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Old News from March 2011
News - March 31st 2011 - For When You're On The Ice Or On The Beach Today there are a lot of new notes from the 4.1 PTR, both official and datamined. Those who have multiple accounts might be glad to see that BoA items are being changed to being bound to your Battle.net account. Honor Point gains are being doubled. There are a bunch of changes to 5-man instances. There are also a lot of class changes as well. It's surprising that so many changes are still being made even this long into the PTR testing. SwagDog, the nice company who makes customized guild T-shirts, has announced two new items: NHL replica jerseys and short-sleeved Hawaiian style shirts. Plus the NHL jerseys come in a non-customized version with just a Horde or Alliance style, and a customized version that lets you add a name and number to the back. These are some great gift ideas. And a final reminder that you have until the time I log off tonight to get in some last minute achievements and get entries for the 10K giveaway. Again, I'll be posting everyone's numbers on the forums tomorrow and Saturday morning the winner will be picked. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 30th 2011 - Just A Few Odds And Ends To Mention Halfway there. With us finally beating Maloriak last night that puts us at 6/12 for normal Cataclysm raiding. Hopefully we'll bump that up to 7 tomorrow night since the Ascendant Council is barely managing to avoid its defeat. There was a very small hotfix applied yesterday, only three fixes to be exact. It's kind of funny that they're still fixing things from 4.0.6 when 4.1 is getting relatively close to going live. Blizzard has finally made the offical announcement of Guild Challenges. It's mostly stuff we've already learned, but what is new is in order to earn gold for doing Challenges guilds must be at least level 5 and also participating guildies have to be at least honored with the guild. If either of these requirements are not met the guild will still get guild xp, but no extra gold. That shouldn't really have much of an effect on us. And so far the actual Challenges haven't been changed so it's basically a guild does what it typically does anyways and it'll get extra stuff for it. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 29th 2011 - Double The Raiding Opportunities If you haven't noticed it already there are now two raid sign-ups for Tuesdays and Thursdays. These new runs will start an hour later and will give more guildies the opportunity to raid. This is the first week we're doing this, and there are bound to be sign-up confusions, so please read through this post on our forums so you can help keep the confusion to a minimum. Part 3 of the Ask the Devs Q&A is up and this one talks about the UI. Although it's somewhat minor I did like reading that we should be able to rearrange the order our characters appear on the selection screen in patch 4.2. We now know that Maelstrom Crystals will cost 3750 Justice or Honor Points in patch 4.1. Just an FYI. And this may be old news or new news for our Canadian players. It turns out that Rogers, a major ISP in Canada, has in fact been throttling the connection speeds to WoW. They say it's done accidentally due to their attempts to crack down on P2P applications and the sharing of pirated media. But if you use Rogers as your ISP, well, unfortunately they won't have any sort of fix for this for at least a few months. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 28th 2011 - Datamining, Seahorses, And Challenges MMO-Champion graced us with a lot of news over the weekend. They datamined a boat-load of new stuff from 4.1 including some new vanity pets, updated stats for the loot that drops from elite rare spawns, a bunch of achievement changes (some of which we've already seen), and a bunch of spell and profession changes. There's a new rare spawn in Vash'jir named Poseidus who also drops a new seahorse mount which can be used in all water environments, not just Vash'jir. It'll move at 270% speed in Vash'jir and 108% speed in other waters. And we're finally given a preview of the new Guild Challenges feature coming in 4.1. Everyone's really hoping that this is just a starter template and that the real challenges will be a bit more, um, challenging. Just a little reminder that the 10K giveaway contest ends this Thursday night, so you have until then to get achievements. I'll be posting a list of everyone's numbers for the drawing on the forums on Friday and then Saturday I'll be picking someone to make the random roll to determine the winner. I'm holding off on doing the drawing until Saturday so that no one thinks it's an April Fools joke. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 25th 2011 - A Quiet Friday For News Blegh. That's the sound I made when I realized the only news I had to give you today was a small batch of somewhat mediocre hotfixes. Oh well, at least it's something. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 24th 2011 - New Guild Features There are some guild-based game changes coming eventually that I want to mention. We already heard a teaser about something called Guild Challenges coming in patch 4.1. While the feature is still in development, and hasn't even shown up on the 4.1 PTR yet, Blizzard is giving us a small bit of additional information about it. There will be 3 categories of challenges: Guild Dungeon Run, Guild Raid, and Guild Rated Battleground. A guild group can complete each category a certain number of times each week. Doing so will give the guild achievements, guild xp that can go above the daily cap, and gold that is put straight into the guild's bank vault, with extra gold deposited if the guild is at the level cap (currently 25). That's all they're telling us for now, but they also say this feature should show up on the PTR very soon so we'll learn more then. Another new change probably coming sometime after 4.1 are the abilities to rename a guild and to transfer a guild intact to another server. The guild name change is self-explanatory, and the server transfer will keep the guild structure intact, including who is the guild leader, the guild bank, guild ranks, and the guild name (as long as the guild name isn't already taken on the new server). If the guild members also choose to transfer to the server the guild moves to they still have to do a paid transfer, but when they show up at the new server they will already be back in the same guild with the same guild rank and with their guild reputation intact. And I just have to mention the latest post at The Daily Blink. It details the "new" Mage changes coming to 4.1. And if you're not familiar with The Daily Blink, it is fake and is meant to be humorous. But I found this post hilarious, I especially liked the changes to Teleport spells. LOL!!! _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 23rd 2011 - Just Some Notes And PvP Answers Another round of patch note updates for 4.1. It's nice to see that Maelstrom Crystals will become purchasable with Justice and Honor Points. Many of the achievements for the Battle of Gilneas battleground are getting nerfed. A few class changes. And for you Arena players the Ring of Valor arena is coming back. The next part of the Q&A sessions with the game developers is posted. This one focuses on questions pertaining to PvP. None of the answers are earthshattering, but then again I don't PvP much so maybe I missed something worthwhile. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 22nd 2011 - Flying Kitty In The Blizzard Store Guild level 18. Ding! We now have the guild perk For Great Justice which gives you an additional 10% Justice Points. I'm sure some people (including those who like to gear up alts) still need JPs so this will be a help to them. Remember that winged lion mount we saw a rough model of last week? It turns out that that's going to be the next mount purchasable from the Blizzard online pet store. Price and date of availability are not yet announced. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 21st 2011 - More VPs For The Taking More news regarding the instance-per-week cap changes. It turns out that since the new ZA and ZG instances are in the next tier up they will have their own limit of 7/week which will be separate from the limit of 7/week for the current Cataclysm instances. That means you will be able to run the current heroics 7 times each week AND any combination of ZA and ZG 7 times each week and get extra money and VPs for each of them*. And to make things extra sweet, the Victory Point bonus you get from ZA and ZG runs are doubled, so 140 VP each time you run either of them up to 7 times a week. * Keep in mind that there is a weekly hard cap of 980 on the amount of VPs you can earn from running heroics. And I gotta mention the accomplishments of the toon named Mione. This adventurous Death Knight is making a name for himself by soloing Wrath content. He's already soloed Yogg-Saron, the Twin Val'kyrs, and also the Faction Champions (which took him 2 hours to do). And just as another note he is working on trying to successfully solo the Lich King. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 18th 2011 - Show Me On The Map Where He Targeted You Just a few quick notes today. The 1/day to 7/week cap change for running instances that was mentioned yesterday appears to be a factual feature. This pic shows that it's now implemented in the PTR, so unless Blizzard changes its mind you can expect this to be the way things go in the near future. And another new feature will be a marker showing up on your minimap indicating where your targeted target is located. While this may not be that valuable of a feature, I can personally say that this will be great for when you're using NPCScan to find rare spawn mobs. And I'm sure there are other situations where this feature could come in handy. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 17th 2011 - Blizzard Helping Those With Time Restrictions? We haven't had any hotfixes for a while so here are some to look over. And MMO-Champion dug up some new strings of game script from the 4.1 PTR, the one of most interest though has the explanation "The first seven random dungeons of this tier that you complete each week will earn you:". Which could possibly mean Blizzard is going to change things from having a cap of 1 instance a day that gets you an extra reward to a cap of 7 instances a week. In case you're not grasping this, right now the first heroic instance you run each day gives you 70 Valor Points and some money. Any other heroics you run that same day don't give you anything extra, you have to wait until the next day. This change would mean that the first seven heroics you run during the course of a week would each give you extra goodies, even if you ran all seven in a single day. Could be an interesting change and would be very helpful for people who have a bunch of time to play some days of the week but no time at all to play on other days. Of course none of this is official until Blizzard says so. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 16th 2011 - Just Say No To Bots Yesterday Blizzard did another of their mass-bannings, and a lot of people that use bot programs in the game got hit. Included in this ban wave was our own local guild Dissolution. Disso used to be the top guild on our server back in Wrath, and from the info I've been able to gather it seems that a big majority of their guild was included in this set of bans. Oh well, they knew using bots was considered cheating so I guess it serves them right. And if anyone in our own guild uses bots for any reason, just stop. For the rest of today's news I direct you to this post on MMO-Champion. Included in it are a number of datamined and official notes from the 4.1 PTR. It appears the loot from Ahune in the Midsummer Fire Festival is all being upgraded to Cataclysm ilevels. You'll also see some pics of a very rough beginning model of what appears to be a winged lion mount. And you may notice a little blurb from Blizzard mentioning that they're not done dishing out bans and are actively working on ways to detect people who bot or frequently go AFK in battlegrounds. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 15th 2011 - Check The Map I did neglect to mention one thing guild related yesterday. It seems that over the weekend we did manage to get the Profit Sharing guild achievement which unlocked the ability to buy the Guild Herald. It's the exact same thing as the Guild Page but with a 4 hour cooldown instead of 8 hours. Plus it's another pet for you pet collectors. Speaking of minor boons, the /map emote is getting an animation in 4.1. Now your toon will actually pull out a map and start looking it over. Also, supposedly when you open your map (with the M key) this animation plays so that others can see that you're busy scanning the map. For something a bit more interesting, the answers to the first Q&A session with the game developers are now posted. There are a wide range of questions that were asked, of course some more stupid than others, but there could be something of interest for you buried in there. I will note that they did answer the question of why spells don't do one thing for PvE and another for PvP so that when they "fix" the spell to balance one aspect it doesn't screw over the other. Unfortunately the answer they gave to it is dumb. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 14th 2011 - I Guess Just Some ZG Action Today Huh. What a crappy weekend for news. I guess all I got for you today is a video explaining a run through the new version of Zul'Gurub. Obviously this could be considered spoiler-ish but it's never a bad thing to get an idea of what to expect in an instance. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 11th 2011 - New Loot From Dem Trolls Wanna see what you could end up getting from Zul'Aman and Zul'Gurub? Sure you do. Well here you go. And as it says this list may not be complete and there are currently no models for any of these items in the PTR yet. And just a little thing of note, if you browse through the blue posts that come after the ZA/ZG loot list in the link above you may notice that it's stated that the new model of Ragnaros, the one where he's got legs, will only be used during a Heroic-only phase of his fight. So for the most part he'll look pretty similar to how we've fought him in Molten Core. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 10th 2011 - New Maps For Old Instances To start today's post we've got an update to the 4.1 PTR notes to look over. Just the first item mentioned in the notes alone makes 4.1 a worthwhile patch. Also Hunters should take note that the happiness system for your pets is going away. 4.1 is also bringing us a bunch of new instance maps... for BC instances. Basically they're just being updated to the new map art style introduced in Cataclysm. ZG and ZA are also getting new maps to go along with their revamping in 4.1. And just past these ZA/ZG maps you'll find a datamined batch of spell changes that we'll likely see in an official patch update in the near future. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 9th 2011 - Speedy Delivery Last night we dinged guild level 17 which gives us the guild perk G-Mail. Now any mail you send to another guild member arrives instantly. So when I send Neolete 12 stacks of South Island Iced Tea he won't have to wait an hour to get it. Everyone with multiple accounts rejoiced for getting this perk. Yesterday MMO-Champion gave us a datamined look at the new Firelands daily area and today they give us a peek at the new Firelands raid instance. Based on datamined icons we get a look at some of the possible bosses. There's also a pieced together map as well as some screenshots from the beta. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 8th 2011 - Blizzard's Birthday Bonus MMO-Champion has pieced together a preliminary map of what will be the new zone for doing the Firelands dailies that will come in 4.2. They also have a number of screenshots from the beta, but they are largely unfinished. I originally thought that the new Hyjal dailies would be giving Guardians of Hyjal rep, but with an entire questing zone this size I seriously doubt that will be the case. No word yet on what incentive there will be for us to take on these new daily quests. This year is Blizzard's 20th birthday and they've given us a video showing us their history. The video goes through a 20-year retrospective about the foundation and formation of Blizzard from it's initial start up to the company that we know today. It's a little long, nearly an hour, but I'm sure some of you will find it interesting. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 7th 2011 - More In 4.2 It appears that the late night raid that took place Saturday night managed to take down Chimaeron which puts us now at 5/12 for normal Cataclysm raiding. We should probably see the Ascendant Council go down this week as well. The Firelands raid isn't the only thing being pushed back to patch 4.2. The new Hyjal dailies are also being moved. The conversion of Valor Points to Justice Point will also be bumped to 4.2 and the patch also marks the start of Arena Season 10. Plus 4.2 will add a new feature called Guild Challenges, the details of which remain a mystery. And speaking of Arena Season 10, here's a look at the new armor models for it. *update* I originally posted that it was Arena Season 11 that was starting with the 4.2 patch but it's actually Season 10. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 4th 2011 - Ragnaros Is Safe For A Little Bit Longer I guess this is our week for narrowly missing out on defeating new raid bosses. Tuesday we got Chimaeron down to less than a million HP a few times but with no success, and then last night we nearly beat the Ascendant Council, but ran out of time for more attempts. Next week we'll see if we can finish off both of these. According to both Eurogamer and an official blue post from Blizzard we will not see the Firelands raid instance appear in the 4.1 patch. It is being held off until 4.2 because Blizzard learned from past mistakes. When they released ToC in Wrath there were still a lot of people that weren't even done with Ulduar yet (our own guild included). So they're pacing themselves a bit more since many people are not finished with Cataclysm's three initial raids and only a handful are done with the heroic modes for the raids. So the only new content in 4.1 will be the revamping of Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman. This is causing much nerd rage, most of which is probably from the Wrath babies, but Blizzard has said that 4.2 will hit the PTR very soon after 4.1 is released so it won't be that long of a delay overall. And if you scroll down a bit in this post you'll see the latest batch of updates to the 4.1 patch. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 3rd 2011 - Questing For Legendary Information The news has slowed down once again. What I got for you today is part repeat, part new stuff. We've already looked at some datamined info pertaining to what could be the next legendary weapon, but now we also get a look at part of the questline involved with making the weapon as well as a look at some of the things you'll have to gather for it. There's still no confirmation that this is indeed the legendary, it could turn out to be another Battered Hilt, but chances are very good that it's legendary in nature. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 2nd 2011 - Zul'Gurub Version 2.0 Today's post starts with a couple of hotfixes, including the temporary disabling of the Walk A Mile In Their Shoes (i.e. the broken escort) quest in Tol Barad. If you've ever tried to do this quest then you'll probably be glad to hear this. There's also this post that includes two Warrior changes on the 4.1 PTR notes as well as a batch of datamined achievement and spell changes. And speaking of 4.1, here's a first-hand review of the new 5-man heroic version of Zul'Gurub. Obviously it's full of spoilers, but it's interesting to see how much they've changed the instance and the fights. It should be a fun time once 4.1 goes live. _________________________________________________________________________ News - March 1st 2011 - A New Pet, A Contest, And More From 4.1 Blizzard still hasn't fixed the guild achievement United Nations. It's supposed to count all the unique exalted reps throughout the guild, but instead it only counts the exalted reps of the one guild member with the most number of them. That meant it was probably up to me to finish getting Lishtaar to 55 exalted reputations, which I did manage to finally get last night. And since we have this achievement it unlocked the ability to buy the Dark Phoenix Hatchling pet, so call up your Guild Page or stop by the guild reward vendor in SW and buy one. Before I go to 4.1 news I also want to mention that I am holding a contest to give away 10,000 gold. So if that interests you then head over to our forums and find out what you gotta do to win. We've got an update to the 4.1 PTR patch. It's mostly some class ability adjustments. Some are good, some are bad, but all of them are subject to change before 4.1 goes live. There are a couple more changes that will be taking place in 4.1. One is the grind to get Winterspring Trainer faction rep is getting changed to involve doing dailies in order to get the Winterspring Frostsaber mount. You'll have to do dailies for 20 days in order to get what you need to get the mount, which isn't really that bad compared to the grind you gotta do now. Another change is a bit unclear still, but with everything the Cataclysm did to Southshore it's a guarantee that at the very least changes will also need to be made to the Hallow's End world event since you won't be cleaning up stink bombs anymore. Thanks to some datamining we've got a few details that hint toward how the world event will be changing, including being able to wear masks over your helmet, some masks giving buffs, and a change to a currency system to buy things for the event. |
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