Yay, Patch!

There's always something to be excited about. Today is patch day, which means lots of emblems of triumph for me. This is a really big deal, because my two main DPS characters (Mariwocket the warlock and Jillathee the rogue) have been sitting at more or less "pretty decent, you could run ToC for some upgrades" gearing levels. Having a lot of new iLevel 232 gear for the grabbing will be excellent.

Here's a protip: when you go to upgrade your kit, think about whether or not you like the 4t9 set bonus. Because there's two pieces of 245 level gear that are excellent on the emblem of triumph vendor for each class, but they're in the same body slot as t9 (head and shoulders). So you can either go with a piece of 232 that activates your 4t9, or you could go with a piece of 245 with higher raw stats.

I'm also excited because this patch gives rogues some free DPS. Murder now is 4% more damage on everybody (before it was a limited set of creature types, which was annoying). The deadly poison change is also a big boost to everybody's sustained DPS. Once you've got a 5-stack of deadly poison up on the target, extra DP procs will instead proc your mainhand poison. That's pretty huge all around (since it makes the need for weapon swapping kind of obsolete), but there's a funny mechanice to it that makes it even weirder: the two instant-damaging poisons (instant and wound) are on a PPM system, so they add predictable amounts of DPS to your rotation. Deadly, however, is not on a PPM, it's a flat percentage. But now deadly poison on your fast offhand will proc that wound on your mainhand (or instant, depending on your talent spec), and will do so pretty frequently, for a lot of damage. I imagine this will be nerfed eventually, so enjoy it while it lasts.

There's also quel'delar to look forward to. Just about every class can benefit from this, although not every spec. For example, there's no dagger reward. Which means, despite my love of assassination spec (rogues should use daggers, it's just the way it should be), I'll be heading back to a combat sword spec for the time being. Q'd is only a 251 weapon, so while it's a huge upgrade over the 219 black knight's rondels I've been using, it's equivalent to ICC-10 gear. So hopefully I'll be able to replace it somewhat soon. Depends on how soon the guild starts running ICC-10, or any 10-man raids for that matter. But between now and then, there's 3 new instances and all this wonderful auto-heroic-queuing system to play with. Whee!