Woohoo. New World of Warcraft patch gone live. So most of the servers were down until early evening because the scheduled maintenance on a patch day always takes longer than scheduled, and all of them were down again in the late evening after the publishers realised that their new software wasn't stable.

WoW is unusual in that it allows extensive interface modification, modification that many of the players use to the full in a hefty array of little tweaks and whole new functionality. Normally a patch just warns you they're all out of date, allowing you to force-load them anyway, but the v2 patch declares itself completely incompatible with anything that went before and won't load out of date addons. So even when I can get into the game, it doesn't look like I'm used to, doesn't have the functionality I'm used to, and since I don't really want to mess up my keymaps (hoping to get patched versions of the addons ASAP), some of the buttons don't even work.

On the plus side, they changed the talent trees that allow characters to specialise, and each big talent change comes with a refund of your talent points, in case you want to spend them differently in the new tree. I've taken the free respec and run, turning my holy priest specced for dedicated healing into a shameless killing machine of shadow magic. It's pretty much quadrupled my damage output.

Although the people expecting me to heal might not get such a good deal.