Fall of the Lich King postmortem

"After about a week of playing the new content, I have to say I'm impressed. Launch day was riddled with issues, the most prominent being that there simply were not enough instances to go around for all the players trying to get in. The instance servers crashed repeatedly and it could be summed up as a generally frustrating experience. However, Blizzard stayed true to their style and got things up and running by the next day and all was well.

The three new instances, Forge of Souls, Pit of Sarron, and Halls of Reflection are, in a word, fantastic. The boss encounters are challenging, the storylines engrossing, and the loot....OMG the loot!! We're talking item level 219 drops on REGULAR, Emblems of Triumph off of every boss, and enough random epic drops to make one crit their pants. Be mindful, oh ye with blue and green gear, these instances are NOT for the undergeared. They were designed to be challenging, and even for the well-geared, they are.

The next item I'd like to talk about is the new Looking For Group tool. Finding an instance group has never been easier...or more rewarding. Implemented with the patch is cross-realm instancing, meaning that the new tool allows you to run instances with players on other servers. You simply select what role you want to fill and the tool finds what's missing for you, adds them to your group and then teleports your whole party into the instance. No more travel time or waiting for hearthstones to cool down!! Further, there are no more heroic daily quests to pick up. If you select to run a random heroic dungeon, as soon as you down the last boss, the emblems and cash rewards are automatically placed in your currency tab. This only applies to the first random heroic you run that day, but it's still a hell of a lot easier than what we had previously.

Let's talk about emblems and emblem rewards for a minute. When you run a random heroic, the bosses now drop Emblems of Triumph instead of Emblems of Conquest. That's right, kids... Tier 9 and item level 245 gear is now rapidly farmable. So rapidly, in fact, that if you run nothing but random heroics for about 12-15 played hours, you'll have enough for an entire set of Tier 9. How's that for fast gear? Are you still reading this? Hello? See you scrubs in game!! :D"


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