Living The Cataclysm

So we’re drawing to the end of the first week of Cataclysm. From what I’ve seen,
there’s been groups of people on both sides of the coin, some love it, some hate it.
Personally I do feel the leveling process has been fast. Although I cannot say I hate
or love it. I do like the fact I’m 83 without being able to really play that much due to
a video card dieing out on me. I can play although painfully with integrated, but when
you play on such a lively PVP server as I do, playing with sub 10fps is an open
invitation for ganking. But thus far, I have liked the gameplay for the rogues. I’m
sure many rogues are more or less pleased with how they’re playing in general. This
is totally aside from pve/pvp feelings. As to say that the class thus far feels fun.




There’s two things that already were implemented that I still feel are amazing for us.
The first is how Vanish has been redone. I’ve always thought of Vanish as many people
have, a “get the fuck outta there” spell. So back when, if you popped it while a hunter was
firing down on you, it was a realistic happening that one of their in air shots or one short shortly
there after, would take you right back out of stealth. Or the same with a pet, and some other
abilities with other classes that had the same effect. It’s a once visited change, that I suppose
they just decided was the easiest effective fix they’d find in an acceptable amount of time.

The second is Recuperation! This ability right on it’s own I feel has enabled me to stand
toe to toe with some of the more difficult fights both in pve and pvp. I had a 1v1 against a
warrior where I was left with just around 1000 hp. That in my mind clearly is chalked up to
having Recuperate up. It also allows you much lower downtime, especially important given
the amount of damage mobs out in the world do in clysm areas.
Combat readiness is also a big reason to be excited. It’s noticeable in nearly every situation
you use it in. It along with having evasion and recuperate led to some pretty low downtimes.
Keeping Recuperate up, and using Combat Readiness on one mob, then moving on to the next
you still have Recuperate up, and can use evasion, and pretty much always have one of the
two up.  I really felt it’s presence when fighting any feral druid or rogue. The quick attack speed
ramped up the dmg reduction fairly quick. I really love its graphic as well. It’s completely
different from any other visual for buffs. I can really see it’s strong points against any team with
melee in it. It will very well be the ability that shines through on a tournament somewhere. As
to say it’ll be the type of ability that’ll give a team a win, or bad timing with it will cause
downfall.
The game really starts on the 14th for my rogue, as that’s when th e Arena Season will begin.
Things important to note are..
-This will be as with other first seasons of an xpac, the only season where everyone is on
equal terms. There will be some with more gear here or there, but nobody will immediately
have a set of arena gear on their character.
-Some folks will use an entire PVE set, an entire PVP set (crafted blue set), or some mixture
of it.
-MANY things changed, and nobody had a realistic way to test these changes out in arenas
as even skirmishes were taken out with the Clysm patch. So while there will always be the
RMP, it might realistically have been a big enough mixture of changes to shift a lot of comps.
To what degree, were unsure of. The word on the street however tends to believe that the
Wizard Hats will be just as dominate now as they were late WOTLK.
However, the big thing that was touted was the shifting down on match speed. On both micro
and macro levels. They wanted it to not just be this nuke down every match, they wanted
people to be able to have time to realistically react if they were part of a burn down. It really
boiled down to their dislike of a team globalling down a person.

I’m also happy to see that GCD hacking has gone away. I really felt it did hold our team back
quite a bit after I read about it. After reading an article on Worldofming.com, I then went and
checked my matches against hunters and other casters to take a look if we had fell victim, and
not too much surprise came to me when I found out that indeed, some people had used this
hack against us.
It was realistically saddening and very irritating looking at a time sheet showing 4 hunter shots
of various kinds all within the span of 1 second. SOOO, I’m quite happy that that was dealt
with.
As far as it’s been talked of, we’ll be returning with the Priest/Rogue lineup. Although I’m still
in pretty good contemplation of what specialization I’m going to run. It would make for quite
the interesting gameplay with a priest yanking me to safety, and me shadowstepping,
and smoke bombing. So you see that there’s a ton of room for so much creativity.
I’m really excited for it! We’ll see what the season has to offer, I’ve taken some video while
questing and I’ll probably take some more when I get my video card, it’ll really just have video
of 81-84 or whatever, of the actual encounters I had while leveling my character.

At any rate, I hope you look forward to this upcoming season just as much as I am!