Yesterday, we asked you what your best guess was for the arrival date of patch 5.3, and at the time the article was written, the PTR build was still a test. Since then, it has been updated, as many commenters mentioned, and is now a release candidate.

What does this mean for a potential release date? Looking back at patch 5.1, WoW Insider reported that a release candidate was live on November 13th, and the patch released on November 27th, a fortnight after the first release candidate went up. Patch 5.2 went to a PTR release candidate on the PTR on February 26th, and the patch dropped on March 5th, just one week later. We can't really discuss earlier patches, thanks to Blizzard's new, improved patch cycle, but these two indicate that the patch may well drop within the next fortnight, so May 21st or 28th, perhaps the first week in June at the latest.

Of course, this is just estimation, we're doing research and gathering clues, but it's not a firm confirmation. While you're waiting, you can check out all our patch 5.3 coverage.

Yes, patch 5.3 isn't even out yet, and we're already looking towards patch 5.4. Thanks to Ghostcrawler, we have this to think about for the future, namely that Vengeance is getting capped at a significantly lower threshold in raids in the future. If you remember back at August of last year, Vengeance saw some significant changes that increased how fast it could ramp up in raids and also gave it a far larger maximum potential. It's been adjusted over time, but in general what GC said back last August has held true -- tank DPS in raiding really did go up. To the point where on some pulls it's not unusual to see tanks leading the DPS, sometimes by extremely large numbers.

Since this is a big change that will drastically lower tank damage output (25-man tanks with their 600,000 or more health buffed will lose roughly 300,000 AP on fights where Vengeance was capping at 100% of their health) I'm not surprise it won't be coming in 5.3 -- I am a little surprised it's happening at all, because we all knew Vengeance and tank damage would do exactly what it has done when it was changed. Still, I wait to observe if it has much practical difference since aside from AoE tanking where a multitude of hits can roll in a short window of time (that 20 second ramp up period) and the tanks can make effective use of all that AP I'm not sure it will matter. 5-mans and scenarios were not mentioned, so for now I'm assuming this is only for the raids mentioned.