Posts with tag epidemic

Exploit Hotfixed: Azeroth's cities safe once more

by Olivia Grace Oct 7th 2012 at 5:50PM

Nethaera hopped on the forums today to let us know that the massive city deaths were indeed a result of an exploit taken by nefarious individuals. The exploit has been hotfixed already, and it should no longer be a problem.

Blizzard doesn't mess around with stuff like this... if people are found exploiting the game and causing problems, they'll not only find themselves banned but also in some other troubles.

Nethaera

Earlier today, certain realms were affected by an in-game exploit, resulting in the deaths of player characters and non-player characters in some of the major cities. This exploit has already been hotfixed, so it should not be repeatable. It's safe to continue playing and adventuring in major cities and elsewhere in Azeroth.

As with any exploit, we are taking this disruptive action very seriously and conducting a thorough investigation. If you have information relating to this incident, please email hacks@blizzard.com. We apologize for the inconvenience some of you experienced as a result of this and appreciate your understanding.

source

Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

Filed under: News items

Entire cities dead on some World of Warcraft realms

by Olivia Grace Oct 7th 2012 at 3:18PM

This afternoon, Paris time, something very strange happened on various realms. Argent Dawn's forums have a long thread about it, but to cut a long story short, everyone in Stormwind and Orgrimmar was killed, NPCs included. It's also been happening on Tarren Mill, Ragnaros, Draenor, Twisting Nether, and no doubt other servers.

Of course, rumors abound as to just exactly what happened. Most people point towards it being a hack, and there's some videos out there floating around that give credence to this theory. Has it happened on your realm? What on earth is going on? And what do you think is causing it?

Update: Blizzard has posted on the forums, informing us that this exploit has now been hotfixed.

More screenshots as they come in after the break.

Filed under: Mists of Pandaria

Lichborne: The lowdown on diseaseless blood tanking

by Daniel Whitcomb Nov 2nd 2010 at 3:00PM

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Lichborne for blood, frost, and unholy death knights.

With everyone getting used to blood being the sole tanking tree, combined with all the new tanking style changes already here in patch 4.0.1 (and more to come in Cataclysm), we've been working at crunching numbers and figuring out strategies to deal with it all. One of the most interesting new paradigms to come out of this is actually a pretty old one: diseaseless blood. Diseaseless blood DPS did rear its head every once in a while back in the Wrath era, and now it's back for tanking. At both the heroic dungeon and raid levels, death knight tanks all over WoW are reporting diseaseless tanking as a superior playstyle in ease of use, survivability and threat generation.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: Unholy DPS 101

by Daniel Whitcomb Feb 16th 2010 at 6:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly peek at the world of the death knight. This week, we're looking at what may be the most volatile, versatile, finicky, and powerful of the death knight dps specs.

1. What is unholy DPS?

Unholy DPS is one of the biggest roller coasters you can step on as a death knight DPSer, in that almost every major patch has bought huge changes to the tree, sometimes making it totally overpowered, sometimes slamming it down into the dirt, sometimes making a basic unholy spec look like a convoluted Escherian nightmare. In Patch 3.3, it's leveled off into a solid, dominant powerhouse that combines stronger diseases and physical damage with the added bonuses of a cool pet and a very powerful magical debuff. It's essentially the choice for any death knight DPSer who wants to maximize their DPS.

Filed under: Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: Patch 3.3 Roundup for Death Knights

by Daniel Whitcomb Dec 9th 2009 at 3:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's weekly Death Knight column, where your host, Daniel Whitcomb, continues to be caught in a bad romance with Unholy DPS.

So we're back on the scene after a lazy and luxurious extended Thanksgiving holiday, and just in time for patch 3.3. Death Knights got their fair share of changes, some minor bug fixes and some rather large adjustments, including, of course, the obligatory complete rebalancing of unholy DPS. That said, with 3.3 the last major patch before Cataclysm, we can hope for some normalcy with the whole issue. Or we can expect Patch 3.3.1, either way.

Regardless, since we're just starting out on patch 3.3, now's a good time to run down what patch 3.3 means for us, including a postmortem on the latest unholy DPS changes, and some advice on what to do with yourself in patch 3.3. Read on.

Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Tips, News items, Instances, Quests, Raiding, Classes, Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: The latest Patch 3.3 PTR death knight changes in depth

by Daniel Whitcomb Oct 12th 2009 at 2:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's death knight column.

Remember when I said that it looked like Patch 3.3 was going to be relatively quiet for us? I may have spoken too soon. There's been a pretty major shakeup to Unholy DPS (again), and there's one or two other changes we might want to discuss, including news of some armor tier bonuses. Let's get to it.

Scourge Strike Rebalancing: The Neverending Story

So before we delve into this change, let's take a moment to review the star-crossed history of Scourge Strike. Scourge Strike is meant to be the basic Frost/Unholy attack of an Unholy death knight, and the hardest hitting of their attacks. In theory. Here's the thing with Scourge Strike: It does shadow damage. That means it completely bypasses all armor, meaning it does a lot more effective damage than you might guess just from glancing at the tool tip. The problem back in the early days of the class is that it was doing far too much, easily outstripping Obliterate. So, Blizzard nerfed the damage, and all was well for a while.

Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, News items, Talents, Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Patch 3.3 PTR: Death Knight patch notes and undocumented changes

by Daniel Whitcomb Oct 2nd 2009 at 1:15AM

Given the massive amounts of death knight changes in the last few patches, Patch 3.3 almost feels like a drought. Of course, that may be good news if you're a bit tired of adjusting your rotations and glyphs every patch. Then again, don't rest yet. Sure, there's only a few changes to Death Knights (so far), but they're big enough that they deserve some discussion. Let's look at them one by one.

Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, News items, Talents, Buffs, Enchants, Death Knight

Lichborne: Emblem of Triumph Gear for Death Knights

by Daniel Whitcomb Sep 29th 2009 at 7:00PM

Welcome to Lichborne, your look into the issues of the moment for the death knight class.

Ah, Emblems of Triumph, the new hotness. Even if you're not running the coliseum, you still have chance to grab them in the heroic daily, and by now, surely most of us have at least had the opportunity to save up enough to buy something. Deciding what to buy, however, is a whole different question. Let's take a look at the badge loot and see what's in it for a death knight.

Filed under: Items, Analysis / Opinion, Tips, Instances, Raiding, Guides, Death Knight, (Death Knight) Lichborne

Lichborne: State of the Death Knight

by Daniel Whitcomb Aug 2nd 2008 at 9:30PM

Welcome to Lichborne, WoW Insider's newest class column. Every week in Lichborne, Daniel Whitcomb will explore the ins and outs of Blizzard's newest class, the Death Knight.

It's Wrath of the Lich King Beta time, and finally time to meet the new Death Knight class. Unfortunately, we can't really guarantee you'll be meeting the same class that you'll see in the live game, per se. It's not that the class isn't shaping up well or isn't quite distinctive, it's more that there's just so much that's changing.

The next build that's scheduled to hit the Beta servers is a perfect example. Not only will talent trees be changing extensively, with some talents becoming baseline and some baseline abilities becoming talents, some talents switching tiers, and others even switching trees, but the very way we inflict and stack diseases will be getting some tweaking as well. In addition, many of the Death Knight's baseline abilities, especially related to disease and damage rotations, are changing as well.

So with all these changes, what can you say about a class that's changing drastically on a weekly basis, and may look completely different from how it does now by the time Wrath goes live? Is it really possible to speak about an overarching unifying theory of Death Knights?

Well, let's try. Welcome to the first annual State of the Death Knight address.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Expansions, Talents, Death Knight, Wrath of the Lich King, (Death Knight) Lichborne

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