Patch this week!

Oooh. It's official, we're getting a 3am maintenance tonight (in normal weeks it's 5am). Some realms are undergoing extended maintenance for hardware upgrades. It looks real good for patch 3.2!

and a blue post on http://forums.wow-europe.com/thread.html?topicId=10222136019&sid=1 confirms it!

"The PTR is now offline. All EU PTR realms are no longer available. Thank you again for your great efforts in helping us test."

Class Q&A out now

Now although my Rogue (Stabyanuts) has never got past level 12, it's great to see that Blizzard have finally come forth and answered all your questions. Ever wondered if the Ravenholdt quest-line would be expanded?

"The problem with class-specific quests is that you’re cutting off 90% (give or take depending on class popularity) of players from seeing the content. Put another way, you can offer 100 class-specific quests per class, or 1000 quests that almost everyone can see. We don’t have any announcements of new content in that quest line at this time."

Bummer. I'm not going to quote more because the questions are as long as the answers! Rogues sure do talk a lot for a stealth class!

Class Q&A finally out

Was it worth the wait? Yeah, you bet ya! There are some really long and detailed answers in this Q&A about the future of the Priest class. Each question in the Q&A discusses very specific topics, aside from the first one about the general future of the class.

"Overall, we feel the priest is one of the most versatile classes in the game, and can be the most enjoyable of the healer classes in the game because of its feature of having two different unique talent specs providing two different types of play styles. And for players who enjoy the dps aspect, you always have the option of going to the dark side as Shadow to either melt faces in PvP or help take down foes in PvE. As for moving forward, in a nutshell we’d like to improve the Holy tree’s PvP niche and polish the Shadow tree a bit more for both aspects of the game." - Ghostcrawler.

Other questions cover specifics like is it too easy to dispel DoTs, are the developers happy with the functionality of Dispersion, increasing the range of Mind Flay, what makes Discipline and Holy priests effective in a raid environment versus a PvP environment and much more. Check it out here.

WoW guild bank ninga gets owned!

This is a post that was made recently in the customer support forums. We've all been victims of hackers at some stage or another, or at least had a friend or guild member fall victim. It's great to see Blizzard taking a stand in not letting these guys get away with it. Even simple things, like ripping off a guild bank, which isn't necessarily hacking but abusing privileges given in game, should be dealt with. People who do this type of thing spoil the gaming experience which is WoW. I got a giggle out of reading this reply from Blizzard to this unhappy camper who ripped off his old guild:

_______________________________________________________

From the CUSTOMER SERVICE FORUM on www.worldofwarcraft.com

Q u o t e: Wakeandbaké the Ninja:
Ok i bought my epic flying but i cant use it for sum reason i have the achivment and sum mount in my bank but i cant use any of em and i'm exalted with netherwing as well witch requirs a epic flyer cant use it ither what should i do

Auryk
Blizzard Poster
Part 1:
I’m sorry for confusion, however my records show that you currently have Expert Riding (Skill 225), Wakeandbaké, but do not currently have Artisan Riding (Skill 300). If you desire to ride an epic mount, you are going to need to purchase epic flying to do so.

Q u o t e:Wakeandbaké the Ninja:
like no error pops up it njust wont let me buy epic flyers and i cant use the ones in my bank not my carpet or drake or gryphon as u can see on my armory i got exalted reps that requir it and i dont have it when i go tot he vendor it says i gtta buy it i dont understand why


Part 2
Wakeandbaké , do you remember the guild you were previously in by any chance? It was roughly a month ago, and appears you went by a different name in those days. Well, according to my records you were found guilty of looting a substantial amount of their Guild Bank and taking off. This was then reported, and the situation looked into.

The findings of that investigation were that you were to repay the items due to your previous guild – unfortunately for you, the sum of the amount taken was no longer in your possession, so we were left to find another way for reclamation. In the e-mail that was sent to you on 6-26 you should see that 2,500 Gold, Cold Weather Flying and Riding 300 (Epic Flying) were stripped from your character. This was found to be the exact sum equal to that which was taken from your previous guild.

All in all, you are going to need to get in touch with our Account Administration department, Wakeandbaké. They can be reached by way of e-mail at wowaccountadmin@blizzard.com or by filling out their webform, which can be found here: (http://us.blizzard.com/support/webform.xml?locale=en_US).

_________________________________________________________

It's good to see this brought out in the open. It brings me great joy to watch people like this get owned. Stealing from a guild bank that you were entrusted to have access to is the lowest of lows.

Is your blog listed?

We have made up some buttons for bloggers to put on their blogs to advertize that their blogs are listed on Gaming Faces. We understand that bloggers can't always post every day, but we also understand that readers want a steady flow of news. Providing a feed of regularly updated blogs not only benefits readers, pointing them in the direction of the latest posts, but it also helps drive traffic to all the bloggers out there, uniting the community to find out all they can about WoW.

If your blog, or a blog you visit, is not listed on Gaming Faces, let us know:

If your blog is already listed on Gaming Faces, let other people know about it by adding a button to your border!

This is the 250x250 one but there is a 125x125 alternative as well.

Death Knight blog of the week

gnome DK is run by Dedbitt and Gillderon and it's dedicated soley to Death Knight tips and news and it's been covering Death Knight stuff since the class first started. That means there's a lot of experience to be gleaned from the blog.

Dedbitt loves to PvP and to share news of his exploits and setup: "This setup gives me a bit more resilience than the arena death knights have, the average health, the low end of the average attack power (not bad for all solo gear), just a bit below average crit (I made it my weakest stat since it is the least valuable), and of course I’m hit capped and have all the spell penetration I need. Playing my last couple of games with this setup I did note my damage was better while my survivability was about the same, even though I had less health and resilience than before."

You can also find info on Ulduar weapons: "There was a request made to go over Ulduar weapons for tanking death knights. Since there still are no two-handed tanking specific weapons I figured no one would mind if I went over Ulduar weapons for tanking and DPS."

Dedbitt seems to post approximately once a week. Watch out for his advice in the blog roll.

The Old Republic - comic update

If you haven't seen this already, on the official SWTOR.com website, they have an online comic book which introduces the TOR story. If you're a comic book fan, or interested in what this world is going to be like, this is a must read. We're now up to issue 12, published late last week. Here's the link to the first page of the first edition.

The game itself is stylized and looks a lot like a comic book, so presenting the story in this fashion is a perfect way to get you into the feel of the world. This is probably one of the mistakes they made over at Star Wars Galaxies. When it first came out, the realistic looking characters were a real buzz to play with, they soon got dated and even updates to shadowing could not save the graphics from looking tired. The stylized universe presented in WoW takes on a different graphical challenge and it has held up to the test of time. Let's hope the graphics in TOR also endure.

Priest class left hanging with patch 3.2 changes?

If you look carefully at the patch 3.2 release notes you'll find a list of small changes, to spells. It seems that healers are getting a bit of the nerfbat, although shadow seems to be getting a bit of a boost. I would love to see shadow priests up there holding their own in DPS. Definitely much needed changes. Here they are:

Prayer of Healing: The percentage of spell power this spell gains in healing (per target) has been reduced from 80.7% to 52.6%.
Psychic Horror: This spell no longer has an invisible missile, so there is no travel time before the spell takes effect.

Talents
Discipline
Penance: Cooldown increased to 12 seconds, up from 10 seconds.

Holy
Inspiration: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target's armor.

Shadow
Dispersion: Cooldown reduced to 2 minutes, down from 3 minutes.
Improved Mind Blast: Redesigned. Now, in addition to reducing the cooldown of your Mind Blast spell by .5/1/1.5/2/2.5 seconds, while in Shadowform your Mind Blast also has a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to reduce all healing done to the target by 20% for 10 seconds.
Vampiric Touch: The amount of damage done when this spell is dispelled has been doubled.

Let's hope that Blizzard finally release a Q&A for the class, however. Rogue and Priest are still left off the list! Has this got to do with priority, I mean Rogues and priests are the least common players in my guild!? I'd love to see more players in these classes though. Mmmmm ... stam buff.

Getting ready for patch 3.2

Blizzard have put together a great post, summarizing all the information you need to know about patch 3.2. The question is, how close is the patch release? The fact that they've summarized it now and that the patch on the PTR servers is classified as "retail" indicates that we may see it as soon as this week. Let's have a look at some of the juicy stuff you'll need to know:

Call of Crusade Q&A

Here you'll find a Q&A with Blizzard about details on the Isle of Conquest and Crusader's Colliseum.

If you've got any questions about how the classes will be affected by the patch, check out the Q&A series about the classes.

Unlike previous patches, the raid achievements for the Epic mount reward are not being removed with this patch. Glory of the Ulduar will still be available after patch 3.2 Here's the confirmation.

Instance locks are also set to change with the patch, "to allow players to progress through content at a pace more of their choosing". With four different styles of raids to choose from, ten man, ten man heroic, 25 man and 25 man heroic, one of the biggest problems we've found with our guild is that although we've got some members who would like to do the hard mode with some bosses, there are too many others that need loot from bosses deeper into the raid. The change will mean that you'll be able to farm easy modes of the instance and still go back and challenge yourself to the hard modes without affecting the easy modes. This is one of my favorite changes coming with the patch.

We warned you a couple of weeks back to stock up on badges. The Emblem system is changing and for all the details from Blizzard feast your eyes here.

There are more minor changes, like the Druid changes which we talked about on Druid Gaming Faces already. Get ready for some sexy cats!

For links to the official Blizzard word on these changes and others with patch 3.2, head on over to the main page of Worldofwarcraft.com today.

As a guild and raid leader, it's now my job to tweak our EPGP system and study the boss strategies before we make our first attempts in coming weeks. This is perfect timing for us, being a casual guild, as we've just got to the stage of farming Ulduar and sharding a lot of loot. It's going to be awesome to get into some new gear.

Q&A: Crusaders’ Coliseum and Isle of Conquest. A blue post at MMO Champ

"Q: What are the planned item levels for the gear that drops in each of the new Coliseum instances and how will the gear differentiate from one instance to another?

Development Team: Trial of the Champion will drop item level 200 and 213 items in the normal and Heroic modes respectively; Trial of the Crusader (10-player) will drop item level 232 items; Trial of the Grand Crusader (10-player) and Trial of the Crusader (25-player) will drop item level 245 items; Trial of the Grand Crusader (25-player) will drop item level 258 items. For those working through a tribute run, there might also just be a surprise or two in the chest at the end??? if you have what it takes to master this run. "

Other questions that are asked and answered were:

Q: Will there be any kind of reputation and titles associated with the Coliseum and will there be a 310% mount meta-achievement reward?

Q: How will achievements work for Trial of the Crusader and Trial of the Grand Crusader, and will there be four different types of achievements to be completed?

Q: Do we have plans for the Argent Warhorses in Trial of the Champion to scale based on characters’ gear (similar to the Oculus and Ulduar vehicles)?

Q: Given that average match lengths continue to fluctuate on the test realms as adjustments are made to specific mechanics, what do you feel would be a satisfactory length for the average Isle of Conquest battle and why?

It's great stuff and a must read for any end game player! Read it all here: Live from MMO-Champion.