Rep Vendor and Badge Vendor



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MMO-Champion reports that their sources have uncovered some news about loot in 2.4. In non-Sunwell news, recipes for upgraded versions of all the various BoP goggles have been found. Mostly, the recipes require large amounts of elemental primals, some khorium, and primal nethers. A peace offering for the recent Rocket Boots Xtreme change, perhaps?

We also have names for what appears to be the PvP armor that will be purchasable off of reputation vendors. They're all called "Battlegear," but we're seeing some familiar prefixes, such as "Kodohide" and "Dragonhide" for the Druids, and "Ornamented" for the Paladins.

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We have some more info straight from World of Raids regarding patch 2.4. This time, we're digging into the spell tables. As a warning, some of these might be spoilers for the Sunwell Plateau raid zone, so read at your own risk. Also, when you come across any funky numbers and symbols in these, keep in mind that you don't often get to see the values for these things until you run into them in-game. You'll get the gist of what they do from their descriptions, though.

First, we have a duo of spells referencing Anveena:

• Sacrifice of Anveena - Anveena sacrifices herself, causing Kil'jaeden to take $s1% increased Holy damage.
• Anveena's Prison - A field of Arcane power traps Anveena.

So it seems that during the last battle of the Sunwell Plateau, we will have an NPC on our side, similar to the Illidan encounter.

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Last week, the undead frost wyrm of Northrend, Sapphiron squared off against the Troll god of Zul'Gurub, Hakkar the Soulflayer in a neutral arena to see who is the top boss. Did the Blue Dragon freeze out the competition or did the Faceless One slither into victory?

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The long-awaited patch notes for World of Warcraft's 2.4 PTR is now here! Blizzard has been teasing us with hints, notes excerpts and little tidbits here and there, but the long wait is finally over.

The patch notes for PTR 2.4 came little less than a month after Blizzard announced that they've started compiling info for it. After that announcement they also released a consolidated list of changes to the UI.

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World of Raids has been releasing information by the bucket loads, and one intriguing little morsel has caught our eye: The addition of four new bag types, marked "Leatherworking Supplies," "Soulbound Equipment," "Vanity Pets," and a fourth one simply marked "Unused."

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Quote from Blizzard staffThere are some changes coming to WSG in patch 2.4. The patch will be on the PTR very soon. Please be sure to check out Warsong once the PTR is up.

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Last week CNN ran an editorial story about online game addictions. Its the typical story about how bad online games can be, and how this addiction can destroy a person's life. The article itself has some good examples of this, from both Final Fantasy and World of Warcraft.

In particular, a specialist at the Illinois Institute for Addiction Recovery at Proctor Hospital, talks about a young man in his twenties. This poor fellow has lost numerous jobs, his girlfriend, and is quite the recluse since he became addicted to World of Warcraft. It's quite the unfortunate tale, and I'm sure we're all sympathetic to his plight.

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We covered the Rocket Mount announcement a earlier last month. However with the 2.4 patch notes released last night, and the test client now downloadable, we've been able to do some digging around. The mpq files have been kind to us and have given us this great animation of my warrior ridding the newest addition to the loot available from the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game, the Rocket Mount.

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I was sitting at dinner with a buddy of mine (I'll call him Zebulon), excited about the prospects of being one of WoW Insider's newest bloggers. He suggested that I should write a post on why Druid's Swift Flight Form is "OP." I thought he was just whining, so in my least empathic voice I said, "QQ more nub, you knew what you signed up for on a PvP server."

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Quote from Blizzard staffI didn't mean to give the impression (by showing why people's expectations were unfounded) that 2.4 will not include class changes. I was merely trying to understand why there was such an expectation, and then after figuring it out share with people where the disconnect lay. It obviously lay with fan sites reporting misquoted translations. That's just too many muddy hurdles for information to cross, in my opinion, and end up clean on the other side.

I didn't mean to give that impression because we're taking a different tactic in 2.4 than in previous point releases. Usually, a point release comes out, and that would be 2.2.0, 2.3.0, 2.4.0, etc. The large patches inbetween expansions. Usually those come out with a large amount of class changes, POW, lots of stuff, and throughout the PTR... those changes start to disappear, they start to turn into something else, and by the end of the PTR usually the class changes are half removed or half altered to the state of being unrecognizable from the original patch notes. Not exactly satisfying, and it really just stirs things up too much, too unnecessarily. The PTR process on these patches is very long, and over the course of the weeks or months (!) they last our minds change, our ideas change, and making huge changes out of the gate doesn't seem as appealing.

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One of the more popular dynamically generated signatures out there are provided by guild forum hosting site Guild Launch. For those that don't know about it, they provide nifty signatures to go on the bottom of your guild forum posts, and look just like the one pictured in this post. The signature updates based on the WoW Armory data provided by Blizzard. Pretty handy for showing off your stats. After all, who doesn't want to show off that their warrior has just over 16k HP unbuffed?

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Bornakk announced last night that we can expect what could be a fun change for this and future PTRs: the US, Korean, and EU servers will share test realms. We might speculate that this could be delaying the release of the PTRs despite the fact that we have the notes and the patch in hand, though it is, of course, possible that it's the problems with the live servers right now as well.

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var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/playable_web_games/New_Sunwell_map_is_discovered_for_World_of_Warcraft_Patch_2'; Thanks to Michael for alerting us to a post over at BigRedPimp's LiveJournal. He has managed to piece together a map of Sunwell Isle and the new Azeroth world map from the beta files currently available for patch 2.4. Of course, this is just beta information and may change at any time.

As far as the PTR goes, you can now download the patch files. However, when you try to copy a character you get the error message "You have no characters on Anvilmar," or what ever server you live on. This is because while the patch files are available, the server is not up yet.

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Anyone who has been playing WoW for a bit knows that this game is unique in that both adults and children can enjoy it at the same time. Indeed this duality can be considered one of the best features of the game. How often can you sit down with your son or daughter and truly enjoy the same video game? Besides the amazing adventures of Dora The Explorer, other kid friendly games like Disney Online's Toon Town and Club Penguin just don't provide the same level of enjoyment for adults and their children. (What's the game in Dora, you ask? Assisting her in finding the red berries or yelling at Swiper. See this not-safe-for-work Kevin Smith YouTube excerpt for an explanation.)

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Last December, Blizzard revealed that they will be extending the daily quest per day limit to 25 in World of Warcraft. However, news of this wasn't included in the patch notes, which got gamer Jamrock to ask in the forums if the extension pulled through.

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With the release of the latest patch notes for the 2.4.0 PTR of Blizzard's World of Warcraft, Bornakk officially announced the opening of the Public Test Realms to WoW players who want to try out all the new goodies the developers have been enticing players with lately.

As an added bonus, Bornakk also explained that the 2.4.0 PTR will be region-free, so players are free to choose which test realm they want to play on regardless of which server region they normally play. He also added that this will be a new trend that they plan to implement in future patches.

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Late last night when the 2.4 Patch Notes were circling around, Drysc responded to a lot of QQing on the class forums about lack of buffs and nerfs. In particular, many shamans were upset (most of the threads have been deleted due to offensive language). The gist of what Drysc told everyone: The patch notes are not complete. More class changes to come. Nethaera also later confirmed.

He gave us a little history lesson too. There are two types of patch notes: test realm patch notes, and live patch notes. Live patch notes reflect the changes to the live servers. Test realm patch notes reflect the changes that are on the test realm servers. Test realm patch notes are the basis for the live patch notes, but many change are made to them. As players are active on the test realm and balance issues are discovered, they tweak the patch notes. In the end, the final patch notes that went to the live servers were sometimes nothing like the test realm patch notes; a few things were added, a few things were removed. I wanted to check this out for myself so I found the old test realm patch notes for 2.2, and the live patch notes for 2.2. The following changes were made between the two different versions of the patch notes:

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The Lunar Festival is in full swing, and every once in a while Omen is no where to be found. I talked about killing him earlier in the week, but there is another strategy that's been popping up. Have you ever wondered what it's like to kite something across half a continent? Well, now's your chance!

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Recently members of my guild have been using a tool called Faster Ping to achieve better ping rates in game. My guild is a West Coast based guild, and attracts a lot of people from Hawaii and Australia, so they naturally have higher ping rates than those of us in the States. Faster Ping seems to be working wonders for them. It is not so much of an addon as it is a tool for Windows (though lots of people mistakingly call it an addon).

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Here's our weekly content from the past seven days, all wrapped up in one big post. It's a week's worth of reading, in one list full of links.

Sunday Morning Funnies: Observations
Amanda's weekly roundup of WoW funnies will make you laugh any time.

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A long time ago in a land far, far away, the boys of Oblivious Films decided that they wanted to make epic machinimas. However, Macheath had to learn Adobe Premiere Pro first. What follows is a video, Oblivious Hardcore, made about two years ago, before The Grind, their award-winning series, was created.

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Wired's games blog brings us more news from D.I.C.E., with word of a "never before seen" presentation about Blizzard's canceled games over the years. Some of the games were later released by other companies, but others... Well, if you can remember anything about them, you may be a true Blizzard fan, and we'd have to kneel in homage to you.

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The long-awaited patch notes for World of Warcraft's 2.4 PTR is now here! Blizzard has been teasing us with hints, notes excerpts and little tidbits here and there, but the long wait is finally over.

The patch notes for PTR 2.4 came little less than a month after Blizzard announced that they've started compiling info for it. After that announcement they also released a consolidated list of changes to the UI.

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Sheltem of the Scarlet Crusade server was role playing in Stormwind with his friends. Taking advantage of the Lunar Festival rewards, they stacked four Elder's Moonstones together in the same spot to create this solid shaft of light. It's so brilliant that you can neither see in nor out of it. Hmm, sounds like we have a new PvP strat to consider.

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The WoW community has wasted no time in tearing apart the patch 2.4 files in search of goodies, and goodies they have found! The patch notes themselves didn't blow me away, but this tidbit got me a little excited. The new legendary bow in the Sunwell Plateau is named Thor'idal, the Stars' Fury. It's quite impressive indeed!

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According to Drysc, the Sunwell Plateau will bring new badge loot to a vendor near you. Its too early to say what these items will be, but Drysc says the items are going to be Black Temple quality.

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There's been some talk as of late on the topic of having vanity gear in WoW, or gear that is just for looks and separate from the gear you wear for stats. It's even come up in our very own WoW Insider Show. The idea is that you have one set of gear that affects your character, and another set that is what people see. A couple other games are doing it, and mixed thoughts aside, there are rumblings of this feature possibly coming to Azeroth.

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It may not be breaking news, but you might want to be let in on the buzz. Blizzard Entertainment's CEO, Mike Morhaime - together with Rob Pardo, Senior VP of Game Design, and Frank Pearce, Executive VP of Product Development - were highlighted in DICE 08's Summerlin Ballroom event yesterday.

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Full patch notes are after the break.

Welcome to patch 2.4. There's definitely some big stuff in there. We here at WoW Insider will start poring over them now and break down what they are and what they mean. Expect tons of the news in the next few days as we get on the PTR and check everything out.

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Yeah yeah, the full patch notes are a good read, but why read those when we can pull the good stuff out? Here's what we thought was big in patch 2.4:

• Sunwell is inc! Also, the island where the Shattered Sun Offensive is fighting is called the Isle of Quel'Danas.
• There's a Keeper of Time to take players in Shattrath to the Caverns of Time
• Spell haste changes are in, as well as item casting changes (items that cast spells will do so at player's level now), and more intellect will now regenerate more mana per Spirit
• Find Treasure doesn't deactivate on death anymore, but there's nothing about Find Herbs, Find Minerals, or any of the other tracking spells
• Fear Ward usable in Shadowform (meh, say shadow priests)
• A whole host of spells that weren't penalized at lower ranks are now penalized
• Earth Shield nerfed-- mana cost lowered and charges dropped from 10 to 6, and Shamans get a default UI totem timer
• Ritual of Summoning can bring players into instances now
• Warrior Endless Rage is fixed, and now you can't change into a stance that you're currently in
• Honor instantly calculated, since there are no diminishing returns
• Warmasters and marshals in AV now share each other's health, and Horde starting point has been moved south
• WSG changes: when both flags are held for 10 mins, flag carriers take more damage, increases over time. Also, flag carriers can be tracked after holding flag for 45 seconds.
• Enchanting: Void Crystal to Large Prismatic, and Defense +15 to chest
• Rocket Boots nerf is in there-- players carrying flag in WSG will drop it when boots are activated
• 25man bosses drop more cash and an extra set token
• No attunments for Hyjal and Black Temple any more (players who've completed Attunement will get "Hand of Ad'al" title)
• Vashj and Kael can be fought without finishing all other bosses in the instance
• Undead and Mechanical can bleed, elementals not always immune to poison and disease effects (though nature-based elementals will be immune to nature poisons and effects)
• Level 70 superior quality PvP items from rep vendors
• Weightstones and sharpening stones now work while shapeshifted
• Lots of UI changes, including new options screen


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Blizzard announced the following important four lines in their 2.4 Patch Notes:

• Players will no longer require an attunement quest to enter Hyjal.
• Players will no longer require an attunement quest to enter the Black Temple.
• Players who have completed the attunement quests for Black Temple and Hyjal will be granted the title of "Hand of A'dal".
  
• You may now fight Prince Kael'thas and Lady Vashj without first killing all the other bosses in their respective dungeons.

I have to say, despite the difficulty of Vashj and Kael'Thas, I am quite surprised to find that Blizzard has removed the attunement requirements from Patch 2.4. Naxx, Blackwing Lair, and even Molten Core still require people to become attuned. Now seemingly, two of the hardest and most revered raids do not.

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