World of Warcraft Patch Thoughts

The huge World of Warcraft patch getting ready for Mists of Pandaria came out today and I couldn't wait to log in when I got home. It turned out the servers were still down and the client wanted to take some time to optimize the install on my system. Ok, fair enough. By the time the optimization had finished the servers were up and I jumped on to take a look at all my new achievement points...

I didn't have any new ones at all. Huh. What's going on? I looked around through the achievements and saw some account-wide ones but they were all things I knew I'd done on Recolada. I went to look for one I knew I'd done on Rhododendron but not on Recolada: fish up Old Crafty. Not there. *frowns*

I decided to log on and look at Rhododendron's list to see if it was still there. When I popped open her achievement window I noticed she had about 300 more achievement points than I'd just had on Recolada. I'd also noticed when I'd logged onto Recolada I got spammed with all my pets getting converted into the combat pet system but when I logged onto Rhododendron I only got 3 new pets. Maybe you need to log in to each character to sync up the system?

Back to Recolada where I found the following:

Sweet! It's nice to be able to see who earned the achievement and if I could still get toasted for it on Recolada or not. There isn't currently a filter for 'earned but not on this character' but I can only hope one will be added at some point. I guess it's time to log into every character on my account in the hopes of getting some more achievement points!

The patch also included an intro movie for Mists of Pandaria which I thought was awesome. It isn't as grandiose as Illidan's video for The Burning Crusade but I liked it regardless. I particularly like when the third character adjusts a statue thing to be perfectly straight. Go OCD!

There's a very convenient and not at all blatant 'buy Mists of Pandaria' button on the character select screen. Goodbye, retailers!

Singing Sunflower is a valid pet battle pet! This makes me happy and I hope people are ready for mad flower beats. Apparently she's an elemental which makes her weak to water and strong against machines. I believe you get to build a team of 3 pets so I guess I'll need to find someone strong against water to protect her. This looks to be flyers. Like the Westfall Chicken! BuCAW!

Archaeology also seems to have been buffed. I got 45 fragments total from one dig site. I think on launch you would get 9? I'm going to have to look into this further...

I did not get my merciless nether drake to carry over to my DK. My warrior can use 'the Insane' title though, so that's something!

You do have an 11th character slot now.

All in all it looks pretty sweet. All the spells and stuff have changed a lot since yesterday and even more in the year and a half since I last played. I'm almost tempted to start a new character just to get a handle on how things play now...