Patch 3.2: A Retrospective On Its Application
Posted by iTZKooPA on Friday, August 7, 2009 - 28 Comments Tags: bugs, call of the crusade, downtime, lag, latency, patch 3.2, patch v3.2, server stability, trial of the champion, undocumented changes
Whenever Blizzard decides to lay a patch on us I hold my breath. Sure, I want the bounty of content, but sometimes that isn't all we receive. Oftentimes we'll be stuck at login screens, the World Server will be down, our add-ons will cease to work, or worse, fail to do their jobs appropriately. And that's just some of the "features" that we hope to see on a Tuesday evening. More painful are the Slowsky approved download speeds, constant reboots, authentication problems, massive lag, or lag spikes, and the realization that nothing is going to be accomplished till Wednesday. Think I am being a bit dramatic? Then allow me to refresh your memory of Patch 3.0.8.
I was as excited as anyone for Call of the Crusade (the game can never have too many 5-mans), but I had my reservations about the patch actually going live. Boy have I never been so glad to eat my words before.
Blizzard delivered the patch with only slightly extended downtime. While I didn't login till a few hours after my server returned from dead, I was greeted with a stable, normal latency experience the entire night. It didn't matter if I was running around the generally packed Dalaran or the newly flooded Argent Tournament grounds. It was all entirely playable on Magtheridon (NA). The post-patch trauma has been so negligible that I've been able to run through the dailies, grab a level and change on Solidsagart and tackle the new dungeon (repeatedly), along with some heroics. And that was just on Tuesday!
To round out the objectiveness of the post I should point out that it hasn't been all roses. Roughly half of my add-ons were broke (and some remain unfixed by authors too busy with content) by Patch 3.2. I've encountered the Trial of the Crusade opening encounter bug (is there an accepted name for it?) roughly half of my attempts. Last, but not least, is the ninja change to Malygos, I doubt it's a bug, that gave our raid a bit of pause. The big blue dragon's Vortex drops players off far farther from their original location than ever before. And no, I still haven't kill the crazed warmonger.
I heard there was something up with Kel'Thuzad, but haven't come across the lich recently. Has anyone experienced anything wonky with that encounter? How stable has your server been since patch day? Have you been able to chain those heroics?
All things considered I believe Call of the Crusade was the most expertly executed patch in recent memory. Certainly since Wrath of the Lich King's launch back in November. Dare we assume Blizzard is finally getting the hang of the patch spiel?!
Reader Comments (28)
man i wish my server (draenor) worked as good as yours did on tuesday. everyone on the server had terrible lag problems then they eventually shut down the realm for more maintence after every other server was up. barely got to play tuesday but it was all good by wednesday so no big deal
about the same on my server as you have described. I have been able to run TotC quite a few times which is really great for the guildies we are gearing up.
had a wednesday Naxx25m that Arachnid went fine, but Plague was mega bugged. Somehow we managed to get to the second boss of the quarter and the minute we started it ever mob past the boss desided to join us by coming through the walls!! after thinking we had managed to kill a few, but wipe and try again even more came. So we decided to call it and wait for things to come back together. That and only 2 healers were using there adds and the others were just trying to make due without. It certainly was interesting to see who lived and who died for each mob.
Otherwise can't say I have noticed much else out of the ordinary. just working heroics for emblems and the new 5 man to gear up our guildies.
Also something happened with XT -something about the bomb bots' spawns. My guild found out when we started our weekly 25 man Ulduar. We weren't sure if blizz had buffed it a bit, but after about 3 wipes of getting used to it. We did it. We're not the biggest or best guild, so were pretty happy about it when we found it got hot-fixed the day after.
I have at last encountered the fabled 'Additional instances could not be launched' message, but after about 5 mins of waiting at most, I could get in.
Blizz get the hang of sorting out patches? Well, I'm not sure, but they did a fairly good job so far on 3.2. As long as you're not too busy complaining about how easy everything is now =P
Super-lag on the Duskwood server until about 1 am CST. After that I have had no problems whatsoever. Granted I don't raid so I can't say if there were/remain problems with Mally, KT, XT or any other reaid encounter. But I have been able to do my Champ dailys, collect my seals adn grind the new 5 man, which despite the loooooooong intro that gets stale after the first 2 times is really quite fun.
I say Kudos to Blizz on 3.2!
I noticed some random stuns/CC's on us during a bunch of heroic grinding that I never noticed before, don't know if it was intentional or what, but I can honestly never remember our tank getting iceblocked during Lady Telestra trash before.
My guild also went for an Uld10 trip last night and decided to rock a 1 tower FL leaving Hodir's tower up. However once we engaged him an extra buff popped up and we found ourselves facing a two-tower level FL. AFter two wipes, we checked all the towers again, tried and wiped again. Finally we downed Hodir's tower and both buffs disappeared for the fight and he went down like cake.
Then on XT, we had adds from all 4 piles despite the old "pull him to one side" trick. Which, despite getting very convenient bomb/scrap bot groupings, led to some slight panic as we rushed to keep the little bastards coming from the close piles from healing XT.
Yeah, at least this patch came nowhere close to the havoc and chaos that was patch 3.0.2. *shudder*
Btw, none of your pics are working.
Never mind. Must've gotten fixed while I was posting.
oh yeah, we had the add problem with XT as well, even though we wiped we ended up getting the achievement for killing 20 bot with one of them exploding, er something like that.
Also, we were doing FL with 2 towers and he had 3 buffs, we were close to defeating him before realized it, then it was just too much. So we took down one tower and did it with technically 1 tower, but he had 2 buffs. silly game. LoL.
agreed that things are not near as bad as previous patch with instances and actually getting into them.
Amazingly enuf, my Latency has only been double digits versus the 150-200ms since just b4 the patch and FPS jumped from 5 to ~15 in Dalaran and from 15 to 25 maybe 30 elsewhere. Has remained fairly stable even since the patch. Had a few issues with loggin onto Stormscale on Tuesday but prob was rectified by Wednesday.
Sometimes I wonder if you play the same game? The patch sucked from no walls in naxx, star fire pulling all the mobs in the instance, the bot buggs on XT, and the nice one shot charge in Thorim tunnel. This was all existing content, I can't remember the last time we got a patch for new content that screwed up so much old content. Plus they seemed to leave the debug options on keeping the servers at an utter crawl for two days. They don't and never have done patches well and on many servers there is tons of stuff still broken that probably won't be fixed for weeks.
I went at KT just last night in 25-man Naxx.
Only glitches that came up were small things that actually benefitted us, tho. He only spawned 2 adds (Down from the original 4). And, despite our large number of melee DPS (Roughly 8-12 people), NOBODY got Ice blocked.
Only other thing of note was a shade popped up during the first part of the fight. Don't know what was up with that.
Just did Halls of Stone on heroic, and the bosses were aggroing onto us during trash despite being in different rooms.
Other then that and the XT bug, everything seems smooth.
After this patch is the only time I can hearth to Dalaran without spending 5 minutes at a loading screen, dunno what is up with that.
I couldn't logging untill Wednesday night (had to babysit my cousin) but all I got was some error messages from AddOns and some lag spikes.
Finally it's actually true that "patching is made easier".
patch 3.2 messed up my screen caus ever since patch 3.2 my screen is stuck on freeky zoom on everything and all wow players i see are just black outlines and again my screen ouside of wow is stuck on zoom and terrible gamma...
while the technical issues might've been few, i still blame blizzard for the most fail patch timing in history... it'll be while before blizz really get the hang of patching
additional instances could not be launched, please try again later.
additional instances could not be launched, please try again later.
additional instances could not be launched, please try again later.
additional instances could not be launched, please try again later.
wow i would have loved my server (executus) worked that well i was soloing SM cath for my shammys epic mount i couldnt even sell stuff over thirty min went by and i sold a grand total of 3 items
ps:love the site keep up the good work
Everything was smooth on my server (Shattered Halls US) We did notice that Maly throws you wherever he feels now after the Whirlwind but nothing too bad. One thing that may be old but I'm not sure, was that my guild was going into 10man Ulduar and when we started, one of our Siege Engines fell straight through the map, and it never respawned for FL, so we had to do it down a Siege.
@ Agadax
We also tried the "pull XT to one side" trick and the adds only came from the side we were on, not the opposite. After a while through the fight our tank kited him across to the opposite side and, yet again, they came from the side XT was on. Downed him but still very annoying.
i was able to log on to garonaa about 6mp EST first thing i did was i got my druid the flying form theen i went to tryout paly see hwo muc hhey nerfed abut i couldent enter stocks (whear i usualy practiced) so i wnet to beat the dumy but after 5 minets it ggot boring so i went to my DK to try out the new BG the first day it was fun despite the in ability to hit anyone with all the lag and miinet long rezzes the BG was lots of fun driving a glaive twrower or a catpult or jumping intop the enemy keep and kill the genral i spent the day bombing the gate and attempting to defend the alliance keep as well getting some of the acheivement like the four car garage or destroy every vehicle or jumping to the keep with the gate still up bomin gthe gate 5 times without dying which is preaty easy when your a rogue trying to contro both the quary andoil refinary when we win kill players with hte torrets i even tryed for the all star achievemnt and owcurse like in every o9ther BG i failed at i am 1/10 to 100 victorys in isle of conguast the second day i continued this and got enough honnor ffor some pvp braces and a belt the lag wasnt that bed i was able to harth and walk in dalarn in 10 second of porting to it though i still had walk cause riding around my mound was stil too much lag i spend the rest of the day trying to mine and prospect the stuff i get t oraise my skill next day my guild was issuing trail of the crusader and champion invite i got both but we couldent even get past the first boss sowe tryed the trail of chamioon and beat and i went back to mining on the third day things really got bad i woul keep getting freezed up and ended up having to restart my comp not mention my rouuter around the tie that happen after the daily herioc something happen and i could no longer see my text or anyone ellses texts i could not caht in /1 or /2 nor in /g /raid or /p but /s and /bg worked just fine it was teh wierdest thing anyone know how to fix that?
but ya i would say this is the best done of the patches i renember patch 3.0 i couldent even do anything i constantly got DCed and the lag was horrible this patch atleast didnt have the DC
if anybody has authentication issues, merge your account with battle net, it skips the authentication steps and your login should never have problems again
Oh Crazytree you just summed up my day ^^.
On the other hand the batle for control of the Nexus summoning stone (Oculus was the daily) was some of the finest world PvP I've encountered.
We also pulled the trash from the other side of the door after Gothik's room while we were occupied with downing the waves. Was kinda cool mine and the other healers simultaneous 'oh shit' reactions when they came charging through the locked door around wave 8.
Oh and as for Kel'Thuzad, we had a total of 2 people being iceblocked during the entire encounter, and only 1 person had mana detonation.
We also had the XT bug as well. Except for us the adds kept coming even once the add phase finished. Also the sheer amount of adds spawning at once once the add phase did start *shudder*. Come to think of it.... I think we had the same amount of adds spawn at the start of the add phase that the entire 25 man gets in the entire encounter....
patch went pretty well with variable bugs in ToC. I actually got a really nice bug in H ToC Wed night when i instructed my group to run out of the instance when the 3 champ were all dismounted. a bug occured where when we entered back in the 3 champ where standing at the back door on the ground but had there shield up like they were on their horses so we all jumped on our horses and killed them on horses really nice bug!
i have found naxx to be mega bugged! Gothic the harvester has the whole dead side of the encounter running through the gate onto the live side almost wiped us. Then on 4 horsemen 2 of the horse dudes kept running to one side even when i had aggro....wiped us a couple times. Then Sapp was a disaster. The only naxx boss i have never wiped on and we wiped 3 times because when some of us stood behind the ice block we still got hit by the breath attack....then KT.......this was primarily only happening to me but i was tanking the adds and the void zone would hit the ground and immediatly go off without at lapse in time happened twice....what a horrilble naxx run it was....
patch seemed pretty good on our server tbh (Dragonblight EU) but there was some major lag in the new BG which made it pretty much unplayable.
our server has a different glitch on KT, some ppl randomly get DCed when the encounter starts, great fun when its a tank or healer.
@ cocopuff
I really wish you would learn to spell. And post all in one comment.
Also i only got major lag spikes, nothing else thank god!