A bit like Christmas, and things the trade-crowd doesn't get.

Easter has been over for a few days now, but then The Patch came, and I've been totally engulfed by it! OK, I'm not part of the Ulduar-going crowd (never say never, though - I'm leveling a healer, and I want to heal people, dammit!), but there are so many new features that just warm my casual WoW-heart:

• New fishing features: Fishing anywhere! New dailies! Cool turtle mount! New fishing rod rewarded by my favourite fisherman!
• The Argent Tournament is like a new and improved Shattered Sun Offensive-thingie - fun for a casual solo-player like myself, and you get quite a bit of gold from the quests.
• Dual spec! As I haven't bothered grinding cash for a while, I've only been able to get it on two of my characters so far - Bunnyhop, BM-huntress extraordinaire, and Rahamra, my baby tree (52 and counting) - but ooh, I love it! I was a bit annoyed before I realized I had to dismiss my pet before switching specs - if I didn't, the pet had its talents wiped, and I'd have to do them all over again... Dismiss first, then switch. Bunnyhop is sporting two different BM-specs atm, but I'm looking into MM and Survival as well, planning to explore those talent trees soon. Rahamra is a tree and a moonkin, as planned, and I love it. Being able to have a "real" healing spec, and still having an efficient solo-spec, all while leveling - its just so sweet.
• Improved quest tracking! By looking at the tooltip of a quest related mob, you can see the name of the quest, and your progress. Also, if you got a "use"-item when you picked up the quest, there'll be a little clickable icon next to the quest in the tracker by the mini map. Now, I've used addons that did these things, but 95% of the time I've gotten along fine without it, so it's really not necessary. But at the same time - why not? It's really annoying when you're grinding a certain type of mob for a quest drop, end up with nothing, and you check on Wowhead only to discover you should have killed the other type of mob. However, if Blizzard puts something like QuestHelper in the default UI, the game will be too casual even for me... I like reading the quests, taking in the stories behind them - if I want arrows showing me in what direction to go next, I'll go to IKEA.
• Lots of more stuff, probably - I just haven't taken it all in yet.

Now, a new patch isn't all hugs and puppies. The servers have been shaky, to say the least, and it usually takes a couple of weeks before things run smoothly again. Also, addons tend to get messed up by patches, and as a lot of addons are made by pure enthusiasts, not all of your favourites will get updated immediately, if ever. Yesterday I had to turn off Spammenot, since it caused my chat to malfunction, and sadly it seems like it won't be updated anymore :´( I do hope there's another way to filter out all the goldsellers and Dirge-spammers...

So, what to do if something in your UI isn't working correctly? You can't see whispers, your unit frames are weird in some way, your character keeps pulling bunnies out of hats for no reason (yeah, I made that up, aren't I crafty?) and so on?

First of all, try turning off all of your addons, just to make sure the problem is addon related.

Secondly, turn on half of your addons. If the problem appears again, you know it's caused by one of the addons you've activated, and you move onto the next step: Turn off half of the activated addons, check for the issue, and by doing this over and over, you rule out the innocent ones in chunks, until you've found the one causing you trouble.

I hope I'm making sense here :D It's a really simple, basic thing to do, but a lot of people in trade and general chat have been endlessly clueless and frustrated during the past few days - low fps, not being able to click links in chat, bunny issues - and they simply don't seem to understand the concept of the addons they are using every day: They are not an official part of the game, and it's not Blizzard's fault if they don't work.

If something doesn't work, turn it off for the time being, and wait for an upgrade. Or, if you're able and willing, write your own addons! But something tells me the people complaining in trade and general aren't equipped to do that :D

OK, I'll be spending my evening doing Argent Tournament-dailies on Bunnyhop, and on my old druid (temporarily pulled out of retirement, to check out the Icecrown-action), and hopefully I'll be able to get a level with Rahamra - I'm very much looking forward to taking her to Outland.