Quote from Blizzard staffThere will be no changes to gear availability/rating requirement until Season 4 starts, which will not begin when patch 2.4 goes live.

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Boubouille from MMO-Champion has recently posted this "leaked" screenshot of Kil'jaeden in-game. According to the sender, this shot of Sunwell Plateau's final boss was leaked from a GM.

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Susana of Hyjal speculates about something I've thought about a few times before -- just what exactly are Blizzard's internal development tools like? Most games that have mapmakers can churn out new maps pretty rapidly, but we've had the same BG maps for years now, and only one or two per year since then. And even the created maps aren't fixed easily, apparently -- a few map tweaks on WSG would probably fix the turtling problem, but Blizzard instead is tweaking the rules to fix things. Just what is Blizzard using to make their game that they take so long with development?

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If you've been taking a break from playing Blizzard's World of Warcraft due to the PTR and TTR maintenance announced a couple of hours ago, then everything should be up and running again by the time you finish reading this article.

Blizzard Poster Hortus announced that around 12:28 a.m. PST the realms had to be taken down due to some updates the developers had to test out with the latest build for the 2.4 patch. Hortus came back a couple of hours later and announced that the PTR and TTR realms are now good to go.

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Every Thursday, Well Fed Buff serves up the tastiest dishes to boost your HP and stats, just in time for your weekend gaming.

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How much would you pay to be guaranteed a Zul'Aman bear mount? Five thousand gold? Ten thousand? If you're Kharmen from the European realm of Talnivarr, you reportedly paid twice that -- according to the forum thread, Kharmen paid 20,000 gold to the guild Torment to take her into Zul'Aman and get her a bear mount from the timed event rewards.

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It is time for Totem Talk to talk about totems, and the shamans who drop them, in PvP. Matthew Rossi takes his resto and enhancement shamans into PvP from time to time... the resto heals until someone decides to kill him, and then he dies because his teammates are ten yards away and could care less about him dying until they start yelling for heals while he sits in the graveyard back at the farm, which is why he prefers to play the enhancement shaman. Healing people hurts.

PvP is a sensitive subject among some shamans. Elemental shamans basically PvP with a specific talent build that allows them a large burst of damage up front (so specific that it was nearly nerfed, which would have gutted elemental as a PvP build), enhancement shamans have been complaining of mobility and dispelling issues with their abilities for some time (leading up to some as yet still intended changes for the spec in 2.4) and resto shamans heal things and get killed for it. Luckily, they've reduced the mana cost on Earth Shield, so that when it gets spell stolen or dispelled it won't cost as much mana.

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Just had to share this amazing "Tree of Life" wallpaper with you all, as seen on Resto4Life. It was commissioned by them, and done by Andrige, an artist who's created quite a few terrific WoW-related images. But man this is a great piece of work from start to finish, with a little Night Elf treeform backed up by the big Ancients in the background, all covered with that great purple Darnassian glow.

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The upcoming patch, patch 2.4, now known as The Fury of the Sunwell, revolves around... well, the Sunwell! I guess there's something in there about a huge demon by the name of Kil'jaeden, but I'm sure he's not important. Like my previous installments of Know Your Lore, I'll give a little bit of background information on our subject, so you understand the foundation of it. This bit isn't quite as exciting as my last installment or two, but this took a lot more research, and a lot more piecing together half-told bits of story from multiple authors. It's a bit like playing Connect the Dots, but instead of getting a flower or a sailboat, I get Richard Knaak flipping me off. Sorry it's so dry, but on with the show!

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Or:

"Are you sure you want to do this? Really?"

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In Blizzard's attempts to get rid of gold farmers and hackers, one of their most annoyingly persistent enemies has been the WoWGlider bot, now known as MMOGlider. They've been throwing suits and countersuits at each other for a few years now, but the latest salvo seems to have gone against Blizzard, the Game Activist reports. Blizzard was trying to subpoena Joe Thaler, owner of Lavish Software LLC, maker of programs such as EQPlayNice. While Lavish Software's programs do not appear to be cheat programs on their own, they did make a deal with MDY Industries, maker of MMOGlider, to use the programs within MMOGlider.

According the judge's decision, Blizzard was hoping to obtain all documentation related to the deal, all communication between Thaler and Lavish and MDY and its owner, Michael Donnelly. They also wanted a list of all WoW accounts owned by Thaler and Lavish, as well as the contents of the WTF folders of every installation of WOW used by Thaler and Lavish Entertainment. Unfortunately, the Judge ruled that Blizzard was demanding information that could compromise Lavish's trade secrets and client confidentiality, and that the demand for the information within 9 days did not give Thaler and Lavish enough time to respond an gather information.

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It looks like celebrities are unofficially joining in on the parody commercials. Vic Mignogna, best known as the voice of Edward Elric on the anime series, Full Metal Alchemist, is the latest to participate.

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 Warning: This article may contain spoilers. Read at your own risk.

If you've been following the adventures of Lo'Gosh and friends in the Wildstorm comic adaptation of Blizzard's World of Warcraft, don't worry. Your patient waiting will bear fruit...in less than three months. You see, issue number 8 of the comic book will go on sale on June 18, 2008.

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Rumor has it that the record for leveling from one to seventy has been broken yet again. Tosog of EU Kil'jaeden has reportedly maxed out in one day, four hours, and twenty-nine minutes. This was posted in a thread where Athene boasted a (NSFW) new video (NSFW) on how he went from 1 to 70 in 1 day 19 hours 39 minutes.

Both are inarguably amazing feats of power leveling. How did Tosog do it? Well, if you speak German, you tell me: Wie das möglich ist?


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Player Naraki of the Battle Royale guild on Trollbane decided to have a little fun on a trip to the Scarlet Monastery. Apparently these racks can be used for more than torturing the unclean. They're also good for taking a quick snooze.

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One of the biggest challenges for new rogues is figuring out the combo points/finishing move system. Sure, the combo points are easy, even though they really don't rely on "combos" per se. You hit stuff with your main move and get points. Any human, great ape, or intelligent robot could do it. But without an understanding of finishing moves, your target will die with five combo points on him and you will curse yourself for ever getting involved in this soul-sucking game.

So, to help you decide what move is appropriate when, here's a guide to the seven rogue finishers. (We'll get to openers in a couple of weeks.)

Eviscerate

• What it is: Your first finisher, and if you're like most rogues, probably your favorite. This most basic of spells does direct physical damage based on how many combo points you have.
• Mechanism: According to WoWWiki, the official damage range of Eviscerate Rank 10 is:
  Eviscerate = (Base Damage Minimum + Attack Power * (Number of Combo Points used * 0.03)) - (Base Damage Maximum + Attack Power * (Number of Combo Points used * 0.03)). Yeah, I'm bad at math too.
  So what does this mean? Well, starting in 1.12, Evis finally began scaling with AP (a change many rogues were clamoring for.) But it scales very slightly -- and the more combo points you have, the better it scales, since the AP multiplier increases with each point.
• Affected by: Improved Eviscerate, a first-tier Assassination talent, improves Evis's damage by 5/10/15%. Aggression, a sixth-tier Combat talent, improves it by 2/4/6%, along with SS and Backstab. The two-piece bonus of Tier 5 armor increases Evis's damage by 40 per combo point.
• Analysis: Sinister Strike/Eviscerate is the bread and butter of rogue leveling, particularly for combat swords/maces/fists rogues who don't spend a lot of time stunning. It's also great for grinding and finishing off opponents who have low health. However, when it comes to raiding, Evis is nearly useless. Unless the mob can't bleed (like in Kara), Rupture will always end up doing more damage than Evis, assuming the mob doesn't die before Rupture finishes ticking.


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Roadkillowns of Aerie Peak posed the question on the official forums, what is the easiest class to level? Hunter came up most frequently as an easy class to level followed by Warlocks. They usually have very little downtime. Protection Warriors and Holy Priests were often quoted as the most difficult to level.

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PTRs are up: New Build

PTRs are back online with a new build (4.06 mb), and we didn't notice any noteworthy changes (new build of combat log and some textures changes) in game files & PTR, also from what we got told it's not going to change the outcome of next week's planning :)

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Good evening ladies and gentlemen (cue the WoW Insider Show intro music). For tonight's entertainment, I present to you a fully functional PTR – complete with Sunwell Plateau and lots of goodies to play around with. Well, at least it's evening if you're up with me at 3:00 a.m. when I'm posting this.

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Drysc posted yesterday to tell us a bit about what will be forthcoming when Season 4 hits the servers. It's honestly mostly stuff we knew already. Season 4 will not begin immediately upon the release of 2.4. Season 1 will go the way of the old level 70 honor gear and disappear from vendors, Season 2 will be gained via honor, and season 3 will go down in price, while still keeping the personal rating requirement to purchase the shoulders and weapon. However, the surprising little tidbit is how little they currently plan to change the requirement. Drysc quoted a requirement of 1950 for the shoulders and 1800 for the weapon. That's a total drop of only 50 points for each item. Of course, he also stressed that this information was not final, and neither the final requirement drop on season 3 nor the start date of Season 4 had been announced yet.

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