Filed under: Odds and ends

So here we are. It's been a while since Patch 3.3 started, and we've had a suspiciously early downtime announcement to boot. The holidays are winding down, and most of us, including, one would assume, the Blizzard devs, have finished our eggnog and put our noses back to the grindstone. As of this writing, there's no official word either way, but I'm feeling pretty optimistic about waking up to news of a new section of ICC being opened, or at least a nice mini-patch full of some bug fixes -- say, to certain borked class cooldowns. We can't say for sure, though. All we can say for sure is that the realms are down, and will be for a while, until at least 11 AM pacific time.

With that in mind, it's a good time to catch up on the news. As usual, we have a roundup of some of the best articles from the past 7 days or so. We're shaking off the holiday drowsiness and getting into full gear to help you get through the next phase of ICC, find out when we'll see more Cataclysm news, and more. Join us in the server downtime vigil and read on.

A nasty bug with the 2-piece Tier 10 bonus for Elemental Shamans reared its ugly head recently when a player attempted to use Elemental Mastery. The bonus, which is supposed to reduce the cooldown on Elemental Mastery by 2 seconds each time Lightning Bolt and Chain Lightning is used, instead puts the 31-point Elemental talent on a whopping seven day cooldown. This is akin to the bug found with the Hunter ability Call Stabled Pet, which puts the ability on an even more staggering 25-day cooldown.

Ghostcrawler immediately responded to the concern as raised on the official forums, stating that the problem happens only in cross-server instances and that raiding shouldn't be affected. Elemental Shamans sporting two pieces from the Frost Witch's Regalia would probably do well not to activate Elemental Mastery while in a dungeon using the Dungeon Finder until a fix is found. Ghostcrawler stated that Blizzard is working on the issue.

Weekend's done, it's back to work. How was everybody's New Year's celebration? I hope everyone's sober and up and running to start your Monday. It's the start of the week, after all, hopefully you're all not still hungover from the very long weekend. Then again, it's not always a bad thing to be a little out of sorts, especially when playing World of Warcraft. Some of my most memorable raids have actually happened when one or (regrettably) more raid members have been, how do we say, ah, rambunctious with the help of a little liquid courage. We didn't necessarily have smooth runs, but they sure were a riot, especially over vent.

Did you guys use the long break to play the game? Or did you use it to actually catch up on real life? If you guys played, did you do it with a little more eggnog than necessary? Or maybe you loaded up on sweets like candy canes and played with a little sugar rush? Did you go through the break wearing real life Beer Goggles? With the long vacation over and the new year ushering us all back to work, school, or anything that isn't inactivity, let's use this sobering breakfast topic to talk about what we did over the long holidays. Heck, regale us with tales of inebriated raiding or playing. Since I'm something of a teetotaler myself, reading those stories should be a vicarious treat.

When writing this Breakfast Topic I noticed in the comments a certain disconnect between how I approach running heroics and how other people seem to. So I thought I'd try and encapsulate the differences and try and help explain why sometimes tanks seem a little touchy or off in runs. It's not just the blows to the head, guys.

Behold the miracle of confection. Made by Christina Drylie of Apple Valley, California it's one of the 10 winning entries in this year's Blizzard Holiday Desert contest. Warning: may erupt from Deepholm and unleash elemental devastation. In addition to the Aspect of Earth, we have Moonkin, Murlocs, Lord Marrowgar and Icecrown Citadel in edible form. Hasten yourselves to go forth and consume their images. Unfortunately you won't be able to actually eat any of the deserts, but it's the web, we haven't worked out how to make hypertext work for creating cake.

Arcane Brilliance: How to be a good PUG mage: "It was like some kind of idiot convention, and I was the keynote speaker."

Totem Talk: On unique gearing and gear consolidation: Rossi has mixed feelings on the benefits of gear consolidation, particularly because +spellpower mail is far better itemized for Restoration, and Enhancement shares gear with hunters, who don't want the same stats.

Official patch 3.3 confirmation and patch notes: Patch 3.3 went live on December 8th to universal acclaim, and the enormous popularity of the Dungeon Finder took everyone by surprise.

The lore of patch 3.3: A fantastic joint effort between Adam, Alex, and Sacco to bring you the background on how patch 3.3's story came about.

Some instances and raids, you understand why you're there. Icecrown, for instance, makes a lot of sense to me. I get why we're running the five mans (trying to sneak into the Citadel while the Scourge is focused on the front door) and the raid (that didn't work out so hot so brute force it is!) I always enjoyed Scarlet Monastery and had no difficulty with why I was running the place either as Alliance or Horde. Alliance, you were cleaning out a nasty pack of gibbering mouth-breather sociopathic xenophobes who were totally freaking insane, and Horde... same deal, plus they were killing people you actually knew.

November saw the celebration of WoW's fifth anniversary, the introduction of the pet store, and a steady avalanche of news from the patch 3.3 PTR.

Drama Mamas: When a partner wanders astray: The Drama Mamas answer one of their hardest and most unsettling questions.

Cataclysm: The exhaustive list of old-world changes (so far): Sacco goes over all the known information concerning upcoming zone and dungeon changes in Cataclysm with a fine-tooth comb.

Blizzard: Arenas were a mistake: Blizzard's VP of game design says that arenas as they were implemented were probably not the best idea. Let a thousand comments bloom.

Blizzard launches real-money in-game pet store: The destination for data-mined pets we'd seen earlier that had never materialized in-game is finally revealed -- Blizzard's selling them. The march to micro-transactions continues apace, and not everyone is happy about it.

Patch 3.3 PTR: Get a pug when you PUG: The destination for the Perky Pug is also revealed, and players are somewhat happier about that, particularly after finding some of the pug's more interesting animations.

Welcome back to Know Your Lore, WoW.com's column about the story behind the game we all play.

This week on KYL, we move away from the Fall of the Lich King (although in the months to come expect more Icecrown related KYL's) and out to the larger world and the major factions that contend across it. I thought we'd start with the Alliance this week for a number of reasons, the first and most important among them being that the Alliance would not exist without the Horde, while the Horde's existence owes itself to forces transcending the Alliance. Because of this, doing the Alliance first will leave open questions that the Horde section next week will help answer.

The Alliance as it stands at this moment in time is a far different entity than the one originally known as the Alliance of Lordaeron. That Alliance was one of seven human nations (Azeroth, Lordaeron, Stromgarde, Kul Tiras, Alterac, Dalaran and Gilneas) with the Dwarves of Ironforge, Gnomes of Gnomeregan and High Elves of Quel'Thalas. This Alliance was born directly out of the statecraft of King Terenas Menethil of Lordaeron and the military leadership of Anduin Lothar, the Lion of Azeroth and last living member of the original Arathi bloodline.

Each member of this alliance had various reasons for being in it and varying degrees of loyalty to it (the High Elves, for example, were only in the Alliance because as the last Arathi, Lothar could compel their loyalty due to ancient pacts and abandoned it as soon as it was possible for them to fulfill said pacts, while Gilneas retreated behind the Greymane Wall not long after the end of the Second War over differences of opinion with Lordaeron) and it certainly lacked in coherence compared to the Horde it was opposed to.

In the transition to Cataclysm, an increasing amount of the game looks pretty dated, and we've already see Blizzard take a wrench to a number of models like druid forms and major lore figures. I've been hoping for a while that they'll do the same with the game's earliest and most dated models -- the ones that haven't changed a whit since the classic game hit beta -- and particularly the following. All of them are a jarring difference from the graphical quality of Northrend creations, and only stand to get more so in Cataclysm:

1. The wyvern

The wyvern is the model from which Blizzard cribbed the horrifying older version of Tauren cat form, but it was already awful in its own right. Compared to gryphons, wyverns look...well...terrible. They have a host of much less impressive and realistic animations and just seem like they're a lower-resolution model overall. The run animation on the player mount version makes it obvious that the thing was never meant to run, and the top of its head looks like somebody took an experimental swing at it with a frying pan. I have yet to see a Horde player fly one of these monstrosities longer than they absolutely have to.

Dear God, someone please put this affront to nature out of its misery.

But man oh man, am I tired of Halls of Stone. Ridiculously, completely, utterly sick of the place. When I see the HoS loading screen pop up (and by now I'm as familiar with that screen as I am with my own apartment) I actually feel my whole body shudder with faint disgust and slight loathing. Ah man, not this place again! And always, someone's going to insist we do every single boss instead of skipping Maiden and Krystallus so I'll be in here even longer. Since I try to only drop groups when I find it absolutely necessary as part of the whole 'I'm tanking so I'm responsible' ideal I have, I find being stuck in HoS over and over again to be my own personal purgatory.

So how about you? Have an instance you dread seeing yet again? Or have you been mercifully spared Violet Hold threepeating in one day? (Seriously, VH, followed by VH, followed by Nexus, followed by VH? That was just cruel, dungeon finder.) Is this just the price I pay for getting nearly instant runs? I suppose it's not so bad in that case. (Oh, who am I kidding, go away Halls of Stone, I don't want to talk to you no more.)

October, as with August, was mostly a lot of news reporting. The patch 3.3 PTR dropped on October 1st and everyone went nuts for the last (we think) major content patch of Wrath of the Lich King. Next up? The content patch heralding the approach of Cataclysm, but with a lot of gated content between ourselves and that, we've got a ways to go.

Ask a Faction Leader: Cairne Bloodhoof: Among all the AAFL columns he's done so far, Sacco's personal favorite is Cairne.

Spiritual Guidance: Don't be that priest: Matt Low not-so-gently lectures his fellow priests on the failings to which the class is prone while not paying attention or entering an encounter unprepared.

Searching for the most popular server: Schramm takes a look at some data and wonders -- what's the busiest and/or most crowded server out there?

Patch 3.3 PTR: New Tauren skins found: So what are those things anyway? A new set of NPCs for Icecrown? A new barbershop option? Tribal markings for the Grimtotem?

Chill of the Throne: Dodge nerfed 20% in Icecrown Citadel: The debuff is quickly termed "Icewell Radiance" by disgruntled tanks everywhere.

Today a guildy induced me to run Heroic Halls of Reflection on my tanking warrior. Sighing, I slapped on my heroic set and we went into the instance (actually, we ran all three ICC heroics) and when we finally got to the Lich King, said guildmate said "Okay, we'll do the ledge strat." I had no idea what the ledge strat entailed, and told him so. He said "go stand over there" and so, bewildered, I did as he asked.

What followed completely trivialized the event. So much so that I'm torn: on the one hand, I hate HoR in no small part due to the difficulty of picking up multiple abominations and tanking them while also trying to get aggro on the spell casting Risen Witch Doctors. The 'ledge' strategy is very simple: let Arthas walk past you and lumber his slow way up the tunnel after Jaina or Sylvanas like he always does. Meanwhile, the hordes of undead he spawns? They come running back to you, even if you're still at the door to the ledge. Since you could never stop the Lich King from getting to Jaina anyway, you don't lose anything for staying behind him, except that you no longer have to adjust in the event that the Lich King is getting closer to you with his aura of hurty.

No, I haven't actually heard of one happening. That doesn't mean I don't think one could be very cool, especially after seeing this video of all the voices Chris Metzen has done for the various Blizzard franchises over the years. The idea that one man is the voice behind Thrall, Varian, Ragnaros, and other luminaries got me to thinking that maybe a film isn't the right way to go with the franchise. Now, of course I know about as much about making movies and managing beloved franchises as I do about installing thermonuclear reactors in submarines, but I'm not going to let that stop me from speculating about how awesome a Warcraft animated movie or series could be. (I also admit I've been watching a lot of DC Animated Movies lately, and the tenuous Blizzard - Wildstorm - DC connection has me all aflutter.)

If done right, a Warcraft cartoon has a lot of potential. I think quite a few fans of animation could point at various styles that would work for the franchise... I would personally stay away from the overtly computer animation of a Clone Wars (unless we could somehow get Pixar to do it. I mean, while I'm dreaming) and would try to go with something more like the actual game, with deliberately exaggerated and unrealistic lines. But I'll leave it up to you: who should star? Who would you choose to do their voices? What art style, what kind of direction would you take it? The sky's the limit for the Warcraft animated series, because as far as we know it's not going to happen.

Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. Winter Veil is winding down, and as we here at the WoW.com offices fight over the last carton of eggnog, we've been taking a lot of time to look over the past year and celebrate. Of course, here in the Tuesday Morning Post, we generally look at the past 7 days or so. So yeah, there's plenty of the navel gazing stuff, but there's a good smattering of news too. Nothing too major, I suppose. Even the dev team likes to see their family over the holidays, I guess. But it's there. And in the meantime, a little bit of a navel gazing never hurt anyone. Our navels are pretty awesome anyway.

Join me for the last Tuesday morning of 2009 and catch up on your WoW reading. The usual list is after the break.