I’ve let my WoW sub lapse for a few weeks while we await the Midnight launch, but before that I had a bit over a week to play around with the pre-patch and its associated class changes. In many ways they’re very small, but as I’ve said before, small changes can still make a big difference.

As is always the case, the hyperbole over classes being “gutted” by the ability pruning was entirely unfounded. Most of my characters lost only one or two buttons, usually stuff that was either blatantly redundant or so niche I never used it. Mostly, I find classes more comfortable to play now, with less need to juggle additional action bars or twist my hands with shift macros.

Mind you, that doesn’t mean everything is perfect. My biggest frustration — or at least the thing I’m must confused about — is that Havoc demon hunter was one of the more heavily pruned specs I play, despite being one of the few I would have said didn’t need pruning at all. It was already one of the simpler specs.

Sigil of Flame was pretty much just another cooldown for the sake of another cooldown, so no loss there, but loosing Demon’s Bite (an active fury generator) for mandatory Demon Blades (a formerly optional talent that makes auto-attacks generate fury) has been a difficult adjustment.

I tell myself it’s the same as a rogue’s passive energy regeneration, but it isn’t quite, because your generation shuts down whenever you’re not in melee. That was also technically true with Demon’s Bite, but at least you could take action to solve your resource starvation once you got back in range. Being at the mercy of the auto-attack swing timer is a very different feeling, and it lacks both the smoothness of energy and the agency of an active generator.

I’m getting used to it. Taking the talent that gives you a second Immolation Aura charge helped, and I usually don’t end up with any dead time where I can’t afford any spenders, but it still feels vaguely off. I won’t say it’s ruined the spec or anything, but I do wish I could go back to how it was before the patch.

I’ve already given my thoughts on Devourer over at Massively, but the TL;DR is that I like it, but not as much as I expected to. I am having second thoughts about making it my new main. I had even considered benching the demon hunter altogether, but I probably won’t go that far. It’s still fun, just not as fun as I’d hoped.

(The current version of Vengeance is absolutely awful, but I haven’t been playing it much lately anyway.)

At first, I was resigned to rogue being absolutely dumpstered. Outlaw is still a mess of juggling boring maintenance buffs with clunky cooldowns. I was glad to see the end of Symbols of Death for Subtlety, but I’m not happy with Secret Technique replacing Rupture. As I’ve said many times, I do not like these ~30 second cooldown rotational abilities, and I especially don’t like them on a rogue.

Secret Technique is just such a boring ability, too. The tooltip makes it sound like it should at least be visually spectacular, but the shadow clones are barely visible. Rupture may not have been the most exciting thing ever, but at least it wasn’t just a second burst damage finisher but she’s got a new hat but on a cooldown.

However, I gave Assassination a try just for the heck of it, and I found it actually feels pretty good now. The loss of Improved Shiv makes it a blissfully cooldown free core rotation; just the standard build and spend loop rogue should be all about. It’s not perfect, and I still miss being able to use swords,* but it has me thinking I won’t have to bench Mai after all.

*I just decided to check on the off chance that the transmog changes made it so you can transmog daggers to swords now, and to my shock and delight, you can! Why have I not seen this mentioned anywhere?!? LOOKS LIKE THUNDERFURY’S BACK ON THE MENU, BOYS.

That does leave a bit unsure which character to leave out instead, or if I should just accept leveling up more than five characters in Midnight after all.

My warlock actually has more buttons to press since the patch. I don’t like Haunt being required for Affliction now, but over in Destruction spec, I was happy to see Shadowburn once again has no cooldown, so I started talenting into it again.

Meanwhile, I also played through the new War Within recap feature with my warrior. I question the usefulness of the recap for new players (is it available to new players?) as it still leaves out a lot of context and detail, but as someone who did the campaign properly it was an enjoyable way to quickly refresh my memory of some of the important bits.

I’m not sure how much is because of the recent class changes and how much is the new cooldown manager helping things, but I did find myself enjoying Fury again. Probably not enough to add her to my roster for Midnight, but it was nice to revisit the character.

I’m trying to get used to the idea that it’s okay to just play a character now and then, or to leave them behind after a while. I feel this weird sense of… not guilt exactly, but a certain regret over not playing characters that I’ve previously sunk time into. I always remember the fun I’ve had with them and regret not playing them more.

I’ve finally worked up the courage to check my /played time with characters now and then, and I find it’s helping with that unease. I vastly underestimate the time I’ve spent even on my lesser played characters. I checked the order day, and I have over seventy hours logged on my warrior, a character I think of as having hardly played at all. That’s more time than I’ve spent playing Clair Obscur, more than triple the amount of time I’ve spent playing Road 96. Knowing that makes it easier to not feel like I’ve missed out by not playing her more.

Anyway, that’s my latest ramble on my WoW alts. Now I’m off to play other games for a few weeks, until Midnight falls. I have really enjoyed the last few weeks of play. The dying days of an expansion are always a good time — the worst grinds are behind us, and there’s the freedom to follow your whims.