5.0.4 Initial Thoughts

Tuesday night I patched my  Warcraft installs up to 5.0.4.  Here are my thougths so far on the pre-expansion patch.   
Firstly the installation optimization took forever, 30-45 minutes if not longer on the systems with multicore processors.  One the one remaining single core system, I am not sure when it finished because I went to bed.
I have most of the addon issues sorted now.  Still have a little bit more to do, as not everyone had a new version posted yesterday.  But the core addons are updated.
I spent an inordinate amount of time logging into each alt and loading up their pets and mounts.  Best thing is I have my dragon from the Chinese Olympics on all my characters.  I want to see what the wife’s pet count will be when she does the same.
Crafted 100+ glyphs this morning.  Found out that the majority of papers used for inscription are grey items and sold them.  Luckily I had been lazy and did not have much of a back stock of paper.   All glyphs are made with the cheap paper and it can be purchased and stacked in lots of 100!  Which is a great!
I have a lot to do with my transmog as apparently Blizzard renamed a bunch of items.  Well, they technically did not change the names so much as correct inconsistencies in capitalization.  Which makes my Auction house addon think they are new items.  I filled up one of my guild banks (all tabs) before I figured out what was going on.  

Roll up the sleeves

After work I started really trying to fix my transmog auction groups.  Many had not changed, but I filled and emptied my guild bank three or four times with items that were no longer in auction groups.  Luckily there is the quick auctions group creation for that.  After spending over an hour fixing this I went on to other markets.  This amount of setup time is cramping my “15 minutes a day” style.
Sapu put up a post over at the Consortium explaining that users of TSM will need to log into their characters and scan each of their professions.  This is to prepare for new profession skills in Mists of Pandaria.  I ended up having to it twice on my main account due to being a bit slapdash when updating tradeskillmaster.  I had let at least one module overwrite the previous version which messed up both the mail module and the new look of the Auction House interface.  Once I fixed that and scanned each of the alt’s professions things were generally back to normal.

On my main I sold all my now grey items and started reforging my gear for the new hit and expertise caps.  Absolutely everything had to be reforged and I had several enchants to replace.  One plus is I was able to pick up a couple of 384 season 11 PVP axes as a good starter for leveling in Mists of Pandaria.  I also hit the combat dummies to work out my rotations, so far I am fairly clunky.  I may be up to running some dungeons this weekend, and maybe if I am brave some LFR.  

In general I am pleased with the quality of life changes and perplexed by the changes that increase totem management.  I expect I will be crafting some creative macros to work around it.  This patch is shaking things up much like the one prior to Cataclysm.