The patch notes went up yesterday, while the test servers won’t go up till next Tuesday (EDIT: I’m wrong, they should be already up). I want to log in to see if these weather effects are acceptable or lame.

The only gripe I have is that the development is continuing to be very slow, and this patch has mostly tweaks and a remix of the same elements. I guess it won’t hit the live servers till around April which means three full months from the previous one which was also another three months from the previous.

We have three months patch cycles, here. They are slowing down, not picking up. A year ago we were all screaming at this pace, a year later and we became pretty used to this, to the point that we feel it just normal and acceptable. Even when the patch isn’t really all that significant.

I guess the slowdown is imputable to the expansion.

Anyway, even if the changes are on the “cheap” side, they are still very, very good. I like them, they look smart and well-thought.

– weather
– xp to gold
– improved flight paths
– 5-man enforced instances (people will remember how running them is harder than running 40-men)
– no loss of target when feared
– very good rep changes in PvP
– KORRAK GONE!

As always I won’t comment the class changes, but what we have here is really good. Back in beta I was one of those begging the instances to be capped properly and I was FLAMED by just everyone, like if I became the antichrist of the “fun”. Now I’m glad that the devs have found an excuse (the revision of the dungeons) to put the rules back in line with the original plan. I wish this would have happened sooner, like… before release.

I don’t believe anyone has underlined enough the faction changes in AV. They are THAT good.

Previously you had people sitting on their asses, doing nothing but getting rep for just being there. Now to get rep you need to KILL.

No more sitting on ass.

If you go give a second look at all these changes you would notice that they are good because they are finally concrete answers to problems that were pointed long ago, with the exception of the “xp to gold” idea and the weather system.

So what I say is that the patch is very, very good. And it is delivering more than what I expected. But I wouldn’t exaggerate praises too much, because:
– It is coming after another three months
– It contains fixes that were long due
– Its content is mostly a cheap remix with a new lipstick

And please notice that I didn’t comment on the new armor sets and dungeons tweaks, since I want to see how they are implemented before expressing my opinion.