So it's the feast of Winter Veil again, and that cute little corgi is back. Blizzard, why can't I pick her up and take her home? It is horribly vexing to me. Forget the pony, I want a corgi. Can you just imagine her, frolicking through the fields, pouncing on rare pets and trotting back to lay them daintily at her master's feet?

As of this writing, there's still no announced downtime, but whether there is any or not, why not join me for a few minutes of fuming over the lack of a cute, fluffy, adorable corgi battle pet? Then to cool down from that, why not catch up on the week's news? The usual roundup follows below.

Hot news and features

• WoW Insider is still accepting applications for new writers.
• In patch 5.2, earned VP over the weekly cap may once again convert to JP.
• Check out the latest patch 5.1 hotfixes for December 11.
• Blizzard talks about instant crowd control. In short, it'll probably be nerfed in PvP sometime in the future.
• Most Blizzard Pet Store pets will be on sale until January 1, 2013.
• We speculate on possible patch 5.2 raids.
• Frostheim thinks that Burning Crusade sucked. Alex disagrees.

• Try out this Klaxxi-themed plate transmogrification.
• We also have a Kor'kron Overseer transmogrification.
• 25-man raids on Asian realms have higher level rewards and high difficulty.
• Blizzard customer support recently held a live Q&A. We have a recap.
• Are low level dungeons too easy?

Class news and guides

• Rossi wonders if rogues are dying out.
• The Light And How To Swing It has retribution advice for Terrace of Endless Spring and tanking advice for Heart of Fear.
• Lichborne examines the unpopularity of the unholy death knight.
• Encrypted Text answers your rogue questions.
• The Care and Feeding of Warriors discusses tanking itemization.
• We take a look at the Ascension talent for monks.
• Blood Pact offers a warlock's guide to soloing old world raids for the new battle pets.

Dungeons, items, professions, PvP, and more

• The Sporeling Sprout is a humanoid battle pet that just might work for your stable.
• Look like a sprite with this easy to obtain illusion item.
• Are Transmogrification limits a good thing?
• Addon Spotlight looks at more raid healing addons.

Odds and ends

• Know Your Lore tells the story of the Yaungol. We cover the end of the vanilla era in our latest WoW for dummies installment.
• Learn of the amazing origin of the Darkmoon carousel.
• You can find some cool stuff looking through archived versions of the official WoW site.
• What's up with that loading screen tip about Alleria and Turalyon anyway?
• We review the Dominance Offensive reputation.

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Tags: downtime, last-week-in-wow, maintenance, realm-downtime, realm-maintenance, roundup, roundups, scheduled-downtime, scheduled-maintenance, server-downtime, server-maintenance, server-status, tuesday, tuesday-downtime, tuesday-maintenance, tuesday-morning, tuesday-morning-post

Filed under: Realm Status, News items