Cataclysm Week 1: Reflections

*Disclaimer: This post is not about reflections.*

Wow, what a week! Leveling dungeons were hard, leveling quests were super crowded, and raids were on the cusp of impossible. Rating conversions dropped, health pools rose, and mana evaporated into thin air. It's been an exciting week, and not just for healers.

Speaking of which, for those keeping tabs, you may think that I'm not a healer. Cataclysm changed that too. Discipline healing is fun again! Heroics are fun and challenging again! Healing heroics has been some of the best fun I've had all year. My first heroic, Vortex Pinnacle, found me gasping for mana and healing on fumes at the end of every boss fight, usually with no more than 20k HP total spread over the entire party. And it was awesome! When I finally (yes, finally, as in, after multiple wipes) defeated a boss, it really felt like I had improved as a player. In heroics! Awesome!

Not only that, but the encounters were interesting! The bosses in there had a variety of important and unique abilities, ranging from 70 odd whirlwinds roaming the room that would knock you around, to an AoE that was absolutely always lethal if you weren't in a particular safe zone in the room (combined with a root effect to prevent you from reaching it!) It was hard! It was fun! Bosses were unique and strategy mattered!

The launch was smooth, servers rarely crashed, bugs were few and mostly unimportant, and the price of new gear and trade materials is still ridiculous.

Healing is very different, particularly at low gear levels (like 329, for example,) and I'll have a post with tips on the new healing model in the next post.