Patch 5.4: The Good and the Bad

Posted by J.E. Douglas at 12:28 PM

Patch 5.4 is here and staying in our living room for a bit.   As with any patch there are good things and bad ideas.

• The lore feels a little lacking in some cases.  It may have just been the large amount of dead bodies      laying everywhere that made it feel like a blitz fest.

• One decently geared toon can pretty much gear all of your alts after a time.  Drops are plentiful for the different gear classes.  This means that a lot of the older areas will feel abandoned once players have the rest of their toons to level 90.  

• So many players running around that it's difficult to get 'kills' needed for quests.  The new faction tagging system comes in handy for elites but for normal mobs your going to be stepping on toes 

• The new items that allow the new transmute mechanic for professions drop relatively quickly.  None of this grinding for hours waiting for your tome to drop 

Sales have been doing pretty well on Gems and enchants.  Since the low level transmutes (Living Steel,  Lightning Steel Ingot) do not share cooldowns with the higher end transmutes there is going to be a good side business of keeping these up and running.  The material cost for both are similar but doubling your transmute materials will allow you to craft not just the high end items but also the lower middle of the road epics.

Skinners are extremely happy with the new island for all of the mobs that players are killing and leaving around unprocessed.  This weekend should bring a lot of chances to stock up on Exotic leathers.  This may drive down the market on the Auction House so the best idea is to combine your expertise with another profession (if you don't have one already) to process the extra materials.

I was disappointed that the changes in reputation vendors didn't expand to the Shadow Pan Assault.  But I can understand the logic because there is already 496 gear that drops from the new area.  This may change later, but it still keeps the raid rewards from reputation with the Shadow Pan assault instead of just driving players to go directly to the new Orgrimmar raid.

This weekend will tell a lot of whats going to happen with the patch.  There has already been a world first to defeat Hellscream (if you want to see the new Warchief just youtube the video).  This bode's well for players wanting to see the new content but might effect the long term usefulness of the final raid.  Players at the end of an expansion cycle get bored easily by repetition. 

Either way the excitement was worth the wait.

Good Luck and Good Hunting

Want to get in contact with me? . Email me at Dragonbear @ gmail. dOT com or find me on twitter at "@JMTCMommar" You can find me hanging out on the Shandris Server, chat me up, and I will buy you a glass of juice. 

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