The fine folks at WoW Insider broke the news, but it looks like Blizzard is planning on a major content patch right before they release the upcoming expansion, Wrath of the Lich King.

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!

Official Notes Here

Looks like druids got hit pretty hard. What do you think?

Druids

* When the duration of “Cyclone” ends, area buffs such as “Leader of the Pack”, “Tree of Life”, and “Moonkin” will now be correctly resumed.
* “Bear Form” now grants 25% increased stamina instead of 25% increased health.
* “Dire Bear Form” now grants 25% increased stamina instead of 25% increased health. In addition, the armor bonus has been reduced from 450% to 400%.
* The multiplier on base weapon damage for “Mangle (Bear)” ability has been changed from 130% to 100%. In addition, the bonus damage has been reduced by the same ratio.
* “Savage Fury” no longer affects “Mangle (Bear)”.
* “Savage Fury” no longer applies to “Maul” or “Swipe”.
* The critical damage bonus on “Predatory Instincts” reduced from 3/6/9/12/15% to 2/4/6/8/10%.
* “Improved Leader of the Pack” can no longer get critical heals.
* The armor bonus from “Moonkin Form” has been increased from 360% to 400% (to match Dire Bear Form).
* The rage normalization equation has been adjusted to grant more rage.
(more…)

I know Burning Crusade is mere minutes from hitting the shelves and Blizzard is expecting about a billion people on the servers all at once to check out the new phat lootz but this patching is getting a little out of hand. There’s been an update almost every single day this week. And this one today seems huge. I got up early to try and get in some AV before things got too crowded and I’ve been stuck “Downloading Update” for the last hour. WTF.

UPDATE: As noted in the comments, once you get the patch downloaded you can’t login. There are several threads on the official forums with pages and pages of people bitching about this.

It’s almost time. I promised a new UI setup guide and I’ll deliver as soon as the patch is out and I can be sure stuff doesn’t break. For up-to-the minutes and some mirrors of your favorite apps, just in case Curse and WoWI go down again, come to #ktwow on irc.freenode.net, we gots the goods.

mogUI 2.0 will be completely Ace2 and have a lot of cool new macro features using the 2.0 macro system which rocks most socks in its versatility (and complexity, of course). A full UI and screenshots here, soon, or on my website.

Stopped playing for a while, after hitting a rut around level 46 with my dwarf hunter. Came back to discover a change from the patches that actually improves my play experience. On my eMac, underwater adventures were no problem. On my MacBook Pro, they were unbearable. My super-duper new graphics has an Achilles heel. A wet, dank Achilles heel inhabited by shit-eating Murlocs. I got so mad while adventuring in the Wetlands that I kicked a puppy. (Calm down — it was an evil puppy.)

Anyway. Things have changed:

Also, my new-fangled Deepdive Helmet is too swank for words. It’s the reason I got into medicine. Er, I mean, engineering.

The new patch will bring with it, I hope, a chance to run Arathi Basin on Thorium Brotherhood. As I posted earlier, one of the reasons a I chose an RP realm is because I wanted a lower population server. While this affords me the luxury of NEVER have to see “Position in Queue” on my log-in screen, it also means that takes forever to get an AB started. For some reason, even on Arathi Basin 2X honor weekends, you’d be lucky to get three or four battles in on a Saturday night. I love Arathi Basin. After today, I may finally be able to lend my demon-fuelled powers to the Defilers.

How about you, readers and authors?? Are there any unpopular battlegrounds on your servers?

This is going to be an interesting day for PvPers….

It’s that time again, everyone has issues downloading the new patch, those that don’t have issues logging on, those that struggle past those hurdles are hit in the face with several hundred addon errors which require several days to remedy as the addon sites are swamped.

I try to be patient at this time in the patching cycle and usually spend my day scrutinising the patch notes for anything that has an impact on my gameplay … Here’s what I have so far:

The good:
A number of items have had their stacking limits increased.
Key rings have been added to the game.
When a Paladin is replaced by their Evil Twin due to transporter malfunction, they can no longer revert to their normal self using divine shield.
Light’s Hope Chapel has been revamped and is now a fully functional quest hub.
New quests available in Zul’Gurub and Light’s Hope Chapel for head and leg resistance enchantments.
Dozens of new quests have been added to Light’s Hope.
Parties and Raids now can mark targets for their party/raid in the gamefield. A party leader or raid leader/assistant can right-click the portrait of their target to select a symbol to associate with that target. All players in the party/raid will see the selected symbol over the head of the target as well as on the portrait of that target.
Players can now turn on the “Target of Target” in the Raid and Party section of the interface options. When this is turned on, anytime a player is in a party or raid, it will show the portrait and health of whatever your current target has targeted.
The Group Loot/Need before Greed dialogue will now show a golden dragon border around Bind on Pickup items.
Illumination: When several critical effect healing spells are cast very quickly, you will now receive the correct mana refund for each one.
New repeatable “turn-in” quests have been added to each of the goblin cities as a vehicle to raise the player’s faction with them (while decreasing the player’s Bloodsail Buccaneer faction)

The Bad:
The Spirit of Zandalar will no longer persist through death.
Darkmoon Fair Card Twisting Nether: If you are Soulstoned, Soulstone will now always take priority over Twisting Nether’s effect.
Divine Favor: It is no longer possible to cast this immediately after a healing spell and “retroactively” make it a critical hit.

The Ugly:
There is now a new raid warning chat channel available to raid leaders and assistants. Text that is sent to this channel will appear in the center of the screen for all players in the raid.
~COUGH~ CT_RaidAssist ripoff. ~COUGH~
Raid leaders now have a Ready Check button on their raid interface. (See above).

I think this the above is real proof that Blizzard are listening and watching players gaming habits, the fact that every guild I’m aware of requires you to have the CT_RaidAssist addon is proof that WoW’s raiding interface is lacking in some respects.

Anyway, is there anything in this patch that just screams out to you? Good or bad … What are your thoughts?

You’ve been downloading it in batches all week, PTRs went offline yesterday and more than one little birdy told me to day is 1.11 day. Get ready for a day of AddOn errors! W00t!

Is it just me, or is it truly a strike of genius to release a new MOG on Blizzard’s patch day. I can’t imagine how many bored players are currently leeching the 1.1 GB download of Dark and Light. Combined with DnL’s promise of Forts (a long requested feature in WoW), Siege Engines (dito), a tiered and branched profession system, making it possible to play a crafter as one’s main char (same), and Social/Crafting/Combat individual experience progressions (now, that’s new and it remains to be see if that works), quite a few WoW players may give DnL a try, tonight. Or tomorrow, during the extended downtime.

Disclosure: I was an early advisor on DnL, I am biased.