of a bummer, and opened a ticket. No word yet. We continued on through to Lob and cleared to there with out insident. By that time it was 11:30 (thanks patch day lol) so we called it a night. I wonder if Blizz will put the boss back up or just say tough luck. *shrug*
I’ve gone extreme casual lately, meaning playing maybe 8 hours a month now, but i did log on to see how the guild was doing. They were stuck on Ignis all night between people getting DC’d and such. I’m surprised no one has commented on how progression for the top guilds is going. I haven’t seen it anywhere. I expected to see a notice on WoWinsder today saying that Ensidia has cleared Ulduar on Hard Mode already. =D
@Cringer: Last I heard i think Ensidia is already like 7 bosses in or something like that
@Lodur
I was just making my rounds and I heard that Exodus US was on Yoggy now and Ensidia EU has been trying to speed clear the place just to catch up since they had one less day of raiding than the US. I keep hearing that their server is plagued with problems.
Didn’t get to watch the Ensidia video but I think they did Freya with the 3 Elders up which tells me that they are going for the Alagon kill, wouldn’t expect anything less from those guys. Would be funny to see them full clear the place on Hard Mode after 2 days considering I saw a bunch of people saying Hard Mode Ulduar would be “just as hard as Sunwell”.
Wish all those guys the best. Also wish I could be there for it, but unfortunately real life takes priority over video games. 🙁
Lost about 9 hours trying to clear XT trash or get around it. Had some REALLY entertaining strategies, like hunters kiting them while I ran in front in travel/caster/travel/caster (i love that kind of stuff!!!). We nearly killed him but RNG kept robbing us.
Frustrating to hear that other guilds’ had their trash removed by GMs while we banged our heads against the proverbial wall from about 4pm til 1am.
Also very disheartening to lose our huge head start that we had on other guilds (we are defending a #1 spot). But hopefully when I head home tonight they will be fixed and we can power on.
Keevas last blog post..Too soon, Executus
We threw together a ten man and accidentally one shot FL while trying to figure out how to work the damn vehicles. Then we had fun wiping on Razorscale, Ignis’ trash, X002’s trash, as we were trying to learn what they all did.
Had lots of fun on Flame Leviathan but wiped some on Razorscale.
Tuesday we got our usual 25 man going smoothly, were the first guild in there without problems, downed FL and Razorscale and called it after 2 hours. Today we got together and found out that while most of our server was in Ulduar, there was an issue with our raid ID only that caused us to receive an “Instance Not Found” error. Turns up we were the only raid that had killed Razorscale before the hotfix this morning. So we’re left with a raidless night and hoping it gets fixed by tomorrow.
Wowmatrix died and there is zero replacements for Linux. Manually upgrading >50 addons + their dependencies is not my idea of fun.
Guild got one boss down in Ulduar, we could have got more if server wouldn’t have been so unstable. Hopefuly it’s better tonight.
First chance I got to look at Ulduar was early early my morning (EU 5 am) we killed FL with a group of alts, and had the mace and hood drop.
Clicked the dual spec button twice already though, priest and druid, have the hunter left to do…sooo much mula x_X
Shyraias last blog post..First Impression (Ori)Flame Leviathan
Our PvE server turned into a full blown PvP server as entire guilds got bored sitting outside Ulduar. Unable to zone in tensions began to build. Things started to heat up as the #2 Aliance guild and the #3 Horde guild started into it, then Ulduar came up. We got one good attempt on FL, (32% first attempt on Hard Mode), when the instance server crashed again.
At this point everyone started to jump into the fray and a “King of the Moutain” game began for the top of Ulduar.
Hopefully we can get some additional attempts and our first kill in tonight.
Xannders last blog post..25 dragons > Malygos
We downed FL on 10 man and at that instant the instance server froze ..could talk in general guild etc. So now the joke on the server is my guild crashed the server killing FL. When we finally got back in it was so laggy we gave up after one attempt on trash. Did FL last night on 25 man but shortly after that the world server went down being late we all decided to call it and go back in tonight. I am just so happy we have new content!!!
I actually got lucky last night and nabbed a raid spot for ulduar. Unfortunately it was for DPS which isn’t my main spec so I was kinda draggin’ ass hovering around 2800. And I didn’t upgrade any of my addons so I was getting constant failures… but on the plus side I learned that /script LeaveParty() works.
I didn’t play too much PTR so I wasn’t too familiar with the Argent Tournament but it turned out to be ok I guess. Maybe its just because it takes 3 days to get the initial 15 seals that I’m slightly disappointed, but I think once you get the 15 that will unlock a lot of new features, so that might help.
Ulduar is massive. I missed out on FL so I never got to see how that works, but we did do Razorscale, which seemed pretty easy. We got that on the 2nd try. Then we tried Ignis. That was a mistake. The trash over there is insane. Naxx has definitely made us trash lazy. A cyclone pinned me up against one of the walls and didn’t stop till I was a roasted chicken. Then we got to Ignis, they said he was bugged but he should have been hotfixed. I never saw this fight before so they assigned me a pretty simple task, when the OT picks up the little guys root them in the fire circle. Simple enough. Well, I got one root off and then *boom* 61K shot from Ignis. Apparently he just picks random people and one shots them. Or at least thats what I was told. So much for a hotfix. Then we wiped on Deconstructor XT for another hour and called it for the night.
I’m actually kinda sad I had to go casual for RL events because Ulduar is exactly the challenge I was looking for when I started Wrath. My first impression is that Ulduar is not going to be a pug fest like Naxx is. Ulduar pugs, even once people get geared, might still have a hard time with the 2nd half of the instance. Which is the way it should be. Nice job blizz, I think this is exactly the right tuning real raiders were waiting for.
Keeva- I feel your pain. We ended up killing XT with all that broken trash up, depending on RNG aggro issues to get the kill. All the other groups on our server had the trash despawned, so we basically just got the short end of the stick.
We are also defending our server first position, but I think it will really only settle once guides start focusing on hard modes. Fine by me. We knocked out 4 more bosses after XT died, but it sucks that we basically lost a whole day to bugged out super trash.
Ah well, new content is worth it.