A New build has just been pushed to the PTR. There's been some changes to Mage and Warlock talents according to World of Raids, including an addition of up to a 10% cast time reduction on Incinerate from the Warlock's Emberstorm Talent, the changing of the Mage Icy Veins talent to add 100% pushback resistance instead of 10% more chance for chilling effects to freeze the enemy, and a reduced chance to be hit for up to 4 seconds from the Mage Improved Blink talent.

[View Remaining 2 Paragraphs]

V'Ming - who thinks that gnome warlocks are travesties of nature and need to be KOSed - shares thoughts and ideas on becoming deadlier at the Arenas. He also dabbles in the dark arts in Blood Pact.

Looking at some of the upcoming class changes in patch 2.4, I can't help but feel that many of them are driven by PvP - particularly Arena - issues. Blizzard is undoubtedly trying to level the playing field for the classes before the 3v3 Arena Tournament, tentatively set to begin in April. That's a very short time to iron out problems and further imbalances that the patch will bring.

[Expand 4 Paragraphs]

The PTRs have been updated with a new build (7.6mb), it includes some pve changes announced by Tigole and some other changes.

Undocumented Changes

[Expand 2 Paragraphs]

Some players on the World of Warcraft Public Test Realm (PTR) have found that the pitlord Brutallus, one of the raid bosses in the game, needs to be nerfed. The problem seems to come from the Burn skill which ticks at about 4,000 damage per second.

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

This week's Insider Trader rounds up some of our favorite professions-related add-ons – and more importantly, it's a spot to share your favorites. I've learned that no matter how much time you spend poring over add-on sites and forum threads, as soon as you mention your latest cool find to a friend, he'll pop back with the name of another great new mod that you've never heard of. It's a fast-moving field, certainly.

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]

WoW Insider has obtained a copy of the "sell sheet" sent to distributors about the upcoming WoW minis game, and it contains information about pricing, pack size, and even some hints at a release date.

var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/WoW_Insider_obtains_details_on_the_upcoming_WoW_Minis_game'; Basically, the minis will become available in three different ways: there will be the core booster sets, which will contain three minis of the same Horde or Alliance faction, plus three character cards and six ability cards, and will have a suggested retail price (SRP) of $14.99 per booster. Additionally, each booster will have a chance to include an ingame Loot Card, supposedly from the Trading Card Game (there is no word if there will be loot cards specifically for the minis game), and a 1/8 chance to have an "epic" character.

[Expand 10 Paragraphs]

This is probably old news to a lot of you, but just in case you happened to join us after Burning Crusade dropped, you might not know about this magical liquid available only in the snowy wastes of Winterfall. Here's something fun that almost anyone after 55 can get.

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]

A new PTR patch is being deployed to the PTRs. This post will be updated during the next hours with all the changes.

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]

 

It seems like there's going to be a lot of complaints coming from the players in the World of Warcraft community who enjoy using melee DPS classes once they see the latest set of undocumented changes from the current 2.4 PTR build of the game.

One of these changes include the Shifting Tanzanite Unique item which was toned down from its previous 5 Strength and 4 Agility bonus to a measly 5 Agility and 6 Stamina bonus. This spells trouble for melee characters who enjoy the easy Strength bonus the item gives once equipped.

[View Remaining 4 Paragraphs]

 

The Public Test Realms in World of Warcraft will be experiencing some downtime today so don't be alarmed if you found you can't enter them. The downtime will only last for a few hours and should be up by 5 p.m. PST.

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]

DJ Steve Aoki, brother of Devon "deadly little Miho" Aoki and one of the heirs to the Benihana steak house fortune, hates World of Warcraft. Our favorite game got a weird mention in New York Magazine -- in a "21 Questions" interview with the DJ, also known as Kid Millionaire, he says that his biggest enemy is Blizzard's big MMO. Getting rid of the game, he says, has left him "much happier."

[View Remaining 1 Paragraphs]

Tomorrow afternoon, Saturday, February 23rd at 3:30pm EST on WoW Radio, we'll go live on the air yet again with our august podcast. This week, we've got myself and Turpster as usual (did you hear that he's doing something every week on Tuesday over at Massively nowadays?), and relative WI newbies Amanda Dean and Adam Holisky will be along for the ride. We'll be chatting about all those patch 2.4 changes we've seen in the past week (including the vaporous promise of Shaman buffs), what Heroic Badges are really for, what our compadre Elizabeth Harper heard at GDC, and of course we've got to get the inside story from Adam about what made him so bitter about PuGs.

[View Remaining 2 Paragraphs]

The Care and Feeding of Warriors burns from within this week. Matthew Rossi has played a lot of warriors, and this week he dedicates the column to fury warriors, the spec which seems the most basic to the rage concept, really. It's a rage bar, after all. No, not a place you go to drink rage. How would that even work, rage potion cordials? It doesn't bear thinking about.

My first warrior leveled as arms, back in the dim past before patch 1.2. It's hard to explain to people just how bad playing a warrior was back then. We didn't generate rage on blocks, parries or dodges, executes took all of your rage even if they missed, and there was a bug that caused attacks that were dodges to be calculated as misses, causing you to miss out on a ton of overpowers. Berseker stance used to grant 10% melee haste, but no one really knew what that meant. (I wonder if warriors today would trade 3% crit for 10% faster attacks?) I managed to get him to 60 mainly through instancing with friends/guildmates. (To be fair, I was ahead of most of my guild, with the exception of a couple of hunters who'd started playing before I did.) So when I created a new warrior on a new server to play with some real life friends, I wanted to do things differently.

[Expand 1 Paragraphs]

Gamers on the Street logs onto U.S. servers to get the word from the front on what's going on in and around the World of Warcraft.

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]

 

Right after Peter Moore took the reins at Electronic Arts, he's been gung-ho to take the publishing giant's EA Sports label on a global level. He's even planning to expand the EA division outside the borders of video gaming.

Just how grand are Moore's plans for EA Sports? Enough to claim that fellow industry giant Activision-Blizzard can't compete with them. Quite a statement to say against the company that brought us the Guitar Hero franchise, which generated US 1 billion in 26 months.

[View Remaining 5 Paragraphs]

Voodooray has been a busy guy this week. Fresh off the success of Voyage comes lolwowcats, a condensed history of WoW ... illustrated with lolcats. I'm not much of a fan of captioned kittens, but I know that they have a devoted fanbase, so here you go!

[View Remaining 2 Paragraphs]

World of Warcraft's European site has posted a new page of their FAQ aiming to describe the effects and consequences of third party gold selling, also known as RMT (Real Money Trade or Real Money Transactions). There doesn't seem to be a similar page added to the American site yet, but we've seen enough to know very well that they disapprove as well.

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]

There are many kinds of love, and it seems that fan artist and MMORPG World of Warcraft player Diana Mezzina sought to express one particular form of it through her WoW fanart.

Blizzard blue poster Vaneras featured the said art on the European World of Warcraft forums. Entitled "Tagren the Hunter," the artwork features the bond between a blood elf hunter and his pet raptor.

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]

Gravedancer of the Runetotem server has started a thread that has been at times both amusing and horrifying on a subject that's near and dear to the hearts of many players: the pitfalls of Heroic PuGs. Now, I generally just run dungeons with guild groups, but every once in a while no-one's really interested, and I really need 4 or 5 more badges so I can get that one last piece of badge gear before the raid this weekend, and I find myself opening the LFG tool. So yes, I can sympathize too.

So what makes WoW players cringe to see when they join a PuG for a heroic dungeon?

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]

 

It may be months before World of Warcraft's Midsummer Fire Festival is underway in the public servers, but the PTR guys are getting quite a head start. Blizzard blue poster announced over at the forums that a revamped version of this holiday has been activated.

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]

Tipster Aikiwoce points out something intriguing on the PTR for alchemists and jewelcrafters. We've already said some things about Razorthorn Rise and the the new daily quest from the unlocking of the Harbor Phase of the Sunwell dailies that sends you there, but here's a bit more information for you. It is given by an NPC named Mar'nah, an alchemist who needs the roots from the quest to "get started" on her efforts to assist the offensive. Another NPC standing next to her, a Draenei named Shaani who is marked as a jewelcrafting supplier but currently has nothing to sell, says that she believes that once Mar'nah's laboratory is complete, they "will be able create gems that were thought to be lost to time."

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]

For those testing out the upcoming World of Warcraft patch 2.4, here's an announcement from Blizzard poster Tigole (a.k.a. Jeffrey Kaplan). The Sunwell raid will be disabled temporarily until the next the Public Test Realm patch goes live.

[View Remaining 3 Paragraphs]