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Old News from June 2011
News - June 30th 2011 - Fixes And Fun Stuff Merely a bunch of fixes to look over today. It's been two days since 4.2 went live and that means a second batch of hotfixes was applied. Looks like we're back to daily hotfixings for a while. Another hotfix is planned to be implemented soon which will make the bags you get from holiday bosses disappear after the holiday ends. This is to keep people from hoarding their bags in the hopes that Blizzard will add something new to the holiday bag loot table the next year, or to use the bag's contents after the holiday has ended. Here's a nice treat Blizzard has given us. It's a list of all the new 4.2 trinkets that have an interesting special effect when you use them, vanity pets, and mounts, as well as how you get them. This is the first time I've seen Blizzard provide a list like this, and I'm glad they did. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 29th 2011 - Blizzard's Wanting More New Players 4.2 went off with relatively few snags. There was much unhappiness in regards to the 'saving Thrall' questchain bugging on occasion, but overall Blizzard seems to be getting their act together with major patch releases. And yes, there are already numerous reports of guilds clearing the Firelands on normal mode. But it's a certainty that these people were playing on the PTR and got ample time to practice and form strategies. So don't take it as a sign that the Firelands raid is going to be a cakewalk. Already there are some hotfixes that were thrown in to 4.2. Funny how this patch has been ready to go for nearly a week and yet they still have to hotfix in some changes after it comes out. Blizzard is making some big attempts to get more new people playing WoW. We already know about the Recruit-a-friend level cap being raised from 60 to 80. Last week they sent out free copies of the game to various "veteran" WoW players to give away to their friends and introduce more people to WoW. Now they're making Burning Crusade essentially a part of vanilla WoW. When you buy WoW through the online store you now get BC thrown in for free. And everyone who owns vanilla WoW, no matter when they bought it, now gets BC for free, too. Plus they have removed the expiration times for WoW free trials. There's still a level cap of 20 and numerous other restrictions, but those using a trial account can play forever instead of the previous limit of 14 days. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 28th 2011 - 4.2 Is Live The only news I've got today is that 4.2 is going live... but you already knew that. Hey, don't blame me, 4.2 should have come out a week ago which means new news has been pretty hard to come by these past seven days. I'm pretty sure that we'll have plenty of news come tomorrow. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 27th 2011 - Ready For 4.2 To Finally Come? 4.2 is definitely going live tomorrow. Are you ready for all that it will bring? The Recruit-a-friend program is getting a buff. The extra xp and freebie levels now go up to level 80, a buff from the previous cap of level 60. This should make getting through BC and Wrath content a breeze for anyone recruiting a friend into the game. And Ask the Devs #10 is out and as I've mentioned before this one discusses DPS. I don't have much of an opinion on this one; it was mediocre with a tad too much focus on Enhancement Shamans. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 24th 2011 - Finally A Good Developer Q&A Session There's another Ask the Devs Q&A posted, but this one is questions asked to the creative developers so it deals with a lot of questions pertaining to the lore in WoW. Although it doesn't give us hints of new features or upcoming nerfs/buffs to our classes it still answers a lot of good questions, and I'm sure there are a few in the list that you've probably wondered about at some point. Overall I enjoyed reading through this Q&A more than all of the previous ones put together. And in case you're an Arena player (which I don't think we really have many, or any, of in our guild) or if you just like looking at new armor sets here's the preview of arena season 10 armors. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 23rd 2011 - Nothin' Much New Alas, the news well has run dry again. Things are probably going to stay slow until 4.2 finally comes out next week. I will pass along this little post from Blizzard explaining why this year's Midsummer Fire Festival doesn't really have anything new associated with it, and a teaser that this year's Hallow's End will have something new in store for us (it will have to since Southshore was overran by the horde). _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 22nd 2011 - Frosty Weapon's Stats Are Not Cool You may have noticed or at least heard about the craptastic stat itemization Blizzard did to this year's Frostscythe of Lord Ahune. No Int, no Spirit, just buttloads of Stamina. Well Blizzard did that intentionally. They don't want it better than the ZA/ZG weapons. They're considering nerfing it down to rare quality and spreading the stats around a little, but they haven't decided yet. That's it for today. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 21st 2011 - Full Bags And Fiery Festivals It's taken quite a while since we haven't been raiding lately, but we are now guild level 23! That means only 2 more levels to go for the cap. Level 23 gives us the extremely nice perk Bountiful Bags which increases the amount of stuff you get when mining, herbing, skinning, and disenchanting. This is a great perk for mains and alts alike. Also, we no longer have a cap on the amount of guild xp we can earn in a day, but that hasn't been an issue for us in quite some time. The Midsummer Fire Festival kicks off today. It looks like everything is the same as last year except the loot that Ahune drops has gotten an ilevel bump to 353. And as usual here's a guide to help you with the holiday. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 20th 2011 - No Patch And No News Unless Blizzard pulls a last minute surprise announcement you can be sure that 4.2 is not going live tomorrow. Next week is looking much more plausible. Unfortunately since 4.2 is pretty much done there isn't a whole lot new to talk about. Most of the other sites that I go to to find news are scraping the bottom of the barrel with things like recaps of new features coming in 4.2 and other types of miscellaneous postings just so they can at least be posting something... similar to what I'm doing. Oh well. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 17th 2011 - Automatic Authenticator It looks like June 28th will be the day 4.2 goes live, at least according to this pic that was taken from the offical WoW site. Note that the date has since been changed on that page and could be an indication that the date in the pic was accidentally posted. There was another very small update to the 4.2 patch notes. 4.2 is bringing a number of spell changes and Blizzard has taken the time to give us an explanation of why they're making these changes to each of the classes. It all comes down to trying to keep the classes balanced, and it's nice that they gave us their reasons for what they're doing. A big change is coming to how authenticators work. When it does, if you log in to WoW consistently from the same computer you will eventually notice that you will no longer be asked for the code from your authenticator; the game will recognize that you're playing from your regular PC and will let you skip the authentication process. Obviously this change is making many people nervous when it comes to their account security, but we'll see how this all turns out. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 16th 2011 - Rage Of The Firelands The official trailer for patch 4.2 is ready for your viewing. It's rather good and focuses more on the lore involved with 4.2 than just showing us clips from boss fights set to some dramatic music and and saying "here ya go" (there is some of that in the trailer, but that's not all the trailer contains). Speaking of 4.2, there was another minor build applied yesterday. This is causing MMO-Champion to backpedal on their prediction that the patch will go live next Tuesday, but others are saying Blizzard's done last minute builds just before a patch went live before, so there's still reason to believe we'll see 4.2 next week. Obviously until Blizzard makes the official announcement anyone's guess is a good guess. The next Ask the Dev Q&A session will be about DPS, and the one after that will be about healing, but that will be the end of the Q&A series. They say the decision to end it has nothing to do with any recent articles on fan sites criticizing the series for dodgy answers to questions, allowing stupid questions to get answered, etc. If you're wondering, they're refering to this recent blog post at WoWInsider which makes very good and valid points regarding the tanking Q&A. But honestly none of the entries in the series thus far have really been all that informative nor have they been well received, a lot of the answers have been pretty much what you'd expect the developers to say, so maybe it's for the better that they bring it to a close. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 15th 2011 - Worgen And Goblin FigurePrints Available! It's been a while since we've gotten a guild reward, but this morning we finally managed to complete the A Daily Routine guild achievement which unlocked the Battle Standard of Coordination for purchase. Not a big reward, but hey, it's something. Blizzard is bumping up the VP gains from the new 4.2 raiding content. Now a bosses in the Firelands raid will give 120 VPs each in 10-man and 140 VPs each in 25-man (up from their previous values of 70 and 90). And the new boss in Baradin Hold, Occu'thar, will give 120 VPs in 10-man and 140 VPs in 25-man (up from the previous values of 35 and 45). So now there is much less whining coming from the WoW community. If you've been wanting a FigurePrint of your new Worgen or Goblin character you've been out of luck... until now. They just announced that they have added the two new races to the lineup, plus they've added armor options up to Tier 11 and arena season 9. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 14th 2011 - More Brief Updates For 4.2 Yet another build was applied to the PTR and this one was labeled as Test instead of Release. Will this affect when 4.2 goes live? We'll have to wait and see. MMO-Champion is still sticking to their prediction that it will go live next week, while other sites are still saying the week or two after. Some new spell changes were datamined (scroll down a little after clicking the link) from this latest build, but it mostly dealt with Druids. And the official test notes were also updated so look those over too. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 13th 2011 - VP And Legendary Changes, Plus Flaming Kitties Blizzard has changed one of the requirements needed to start on the quest chain for the new legendary staff. Previously the requirement was the completion of all of the current raiding content (of which we still only have the final bosses in each of the three raids to defeat). But now you don't have to do that, instead you just have to kill a Molten Lord mob in the Firelands and you'll be able to start the quest chain. The PTR notes were recently updated and the changes being made to Valor Points, especially the weekly cap, are causing a lot of unhappiness in the WoW community. And ever since we saw the previews of the Majordomo Staghelm boss fight and saw that during the fight he changes into his flaming cat form druids have been asking for the ability to do something similar. Blizzard listened and responded. One of the items Staghelm will drop is Fandral's Flamescythe and although it doesn't say it in the tooltip if a druid is wielding this weapon in combat while in cat form their form will automatically change into a flaming cat. Oh yes, I will kill for this weapon. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 10th 2011 - Balloooooooons! The latest PTR build was tagged as a Release build so things are looking very good for 4.2 to go live on the 21st. Some new info was datamined from the latest build, nearly all of it was new crafting recipes for Blacksmithing, Leatherworking, and Tailoring. There were also some Alliance and Horde balloon pets that were found along with some generic balloons (there are actual spells to summon the faction balloons which is why they're probably pets). _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 9th 2011 - Devs Talk About Tanking The only thing to mention today is the 9th edition of Ask the Devs which talks about tanking. Not much more than what you'd expect from a discussion about tanking, but there is the hint that yet another new legendary weapon will be seen in patch 4.3 and it will have a much narrower group of players that will want it than 4.2's "caster" staff. And in case you're wondering, Ask the Devs #10 will be about DPS. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 8th 2011 - 4.2 Is On The Horizon Blizzard announced that arena season 9 will be ending on June 21st. And because of this there are dates being tossed around for when patch 4.2 will go live. MMO-Champion is picking June 21st. WoWHead News is picking either June 28th or July 5th. Personally I'd go more with MMO-Champion's bet since Boubille has an inside source at Blizzard that he gets most of his leaked info from. Regardless, expect 4.2 to go live within the next few weeks. And Blizzard has updated the 4.2 patch notes so look them over. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 7th 2011 - Little Guy Has Some Serious Heartburn Murkablo has finally been given some animations. This little guy sure does like to breathe fire. Granted, his animations are clearly borrowed from Deathy which makes him just a reskin... :-( And there was yet another new build applied to the PTR and MMO-Champion has datamined up some spell changes. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 6th 2011 - Occu'thar Sees You! Things have started to slow down a little bit again. For now though here's a video showing the new boss in Tol Barad. The big doggie Occu'thar wants to set his eyes on you. Also the boss's dungeon journal entry can be found here (scroll down a bit) so you can get an idea of what's happening in the video. If you're interested in doing the new dailies coming in 4.2 then you'll want to start off reading through this guide to stage one of the new dailies. And keep in mind that there is an introductory quest chain you have to do before you can get to working on the actual dailies. And a big Happy 5th Birthday to this website! It's hard to believe that it was five years ago yesterday that I threw together this little site just out of boredom. It's even harder to believe that I've been updating it Monday through Friday every week since then. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 3rd 2011 - Pet Videos Today is another pet day post with videos to watch. We've got a video showing the 8 new tamable hunter pets coming in 4.2. Each of these pets is named, is an elite rare spawn, and more interestingly each has a unique challenge involved with taming them. For example, Ahnka will do more damage to you the more armor you have. So in order to survive long enough to tame Ahnka you've gotta take off your armor or else he'll probably one-shot you. Here's a video showing off a new vanity item, Mylune's Call, as well as the new vanity pets Nuts, Brilliant Kaliri, and Celestial Dragon. These pets are the rewards you get for getting 100, 125, and 150 vanity pets respectively. And here's a video showing the animation for Murkablo. Don't get too excited, for now he basically just stands there. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 2nd 2011 - Support Our Guild Authors We haven't had a batch of hotfixes in a while so feast your eyes on these. Ever wonder what Blizzard thinks about the big changes they made to the talent trees when Cataclysm came out? Well they've listed what they like and don't like in a post-mortem. None of these are things that will be changed in the upcoming patches, it's all just their brainstorming and opinions. And did you know that we have some authors in our guild? Turns out that Spankem has been writing a novel. The first book in his Jack Ranis series, Jack Ranis and the Book of the Labi, is now available as an ebook for the Kindle and the Nook with a paperback version coming soon via Amazon. And while you're at it hop over to also buy a copy of Dyla's book, Ali's Venture in Wonder, from Lulu.com in either paperback or PDF format. _________________________________________________________________________ News - June 1st 2011 - Flying Cats, Murkablo, Roars, And Firestones If you've logged on at all since yesterday I'm sure you've already seen that you can now buy the Winged Guardian mount from the online pet store. This thing will set you back a chunky $25. There was another build applied to the 4.2 PTR. There's some more new raid loot, as well as official and datamined game changes. Probably the biggest changes are Needing on a BoE item will make it soulbound (finally), and all races will have a sound when they /roar (this is a great addition only because it means people will quit f*cking bitching about it; seriously, unless you frequent the various site forums you have NO idea how much bitching there has been about stupid /roars not making stupid sounds for some stupid races). ...Sorry. Also Murky's Little Soulstone was found in the files which gives you the Murkablo pet. This is mostly likely to be given away at this year's BlizzCon. And an interesting new gear upgrade mechanic has shown up on the PTR. In Firelands you'll get the heroic versions of gear by trading in the non-heroic version and a Crystallized Firestone which drop from every Firelands boss on heroic mode. The non-heroic versions of the gear drop from the normal mode Firelands bosses and purchased with Valor Points. Should be interesting to see how well this works out. |
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