Posts with tag Breakingnews

Wowhead News has unearthed some interesting additions to the Children's Week holiday, which starts this Sunday shortly after Noblegarden 2011 ends. For anyone worried about the meta-achievement For the Children, the achievements associated with the holiday haven't changed (more's the pity re: School of Hard Knocks), but the quest lines in classic Azeroth have.

If you're Alliance, the brand-new quest series starts with Children's Week, offered by Orphan Matron Nightingale in Stormwind; if you're Horde, it starts with Children's Week, offered by Orphan Matron Battlewail in Orgrimmar. Both new quest lines will see you surveying the changes to the local landscape in Cataclysm, in addition to meeting important lore figures and paying your respects to the dead. Afterwards, you'll go out for the traditional ice cream treat and then visit a local vendor to get kites to fly. Wowhead News has more details on the individual quests if you don't mind spoiling yourself.

The quest lines end with the offer of a new noncombat pet in addition to the usual Piglet's Collar, Rat Cage, and Turtle Box -- a new Snail's Shell! It looks like the Outland quest series will also offer a new pet called Legs, though there don't appear to be any new quests there. Experienced orphan herders thus have a reason to pick up a tyke again this year, and with any luck, the Wrath of the Lich King variant will be available even if you've done it before.

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The Shattering has torn Azeroth asunder, and the world has broken under Deathwing's mighty power. However, your intrepid WoW Insider team has saved the old world for you in gallery form! Kalimdor, the Eastern Kingdoms, the capital cities and more are all going to be preserved forever, thanks to our galleries. Take time to see your favorite places and reminisce, because when the servers are back up, there's no going back.

Jump through for a list of galleries of the old world, pre-Shattering, and sigh wistfully.

Straight from the Mike Morhaime's mouth during opening ceremonies -- Cataclysm will be available for digital download at midnight Pacific Standard Time of December 7, 2010. For the first time in the game's history, the game will be available for purchase online at the same time as it launches in retail stores. Pre-orders for Cataclysm digital downloads will be available on the Blizzard site soon. Players eager to play the game right away but don't have the endurance (or geographical proximity) to attend a midnight launch can simply sit in the comfort of their homes and enter a broken Azeroth as the game goes live on launch day. CLARIFICATION: Morhaime mentioned that the game should be available for digital download ahead of the launch date, allowing players to have the full game when Cataclysm goes live.

The Cataclysm cinematic has just become available, and -- words fail me -- it's amazing. Some folks behind the scene here think it's Blizzard's best yet, but personally, I think it's a dead heat between this and the Wrath of the Lich King cinematic.

Interestingly, there are no NPCs or characters of any kind visible in the cinematic apart from Deathwing himself (apart from a quick glimpse of what are probably a few goblin or human-looking armorers). You do see some extraordinary landscapes rendered in high-definition glory for the first time -- The Barrens, Thousand Needles, Darkshore and Stormwind -- and perhaps it's meant as a reminder that the aspect of death was once the aspect of earth and that he hasn't relinquished his power over the latter.

Sorry, gnomes; looks like you're still waiting for a cinematic debut!

Before we even begin with the new 4.0.1 content, Blizzard has released a post about the known issues with the newest patch. We are confident that a lot of these issues, mostly tooltip problems or item costs, will be rectified soon. Other than that, enjoy some of the funnier issues, like how the new shaman spell Earthquake is "looking awkward."

The patch 3.3.3 PTR has a bunch of cool pre-Cataclysm content added to it that was datamined by MMO-Champion. Massive spoiler alert, so don't click on that link or follow us after the break if you want to avoid spoilers!

Two minor in-game fixes that were applied last night to the game. These fixes should be active once the servers come back up later this morning/afternoon. They're modifying the Professor Putricide encounter just a tad, and should make a couple annoyances with the fight go away.

The fixes as enumerated by Bornakk are:

• Professor Putricide's Tear Gas will no longer remove player auras.
• The Growing Ooze Puddles in the Professor Putricide encounter will no longer continue to grow while players are stunned.

That's all, and if there's any more in-game fixes we'll be sure to let you know.

With the heroic versions of Trial of the Crusader going live yesterday, raiding guilds are already venturing into the more challenging versions of Tier 9. As of evening Tuesday EST, the European guild For the Horde has claimed a world-first A Tribute to Insanity-10 (a no-wipe full clear of the instance) on 10-man heroic Trial. Unfortunately, I don't speak German so I might be missing some of the finer points related on their website (anyone who can shed more light on this, please drop a comment!) but it looks like they weren't deliberately aiming for the achievement until they reached Anub'arak with all 50 attempts remaining, and then decided to go for it. Next in achievement progression? A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity -- repeating it without any gear from 25-man ToC, which is broadly equivalent to the Herald of the Titans achievement. Ouch.

Boubouille at MMO Champion has since confirmed that the Swift Horde Wolf and its Alliance counterpart the Swift Alliance Steed are drops from the tribute chest upon completion of the no-wipe clear, and it's quite possible that the mounts also drop from the 25-man version as well. However, I doubt we'll be seeing A Tribute to Insanity-25 this week, as none of the guilds doing the heroic-25 mode have reported a wipe-free experience thus far.

We'll keep an eye on guild progression for you, and congratulations to For the Horde!

As an FYI for all those who have ordered the service, the internet stream for the DirecTV broadcast from BlizzCon is working, although all you'll see for the moment is a looping series of advertisements for the feed itself (still scratching my head over why they feel the need to advertise a service you've already purchased, but oh well), a recap of BlizzCon 2008, and the Starcraft II, Diablo III, and Wrath of the Lich King trailers.

We've gotten some reports from people that the stream seems buggy and that they've had some problems with logging in, so if you've ordered the service, I would recommend logging in early and keeping a tab up with the feed just in case. The main page for the DirecTV feed is here, so head over and make sure you've got everything in place. Don't forget that you need to press the Login button while entering your username and password; don't just hit enter! We'd guess the actual broadcast will begin shortly before the opening ceremonies at 11:00 am PST/2:00 pm EST.

UPDATE: For those of you getting an "Account expired" message, Michael Sacco suggests refreshing the page several times and clearing out your cache/cookies if all else fails. Apparently that's worked for a lot of people -- try it and let us know.

2:02 PM EST: Stream is now live!

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BlizzCon 2009 is here! WoW.com has continuing coverage, bringing you the latest in Cataclysm news, live blogs, galleries, and reports right from the convention floor. Check out WoW.com's Guide to BlizzCon for the latest!

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For the second Tuesday in a row around the same time (9:00-9:30 pm EST-ish), the US Retaliation battlegroup has crashed. Blizzard has confirmed that it's performing urgent maintenance on the hardware of the affected realms, and they'll provide an update at 11:00 PM EST/8:00 PM PST. Hmmm. Makes you wonder if whatever caused last week's crash was accidentally rolled back during server maintenance earlier today.

The following are the affected realms:

Area 52, Auchindoun, Azuremyst, Blade's Edge, Blood Furnace, Coilfang, Dawnbringer, Exodar, Fizzcrank, Galakrond, Ghostlands, Grizzly Hills, Shattered Halls, Terokkar, The Scryers, The Underbog, Velen, and Zangarmarsh.

My guild's on Retaliation and has consequently found itself without something to raid for the second Tuesday running. Last week their solution was to take off to Mug'thol and do a level 1 Hogger raid, complete with designated tanks and healers, damage meters, and -- to top things off -- a bonafide ninja looter of the Malachite drop. Our server might be down, but our hallowed traditions remain.

Thank heavens for Twitter. Twitterer @kreeoni tweeted a scoop detailing the Night Elf Druid bear forms following the exciting revelation of Tauren Druid bear forms yesterday. And oh boy... do they look spiffy. I particularly like the fellow on the lower right, with the Spike-like white stripe and matching sideburns. Our girl Allison is already jumping up and down from excitement (or is it envy? I can't tell with Tauren females...), probably impatient that we don't have the cat forms yet. But here you go, savor the first look at these new Druid bear forms with nastier growls and face paint. Man, Druids get excited over the tiniest things...

UPDATE: Apparently, Allison was jumping up and down from, uh, being underwhelmed. She's kind of weird that way.

ALLISON UPDATE: Hey, I am totally whelmed here. Maybe they're less a shock to the senses after the initial change to Tauren bear form!

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Bornakk just announced on the forums that Jewelcrafters are about to see a new nerf, and as a result, people are already beginning to weigh the benefits of switching to a different profession for min-maxing, or working out how they are going to re-itemize their gear.

Bornakk:
In the next major content patch we will be removing the prismatic quality of the jewelcrafter-only Dragon's Eye gems. Like other gems, they will have to match the socket color to receive a socket bonus. When this change occurs, players with qualifying jewelcrafting skill will be provided a yet to be determined amount of Dalaran Jewelecrafter Tokens as compensation.

This probably won't be enough to entice players to drop the profession, but it is a bit of a blow. Stratfu points out that because Mage T8 is equipped primarily with yellow and blue sockets, the only way to actually meet socket bonus requirements will be to use sub-par gems.

The JC-only Runed Dragon's Eye offers +32 spell power, and currently fits into any socket, conforming to meet the necessary color requirements. This is compared to the +19 spell power that the rest of us folks get from Runed Scarlet Rubies. While Jewelcrafters will still be able to use these gems, they won't be able to stick them just anywhere.

According to a recent list by Develop magazine, Blizzard has dethroned Nintendo to become the most bankable game studio in the world. I'm surprised they weren't there already, but I guess it's just this side of possible that Nintendo is hard to budge. Develop's top 100 is compiled by their editorial team and accounts for total sales, reputation within the industry, and a variety of other criteria. When all was said and done, the editors wrote, Warcraft "continues to do the sort of numbers previously reserved for crime syndicates and smaller members of the United Nations."

Nicely put, but what I find most bizarre about the list is that Blizzard jumped from #47 to #1 within the space of a year (you'll find Blizzard's 2008 listing on page 82 of a highly annoying-to-navigate Issuu archive). While part of that's due to the merge with Activision, Develop claims that Wrath of the Lich King being the fastest-selling PC game in history was the greatest contributing factor. Hang on. WoW was doing just fine even before Wrath hit, so how did Blizzard manage to get itself ranked behind do-little studios with sales of around $1-2 million per game on the 2008 list?

Bornakk posted a tentative date for the announced end of Arena Season 5, indicating that the season can end "as early as April 14" or a week after. It should be noted that the first four Arena seasons had no breaks in between, with one season beginning immediately after the last ended. Arena seasons were only suspended upon the release of Patch 3.0 leading up to Wrath of the Lich King, with the first season of Level 80 Arena play beginning on December 16. This time around, however, Bornakk makes it clear that the next Arena season will not begin immediately but have at least a one week break before Season 6 begins.

This should also be taken as an indication of when Patch 3.1 will be released. Blizzard has stated that they plan to unleash Season 6 almost simultaneously with the new raid content, so if Season 5 ends within two or three weeks, it should be expected that Patch 3.1 is just around the corner. It might even come sooner rather than later, as Blizzard has noted that Season 5 would "end with or shortly after" Patch 3.1 goes live. All of the necessary files such as Season 6 items are contained in the patch, so this only makes sense.

Bornakk reminds all players who feel they will be eligible for end of season rewards, such as titles and the Deadly Gladiator's Frostwyrm, should refrain from transfering their characters to another realm until after Season 5 ends (or until rewards have been handed out to be safe). During the break between seasons, all ranked matches will be disabled and all Arena points and ratings will be wiped [EDIT: Arena points and ratings will continue to be available during the one week break to allow players to spend their points, but will be wiped when Season 6 begins.]. However, players will retain their matchmaking ratings and Honor points.