Project Lore

Ugg, maintenance day. What a waste of perfectly good play time Tuesday mornings are. Doesn't Blizzard know that the morning is when I do my Auction House browsing and such. Anyways, since there isn't much going on in the game right now I figured I could hit you guys with an update on Wrath of the Lich King and the load of mounts that are being added with its launch. MMO-Champion has a screenshot for all but one of the mounts, so its best you head to their post if you want to see more. At the moment there are 32 new mounts by my count, a few of which we have known about for some time. However, 32 is a bit of an inflated number since many of the mounts are simply different colors of each other. Currently, there are actually only eight drastically different models split up into seven categories. Category and model breakdown:

• Others – Windrider and Gryphon
• Bears – Four Assorted Bears
• Mammoths – Eight Assorted Mammoths
• Proto-Drakes – Seven Assorted Proto-Drakes
• Drakes – Seven Assorted Drakes
• Tailoring – Two Magnificent Flying Carpets
• Engineering – Two Hogs

I am less than thrilled about the Alliance version of The Hog, the motorcycle that I raved about before. My second choice would be the BlizzCon Polar Bear (aka Big Blizzard Bear), but we all know how that went. So now I am on to my third choice for a ground mount it seems. I guess I will just have to settle for ridiculousness and put my Gnome Rogue atop one of the many Mammoths. Why is it ridiculous? Because my character is smaller than what he would poo.

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Oh sweet jumping Jesus.  Patch 3.0.2 is apparently creeping up on us sooner than I expected.  Blizzard Poster Zarhym announces that the bridging patch is going to be a large one.  Not that we expected anything less, considering the size of the pre-TBC “Before the Storm” patch.  I already touched on some changes that were announced when the patch was first revealed but the news of the impending download calls for an update. For starters, Zarhym warns us that this patch will be big.  So big that the flying skull wants all users to activate their Background Downloader to prepare to download the data that has been finalized.  It is also mentioned that the downloader should be downloading faster in general now.  Seems that they tweaked their torrent system a bit. The process should be enabled shortly. Even though we received the warning, Blizzard has still not added any patch notes to their site.  It's likely we will see some patch notes this week to elaborate on all the known changes. We also have some anecdotal evidence to hint at how soon the patch may be coming.  First off, the PTR forums have been wiped, which usually occurs before a patch heads to them.  I should mention that much of the new stuff has been tested on the beta realms extensively, meaning a PTR session could theoretically be skipped.  Secondly, the Launcher is now displaying a Wrath of the Lich King splashscreen.  Nothing groundbreaking or concrete, but evidence nonetheless. Here is some of the stuff we already know is coming with the new patch:

• Massive alterations to the way raid buffs/debuffs work
• A built in Guild Calendar
• New class spells and talents
• Stormwind Harbor
• Barbershops
• Two new Arenas
• Inscription profession
• Hunter pet changes and additions
• Zul'Aman bears no longer awarded

Get to work on those bear mounts guys.  I will be content with waiting for a Polar Bear though.

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