Project Lore

Despite the fact that the official patch notes clearly state that the Forge of Souls would be the first wing of the new 5-man Icecrown Citadel instance available for exploring, players on the test server can only currently access the the second wing, Pit of Saron. Even if it does seem a bit odd to kick off testing with the middle of this epic story instead of the beginning, I was still hungry for any bone Blizzard was going to throw us, so I gathered up a war party and ventured deep into the unfortunately-acronymed dungeon. If you're not afraid of spoilers (and there will be some), continue reading below! A word of warning to those who might seek entrance to the Pit of Saron before I begin: while the servers themselves seem to have been largely stabilized, many characters are having trouble seeing the instance portals. This appears to be a bug associated with phased content, meaning that anyone who has completed certain Icecrown quests (the exact culprits haven't been nailed down just yet) will not be able to see, let alone use, them. In that case, you'll have to either transfer another, less developed character, use a premade, or hope there's a Warlock in the group that can summon you in. I, for instance, have been stuck using my under-geared Elemental Shaman, Nuggnuts, instead my pimped out Rogue, Amatera. This will no doubt be fixed in upcoming builds, but those are the only options for now. If you're not cool with that, feel free to join the rest of the players out there using the dungeon's abbreviation as a fun pejorative for describing their current experience! That aside, let's get on with it! The first thing I noticed when I entered the Pit is that the bulk of it consists of a wide-open outdoor area. This means two things: mounts and the ability to skip trash. There also may be some choice regarding which order you tackle the first two bosses in. The dungeon map for Pit of Saron. The second thing I noticed was the big, bad frostwyrm called Rimefang hovering overhead, with Scourgelord Tyrannus, the mine's overseer in the saddle. After taking a few steps in, Lady Sylvanas appeared from the portal behind us (well, if you're Horde, she will), with two of her Dark Rangers, and a small battalion of troops in tow. The redshirts of the group charged right for Tyrannus, who clearly doesn't like people interfering with his operations. A little bit of the old Darth Vader stranglehold and they all dropped to the ground, dead. Tyrannus flew off, leaving the remainder of his undead minions for us to deal with.

Sylvanas' forces attempt to crush Tyrannus...

...and are subsquently destroyed. From here, the path split off to the left or the right around the eponymous Pit, where tired slaves are busy digging out Saronite while a giant, floating skull watches from above. Each one leads to a different boss encounter, and as I mentioned before, it doesn't seem particularly important which you decide to fight first. We chose to go to the right, which included offing some giant skeletons, necrolytes, and vrykul -- in other words, the usual Icecrown rogue's gallery. *The* Pit of Saron Along the way, just passing by slaves working the ore freed them, and they had all sorts of reactions to their saviors, from just plain old running away to thinking that they're hallucinating when they first saw you. It adds a nice little touch to the proceedings. Eventually, we reached the platform where Forgemaster Garfrost resided, who was essentially a giant vrykul crossed with an abomination. He looks a lot like the Pustulent Horrors you might see wandering around Mord'rether, but with a sack of giant Saronite boulders on his back, which he evidently thought was a good idea to toss at us during the fight. His other primary ability seems to be an AoE pulse that stacks a debuff on you, increasing Frost damage taken. This means you'll need to take him down quickly before it builds up and his regular attacks start doing too much to handle. Garfrost's ugly mug. Though we downed him on the first attempt, I won't say it went cleanly. I was killed due to one of the boss' ranged attacks and so were the Hunter and Resto Druid (aka the healer), leaving the two Paladins in our group to finish the job (I should mention here that loot hasn't been implemented yet, on trash or bosses). A previously enslaved Orc named Gorkun Ironskull appeared to retake the forge, along with all the other laborers we had previously relieved of their bonds. He promised that they would take the opportunity to gear up and help us in our final assault. After rezzing everyone and buffing back up, we traversed the Northern edge of the Pit towards the second boss, a corrupted leper gnome named Krick and his hideous companion/mount, Ick. This wasn't a particularly hard fight either, but it was fun and definitely tested our movement skills. For a majority of the encounter, Ick tossed globs of slime, which created poisonous, green pools on the ground where they landed. These came slowly and were easy to dodge. But at some point during the fight, Krick decided that it simply wasn't doing the job on its own and started conjuring time bombs on the ground. Represented by expanding, purple domes, they started popping up all over the place and quickly became difficult to completely avoid. All the while, Ick continued to throw bolts of his fetid bile at the party, dealing direct damage this time. Unfortunately, I bit the dust again, but we still managed to pull off a victory on our first attempt. Krick gets throttled by Sylvanas. Sylvanas appeared to take the vile gnome's life, but before he perished, he let slip that the Lich King's blade, Frostmourne, could be found in the 3rd wing of the instance, the Halls of Reflection. Sylvanas questioned Krick's admission, citing that she thought Arthas always had it by his side, but he continued to insist that he was telling the truth. With the second boss down, Tyrannus showed his ugly mug once again. He taunted us from the skies, provoking us to burst through the ranks of his most powerful undead lackeys and challenge him on the platform above. Several more powerful packs of trash stood before us on the slope, five or six to a number. Trash on the way to Tyrannus. Hey, look! A cave! Embarassingly, we wiped on the first set, but picked back up and made it through the rest more or less unscathed. The cliffside eventually lead to a cave, which I can now admit is probably my favorite part of the dungeon. The trash inside isn't terribly difficult, but you'll have to fight them through falling blocks of ice. If you've ever fought Hodir in Ulduar, you should already be familiar with this mechanic, as glowing blue circles on the ground will show you where icicles are about to drop. This looks awfully familiar... On the other side of the cave we met Tyrannus for the final time. He had nowhere left to run or hide. Gorkun and his men appeared to back us up, distracting the Scourgelord's undead army so that we could face him and his frostwyrm alone... In the interest of at least keeping some things a secret, I'll end my recount of the events here. As for what I thought of it when it all was said and done? Well, if you were expecting a challenge, I don't think you'll find it here. The Pit of Saron, at least, isn't much more difficult than any of the other Heroic 5-man dungeons out there. But it does flow better, and the integrated story elements allow the instance to have a sort of "rhythm" you just don't get in other parts of the game. With each boss down, you feel like you're actively working towards an end goal instead of just more loot, and the inclusion of important NPCs like Sylvanas adds some extra fun, even if you never fight directly by her side. I'm reminded somewhat of the dungeons in Lord of the Rings Online, and I hope that, at least in terms of pushing the narrative, this is a path Blizzard continues to tread in the future. Facing down Tyrannus, once and for all!

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The PTR is abuzz with all sorts of changes right now, at least when people aren't getting disconnected! Through the 30 second gaps of up-time, though, I managed to score a few screenshots of the new quest tracking features that Blizzard's been working on. And guess what? They're integrated right into the World Map! I knew something had to be up when I read this in the patch notes:

Quest Tracking Feature

• This system is currently under development and is not fully functional.

And apparently, this is it: As you can see, your quest log is now integrated into the map screen when you bring it up (though if you prefer the old log, you can still use it by hitting the appropriate icon). Checking a box in the lower-right corner will allow you to actively track objectives on the map. Presumably, the numbers that correspond to quests in the panel on the right while be displayed on the world map where your goal is. Sadly, this must be the part of the system that "is not fully functional" just yet. As for that green box in the upper-right corner? The final graphic obviously hasn't been added just yet, but clicking on it allows you to window the world map, something you couldn't do previously without add-ons like Cartographer. Here's what it looks like: Since the feature is still in development, it's not guaranteed that it will make it to live servers in the form you see it here, but I'm still rather excited by changes like this. If I can log onto the test server for more than a few minutes (I haven't even had enough time to re-allocate my talent points), I'll be sure to bring you more (and, hopefully, some details about the new 5-man dungeon that is currently open for testing). What think you of this feature, good readers?

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As of tonight, Patch 3.3 has gone live on the Public Test Realm. Earlier today, we caught our first glimpse at the latest PTR patch notes, signifying that we knew it would be coming soon. But here it is, just a few hours later, and it's already here! Happy day! The long fight against the Lich King has been arduous, and the final battle has been a long time coming. It seems that we'll all soon get our shot at Arthas. But first - to test out the fights and ensure that they're in good enough condition to release to all. I would expect there will probably be at least 6 to 8 weeks of beta testing before the patch is passed on to everyone, and perhaps there will be drastic changes by then, since nothing on the PTR is ever guaranteed to appear in-game. This is just pure speculation on my part, but perhaps we could see the finalized Patch 3.3 out sometime in January. It seems appropriate, somehow, for the final battle to be played out in the winter (at least for us Northern Hemisphere dwellers). Personally, I can't wait to hear and see more about the new 10- and 25-man raids, and especially the 5-man dungeon at Icecrown Citadel, since I've been having a great time with the 5-man content as of late. And now that I've got a level 80 character, I'm debating whether or not to download the PTR myself... but I'd hate to get attached to any content (or loot!), not to mention Rogue vanish fixes that may never end up on the final version. Oh, decisions. Well, for any of you who are looking into beta testing, here's what Blue Poster Aratil gave as advice on the forums:

Patch 3.3.0 is available for testing on the PTR. We would like to encourage everyone to take time to test this patch and provide feedback on the Test Realm forums. For more information on the PTR, please visit the following threads- Introduction, Installing.

The forums already have jumped alive with excitement, and apparently some at grief that the patch is more than 1.3 GB in size. Hopefully that's an indication that there's LOTS of new content for us to discuss in the coming days and weeks. So, how many of you are going to foray into the PTR?

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It looks like we will see the new patch, patch 3.3, on the public test realms any day now. Check out the current draft of the patch notes: General

• Icecrown Citadel
  • The Forge of Souls, the first wing of the 5-player dungeon, is currently available for testing.
  • Additional Icecrown Citadel dungeon and raid content will be made available in future test builds.
• Dazed: Creatures attacking a player from behind can no longer cause players level 1-5 to be dazed, and have a reduced chance to cause players level 6-10 to be dazed.
• Copied Test Realm characters will no longer be copied with their achievement history in order to better facilitate the character copy process.

Classes: General

• Default Equipment: Starting weapons are now more uniform. Rogues now start with a pair of daggers equipped. All other classes except shamans start with a 2-handed weapon equipped and the required skill already known. Shamans start with a 1-handed weapon and a shield, as they benefit more from the shield than they would from a 2-handed weapon.
• Glancing Blows: The mage, warlock, and priest classes no longer have an increased chance for their melee attacks to be glancing blows; and the damage penalty due to their glancing blows is the same as for other classes.
• Health and Mana Regeneration: These regeneration rates have been increased by up to 200% for low level characters. As a player's level increases, the regeneration rates gradually reduce, returning to normal rates at level 15.
• Spell Mana Costs: These costs have been reduced for almost all lower level spell ranks. In general, if a spell decreased in cost with a higher level rank in patch 3.2.0, that spell now has the decreased cost at all ranks. In addition, spells learned before level 20 with reduced cast times and/or durations have even further reduced mana costs, proportionate to their reduction in cast time or damage.

Races: General

• Racial Attribute Bonuses: These bonuses have been recalibrated to even out the amount of starting health on the various races. All races start with a standardized level of stamina, except for orcs, dwarves, and tauren who now start with 1 extra point of stamina. For each class, bonuses and penalties to all attributes have been adjusted so that each race has an equal attribute total.

Death Knights

• Rune of the Stoneskin Gargoyle: There is now a 1-handed version of this rune in addition to the current 2-handed rune.
• Talents
  • Unholy
    • Night of the Dead: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 45/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Druids

• Pets
  • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Hunters

• Misdirection: Redesigned. Instead of having finite charges, it now begins a 4-second timer when the hunter using Misdirection performs a threat-generating attack, during which all threat generated by the hunter goes to the friendly target. In addition, multiple hunters can now misdirect threat to the same friendly target simultaneously.
• Talents
  • Beast Mastery
    • Intimidation: If the hunter's pet is in melee range of its target, the stun from Intimidation will now be applied immediately instead of on the pet's next swing or attack.
• Pets
  • Avoidance: Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 30/60/90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Mages

• Talents
  • Arcane
    • Arcane Empowerment: This talent now also grants 1/2/3% increased damage done by the mage's party or raid for 10 seconds after the mage gets a critical strike with Arcane Explosion, Arcane Missiles, Arcane Barrage, or Arcane Blast. This effect is exclusive with Ferocious Inspiration and Sanctified Retribution.
• Pets
  • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Priests

• Pet
  • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pet takes from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.

Rogues

• Dual Wield: Rogues now know this ability upon logging into the game at level 1.
• Stealth: This ability no longer has multiple ranks. While active, the single rank of this ability (available at level 1) allows rogues to move at 70% movement speed.
• Vanish: For the first second after this ability is used, neither Vanish nor Stealth can be broken by taking damage or being the victim of a hostile spell or ability.

Shamans

• Fire Nova Totem: This totem has been replaced with a new spell, Fire Nova, which is available at the same ranks as the old Fire Nova Totem. Existing characters will automatically learn this new spell in place of the totem. With a Fire Totem active, shamans will be able to use Fire Nova (fire magic) to emit the same area-of-effect damage as the old Fire Nova Totem from the active Fire Totem, not consuming the totem in the process. Fire Nova will activate a 1.5-second global cooldown when used and has a 10-second spell cooldown. The caster must be within 30 yards of the totem to use this ability, but does not need to be within line of sight of the totem.
• Talents
  • Elemental Combat
    • Improved Fire Nova Totem: Renamed Improved Fire Nova. This talent now provides an additional 10/20% damage to the spell and reduces the cooldown by 2/4 seconds.

Warlocks

• Pets
  • Avoidance (passive): Now reduces the damage your pets take from area-of-effect damage by 90%, but no longer applies to area-of-effect damage caused by other players.
  • Summon Imp: This ability is now available from the trainer for level 1 warlocks and no longer requires a quest to learn.

Warriors

• Victory Rush: This ability is now trainable at level 6.
• Talents
  • Protection
    • Damage Shield: This ability will no longer trigger any chance-on-hit effects from the warrior or the opponent it damages.

User Interface

• Quest Tracking Feature
  • This system is currently under development and is not fully functional.
• Looking For Group System
  • This feature is undergoing several improvements and is not available for testing at this time.
• For additional notes on Lua and XML changes please visit the UI & Macros forum.

Graphics

• A new feature has been added to the D3D graphics engine to improve texture management (particularly for Windows XP users). This is currently enabled by default on the public test realms. For more information please visit our Test Realm forum.

Professions

• Enchanting
  • Black Magic: This enchantment now sometimes increases haste rating for the caster rather than inflicting the caster's target with a damage-over-time effect. It is also now triggered by landing any harmful spell rather than inflicting damage with a spell.

Items

• Glyphs
  • Death Knights
    • Glyph of Icy Touch: Instead of granting additional runic power, this glyph now causes Frost Fever to deal 20% additional damage.
  • Shamans
    • Glyph of Fire Nova Totem: Renamed Glyph of Fire Nova. This glyph now reduces the cooldown of Fire Nova by 3 seconds.

Bug Fixes

• Druids
  • Rejuvenation: Rank 15 of this spell was providing a 15-second duration. It has been correctly reduced to 12 seconds.
• Mages
  • Flame Strike: Some ranks of this spell had an incorrect cast time of 3 seconds. All ranks now share a 2-second cast time.

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With 3.2.2 finally out of the way, the Patch Test Realm is clear for the arrival of 3.3, which should be bringing with it Icecrown Citadel, if nothing else. Though not a peep has come out of Blizzard yet, it appears that the Character Copy service is currently available. If you've never used it before, it allows you to take a character from the server you normally play on and reproduce one with its exact stats and equipment on one of the test realms. Sindragosa in Icecrown Citadel If you think this the timing seems too soon, might I remind you that, at BlizzCon, it looked like they had already put a lot of work into Icecrown Citadel, even detailing some of the events that might occur as you progress through it (like the airship battle between the Horde and Alliance). Even though we've heard little about the encounters, populating a raid with bosses and trash is often one of the last things to actually happen when creating a dungeon (that's not to say they haven't already charted things out in some no-doubt-extensive design documents). Likewise, the freshly released information regarding the new three-wing, 5-man instance accompanying the raid leads us to believe that at least some of the forthcoming content is close to being ready for public consumption. Not to mention, Blizzard keeps talking about that Vanish fix like it's right around the corner. Quoth the Ghostcrawler:

"We have a change for Vanish in place for 3.3. You will get to try it out soon (tm)."

Even if 3.3 is expected to hit the PTR in the next couple of weeks, don't think that you'll be able to go toe-to-toe with Arthas just yet. Previous experience shows that, whenever they choose to start showing off the raid, they'll probably cycle individual bosses in and out on a testing schedule. And in order to preserve the secrecy of key fights, like that against the Lich King, they'll likely leave some out altogether. So feel free to go ahead and copy your character (I've verified it, it works), but be aware that if the real thing isn't coming just yet, they'll likely wipe all of the current transfers before 3.3 actually lands for testing. Can you guys sense it? That excitement? The final conflict of Wrath is right around the corner!

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Blue Stew is a new semi-daily column bringing you a delicious concoction of developer news, thoughts, and opinions straight from the boiling pot that is the official World of Warcraft forums. The highlights of each day include additional commentary by Project Lore staff. PvPvPvE Would you look at this pair of winners... In one thread, Paladin extraordinaire, Feanorion, wonders:

"why are PvE concerns being trumped by the concerns of such a miniscule portion of the subscriber population? "

And in another, posted the same day, Fireweed puts on her frowny-face:

"Since the Illidan kill in TBC I swore I would not touch PvE ever, ever again. It's mind numbing, forces you to deal with people you never want to deal with on your free time, it requires way too much dedication in the scene/too many people and to stay in a guild that is capable to handle it and so forth... What I really enjoy about this game is arena, even some random battlegrounds here and there with a small group."

This, friends, is a microcosm of all that is wrong with the average complainer's mentality towards the game : "I don't like it, so it shouldn't be there!" I've said time and time again that I'm not particularly in favor of PvP, at least not to its extremes, but that's the way I prefer to play. I'm not going to outright deny the ways in which other people might have fun. But the fact of the matter is that if any decisions to change the underlying structure of Warcraft, it would be based on an entirely different group altogether, as Ghostcrawler so handily points out:

"If you expect us to balance around the most popular way to play the game, then you'd see most of our changes aimed at low level alts and very few end-game raiding tanking changes. "

I think we all get so caught up in the endgame, that we forget most people who subscribe to WoW simply enjoy tooling around, by themselves, or with a couple of close friends, in the lower levels of the game. These are the people that like to level up over a week, not a couple of hours. And these are the people that enjoy picking herbs just because they enjoy picking herbs, not because they need to make flasks for the next raid. And that's why I think Cataclysm is going to be such a big hit with the community. It refocuses the game on these types of players without entirely forgetting those at the level cap. You see, WoW is a lot like this scrum-diddly-umptious cake... (image courtesy of http://www.mmmmbrains.com/blogg/) But even ignoring this group of players, can't we just all accept that PvP and PvE are integral parts of the game? I used to be a nay-sayer, too, but I've long since learned that both styles are like two delicious flavors coming together to make World of Warcraft just as enjoyable as a tasty little peanut butter cup! Ghostcrawler explains in a seperate thread why you will never see them split:

"Internal consistency for belief in the game world is part of it. Just keeping complexity down is another part of it. We don't want to see every spell or talent have two tooltips and players having to keep all of that straight. It just feels like two games with one art set at that point, which isn't what we're going for."

Please Explain Argent Tournament Reset Seems like the Faction Change service includes everything but the kitchen sink. Or, in this case, Argent Tournament progress. Kisirani gives a simple enough answer:

"I'm responding to this thread because it's written in a calm and concise manner, so thank you for that. Simply put, while it was not a decision we enjoyed making, due to the way the Argent Tournament functions it was not feasible on a technical level to properly switch progress between factions. I am sorry we were unable to offer a better solution."

I wish he would've expanded a bit more on that, but then again, that's due to my own curiosity. I'm always intrigued to know how the game is built, how its underlying systems are structured to allow certain things and not others. While I have no way of being specific myself, I imagine it's the case of simply coding, or constructing, the Argent Tournament in a certain way at a time before the requirements for the Faction Change service were fully laid out, leaving the two aspects of the game incompatible with each other. So for those of you still considering a Faction Change, please keep this in mind. You'll have to do the Argent Tournament all over again (though, presumably, the earned reputation with each home city will remain intact, even if the quest progress doesn't). And for those of you who already did, without realizing this caveat, I'm sorry! That's potentially months worth of daily work down the drain! Earthen Power Nerf: Overkill Oh, it's the weekend. I'll throw you guys one more bone to look over! This one's for the Enhancement Shamans out there, in response to the most recent PTR patch update, which makes changes to the way in which Earthen Power works, potentially affecting their performance in Arena teams:

"The 3.2.2 PTR change to earthen power will be crippling to Enhancement Shaman, I am not saying that this talent isn't a bit too powerful, but granting the shaman short term immunity to movement impairing effects is not the issue, the issue is it granting the shamans team mates the immunity. Removing the immunity from the shaman themselves will do nothing but cripple a spec that has just recently regained viability, without showing any form of dominance, except as a part of a counter RMP team in one tournament, a tournament which doesn't well reflect the state of play on live (nothing over item level 213)... I would propose that if you feel earthen power is overly powerful, you remove the snare immunity from allied targets, but leave it on the shaman, else we will see a return enhancement shaman being unable to stick to a target. We already suffer greatly from a lack of controllable damage, reliance on long cooldowns (bloodlust/heroism, spirit wolves), and inability to kill healers. Returning Enhancement Shaman an easy to kite class will severely undermine everything you have done to give us arena viability."

Ghostcrawler explains that they favored Ghost Wolf as a reducer of movement-impairing effects instead:

"We think Earthen Power and the Ghost Wolf change were trying to solve the same problem. Together they felt like overkill to us, and we thought the Ghost Wolf change was more interesting so we kept that one. Your mileage may vary and I would be surprised if many shaman agreed since they were the target of the nerf."

Alright, folks! Have a fantastic weekend, but don't forget to respond and let us know what you think about all of these different subjects before you do!

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With all the well-deserved hoopla regarding BlizzCon and WoW Cataclysm over the past few weeks, I thought it'd be fun to take a look back at some of the user interface changes we saw implemented nearly a month ago, in Patch 3.2, now that we've had time for the content to sink in a bit. It seemed that while many of us were excited to see these changes made, a large number of players also were concerned that the changes would make the game too easy, or even dumbed-down. This always seems to be a difficult line that Blizzard must walk when making content changes - and players aren't always happy with the results. Now that we've had a month to adjust to the changes, let's take another look at some of what was implemented:

• How about that auto-complete for character names while in chat, for mail, etc? It certainly simplifies chats and invites, especially for those toons with special characters in their names.
• I'm a fan of the casting bars that now show under target nameplates. It makes timing interrupts considerably easier. But I suppose that also could be considered a bad thing if I was the one being interrupted.
• The double-paned questlog makes viewing quests a bit easier - I basically already had this through the DoubleWide addon, but now it's built in to the standard WoW UI.
• Automatic item comparisons per armor slot and the ease of seeing vendor sell prices also are a welcome addition in my book, but also both are similar to the addons RatingBuster and Auctioneer.
• Druids now can see their mana bars when shape-shifted. Sounds handy.
• Have you found it helpful to have the item level on tooltips? I'll admit, this one I haven't done much with yet.
• Another useful addition - options menus now display an exclamation when they have new features.
• Remember all of those Quest helper additions that were on the 3.2 PTR patch notes? The ones that probably were the most widely debated for their simplification of questing? Well as we've all probably figured out by now, those never made it onto the regular servers. But it should be interesting to see if they were scrapped altogether or if they'll make another appearance in a later patch.

So in retrospect, now that we've had some time to adjust to all these changes, what do you guys think? Are you happy with what Blizzard has brought? Perhaps now couldn't live without some of the changes? They may be minor in the grand scheme of things, but I always think that the UI changes can bring so much to the game in their functionality. I also would say that first starting out on the game can be a bit intimidating. I would argue that many of these changes simplify aspects of the game that wouldn't necessarily affect the actual gameplay, but moreso the ease of getting around the interface and learning how to play. Perhaps Blizzard's looking to expand its market... or perhaps I'm just trying to make something out of nothing. What do you think?

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That has to be a record.  For as long as I have been following WoW, over five years, I have never seen Blizzard go from announcement to PTR that fast.  It took two days, less than 48 hours, for Onyxia's retuning to go from a blue post to actual content on the PTR.  Thanks to the data mining fiend known as Boubouille we've already have a first look inside level 80 Onyxia's succulent loot table. Check out Boubouille's finds here.  He'll have more as the day moves on, most likely. The mount is what excites most people, and at 310% flying speed, it should.  The current model is exactly what I would expect a Disney-ed Onyxia to look like.  She's almost friendly!  Unfortunately it appears that scoring one of these mounts is going to be incredibly difficult.  Zarhym articulates it best, "The drop rate will be extremely low. One day I will have it, though as soon as I loot it I'll probably be struck by lightning on a sunny day and attacked by a shark, all while in the presumed comfort of my living quarters."  Sounds like Winterstrike and Juggynaut will be kept busy for quite some time. Boubouille also had me scratching my head at some new spells he discovered.  Mohawk related spells that are appropriately title after Mr. T's most famous saying.  The PTR patch notes make no mention to the spells, so one can only assume that they are...I have no idea.  I am truly and utterly stumped as to what use they could be other than some sort of crazy joke.  Perhaps Mr. T is making an appearance alongside Ozzy? The current patch notes for Patch 3.2.2 stick with the general rule of thumb for incremental patches, short and sweet.  Solidsamm is pissed though, a 30% reduction to Fan of Knives is going to drastically lower his overall DPS on numerous trash mobs.  Hopefully the mass of raiders being indoctrinated to fear Deep Breath and grinding away at a purple dragon will cause him to forget the nerf. When do you expect the patch to be out?

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With patch 3.2 on the test realms and the Ulduar hype slowly fading, it seems like the live servers are more empty than usual. Not only are there less players overall, but there may be less gold farmers than usual. The game economy on each server is relatively small and sensitive to these temporary changes in player demographics, and right now the shifting player base on at least my server has had some serious effects on the economy. The first thing that I noticed are less raw materials at a higher price. Since there are less players on, there are less players running around doing dailies and quests that lead them to herbs, mining nodes, or dead animals to skin. On the flip side, there are less people spending hours and hours a week raiding than there were with the launch of Ulduar. Thus, the demand for things created by these materials - like elixirs, Ulduar recipes, etc, has also declined. The result is an overall smaller market that is overall easier to manipulate.  With less herbs (especially Frost Lotus) available on the auction house, I'm not able to make quite as many flasks, but they aren't all getting bought either. With less competitors in the market, I have made quite the pretty penny on flasks - though I am selling much less overall. Its a perfect opportunity to expand and explore into other areas. I recently picked up Engineering and I'm going to see how many of these Nesingwary 4000 the market is willing to buy. It makes me wonder how much of am impact gold farmers really have on the market and how many are really out there. Back in the vanilla WoW days, you could hardly walk into Tyr's Hand without seeing a dozen gold farmers gathering cloth and other baubles to sell in the auction house. It might be more subtle these days. Ever see those power-leveling services advertised in trade chat? If they are going through the hassle of advertising in-game, they are getting at least a few people to buy into it, and all those characters at their disposal gives them a great way to farm up cloth and materials while leveling those characters and dump it into the market. Where there's fire, there's smoke. Illegitimate services like power-leveling are likely a sign that gold farmers are still out and about on the realms in some fashion. With a steady supply of raw materials into the market from illegitimate players like gold farmers and hackers, many of the prices we are accustomed to are likely the work of a great supply. We are used to the land of bounty where we can go to the auction house and get almost whatever we want if we are willing to pay a reasonable price. If gold farmers leave the game completely, will this change? How negatively do these types of services actually impact the game? Looking forward, the release of patch 3.2 will bring an influx of players eager to jump back into heroics and all the old raids as well as the new Argent Tournament content. Start preparing now and stock up on potions, elixirs, eternal, and other materials. With epic gems and many new recipes, patch 3.2 will undoubtedly jump-start the WoW economy.

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The PTR datafiles have once again been mined in order to give us a preview of what the newest Arena season has to offer. MMO-Champion has posted screenshots of the latest armor sets available to the top Arena competitors next season, and I have to say, most of it is pretty good looking. In fact, I have no issues with any of the sets except one. The Shaman set has to be one of the ugliest sets I've ever seen. My only hope is that there are some changes coming up for the colors, at the very least. It could be that I am just overly critical of Blizzard's decisions that affect my class, but in my opinion every other class has a nice evolution from the Season 5 and 6 sets with decent looking gear that generally fits the overall feel of the class. I can't say the same about the Shaman set. Blizzard's design philosophy behind arena gear in Wrath of the Lich has been less flashy gear that has been made by the top crafters that gets better as the seasons progress. While the shaman set certainly didn't start out pretty, it seems to be getting worse. Take a look at all of the sets over on MMO-Champion, I'd love to hear if other players (shaman and non-shaman alike) think I'm just being too particular about gear that I probably will never get - especially the helmet and shoulders.

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