Good Tuesday Morning, everyone! By now, I'm sure you're all aware of the amazing and frustrating odyssey that has been the attempt to secure BlizzCon tickets, as documented here by Mike. This writer finally managed to buy his ticket only at 9 PM PDT yesterday, despite having been poised at the virtual ticket counter since approximately 7 AM yesterday. The sight of the Fail Murloc and his cousin the Fail SCV (shown at right) have almost been burned into my very retinas. As of this writing, some of my colleagues still haven't managed to get through to buy a ticket.

As a reminder, the store will reopen sometime this morning, and Blizzard has said that there are a lot of tickets remaining.

Despite the hubbub, all this trouble hasn't (completely) dampened our enthusiasm for the wonders of BlizzCon. We've spent the refreshing time tossing around speculations about what we'll see on October 10th. See if our predictions match up with yours.

In other news, it's an extended maintenance this morning, which means downtime goes from 3 AM PDT to at least 11 AM PDT, which means you should have plenty of time to read WoW Insider. There's plenty of news to catch up on, of course, especially with a new build hitting the Wrath Beta servers. Let's take a look at some of it:

Wrath Beta Hot News and Features:

• Blizzcast episode 4 came out yesterday. It includes some Dungeon Q&A with Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan, as well as some intriguing profession information.
• Ask a Beta Tester continues apace. Check out the back issues, and if your question hasn't been answered, ask away in the comments latest installment!
• This latest Lichborne covers the ins and outs of the latest iteration of the Death Knight Unholy tree.
• Find yourself thinking back to some old familiar faces from your leveling days? You may see them again in Wrath. Check our gallery and see if your favorites are in.
• Death Knights are looking more and more deathly these days. Check out this gallery to see what we mean.

Class news:

• Check out Dan's Feral Cat adventures in the Borean Tundra.
• You might also want to read all about Rossi's Shaman experiences in Beta. You might also want to see our analysis of the new Shaman glyphs and the latest Elemental tree changes.
• Matt gives his impressions of tearing through some of the new dungeons as a DIscipline healer. He had a pretty awesome Hunter in his party,if I do say so myself.
• For Hunters, we have news on pet scaling and PvP viability. Also, check out Big Red Kitty's latest columns for video of the new exotic pet families, and check our gallery of the newest exotic pets, including the fearsome Jormungar Worms.
• Ok, so Titan's Grip is cool, but is it good? Also, theres some not-so-cool cooldown news for Warriors as well.
• Don't get too shocked, but Arcane Brilliance may actually be getting optimistic about Mages.
• Bear itemization may be a bit of a problem in Wrath.
• Here's some Power World: Shield news that both Priests and tanks should like.
• Warlocks are a little overpowered right now, with the proper gear and talents.
• More than a few people have mentioned that some class trees seem a bit bloated. Blizzard disagrees.

Professions, Items, and Odds and Ends:

• New Glyphs are showing up. See our analysis of the Shadow Priest, Holy/Disc Priest, and Paladin Glyphs.
• Engineers can preview some of that promised Blizzcast love by checking out some of the new beta recipes here.
• Tailoring is getting some nice new BoP cloak enchants. Oh yeah, and there's that whole Flying Carpet thing too. Which I totally called, by the way.
• Herbalists now have a nice little buff of their own. Oh, and Potion Sickness is gone.
• Blacksmiths got a whole mess of new recipes in the latest build, including some that should have every melee DPSer and tank headed for the forges for sure.
• Jewelcrafting also got some new recipe love.
• If you're used to skilling up on Servants of Allistarj, you may have to look elsewhere come Wrath.
• Wondering what rewards achievements will bring? How about a new pet?
• And yes, they are working to make achievements as retroactive as possible.
• Spell pushback? In my Wrath Beta? It may be less likely than you think!

In non-Wrath related news, try some of the following tidbits:

• People have discussed the possibility, but it finally happened. A raid gave Thori'dal to a Rogue ahead of a Hunter.
• Does lightning fast leveling and your very own Zebra mount appeal to you? Check out Blizzard's new recruit-a-friend program.
• Ever thought about how you'll go out if (or when) you quit the game? Boom put a lot of thought into it.
• If you're into comics, check out the new Tokyopop Warcraft Manga preview.
• Check out Blizzard's response to the latest round of Authenticator questions.
• Check out some WoW-related arts and crafts creativity.

Tags: beta, blizzcon, downtime, extended-maintenance, fail-murloc, fail-scv, maintenance, roundup, scheduled-downtime, scheduled-maintenance, server-downtime, server-maintenance, tuesday-morning, tuesday-morning-post, tweet-this, wotlk-beta, wrath-beta

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, News items, Expansions, Wrath of the Lich King