Hotfix: Legplates of Conquest
Quote from: Dresorull (Source)We recently made a change to the sell value and disenchant materials obtained from Legplates of Conquest. The material costs used to create this item were unintentionally low, and we were prompted to make changes to minimize the impact on the game's economy.

Official Patch Notes Update
The official patch notes have been updated once again. Below are the new changes, additions to existing changes have a different color.
Quote from Blizzard staffGeneral

• Due to significant talent tree revisions, all players will have their talent points reimbursed. Several new spells and abilities have been added for select classes. Players will need to visit their class trainer to learn new spells.
• The Argent Tournament, a permanent in-game event, has come to Icecrown. Players interested in taking part in this event should visit the Argent Pavilion located on the west side of the tournament grounds. Features include:
• New ways of gaining reputation with capital cities.
• All new daily quests, achievements and titles.
• New rare and epic items, tabards, pets, banners, faction shirts and mounts.
• Mounted combat, and much more to come!


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D&D co-creator Dave Arneson passed away earlier this week. While you might not have played D&D, know that he and the late Gary Gygax were the pioneers of this genre of games. I would not be surprised to hear from Blizzard on this in the upcoming days.

On a personal note, I ran into him around the age of 10 while in a St. Paul, Minnesota comic book store (Schinders, for those of you wondering). I was looking at Magic cards mainly, but he was browsing around and came over and talked with me when he saw I had turned my attention to one of the D&D 2e books. The clerk later told me as I was checking out who he was.

• Mystic Chicanery gives a good step-by-step guide on how to make voice overs for WoW movies.
• Teeth And Claws has a nice discussion looking at a feral raiding spec for patch 3.1.
• Derevka of Tales of a Priest has a very good rundown of the Acutioneer add-on. We've covered it a few times as well.
• Our own Matticus has thoughts... about Val'Anyr and "stuff."


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Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW Insider's series of fantasy death matches. This season's bosses come from the five-man instances of Wrath of the Lich King.

Ever want to throw two bosses into the ring simply because they've both annoyed you? This week's Two Bosses Enter deathmatch strikes me a little that way: Svala Sorrowgrave of Utgarde Pinnacle vs. The Prophet Tharon'ja of Drak'tharon Keep. As much as I constantly urge readers to keep real-game play experiences out of the debate, I have to confess to mentally categorizing both these bosses under the "ZOMG, not this fight again..." section in the Annoying Speed Bump category.

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Hotfix: Legplates of Conquest

Quote from: Zarhym (Source)

We recently made a change to the sell value and disenchant materials obtained from Legplates of Conquest. The material costs used to create this item were unintentionally low, and we were prompted to make changes to minimize the impact on the game's economy.

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Blizzard has once again updated the PTR patch notes for patch 3.1. As usual, none of the changes here will be a surprise to you if you've been following all the action, but for the sake of completeness, I'm going to list them here anyway. Many commenters requested last time if they could just see what's changed between this and the previous patch notes, so that's what I have for you tonight. These are just the new things in tonight's patch notes revision. If you want to see the latest PTR patch notes in full, head over to the Blizzard PTR forums.

• • Due to significant talent tree revisions, all players will have their talent points reimbursed. Several new spells and abilities have been added for select classes. Players will need to visit their class trainer to learn new spells.
  • The Argent Tournament, a permanent in-game event, has come to Icecrown. Players interested in taking part in this event should visit the Argent Pavilion located on the west side of the tournament grounds. Features include:
  • New ways of gaining reputation with capital cities.
  • All new daily quests, achievements and titles.
  • New rare and epic items, tabards, pets, banners, faction shirts and mounts.
  • Mounted combat, and much more to come!
  
  
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Not only did Blizzard clean up at the MI6 awards (and yes, that's not to be confused with the British Intelligence Agency that some dude named Bond works for), but their partners at Massive also gave a presentation there. Who's Massive, you ask? You may not know their name, but you've already seen their work: they're the company, related to Microsoft, that Blizzard has hired to run their ingame and in-software ads.

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Here's an interesting bit of info from the Nielsen folks: over 400,000 women are playing World of Warcraft in the US, which means it's the most-played "core" game for that gender. And even more interesting, females 25 years or older make up the largest block of PC game players overall, and they account for 54.6% of all gameplay minutes in December of last year. Girls don't just play WoW -- they're quickly becoming one of it's main demographics.

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Our resident Inscription expert recently made us aware of an interesting correlation between the Darkmoon Faire’s arrival in town and the prices of the various Darkmoon cards and materials required to make them. It would seem that the prices of Northrend herbs and Snowfall Ink all rise slightly when the faire is in available in town. Our scribe reasons that this is due to the increase in players trying to complete their decks for turn-in while the faire is passing through rather than waiting another month for the Darkmoon boys to come around again. We decided to test this theory and, sure enough, all three test servers showed an increase in herb and ink prices. The increase was modest but consistent (and frankly, as dedicated finance wonks, we’ll take reliable profit over huge profit any day).

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Vaneras has gone and clarified these questions and more, in a FAQ post on the European forums. I'll try to distill the information that I found useful into a few bullet points.

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Medievaldragon has all the results from the recent MI6 marketing conference (where Blizzard was nominated for a number of awards), and apparently it's a clean sweep: Blizzard won in all six awards they were nominated in. Pretty impressive -- they won for overall marketing on Wrath of the Lich King (which seemed like a tough category for them), best product packaging for the expansion and best product logo for Diablo III, as well as two awards for their TV campaign, including best writing on the Ozzy Osbourne commercial.

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Blizzard announced a brand new contest yesterday, and it's quite possibly their most simple contest yet. Read an excerpt from Arthas: Rise of the Lich King, answer three questions about what you read to enter the contest, and then you're given a chance to win a collector's edition of the Arthas novel. Pretty sweet and, as I said, really easy to enter.

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Good afternoon, ladies and gents! Let's waste no time and jump right in today, shall we?

Horris asked...

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I guess I'm gambling that the patch won't be next week. Because there's no way I can cover all the gear available for shamans in 3.1 (both set and otherwise) for three specs in anything like two weeks of this column. In addition to discussing sets for resto, elemental and enhancement there's quite a lot of non-set gear to discuss, rings, trinkets, and so on. We know that Flametongue Weapon will be changed to reassert the superiority of the slow/slow combo for enhancement, for instance, so there's also weapons to discuss. Since I know that's not possible for me to cover in one column and probably not in two, we'll just take it as it goes. This week, we'll discuss the Tier 8 sets from Ulduar 10 and 25, the Valorous and Conqueror's Worldbreaker sets. As is usual for shamans, it comes in Battlegear for Enhancement, Garb for Elemental and Regalia for Restoration. As was the case for Tier 7, the 10 and 25 man sets have the same set bonuses and will work with each other, so if you have two pieces of Tier 8 from 10 man raids and 2 pieces from 25, you'll get both set bonuses.

First up, let's look at the Conqueror's and Valorous Worldbreaker Battlegear.

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We are, unfortunately, late in awarding our first ever Guild of the Month winner, but we've got a good reason: when we contacted Nytrok, the guildmaster, he was away in France for the 60th anniversary of NATO, and as an Air Force Corporal in the Canadian Forces, was meeting with the Prime Minister and Chief of Defense Staff. Very impressive! But fortunately, he found the time to send us some information about the guild, and we're glad to award him and | The Holy Crusade | of Bleeding Hollow our first Guild of the Month.

For winning, they'll recieve not only a profile right here in this post (check after the break to see why we chose them as winners this month), but also a raid pack from Swagdog.com, which includes a big stack of custom-made guild apparel for them to distribute among their guildies and officers as they see fit. If you didn't win but still want to show some guild pride, Swagdog has hats and t-shirts that can be emblazoned with your guild's name and tabard, as well as your character's name and class logo. Huge thanks to them for sponsoring our content.

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Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW Insider's series of fantasy death matches. This season's bosses come from the five-man instances of Wrath of the Lich King.

Ionar electrocuted Ichoron in the ring to emerge victorious in this week's fantasy boss deathmatch. The electricity vs. water matchup evoked theories ranging from the fantastic to the scientific ... to the Pokemon. (It's true -- we suspect more than a few readers actually cast votes for Ionar over Ichoron based on Pokemon. /facepalm) Ichoron definitely carried the support of readers who took time to break down the fight in the comments, yet in the end, Ionar jolted out the final vote.

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Most of you are excited for 3.1 so you can start raiding Ulduar, or take advantage of the new class changes. But I know what some of you are on pins and needles for. It's the new title The Insane.

Insane In The Membrane is exactly what it sounds like -- an achievement for people who are completely nuts. To earn this title you must be willing to spend a lot of time destroying and raising obscure factions in Azeroth. I mean a lot of time. It requires that attain the following:

Honored with Bloodsail Buccaneers
Exalted with Everlook
Exalted with Ratchet
Exalted with Booty Bay
Exalted with Gadgetzan
Exalted with Ravenholdt
Exalted with Darkmoon Faire
Exalted with Shen'dralar

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Guild promos can be tricky things. They serve a few different purposes. Some, like yesterday's Das Strafgericht, celebrate things that a guild has already done together. Others, however, like today's Beyond Godlike, is a teaser for the future. It's meant to inspire the guild, and help prepare them for what they will be doing together.

The author, Draix, dropped me a note about the Beyond Godlike trailer, asking if I had some tips. That's a little tough, because a good movie review has to be focused on the purpose of the movie. If the purpose of this piece was to be a music video, I'd be forced to say it fails. But, if I guess correctly that the trailer is meant to rile up his Guild for what's coming when 3.1 drops, I'd say the video is outstanding already.

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This mod is strictly for Death Knights. Fortunately, I figure at least half of the WoW population has a Death Knight at this point, so a post like this isn't so much of a problem.

What is a problem is Blizz's official rune UI (at right). I love Blizzard to tiny pieces, but they dropped the ball there, in my opinion. Aside from the icons being a bit ugly and inscrutable, it's flat-out difficult to tell the state of your runes at a glance on the default display. The little rotating line that is supposed to tell you when your runes is ready again is also hard to read, at least for me. And watching critical debuffs on the default target frame is less than pleasant.

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While in the Halls of Lightning one day, an unfortunately timed Killing Spree sent Octalas of TalmaheRä off a ledge and deep into a pit. There, he found himself surrounded by Loken's army of unliving warriors, the indomitable iron vrykul. These seem to be based off the real-life Terracotta Army, created by the first Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi to protect him in the afterlife and totally creep out tourists. Octalas may have become an unliving warrior himself; he writes that there is no way back out of the pit once you fall in.

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This is one of the quickest and easiest dailies to complete for your Argent Tournament prestige. The questgiver asks simply that you kill 10 Scourge units in Icecrown.

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Arena Tournament - Standings Recap
The Arena Tournament has been running for some weeks and we now have enough information to build a few graphs. The comparison between American and European realms is really interesting and these stats actually prove that the tournament is very different on each continent.

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There are a lot of great features coming our way in Patch 3.1, from dual-specs, a massive raid dungeon with difficulty levels you can toggle, an entire event in Icecrown... Blizzard has called it their most ambitious content patch ever. And from the size of it, it looks like they weren't kidding. So even though sometimes we wish some things were added to the game, there are things that probably should never see the light of day.

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Small site update today.  I've added "Share On" functionality to news so that you can share the news on various social media sites like Facebook, MySpace, Digg, Twitter and Delicious.  More updates will be coming throughout the weekend as well.

Focused Testing - Arena PvP - April 9th, 2009

Quote from: Dresorull (Source)

PTR Focused Arena Testing!

We are planning on conducting some focused testing on the test realms tomorrow (4/9) with arena games. The main focus of this testing is to uncover any bugs with the arena map functionality. Bring your teammates and friends and play as many games as you like. I will be on hand tomorrow to observe testing and take any bug reports on issues you may find.

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