You probably read Tigole's announcement the other day regarding the Sunwell Plateau instance (it was disabled via hotfix on the Public Test Realm), and well, here's another update regarding the bosses of the said instance. Blizzard Lead Encounter Designer Daelo dropped by the WoW Forums and made a sticky post: Brutallus will now commit suicide right after he enters the encounter.

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The Rogue in your next instance or battleground may just be a spy- not from the opposite faction, from the United States Government. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence submitted a report to Congress [Via Wired] on their plans to use data mining in virtual communities to root out spies. The project will involve sifting through vast amounts of data, looking for suspicious behavior and actions. The Intelligence Community wants to target MMOs because they typically fall outside the purview of study. The spying project would only use publicly available data. The findings of the endeavor would not be classified.


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We've mentioned it in passing, but it's considered by some to be a pretty massive change in the way Warlocks will be played in the future, and thus deserves a closer look. Life Tap will now take a certain percentage of your max hp (26% at the highest rank on the PTR currently), and give you a certain percentage of your max mana (26% at the highest rank on the PTR currently, as well). Before, it took a set amount of your max hp and gave all of it to you as mana.

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Last week, Illidan Stormrage the Betrayer, entered the arena against double threat of Ahn'Qiraj, the Twin Emperors. Did Illidan's Shear decimate the Qiraji brothers or did the Lord of the Outlands fall to the siblings' superior numbers?

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First off, I'd like to warn everyone that this post contains fairly detailed spoilers for the upcoming holiday, the Midsummer Fire Festival. If you'd like the details of the new boss to remain a surprise, this post probably isn't for you! But I know quite well that most WoW players can't stand not knowing what's what, so I'm sure many of you will continue.

As mentioned in Daniel's post a few days ago, this Festival will bring us another Headless Horseman-esque boss, complete with phat lewts. You can check it all out on the PTR right now. Found within the Slave Pens, this boss, named Lord Ahune, is another Ragnaros look-alike. As you can probably guess from his appearance alone, Ahune is another lieutenant of the Elemental Lords, like Prince Thunderaaan. Ahune is serving one of the Lords in particular: Neptulon. Is this another bit of the story of Skar'this? Time will tell!

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Many Alliance players have this impression that the Horde is constantly united, more cooperative, and generally understands how to play better than the Alliance does. Whether this is true or not is not something I myself can speak for, though I have heard my Horde friends say they have just as many clueless PvP people as the Alliance does.

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It seems like those wacky developers from Blizzard are at it again with those funny shrink rays of theirs. Or maybe not.

Just when you thought tiny Taurens running around Azeroth and the Outlands were weird, wait until you get a look at the latest size-altering bug found in the latest PTR build of Blizzard's World of Warcraft.

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If you're of the mana-using class in World of Warcraft, you probably noticed a change in the waters of Azeroth. Apparently, drinking's been nerfed; mana no longer replenishes as swiftly if you drink too fast.

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Hybrid Theory returns under the banner of column-newb Alex Ziebart. Incredibly biased opinions await you. If you are reading this, you have already been made a victim of his inability to create interesting graphics. No World of Warcraft players were harmed in the creation of the previous image, though that does not mean it won't hurt you.

When I decided on my topic for today, I was mighty excited. A fire raged within me, and my fingers flew over the keyboard as soon as I sat down at the computer. My first column! Awesome! Yes! About three paragraphs in, I realized I should probably make sure my predecessor, Jason Lotito, hadn't done the topic yet. Unfortunately, he did. Fortunately, I completely disagree with what he said in every possible way.

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A minor(but interesting) change was included in the last PTR push: The Shifting Tanzanite has had its stats changed up a bit. Previously a Strength/Agility gem, it is now Agility/Stamina, as you can see above.

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Have you ever lost a battle because you fumbled through a sequence of actions? Perhaps when trying to run from a rogue and you dropped a Stoneclaw Totem rather than the intended Earthbind Totem. Alternatively, you may have cast Frost Nova rather than Counterspell on a Warlock casting her 1.5 second Fear. Missed clicks or keystrokes have been the bane of many players. This is where the magic of macros can save you from keyboard fumbling.

Among their many uses, macros can be used to establish cast sequences, "I win" buttons and evasive action commands.

Macros are something many players have heard of, but shy away from because they require some basic scripting knowledge. For the uninitiated, macros are commands built by users to execute customized actions or action sequences. A macro, known in the Computer Science world as a macro instruction, are defined as a rule that specifies how a certain input sequence should be mapped to an output sequence. Sounds horrible, I know, so let's make it easier.

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It may seem like it didn't need to be said, but they're saying it anyway: gold buyers are financing the hacking of accounts and the selling off of people's gear. Since we at WoW Insider have seen a lot of these cases (have even had them happen to some of us) we know how profoundly irritating and even emotionally painful it can be to have all of your work on a character or characters gone in a heartbeat, much less seeing them transfered to other servers and even in some cases having their names changed. Blizzard points out power leveling services as a particular culprit in this trade, saying "Through our normal support processes and the assistance of players, we also find that many accounts that have been shared with power-leveling services are then hacked into months later, and all of the items on the account are stripped and sold off. Basically, players have paid money to these companies, sometimes large amounts, and they're then targeted by these same companies down the road."

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It looks like Fishface went a little filter-happy this weekend. He created Streamline, a short music video based on the Pendulum song by the same name. As Baron Soosdon said on the video page, it would be a lot better if the cuts were in sync with the music. In addition, the L70ETC band didn't really fit in with the type of music that he used.

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Recently on the forums there have been a number of threads popping up wondering what the average tank's situation is going to look like, gear-wise, after patch 2.4 hits. Assuming you won't be raiding Sunwell Plateau anytime soon, the new 5-man dungeon Magister's Terrace is the obvious choice for new loot drops if you're raising a Warrior, Druid, or Paladin whose primary responsibility will be tanking. My guild is raiding Tier 6 at this point, but I have to admit: 5-mans are still my favorite part of the game and I've been looking forward to seeing Magister's Terrace more than anything else. But after running across a now-departed forum thread complaining that it was going to be even more difficult than usual pugging a tank for a dungeon where virtually no tanking loot drops, it occurred to me that spoiling myself a little with a look through the known drops might be in order, especially as I had heard rumors of a truly amazing drop.

Well, it turns out the forum poster was right. Sort of. Thankfully, so were the rumors.

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You've probably seen plenty of screenshots of the floating islands of Nagrand, but this one stands out among the others. Look closer and you'll see something a little different embedded in the side: a fossil of...what? Player Sin of Alexstrasza who sent us the shot suggests perhaps ancient flying clefthoof. What do you think?

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I've met some really cool people playing World of Warcraft. With the exception of a small handful of my RL friends, most of them are just friendly voices on Ventrilo. I had the opportunity to hang out with a guildie last spring. It was an awesome time.

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World of Raids has discovered something hiding in the latest patch build: All the epic gem cut recipes from current 25 mans will now be available from the Shattered Sun Offensive at various reputation levels.

While no vendor has been found for them, the most likely candidate would seem be Shaani, one of the new NPCs we mentioned yesterday. In fact, I would call this even further evidence for the likelihood of epic gem transmutes from the lab set up by Mar'nah from the Razorthorn Rise daily, also mentioned in that article. Certainly, if casuals will be able to learn epic gem cuts from a daily grind reputation, it would make sense that they'd also be able to obtain epic gems to cut from somewhere other than the AH. It really does seem like Blizzard is preparing for Wrath of the Lich King with this patch, giving more and more opportunities for the casual player to catch up so they can start the expansion on a much more equal footing with the raiding player than they did for the Burning Crusade.

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 We know that Blizzard wants their fans to get the most out of the BlizzCast. They're dedicated to it, so much so that they're doubling the length of the actual show.

Of course, to extend the length of any show, one needs content, and that's something that only the gracious fans of Blizzard can provide.

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Just because players do it doesn't mean that Blizzard approves of it. In fact, the company behind World of Warcraft has released an official statement regarding the its stance on gold-buying and paid power-leveling services in their MMORPG.

According to Blizzard, companies which sell WoW gold to players actually steal the gold from players - that is, the companies hack into players accounts, grab the loot and then sell them to other players for a fee. Apparently, these are the very same accounts that players entrusted to power-leveling services in the past.

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It looks like there's some good news for Black Temple and Zul'Aman raiders out there. Tigole has announced that a hotfix will be applied to live realms that should keep a bug from occurring during the Mother Shahraz and Nalorakk encounters.

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World of Raids has discovered something hiding in the latest patch build: All the epic gem cut recipes from current 25 mans will now be available from the Shattered Sun Offensive at various reputation levels. No vendor has been found for them. The most likely candidate as a future vendor of these recipes would be Shaani, the new NPC we mentioned yesterday. In fact, I would call this even further evidence for the likelihood of epic gem transmutes from the lab set up by Mar'nah from the Razorthorn Rise daily, also mentioned in that article. Certainly, if casuals will be able to learn epic gem cuts from a daily grind reputation, it would make sense that they'd also be able to obtain epic gems to cut from somewhere other than the AH. It really does seem like Blizzard is preparing for Wrath of the Lich King with this patch, giving more and more opportunities for the casual player to catch up so they can start the expansion on a much more equal footing with the raiding player than they did for the Burning Crusade.

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Folks at the World of Warcraft Public Test Realms were a bit surprised when they logged in earlier. Why? Well, there's currently a bug in the PTR that's pretty hard to miss. Small Tauren and giant pets are running around Azeroth and Outland.

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