I suppose we could argue for days about which World of Warcraft patch over the past two years has been the worst.

There was that one patch that nuked item enchantments — that was fun in a “I can’t freakin believe this” kind of way. The cross-server battleground patch was a pretty good one, except for the “everyone’s corpse piling up under Alterac Mountains” part. The patch nerfing out-of-combat resurrections should at least get an honorable mention — not only as a shining example of what I call a “too bad for the rest of you sorry bastards” nerfing, but also because of the ripple effects. I’d bet there’s not a Warcraft player out there that hasn’t experienced this: sitting around, waiting for someone to arrive or regenning health or mana, whathaveyou, you’ll look down at your action bar and think “why the FUCK am I in combat?” Moments later you knew exactly why you were in combat.

Ahh, memories.

But this Patch 2.oh!.1 is just fucked.

This patch is so fucked, they had a recurring in-game server-wide broadcast directing players to a Blizzard forum post about patch issues. Here’s the thread: Patch 2.0.1 – Issues & Revisions. And actually, that’s not the link addy they were broadcasting in game, but, as I WAS RAIDING at the time, I couldn’t alt-tab out to check — I assume this is the gist of it.

White Text for Enchantments – annoying and momentarily panic-inducing, but shit happens. No biggie.

Arena Battlemasters Temporarily Unavailable – again, a nuisance but we’ll deal.

Honor System Revisions – there’s some creative spin going on in that thread. No great shakes.

Display / User Interface Issues – here we go. And where to start? Meh, I’ll get back to this.

Missing Bank Bag Slots or Items – this seems kind of huge. Hotfix incoming though, which is nice. Maybe if they weren’t trying to shove the square Beta code peg into the round Live code hole this wouldn’t be an issue, but what do I know about coding? Nothing, that’s what.

Level 60 XP to Gold Conversion, Display Issue – nuisance.

Shaman and Paladin Items – (my favorite cuz it’s so damn stupid) Vrakthris, Blizzard short straw holder:

With this patch we have released many features/changes in preparation for the upcoming expansion. One of these changes is that Paladin items will now be found by the Horde and Shaman items by the Alliance.

Although some of these classes might not be available by the opposite faction until the Burning Crusade release, this is indeed an intended change.

Bull. Shit.

I so loved those two paragraphs, I macro’d those for /ra chat and used it each time we scored shaman gear. In hindsight, maybe I shouldn’t have. So disheartened were we, we left Nefarian up for today because we all just KNEW he had 2 shaman breastplates waiting for us. Seriously. We left Nefarian up, not because it was getting late (it wasn’t) or because we needed more players in the raid (we didn’t) or because we were scared (we weren’t … of him, anyways), we left His Dragonness up because we feared the shaman breastplates.

The raid was already horrible: late start because CTRaidAssist wasn’t playing nice with the default UI (read: forum thread. solution: /bye CTRA), and because of the INSANE clicks every time someone did almost anything in the raid (read: forum thread. solution: turn off all sound), and because of default UI’s needing that complicated reset procedure (solution: leave those poor souls behind at the entrance), a drawn-out Razorgore kill because the UI was killing pet action bars which makes it rather challenging to control Razorgore, the healers monopolized Vent chat during Vael with their “who’s tanking now??” “how bout now?” “why is a warlock tanking?” “who’s tank?” “is he dead yet?” “what’s Vael at now?” (no CTRA, remember?), same healer deal with Broodlord, but add in a Raid Leader near-SCREAMING at the warlocks bombing the shit out of Broodlord. Firemaw, fine. Trash, fine. Ebonroc, fine. Flamegor, fine. Chromaggus, a typical pain in the ass, but fine.

Chrom was a little dicey with the manual decursing, but all’s well that ended well. No shaman shoulders either, nevertheless he dropped shardables (i.e. junk to us).

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