Now the fine folks at WoWhead have released something I’ve been dying for for a long time now, an easy way to compare two items that isn’t somewhat busted like Blizzard’s own “Find an Upgrade” feature on the Armory is. WoWhead’s Item Comparison Tool allows you to distinctly compare two items, multiple items, or even item sets against one another to see which is superior in the areas that matter to you.

See above? That’s where I’m comparing the Season 2 hunter PVP set against the Tier 4 hunter PvE set to see the differences. The tool couldn’t be easier to use - simply click to add an item and type in the name of the item or the item set to add it to the tool and get instant results. Never again will you have to go wondering if a specific item is an upgrade or not…unless that is, unless you’re in-game and have to make a snap decision once it’s dropped. Roll on it and decide later, I say! It’d be cool though if a tool like this came in the form of an add-on (are you listening, add-on developers?)!

Thanks much to one of my favorite WoW bloggers, Big Red Kitty for breaking the story!

The news you’ve all been waiting for (hopefully) has finally arrived! Blizzard has finally announced the release date for Wrath of the Lich King! They’ve also announced that there will indeed be a Collector’s Edition, and pricing information for both versions of the expansion!

The regular version of Wrath will run you $40 USD, and the collector’s edition will cost $70 USD.

What makes the collector’s edition (shown here) so special? Check it out:

* World of Warcraft: The Wrath of the Lich King on DVD-ROM.
* The Art of World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King, a 208-page book featuring never-before-seen images from the game.
* An exclusive in-game pet: Frosty, the baby frost wyrm.
* A behind-the-scenes DVD containing over an hour of developer interviews, the Wrath of the Lich King intro cinematic with director’s commentary, and more.
* The official soundtrack CD, containing 21 epic tracks from the game, along with exclusive bonus tracks.
* A mouse pad featuring a map of the newly opened continent of Northrend.
* Two World of Warcraft Trading Card Game March of the Legion™ starter decks, along with two exclusive cards available only in the Collector’s Edition.

I’ll certainly be trying to get the collector’s edition, but the regular edition is already available for pre-order at a number of online retailers if you want to stake your claim early! Head over to the official site for details!

If you’re like me, you have a ton of webcomics that you read on a regular basis. If you’re really like me, you have enough that it makes your friends wonder how you get any work done during the day if you keep up with them daily.

Unfortunately, of all of my webcomics, only a half-dozen of them or so pertain to World of Warcraft. Now, thanks to the fine folks over at WoWWiki, I can find way more than I ever wanted, thanks to their list of WoW-Related Webcomics, and so can you! Go forth and swell your bookmarks list!

Some of my favorites? I loved Hammar of Grammar before it died and the domain expired, I still love By Way of Booty Bay, Adventurs of Blanc, Manic Graffiti (Anya’s art is fantastic, and Dark Legacy Comics. Some of my faves thataren’t on the list are Ding! (of PvP’s Scott Kurtz, shown above), Get Buffed, and Teh Gladiators. Enjoy!

So I’ve been playing the Wrath beta for about a week or so now, and disconnects and server drops aside, it’s pretty impressive, and very immersive. Granted, I’m not terribly far along in the content, but I think I’ve earned the right to share some experiences from the beta thus far. I copied over my 70 NE Hunter, so don’t mind if a number of my impressions are from the Alliance-side. More details below the jump.

Look and Feel

First of all, playing in Northrend is so immersive that in some ways it’s difficult to remember that you can still travel to Kalimdor, Eastern Kingdoms, and Outland. Admittedly, the terrain is vastly different and interesting to run through, but the critters and creatures are definitely Azerothian; the game definitely has an earthier feel than Burning Crusade did - whereas in BC you were obviously traveling to another world where the heat of battle could be seen the moment you arrived, landing in Valiance Keep yields a different feel. First of all, getting off the boat at Valiance Keep really does feel like you’re in a salty old port, walking off the boat to a foreign-yet-familiar land that’s bustling with activity.

The inn is right off to the side as soon as a you arrive, and if your experience is anything like the beta, there are people running to and fro everywhere, both players looking for new missions, heading into the inn, or turning in quests, as well as NPCs who are lining up to join the Northrend offensive and looking to put their skills to work for the cause. All it takes is a quick trip outside of the Keep gates to understand that yet again however, everything you know is under attack by the scourge, who are scrabbling at the gates of the Keep. Guess what your first missions are. That’s right- cut down those scourge and trim their numbers.

Aside from the immediate feel, the terrain in Borean Tundra (the first zone when you get to Northrend) changes dramatically depending on where you are, moreso than any other part of Azeroth. To the north, you’ll see charred rock and pools of boiling water and oil rushing up from the earth, in the interior of the tundra you’ll find lush plains and green lands teeming with wildlife, and all along the rim of the tundra you’ll find ice floes, icebergs, steep cliffs, and lots and lots of snow and ice.

Questing and Leveling

The quests around the area are interesting and engaging, and it won’t take long for you to face new enemies, meet new friends and allies, take on some really really fun quests, start grinding rep with the Kirin Tor, and yes, dig through some more poop.

Perhaps one of the craziest feelings so far is actually leveling. All of the major quests yield around 20k experience, and watching your experience bar return and slowly rise is definitely a change in your state of mind. The other incentive to progress and keep doing things comes in the form of Achievements, which you earn by completing specific objectives like completing a certain number or type of quests, collecting a given amount of a specific item, earning a certain amount of gold, and so on. For example, you can earn an achievement just by using the Barbershop to change your character’s appearance, and there’s another for completing all of the quests offered by the Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals (DEHTA) at their camp in the middle of the tundra.

Phat Lewts

If you’re a decked out 70 rocking purples from raids and badge loot, you won’t think too much of most of the gear that you’ll collect from your first batch of quest chains in Northrend, but the one thing I picked up from examining the gear closely is that it’s actually not bad gear and if you’re a level 70 whose objective is to get decent enough green gear to get into level 70 instances and keep progressing towards 80, the goods will be pretty solid upgrades. This means that you won’t have the Burning Crusade effect where 60s in epics ditch them wholesale for greens that drop off of trash mobs right outside of the Dark Portal - a level 70 wearing the good stuff will be solid for a good long while in Northrend before they start seeing significant upgrades.

One strange thing I noticed about the gear in Northrend so far however is that there’s a lot of focus on stamina as the only stat on the item and item traits to make up the lack of other stats. For example, rather than putting agility on a number of obviously-Hunter quest rewards, you’ll see relatively high stamina on the item (I mean +30 - +45 sta), and attack power or critical strike or haste buffs on the item instead. That’s the other thing that threw me for a loop, the fact that a lot of the gear in Northrend focuses a lot on haste. Maybe Blizzard has a plan, and stamina and haste will suddenly become more important than they are now.

Closure

All in all, my experiences in the beta so far have proven beyond a shadow that at the very least Blizzard has some fresh and interesting content up its sleeves. The quest themes in a lot of ways are recycled: kill x number of this, collect y number of that, kill these little guys and then go back and kill their leader, but the chains are a bit more linear, rewarding, and definitely doable right after one another. That essentially means you can do the whole chain and get the good loot instead of stopping at the last mob you have to kill, leaving to level up, and then coming back later to finish it off.

Aside from that though, everything from the new element of lore to explore to the terrain you’ll see, the NPCs you encounter (like the Tuskarr (Alliance allies) and the Taunka (Horde allies)), the mobs you’ll fight (the Vrykul, for example) feel fresh interesting enough to keep me from actually playing my live characters. Which isn’t as much of a problem as you might think - the beta servers disconnect and go belly up enough that when they’re down they’re down long enough to get a good AV in on a live server.

So what do you think? Looking forward to the beta? Have any questions you’d like me to try and answer? Let us know in the comments and I’ll see what I can find out!

This isn’t a huge surprise; they did the same thing before Burning Crusade, but the fact that they’re making the announcement now and that most people are predicting that the patch will land on the PTR (Patch Test Realms) any week now means that Wrath might be closer than we all think!

The new patch is supposed to include a lot of the new content that’s already available in the beta that Blizzard developers already have mostly hammered down, including:

• New talent trees (including 51 point talents!)
• New zepplin towers (Horde) and Stormwind Harbor (Alliance) for travel to Northrend
• 2 new arenas
• The hunter pet skill revamp (talent trees for pets)
• Built-in guild calendar (making the Group Calendar add-on obsolete)
• Barbershops in capital cities (Night Elf Mohawk anyone?)
• New skill: Inscription
• New class spells and talents

Pretty slick, eh? Looks like slowly but surely Blizzard is implimenting the new content that will bring some players who have been anxiously waiting for new content back to the game and prime the pump for Wrath. Also, expect another hot steamy world event right before Wrath, just like we had the Scourge Invasion before Burning Crusade!

In case you guys missed it (and I can’t believe you would), Blizzard released the official cinematic for the Wrath of the Lich King expansion, coming later this year.

Oh Arthas, we heart you in all of your blue melodramatic emoness.

To watch the trailer, head over to the official World of Warcraft site: here!

How could I say no?

Don’t worry, before you guys get out the torches and the pitchforks and find out where I live, I’ll share the spoils with you. I’ve been eager to get in for a while now, and it’s just luck of the draw that I did.

So! That being said, expect screenshots, thoughts, experiences, and more - and maybe, just maybe, I can answer some questions about the beta as if I were a real authoritative source! Sound good? Let’s go.

i am murloc!

Consider myself the kindly keeper of the murloc beat or something like that, but when a friend passed along a post at WoW Insider explaining that Play.com (UK) is selling pre-orders for Murloc plushies (to be shipped in September), I was thrilled.

Sure the little buggers are going for £24.99 ($47.43 USD at today’s rate), but they talk! Play.com claims “the Murloc speak a dialect of ‘Nerglish’ (aka Murloc) and this plush utters phrases in this language!” Still, I’m not sure how many different ways the little guy can say “mrrrgllgrrlggllrrrgllrgll.”

The NDA around the Wrath of the Lich King alpha has finally been lifted, and screenshots, loot, and other information about the alpha has been flooding out. Add to that the fact that beta invitations have finally started to flow, and you”ve got a virtual tsunami of information around the upcoming expansion, which of course, is all good.

Full talent trees have been published in a number of places, as I previously mentioned, and talent trees for Hunters and Mages have been updated and included as well. The end-talents planning for WoTLK are pretty impressive, I have to say, but they’re all subject to change at any time.

The fine folks over at MMO Champion have been collecting tons and tons of information about the beta, including screenshots of the new Dalaran - which is essentially a hole in the ground where it used to be and now hovering over a new zone in Northrend called The Dragonblight, and will serve as the expansion’s new multi-faction capital city, much like Shattrath is to Burning Crusade.

You can check out the new talent calculators, set up your own test builds, view screenshots of most of the new zones as they stand now, look into some of the new dungeons, and even check out some of the confirmed loot that’s dropped in the beta. Enjoy!

Thanks to the fine folks at WoW Insider, word came out this past week that Wowhead has taken the wraps off of some proposed talent calculators to be included in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.

The new talent calculators include the new Death Knight hero class, and all of the added talents to support talent points players will get as they grind to level 80. Unfortunately talent trees for hunters and paladins aren’t available yet, and all of the data is subject to change. So while it’s definitely fun to see how my warrior might turn out, or what I’ll be able to do with a Death Knight, it’s more than likely that Blizzard will change all of the information around before the expansion is complete.

Even so, Wowhead got the information straight from Blizzard at the Blizzard Worldwide Invitational, so the information is bona fide for the time being. It’s fun seeing what the people working on the game are thinking about adding to the class talent trees, even if I can’t find out what’ll happen to my poor hunter main. Try it out, and if you have any awesome builds for the expansion, let us hear it in the comments!