Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. With the holidays in full swing, one might have expected Blizzard to take it easy. Instead, they sprung a whole bunch of news on us. The Patch 5.2 PTR will be up in January, and they've already given us a preview of the patch notes. We've already seen hints of lots of new stuff, including

• New pets and mounts.
• New heirlooms.
• A new raid with 13 raid bosses.
• Rogue class buffs.
• Tier 15 armor models.
• Green gear that hearkens back to old Zul'Gurub models.

If patch 5.2 isn't your thing, have no fear and read on. We have plenty of year end retrospectives, live server news, and more for your reading pleasure. If the connection at Grandma's house isn't good enough to play WoW, why not catch up on some WoW news instead?

Hot news and features

• Blizzard is planning new methods to earn reputation and Lesser Charms of Good Fortune outside of daily quests.
• Blizzard's official Pet Battle page is now live.
• If you have a young WoW player in your family, you may want to read these 5 tips to keep them safe online.
• If you still need more reputation with the patch 5.1 daily factions, why not murder some animals? We'll show you how.
• The Best of WoW Insider is back to reminisce about some our best content from the year 2012. See if your favorite article makes it into one of our monthly roundups.
• We take a look back at the good and bad of the most significant lore developments of 2012.
• Rossi takes a look back at WoW's content progression through 2012 and waxes philosophical on MMORPG loot systems.
• Check out the first winner of the Mists WoW Ironman Challenge: A night elf priest at level 90 with no green gear, no talents, and no deaths.

Class news and guides

• Totem Talk has a restoration shaman's guide to Terrace of Endless Spring.
• Lichborne examines 3 popular death knight requests that probably won't ever be met.
• Spiritual Guidance continues a guide to priest talents.
• Encrypted Text examines how haste affects your rogue's damage spamming.
• The Care And Feeding of Warriors has some suggestions for haste.

Dungeons, items, professions, PvP, and more

• Blood Sport discusses picking a class for PvP.
• We examine the shifting state of the PvP realm in Mists of Pandaria.
• Blizzard recently answered some concerns about gear discrepancies in battlegrounds.
• Horrify your enemies with your own horde of angry spiders.
• Addon Spotlight looks at some PvP addons.
• WoW Archivist takes a look at some zaniest real life WoW-themed merchandise.
• Want to make some extra gold in game? Try picking up a few of the treasures of Pandaria.

Odds and ends

• The newest chapter of Li Li's Travel Journal is up.
• As an old school RPG player, I have to link this sweet WoW pixel art.
• Know Your Lore examines the August Celestials and Lei Shin, the Thunder King.
• Cryptozoic has revealed the latest WoW TCG set, Betrayal of the Guardian.

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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