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Old News from May 2011
News - May 31st 2011 - Something Old, Something New It looks like the new stuff from 4.2 is starting to come to a close. So today we've got some reviews of things we've seen, but with a dash of new stuff mixed in. MMO-Champion has a recap of the new mounts that will be obtainable in 4.2. Most of these mounts we've seen already, but the pics of the Vicious Gladiator's Twilight Drake are brand new. And WoWHead News has videos showing off each of the T12 armor sets. We've seen a couple of these, but this is the first time we get to see videos of all of the ten different armors. And just a reminder that if you sign up for a run on the calendar you are expected to show up for it. If your plans change please either change your status on the signup and/or let someone know. Otherwise you're going to be wasting other people's time. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 30th 2011 - Lots O' Loot To Buy The new Valor Point gear has finally shown up on the PTR so now we can see what's going to be purchasable and how many Valor Points we're going to need to buy the stuff. Keep in mind that all of your existing Valor Points will be converted into Justice Points when 4.2 goes live so there's no point in stockpiling to buy this gear, everyone will be starting over at 0 VPs. The loot purchasable from the new Hyjal dailies vendors is also on the PTR. You buy all of this loot with gold, but it costs 125 Marks of the World Tree to unlock each of the three vendors. That's it. Enjoy your Memorial Day. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 27th 2011 - Firelands Boss Loot Tables More 4.2 PTR patch note updates. The main portion of this update is a nerf to Druid bear damage and some buffs for Rogues. Something that you'll probably find much more interesting is due to an update to the new Encounter Journal feature on the PTR. The Firelands boss loot was added to the Journal, for both normal and heroic and even for Ragnaros, so now you can plan out what bosses you want to set your sights on. And a news article is circulating the net discussing how prisoners at a Chinese labor camp would do hard labor during the day and then be forced to gold farm at night. The prison guards would sell the in-game gold and make a few hundred dollars a day. And if any prisoners didn't meet their gold farming quota they'd get beaten. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 26th 2011 - 4.2 PTR Brings Us Even More Loot Another new 4.2 PTR build means another batch of new stuff to look over. There's a HUGE list of new gear that showed up. The rewards for the new vanity pet achievements have been changed: instead of pet buscuits for the 100 and 125 pet achievs you get Nuts and Brilliant Kaliri pets respectively, and for 150 pets you now get a Celestial Dragon pet. And there are some small groups of spell changes to most classes. The 8th installment of Ask the Devs is posted and it focuses on the Firelands. The topic for #9 will be tanking. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 25th 2011 - Massive Raid Nerfs In 4.2 In 4.2 Blizzard is going to nerf the three current raid instances to the point that they're easily PUGgable and more accessible for the casual player. They're going to try this out for Cataclysm raids and will likely make a similar degree of nerfs to the Firelands raid when the tier after that comes out. The ability to queue for multiple battlegrounds has been hotfixed out of the game. Until now you could queue for two different BGs and if you didn't like the first one you got into you could accept the second one and hope for a better time. That is no longer possible. Yesterday I mentioned SwagDog WoW clothing coming to an end next week, but today I get to mention the whole new set of WoW shirts available courtesy of J!NX's summer 2011 line. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 24th 2011 - No More Keyrings The news that's causing an uproar lately is about Blizzard's plans to get rid of the keyring feature that's been in the game since patch 1.11. Some of the keys that are no longer needed will be automatically vendored and you'll get the money for them. Other keys with no vendor price will just be removed. The thing that people aren't happy about is that the remaining keys that will still have some use will be plopped into your inventory and will once again take up bag space. Blizz has come up with an initial list of the keys that will be hogging your precious bag room and fortunately it's not really that long. A bit of urgent news for anyone who has bought or has been planning to buy any of the WoW clothing from SwagDog. As of next Wednesday SwagDog will no longer be licensed to sell WoW products and will discontinue the line. SwagDog is best known to us for being the ones who make the nicely customizable WoW guild tabard shirts. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 23rd 2011 - Grab Your Popcorn A bunch of videos for you to watch today. First we've got the glow effect videos for Warlock and Priest T12 armors. There are also a bunch of boss videos courtesy of the US guild Reckoning: Lord Rhyolith, Baleroc, Majordomo Staghelm, Alysrazor, Shannox, and a preview of Ragnaros's room. There will be a new faction in 4.2 called the Avengers of Hyjal, but it won't be tied to the new dailies quest hubs, in the words of Blizzard it'll be more "like Ashen Verdict, except players won't be able to grind their way up to Exalted simply by farming trash mobs". No one's sure exactly how rep will be gained then, but we do know what goodies they'll make available as we grind out our rep with them. And if you were wanting to buy tickets to this year's Blizzcon, well, you're out of luck unless you're one of those who managed to buy them within the 25 minutes that it took to sell out. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 20th 2011 - Lots Of Pretty Fire We're now guild level 22 which means just 3 more levels to go. It also means we've got the second rank of the guild perk Chug-A-Lug, so now the flasks you get from cauldrons will last for 2 hours, or a whopping 4 hours if you're an alchemist. The rest of today's post is about new models that showed up in 4.2. We've got videos showing the glowy effects of both the Fire Raven God mount (aka Flaming Anzu mount) and for Paladin T12 armor. Both look pretty nice. There's also a pic of Nozdormu's humanoid form. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 19th 2011 - More 4.2 PTR Goodness Just a small post today, but thanks to a new PTR build that means a lot of new info, in this case most of it is datamined courtesy of MMO-Champion. There are changes to some T12 set bonuses, new Firelands loot, more T12 armor stats, some spell changes, and updates to the loot you get from the Hallow's End and Brewfest world events (the loot is all getting upgrades to ilevel 365). _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 18th 2011 - Cross-Realm Queuing A few updates to things we've already seen. First is an update to the stats of Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest. Some of the stats have been bumped up, the crit has been changed to haste, it's no longer BoE (which we already knew would happen), and the proc effect has been included. Also we're starting to get videos showing off the glow effects of T12 armor. Today we've got the Rogue and Shaman armors. And a new feature is coming to the Dungeon Finder: the ability to form a group with Real ID friends, even those who are on a different server, and queue for an instance with them. But there's a catch. The ability to send the invites and queue the group will be a premium service which means you'll have to pay real money for it. But only the person doing the invites and queuing needs to have the premium service. There's no indication of how much this will cost or when it will become available. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 17th 2011 - Lots Of News From 4.2 PTR, Continued Finishing up the new stuff that came out over the weekend. For you appearance conscious players there are a number of new hairstyles being added: 12 for the Alliance and 15 for the Horde. So now you'll have even more options. We've already seen some written previews of new Firelands bosses and now we've also got videos of the Beth'tilac and Lord Ryholith fights. And I thought the Ask the Devs #6 was the last one, but apparently I was mislead. There's now AtD #7 available and this one discusses Professions. Unlike some of the previous AtD installments, this one actually has some good questions asked and good answers given. And it appears that the next one will be about the Firelands. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 16th 2011 - Lots Of News From 4.2 PTR Tons of new stuff to mention from the weekend news. So let's get started. First up we finally get to see the T12 armor models for Shaman and Warlock. This finishes the new previews of T12 armors. There was a new PTR build and this post breaks down the new official notes, along with a bunch of datamined info. It looks like we "may" finally know what the proc effect of Dragonwrath, Tarecgosa's Rest will be. Other things of note are all your current Valor Points will get converted to Justice Points in 4.2. Cut gems will finally stack in groups of 20. New rewards for getting 100, 125, and 150 vanity pets (the 150th pet gets you another new pet). And for WoW's 7th anniversary we'll get a tabard with an interesting effect on it. The newest 4.2 build also included the new Encounter Journal. So now we've got screenshots and a video showing what this new feature actually looks like, as well as a breakdown preview of the entry for heroic Ragnaros so we can see how in-depth the info will be. And a SPOILER ALERT for this next video. It's from the guild Method and it gives a look at the quests involved with creating the new legendary staff up til the point the quests send you into the Firelands raid. Even more news to come tomorrow. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 13th 2011 - Telling The Former Antichrist Where To Go After listening to the players Blizzard is making some changes to some of the T12 set bonuses. As usual this is the PTR and changes are to be expected. Following up yesterday's strategy for Beth'tilac today we've got one for Lord Rhyolith (formerly known as Lord Anthricyst). This fight has some refreshingly new boss mechanics as the dps actually has to guide the boss by attacking its legs as it wanders around. It sounds like it could be a fun encounter. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 12th 2011 - Let The Firelands Testing Begin We'll start today off with another batch of hotfixes. Enjoy. So now that the Firelands is on the PTR for limited testing there are already boss previews and strategies being posted. Like this one here that talks about the big fiery spider boss Beth'tilac. Overall the fight doesn't sound too difficult, but as with every other boss in the game reading a strategy and successfuly pulling off said strategy are two very different things. Speaking of 4.2, here's a new model for Molten Giants. And the free preview of the Remote Guild Chat and AH has ended. If you tried out the free preview of either of these features and liked them then you'll have to start forking over $3 a month to continue using them. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 11th 2011 - Much More 4.2 News Today we've get to look at a new 4.2 PTR build, an update to the official 4.2 patch notes, and some 4.2 datamined info. You can find all of this here and here. Some of the highlights include:
_________________________________________________________________________ News - May 10th 2011 - A Cataclysmic Subscriber Decline During the recent Activision Blizzard earnings call some initially shocking news was given. Blizzard's CEO mentioned that the number of WoW subscribers has fallen from 12 million last October to 11.4 million this March. This doesn't necessarily mean that WoW is on the way out. Subscriber levels fluxuate all the time and when this figure was compiled Cataclysm had been out for nearly half a year, most of the content had been beaten by a sizable portion of the playerbase with no new content expected for at least a few more months, and RIFTs also launched about the same time. So it's not really anything to fret over. For some smaller bits of news, Hunters may be interested in this article at Petopia that explains the pet-related changes that came in 4.1, but more interestingly it also shows the 8 new looks for pets that can be tamed along with the appearance changes for 4 pets that were already tamable prior to 4.1. And for some extra fun WoWHead News has compiled all of the various methods to change your toon's appearance, i.e. costumes. Fun things like Lifegiving Seed and Noggenfogger Elixir, and less commonly known items like Hook of the Master Angler and Time-Lost Figurine. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 9th 2011 - Hyjal Daily News Guild level 21 was finally obtained which gives us the spell Have Group, Will Travel that lets you summon your group members to your location as long as you're not in combat or in an instance. Nice, but it does carry a 2-hour cooldown though. Delving once again into the world of 4.2 news, here's a video showing off the graphical effects of each of the four stages of the next legendary weapon. Blizzard has given a little more information (and clarification) of the new Hyjal dailies. Basically to start the new dailies you gotta be level 85, and you must have quested in Hyjal enough to get to the point where you reclaim the Regrowth area. Marks of the World Tree are used to open up new daily content, not to buy new gear (gold is still used for that). After you no longer have any use for Marks of the World Tree they plan to make some rewards available to spend them on. And most of the quests will give Guardians of Hyjal rep (though with the amount of rep you get with them just questing through Hyjal this isn't a big deal). Some new improvements and additions are being made to the official WoW site. Things like 3D model viewers, improved searching, and more thorough boss info. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 6th 2011 - The New Legendary Questline The model for Warrior T12 armor has been found. Unfortunately the T12 for Druid, Shaman, and Warlock aren't in the PTR yet so the wait continues. Here's a set of 'fast patch' notes to read through for patch 4.0.1A. I don't know what a fast patch is, I guess it's Blizzard's term for a mini patch. If you're interested in reading through the questline involved with creating the next legendary weapon then you're in luck. Pre-link-clicking warning: This is SPOILER info, read at your own risk. With that, here's the link. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 5th 2011 - Link-Bomb From 4.2 PTR Holy crap. 4.2 hit the PTR and now we've got a flood of new stuff to look at. Prepare to be link-bombed. Over at MMO-Champion this link has datamined info on new achievements and some spell changes. This link has a variety of the new Firelands loot including some of the T12 armor stats, some new mounts and vanity pets, and new profession patterns. This link is loaded with pics of new models for horde and alliance rated battleground achievement reward mounts (that alliance horse is awfully spiky), Tarecgosa, a Tarecgosa Whelp pet (which could be the guild reward from completing the new legendary staff), Malorne, Fandral Staghelm and his fire scorpion form, Lord Anthrycist's lava form, lava spiders, a super cute winged lion vanity pet, a fire elemental named Kar, and Ragnaros's new walking-on-two-legs form that doesn't look as dorky. And finally this link has the T12 set bonuses, pics showing how you can change the order your toons appear on the selection screen, and of course some recent hotfixes. And at WoWHead News this link has some of the same models, and a couple new ones, mentioned above but you can view them in a 3D viewer. This link has some of the stuff already shown above but also shows all of the new icons coming in 4.2 And this link lists new trinkets; a whopping 15 of them in both their normal and heroic versions. Whew, 4.2 is gonna have a ton of new stuff in it. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 4th 2011 - Slow News And A Sleazeball It seems that Blizzard blew its load with all the 4.2 previews and now has little to talk about. Fortunately I had some news as backup. The 6th and final Ask the Developers Q&A was posted, this one talked about Guild Advancement. There's really not a whole lot of interest in it and some of the stuff we've already learned from the 4.2 previews. It's been a while since I've mentioned skeevy pervs trying to pick up underage kids via WoW, so I guess I'll remedy that. This time it's an 18-year old guy in Idaho who was trying to meet up with his 12-year old WoW "girlfriend" from New Mexico. First he tried to go visit her but was turned back by the police. Then last month it turns out that the girl actually managed to travel to him and they were caught together at his parents' home. They had planned for her to live in the abandoned house next door. Wow, classy. _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 3rd 2011 - Firelands On PTR Soon The new previews for 4.2 have finally come to a close, but now Blizzard is giving us the first batch of official 4.2 patch notes since they plan on having 4.2 hit the PTR soon. One of the features in 4.2 is the new Dungeon Journal. To help everyone understand what this feature is and how it works they've released a FAQ for it. To put it lightly, basically they're taking some of the generic info on boss locations, abilities, and loot and putting it into an in-game interface. Essentially helping those who do not know they can look up this info on WoWHead or WoWPedia. And no, there will be no strategies included. A new pet has shown up in the online Pet Store. The Cenarion Hatchling vanity pet is available for $10 and all of the money paid for the pet, from now until the end of July, will go toward the Red Cross's Japan earthquake/tsunami relief efforts, so it's for a good cause. And I'll bet you thought you'd get away without some more hotfixes to look over. Think Again! _________________________________________________________________________ News - May 2nd 2011 - Tier 12 Previews Even more previews from 4.2. There will be a quest chain that will answer the question of what happened to Thrall. After Ragnaros was banished back to the Firelands, Thrall ended up being attacked and his spirit cast into the four elemental planes. Can he be saved? We'll find out. Here's another set of hotfixes to look over. Speaking of hotfixes, Blizzard slipped a change to the LFG tool into the game unannounced. Now when you queue up the game will try to fill the group with players from your own realm before dipping into other realms. Not a big deal really, your group will still be filled, but you may see more familiar faces when you do. Now to the juicy news: Tier 12. We've got T12 models for Paladin, Mage, Rogue, Hunter, Death Knight, and Priest. The models for Druid, Warrior, Shaman, and Warlock are on their way. Just gotta say, sorry Hunters. At least there's the option to turn off the helmet appearance. And even though it's not WoW related, in celebration of the big news that's going around today on all the news channels I gotta post this. |
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