WoW patch 1.12, or: "SANDLOL VANISHLOL ROUGESLOL"

So, for those of you who don't already know, I play WoW, mostly on Malygos. My main is a rogue, but I have a 60 warlock as well, a bunch of other rogues of various levels scattered through other servers because I'm a glutton for punishment, etc. Anyway, today is patch day. This patch was about two major things: PvP and rogue changes. I mean, there are bug fixes, but these were the two big things. The rogue review was a disappointment for me, but I won't make a long post out of that, since so many other people have made excellent posts on the forums about it and been completely ignored.
These are the highlights of the patch for me:

- One of the world PvP things they added takes place in the desert and consists of people gathering...sand...in the desert. I realize a lot of the aspects of any game are silly when you look at them, but this one just completely breaks down any suspension of disbelief for me and sends me into fits of giggling.
- Rogue review: I get to pay extra money to train up my skills to respec in the exact same spec that I had pre-review
- Vanish: still broken
- Gouge is once again causing poison to proc (gouge is a move that incapacitates your opponent and breaks if the opponent takes any damage; poisons, of course, do damage, so gouge is breaking itself)

But, I do sort of like patch day, because it guarantees a lot of funny stuff. Well, not funny for the people who are trying to play, but funny to me. Here are my favorite bugs in this patch from the Blizzard known issues list:

- Players are unable to eat or drink in an entire zone, Eastern Plaguelands (eating and drinking is used to regain health/mana)
- Players can get stuck in Alterac Valley (PvP zone) if buffed with warcry
- Druids' 6-piece bonus from a certain set causes them to stand up (??)
- Mages using Blink while in lava get teleported to the deepest spot
- Paladins summoning their mount causes them to enter combat (I'm not sure if this means their summoning gets interrupted as well, effectively forcing all paladins into being pedestrians)
- Paladins summoning their mount causes them to aggro guards in neutral towns
- Warrior: whirlwind increases weapon skill when not attacking mobs

Cross-server battleground bugs deserve their own paragraph. This patch, Blizzard made it so you can PvP agains people in other servers in the battleground areas. Anyone with an ounce of sense could see that this might be hard to implement and cause a lot of bugs...and I realize, there is no way to QA everything beforehand, but some of these things are pretty obvious--like everyone is rushing to try the new thing and BGs getting overwhelmed. Though I suppose there's not much that could be done about that specifically short of upgrading hardware just for the initial rush, which is dumb. But anyway--so far, reported bugs include:

- Unable to enter BG with "instance does not exist" message
- Unable to exit BG after winning (might happen under other conditions too...not sure)
- People getting flagged and not actually entering the BG--I supposed this could be a side effect of the "unable to enter" thing
- Entire groups being kicked out of matches due to "not enough players" and everyone getting the deserter debuff (this makes it so you can't queue up again for 15 minutes)--so for example, a game that takes a max of 10 players per side, you'll have both teams at the full 10 players, and people get kicked out with the "not enough players" message

But, not to be completely negative--here are my two favorite bug fixes in this patch:

- Invisible houses (official Blizzard text: "There are areas with invisible houses")
- The sound bug! This is one of the most annoying and long-lasting bugs in the game--it's not game-breaking, but holy crap does it get old. If you Alt-Tab out of WoW in Windows (not sure about other OS), when you come back, the music volume shoots up.

If the sound bug is actually fixed in the patch, I may have to call it good and consider this the Best Patch Ever, in spite of everything else.