Random observations

I've not jumped all over the game in the last 3 days since the patch dropped, mostly because of work. But I've played some and here is what I have experienced and learned. Most but not all of it is patch related.

• Northrend Inscription Research actually stops working, once you've learned all the glyphs you can use at level. Imagine my surprise to find out that now Ikoli is 73 it starts working again. So I've resumed building Ikoli's ... Inscription Resume.

• There are a lot of changes in Icecrown that aren't really part of the Citadel. A shrine, for example, has been added with Blood-Queen Lana'thel talking about a broken blade (Tolkein is rolling over in his grave). This is related to the new 5 mans in a way we shall soon discover; she is also a boss in Icecrown Citadel in the part not yet unlocked.

• Speaking of the new 5 mans, Sylvanas is the quest giver. Blizzard is clearly using a new voice actress for her; the difference grates on the ears since they did not replace her normal emotes.

• Timear is boring now and gives no quests. His stuff is replaced with random dailies you access from LFG. His achieve is now a Feat of Strength.

• Proof of Demise is now a weekly raid "...Must Die!" quest. Yes now I'm echoing the patch notes. The first one is Ignis. We will make sure to do these with Eeyan and Telt. That achievement is also a Feat of Strength. As far as I can tell there is no achieve for all the "...Must Die!" quests, which I interpret to mean they are leaving it open ended and will assign them in weekly server updates.

• The first boss in Icecrown Citadel, which has been acronym'd to ICC, is Marrowgar. New art - awesome. Old tactics - he's basically an uncomplicated combination of Leotheras, Patch and Najentus. We down'd him our first time in there, the second try ...after we got past the strategy writeups and realized what we were seeing.



• It appears that tabard rep now applies to all four Horde Expedition factions. I know, "tabard rep" is a misnomer as those reputation gains are what you get when you wear anything but a faction tabard. Anyhow Kuan & Viljo's Taunka and Hand of Vengeance rep shot up when they went into a 5man.

• ditto for some, but not all, of the Tourney dailies.

• Forge of Souls was a straight shot. I would rate it easy. But Kuan healed in a pug our first (and thus far only) time through, and he had to work for it; we had a few deaths and a wipe even. So some might dispute my "easy" rating. Honestly though, you're supposed to be struggling through an instance.

• Forge of Souls is pretty. Blizz continues to rock the art with the undead instances. I loved Stratholme in "vanilla" for all the detailed art, and I love this.



• The pug was cross-server! I hate pugs in some sense. The above screenshot is everything wrong with the pugs, as well as illustrating a lot of what I've typed in this entry. Notice the pug-badness even is contagious to me, there I was the healer, idle and targeted on Viljo. The lock is not targeted on the skull and has pulled a mob with AOE damage into the casters. etc.