WoW 3.3 Means More PUGS

I realize I haven't updated in awhile and I blame that on Thanksgiving and finals. Anyway, WoW patch 3.3 finally came out last Tuesday and there's a bunch of fancy new stuff to play with. First of all, the lfg finder has been seriously upgraded. Now, you simply input whether you're a healer, tank, or dps and it will usually find you a group within a minute. This is because it searches for your fellow PUGmates across servers. It will only group you up with players in your own battlegroup and your own faction of course. Also, to help people out that seriously need to run instances that people hate going to, there's a random instance function. If you're 80 (or slightly below, I'm not really sure what the bottom level cap is), you can pick between random normal and random heroic. This will randomly place you in a PUG inside a random instance. Also, once the group is full; you should be instantly teleported to the inside of the instance. Sometimes it fails (shocker!), but usually clicking the tiny eyeball (lfg button) on your minimap will let you teleport inside after a few tries. This makes it so super lazy people aren't holding up the group by requiring summons. To discourage people from ditching groups that enter certain instances, you get a 15 minute random debuff, which prevents you from queuing up for another random instance until it fades.

You can still pick specific instances, but you won't get the first and subsequent bonuses that you would get by running a random. The first bonus for completing a random normal is 2 emblems of conquest plus some gold. After that, you just get gold for each random normal you do. For a random heroic, the first reward is 2 emblems of frost (the new emblem for better gear) and some gold. After that, you get 2 emblems of conquest and some gold for each random heroic you complete. You still get an emblem of conquest for every boss you kill in a heroic whether it's random or not. This new system does away with the daily heroic quests. Instead, there is a weekly raid quest which you can complete 1 time each week (aduuuuuur), whenever you want.

There are also 3 new 5-man instances and 1 new raid. Basically, you run away from the Lich King through part of Icecrown Citadel with Sylvanas. In the 1st 5-man you will get a quest to unlock the 2nd 5-man, and inside the 2nd 5-man you'll get a quest to unlock the 3rd 5-man instance. These new 5-mans are about as hard as heroic ToC, so don't just queue up if you've run a normal instance before, since normal ToC is about as hard as the original Northrend heroics.

All in all, I'm very impressed with this latest patch. There haven't been too many bugs that I've come across besides the instances filling up (That usually only delayed my instance by like 5 minutes though.) and the new lfg system is pretty amazing (I really don't know why they didn't make it like this in the first place :P). Really, you just need to watch our for noobs that think they are geared enough for the new instances because they are labeled "normal". There is an easy way to deal with this though. You now can simply vote to kick someone, and if it passes; they'll be removed from the group and you can simply requeue to grab another person from lfg. Also, when you enter an instance that has already been started; it will tell you how many bosses have been killed, which is very nice.