Everything seems to be up and running as usual. I was pleasantly suprised to see that my themes & plugins are all fully functional. The only difference seems to be the inclusion of widget functionality in WP 2.2, which makes the previous "widget-enabling" addon obsolete.
Courtesy of WoWInsider again, there are a bunch of news in regards to the upcoming 2.1 patch (that isn't just relegated to the new instance contents). First up, there are all the profession changes in the new content:
Full 2.1.0 profession patch notes
Then there are some comments that Tigole apparently posted on the Elitist Jerk forum here, that talks about reducing the effectiveness of flasks and retuning the raid bosses. Lastly there are also some tidbits about new Darkmoon Faire cards that'll be much better than the level 60 trinkets & items.
Most importantly:
Changes to fishing -
- The fishing timer has been reduced from 30 to 20 seconds and it now takes less time to fish.
- The fishing timer can no longer run through its duration without a fish biting.
- Fishing has been removed from Arathi Basin and Alterac Valley.
- You can now fish in Underbog.
Now the world is a better place.
With the expansion around the corner, Blizzard saw this as an opportunity to implement a lot of changes which are long overdue. The scripting language engine behind the user interface has been updated to the newest version of LUA, and a lot of UI functionality has been modified. Some of the changes are more or less just for maintenance, some of the changes impacts gameplay greatly.
For example, a very popular addon, Decursive, no longer works. Which doesn't bother me a bit, not because I don't often play a class that needs to cleanse/decurse; but there was a long standing tradition for hardcore raiders to not rely too heavily on addons that make choices for you. Decursive was one of those addon that clearly would deteriorate a player's ability to play the "right way" if used too often. I never used it even when I played my Priest, running through Molten Core and Blackwing Lair. In fact, I much appreciate the fact that Blizzard finally made a strong stance on how people should have to learn certain skills to advance in the game, rather than relying on addons that will perform the duty for them.
What really grinds my gear, in a Peter Griffin-like fashion, is that the patch has been out for almost a month now, and there still isn't a single reliable and flexible actionbar addon.
The previous "king of actionbar" addon has to be Discord ActionBars. Which is all but defunct given the release of WoW 2.0. The author of Discord decided to create a completely different addon architecture that can modify the entire UI in-game. I've tried the beta version of this for a bit on The Burning Crusade test realms, but the interface is so complex and obtuse, that I couldn't find my way around it. Discord ActionBar was no simple matter to configure & customize, requiring dedicating at least 20 minutes of my life to it every time. Discord UI Builder was even worse, and not even close to being complete.
There are other very simple bar mods that just aren't flexible enough for me. They can clean up the actionbar a bit, compact some of the elements, but they don't allow you to build everything from the ground up. Then there are mods like Bongos and Trinity Bars, which gives you extremely high amount of flexibility in contructing your actionbars from the ground up, but both has some very annoying, and potentially game breaking bugs. Here are the problems with each as of the writing of this post:
Trinity Bars
Much prettier than Bongos, has multiple bar arrangements in different shapes (circles, semi-circles, columns, vertical & horizontal), and allows a few different types of button textures. A little harder to configure than Bongos, but looks much, much better.
On other hand, buggy as hell. Keybindings not saving between game sessions, stances not swapping correctly. All sorts of other problems.
Bongos
Ugly, ugly ugly, but functional. Configuration is easier than Trinity Bars, but doesn't allow for bars over 12 buttons. Only one glaring bug in sight, it seems to lose stances after a while... for no apparent reason.
That, ladies & gentlemen, are really the only two available choices we have with the "new WoW". There are a few other odds & ends out there, but none of them are as flexible as either of the two mentioned here. It's a sad state of things, and maybe they'll eventually get all the bugs & kinks fixed... or maybe Bongos will get prettier.
I have no qualms about getting rid of addons that plays the game for us, instead of helping us play. However, missing critical mods that provides better "basic" functionality to the game, such as just being able to arrange buttons how I want them, and have them look pretty, is extremely frustrating. Makes me not want to pick up the game for a while. Just hope that everything gets fixed before the expansion hits the shelves.
