|
Old News from November 2011
News - November 30th 2011 - Race Through The New 5-mans 4.3 is here and it appears to have been done with few problems (there are reports of the LFG servers crashing). To give you an overview of what's new in this patch here's a great video that explains it. There won't be any reports of anyone beating heroic Deathwing anytime this week. Blizzard learned how sneakily clever their players can be in 4.2 so they are keeping heroic mode Fall of Deathwing turned off until next week. So you can probably expect word of a heroic kill sometime around next Wednesday. ;) Let's not forget about the three new 5-mans in 4.3. The gear that drops in these is about on par with heroic Firelands so it's definitely worth going for. To help you get that gear ASAP and with fewer headaches, here's a guide that gives you the bare-bones important things to do when fighting each of the new 5-man bosses. These are exactly the kind of boss-fight explanations that should always be given. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 29th 2011 - Hour Of Twilight 4.3 is indeed going live today. To give you something to do while you're waiting for it to download (or for the servers to come back up) take the time to watch the patch trailer. Though many of the previous patch trailers are better and more cinematic, this latest one still has that feeling of "epic adventure". And now that you've watch the trailer here are the official 4.3 patch notes. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 28th 2011 - Patch 4.3 Incoming Though we haven't seen an official announcement yet, MMO-Champion is claiming that patch 4.3 will go live tomorrow. And since the current Arena season is scheduled to end tomorrow, too, I'd say it's a safe bet. So get ready for:
If you missed out on J!NX's Black Friday sale, today you've got another chance. For Cyber Monday they're offering 20% off everything you buy TODAY ONLY when you use the promo code TWOPOINTOH. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 25th 2011 - Daggers, Commercials, And Black Friday The stats for the third and final version of the legendary Rogue daggers has finally hit the 4.3 PTR. Yes, they're very OP. And in case you didn't see them before here are the stage 1 and stage 2 stats. There's another new WoW commercial, this one staring Aubrey Plaza. Earlier this week I mentioned the discounts you can get at J!NX, ranging from 5% to 20% depending on how much you bought. Well for Black Friday, i.e. TODAY ONLY, when you enter the promo code TURKEYCOMA you get 20% off no matter how much you spend. Again, this is valid for today only. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 24th 2011 - Things Are A'changing Already Happy, happy turkey day to all of you that still read this site. :) The folks at MMO-Champion have compiled most, if not all, of the class changes in MoP that have already happened since BlizzCon (just scroll down a little to the big list of green text). It's a fairly large list which just goes to show that nothing so far is set in stone and it could all change by the time the next expansion actually goes live. And if you're looking to upgrade your PC here's a list of some Black Friday deals, and many of them are deals at Newegg so you won't even need to stand in line for hours and fight the crowds. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 23rd 2011 - A Surprise In The Talent Calculator Blizzard has released their own Mists of Pandaria talent calculator, and as a bigger surprise they've also started adding some new class spells as well. If you choose a class and a spec you'll see a list of spells appear, and tucked into those lists are the new spells. To make it easier MMO-Champion has some of the new spells in this pic. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 22nd 2011 - Discounts On J!NX Gear The news is still hard to come by nowadays, a decent sign that 4.3 will be going live soon. But today I've got something that may be a buff to your wallet. J!NX is giving discounts on their merchandise, and the more you spend the bigger the savings. When you use the promotion code SAVINGTHROW you'll get 5% off your order of $30 or more, 10% off your order of $50 or more, 15% off your order of $75 or more, and 20% off your order of $100 or more. With Black Friday and Christmas shopping coming very soon this may be a good opportunity to get someone the gift of gaming wear and save yourself a few bucks in the process. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 21st 2011 - Chuck Norris Is A Hunter The new WoW commercial debuted last night and it stars Chuck Norris. As you'd expect, there are little nods to the Chuck Norris jokes that can be heard in trade chat about every 5 minutes or so. WoW's 7th birthday is this Wednesday, and Blizzard is starting the celebration early. From now until December 3rd, if you log in you'll get an achievement and a "Celebration Package" item. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 18th 2011 - Buffs And Nerfs To Currency Points Blizz is making some more changes to both Valor Points and Conquest Points in 4.3. VPs from Dragon Soul bosses in both 10- and 25-man will be dropped to 100, and Firelands bosses will be dropped to 50 VPs. Also daily BGs will give you a bumped up 100 CPs for a win and non-rated BGs will give you 50 CPs for a win, and there's no limit to how many of those you can run. So some nice buffs to PvP points and some nerfs to PvE points. Pilgrim's Bounty starts this Sunday. For those who wanna get some Azerothian turkey action here's a guide. It will likely be the same world event activities as the previous two years. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 17th 2011 - Firelands Raiding Statistics Things are still looking like patch 4.3 will be going live in a couple of weeks, but new news is still hard to come by for today. But we do have some interesting 4.2 stats to look at thanks to GuildOx. By their calculations 1,000 guilds have now beaten heroic Ragnaros. This means that only 4.2% of the guilds that are raiding the heroic version of Firelands have actually cleared it. That's a rather low % considering how long the raid has been on the live realms now. It's no surprise that Blizzard still wants raids to be more accessible, but they have to keep it tough for the hardcore raiders, too. Also, another interesting stat is out of all the heroic Ragnaros kills 3/4 of them were done in 10-man. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 16th 2011 - Better UI Features Incoming Today I direct you to a post on WoWInsider that gives a good look at the UI improvements that are going into effect in 4.3. Everything from the Transmogrification interface, to the bag search, to guard directions. Most of these improvements are going to be very welcome changes. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 15th 2011 - Legendary Stabby-Stabs Things are still rather slow news-wise. Everyone's probably too busy playing Skyrim. There was a very minor build applied to the 4.3 PTR and it included the stats for the first and second stages of the new legendary Rogue daggers. As can be expected, the stats are in line with legendary quality weapons (i.e. gross). _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 14th 2011 - Minor 4.3 Release Setback The PTR has gone back to being labeled as a test version. Nothing to be concerned about, really. It probably just means Blizzard found an unexpected snafu that they HAVE to fix before 4.3 goes live. Chances are still good that the patch will come out sometime around the end of the month. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 11th 2011 - 4.3 By The End Of The Month? Not much news to start the weekend. The PTR has finally been labeled as a release version which means we should be seeing patch 4.3 go live relatively soon. And since Arena Season 10 is ending on November 29th that could be a good estimate of when we'll see the patch. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 10th 2011 - Class Design Q&A There was a live Class Design and Balance Q&A session yesterday that revealed a good deal more about what changes Blizzard has planned. There was quite a bit discussed and every class was included. It was a very long Q&A session that touched on things like Frost Mages currently having too many CCs, the new resource systemss for Warlock spells, and how Monk healing will probably work. I won't give an overview of everything, I'll leave that to WoWHead and MMO-Champ. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 9th 2011 - The Numbers Continue To Drop The big news for today is that Blizzard is continuing to lose WoW subscribers. They've lost another 800,000 subscribers just this past quarter alone! When you add in the 300,000 subscribers lost in the second quarter and the 600,000 lost in the first, that means WoW has lost 1.7 million subscribers so far THIS YEAR. Over 10% of the playerbase has quit. Of course when you factor in things like Cataclysm not being nearly as popular as Blizzard hoped, most of this quarter's subscription losses originating from China, and the new Star Wars MMO coming very soon, a subscription loss is to be expected. But if Mists of Pandaria doesn't boost the numbers up again it could mean the beginning of the end for WoW. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 8th 2011 - Closer To The Fangs The quest chain for the Fangs of the Father legendary Rogue daggers has been updated on the PTR with another batch of quests added on. Here are videos (part 1 and part 2) of the quest chain as it stands thus far (yes, they could be spoiler videos, but barely anyone plays Rogues anyways). There's a rumor going around that a senior designer for Titan, Blizzard's next MMO, has been laid off. John Staats is not only the senior level designer for Titan, but he's been involved in designing every single raid instance in WoW. This is simply a rumor for now, and Blizzard is obviously keeping tight-lipped about it. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 7th 2011 - Come One, Come All Since it's the first full week of the month the new and greatly improved Darkmoon Faire is now available on the PTR. And wow, it is huge. There are quests, dailies, games, prizes, mounts, vanity pets, replica armor for transmogrification, a deathmatch arena, achievements... hoo boy, this event definitely needed its own island. To learn all that the Faire will offer MMO-Champion has an overview, WoWHead News has a guide, and WoWInsider has a video tour. Blizzard has plotted out the item level progressions throughout the vanilla game and expansions and noticed that the ilevels have basically grown exponentially. As they don't plan on putting an end to future expansions yet they see this exponential progression as a big problem, even going so far as to come up with examples of what the stats would look like in theoretical patches 5.3 and 6.3, and they are more than ridiculous. So to fix this problem before it gets to that point they're currently considering two options: one they're calling Mega Damage and the other is Item Level Squish. There are pros and cons to both ideas, so Blizzard definitely has some thinking to do before Mists of Pandaria comes out and starts this problem all over again. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 4th 2011 - Holiday Pets For Everyone! There was a small addition to the 4.3 PTR notes, nothing real major but there were some nice buffs to a few alchemy pots that will be worth noting. It looks like in 4.3 all the vanity pets you get from the seasonal world events (e.g. the Feline Familiar from Hallow's End, Snowman Kit from Winter Veil, etc.) will no longer be BoP. That means you'll get to trade/sell them if you get extras. Lord knows I junked about a dozen Squashlings this year. If you mess with WoW Mobile Armory on your Android phone you'll want to know that some new features were recently added along with some bug fixes and improvements. So be sure to get the latest version of the Mobile Armory so you can take advantage of these new toys. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 3rd 2011 - Top 10 Toon Names The 1-year subscription, Diablo 3 offer thingy (what Blizzard is now calling the WoW Annual Pass) has been updated. When you sign up for a year of WoW, in addition to getting Diablo 3 when it comes out, and the Tyrael's Charger mount when 4.3 comes out, you also get a guaranteed spot in the Mists of Pandaria beta. What was already a pretty darn good offer just got better. This is only available for a limited time though. The Madness of Deathwing fight is available on the PTR and here's a video of the fight. Clearly it's still undertuned as the group beat the fight after only 3 attempts. To me the entire fight still looks waaaay too boring, it's definitely not the "epic" encounter that Blizzard promised it would be. Oh yeah, and since the video is of a successful attempt it is a bit spoiler-ish. The website GuildOx has taken the time to compile the 10 most popular character names of each class, based on a pool of 11 million characters. As you can expect there are a lot of puns, but some of them are very clever and funny. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 2nd 2011 - Guardian Cubs For Sale The Guardian Cub vanity pet is now available in the online pet store. So you should soon be seeing them showing up in the AH for absof*cking ridiculous prices very soon. Something to remember if you're planning on buying one of these and selling it in the game to make some gold, they are indeed soulbound for the first 24 hours that you have the pet. After that you can sell/trade it to anyone who wants it (or keep it yourself). J!NX has added four new legendary class t-shirts to their clothing line. The classes are Shaman, Rogue, Priest, and Mage. The designs aren't half bad either. They'd make a good gift for the upcoming Christmas season. _________________________________________________________________________ News - November 1st 2011 - Dia De Los Muertos A few quick notes today. Today is the Day of the Dead world event in WoW. There's not a whole lot to do during this event, there's an achievement, a cooking recipe, and a temporary vanity pet, but it's still a heck of a lot more worthwhile than Harvest Festival. Here's a guide to what you need to do for Day of the Dead, and keep in mind that this is a one day event. On the PTR two mounts have been added to the loot tables for the Dragon Soul raid. The Blazing Drake is a possible drop from the normal mode Madness of Deathwing fight, and Life-Binder's Handmaiden is a possible drop from the heroic version of the same fight. Madness of Deathwing is the final fight in the raid. |
 |