Patch 3.1 is looking more and more likely to be dropping tomorrow, now heralded by the official Ulduar trailer. No, not the preview trailer from awhile back, but the official cinematic, complete with story-progressing goodness. Go give it a watch, then come on back. Did you see it? Good!

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The server alert tonight is letting us know that therer will be extended maintenance for all realms from 3:00 a.m. PDT / 6:00 a.m. EDT to 11:00 a.m. PDT / 2:00 p.m. EDT. However, there are several realms listed after the break that will be down starting at 1:00 a.m. PDT / 4:00 a.m. PDT instead.

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3.1.0 Battleground Queue: Update

Well this just about confirms 3.1 is tomorrow.  Stay tuned for more later tonight on the patch.

Quote from: Eyonix (Source)

As many of you know, one of the new features going into patch 3.1.0 is the ability to queue for battlegrounds from any location. With that being said, we wanted to inform players that while you can queue from any location, it's not possible to queue while dead.

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You will return to the location you queued. There is a "known issue" if you queue and accept to enter a battleground while in flight, where you will placed in a designated area. I'm working on getting specific details and will provide an update as soon as possible.

Ulduar Preview: Kinaesthesia

Kinaesthesia -- a member of Vodka -- put together a gameplay preview of Ulduar just in time for 3.1's release.  Check out Vodka's adventures on the 3.1 PTR in the video below, or head over to Warcraft Movies to give Kinaesthesia feedback.  If you watch the video below, click the HD button; it's -much- better.

Ulduar Preview by Kinaesthesia

Visit the Warcraft Movies page
Download in HD from FileFront

PS: vodka is currently recruiting-

• (Holy)
• (Feral) or
• (Elemental)
• (Tank)
• (Balance)
• or


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Out of the blue tonight, the blustering Blizzard Blue bard Eyonix, came out and let us know about a few things that'll be happening with the Patch 3.1 battleground queue (see what queuing will be like now):

• Players will not be able to queue while dead.
• If you queue and accept to enter a battleground while in flight, you'll be returned to a designated destination.
  


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Patch 3.1 on Live Servers this Week
There isn't any official confirmation yet but according to ... external information, Patch 3.1 should be deployed this week on live servers (Let's say 95% chances just to not say 100%). There isn't any confirmation for the moment and you will probably have to trust me a little on this one. Yes, this is the first time I confirm a patch release only based on information I got in the past hours, let's hope I don't end up looking stupid in front of a lot of readers.

The patch is really huge and tons of things can go wrong during the patching process, I don't expect Blizzard to confirm it until the last minute and a cancellation at the last minute can always happen.

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Our friends at The Guild made an ingame appearance the other day, but not in our game -- they showed up as avatars in Second Life as part of a talk show called the Copper Robot. Felicia Day, Sandeep Parikh (Zaboo), and Jeff Lewis (Vork) all stopped by to talk to journalist Mitch Wagner (whom I met on the TUAW Talkcast last night), and you can watch video of the proceedings over on their blog, or just listen in to the audio if you'd like. And there's news about season 3 in the interview -- it should be happening, though Felicia says they haven't gotten "an official pickup" yet, and she hasn't started writing yet. The season 2 DVD is also coming soon.

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Blizzard has gone ahead and implemented their own blue tracker on the official forums, easily showing every blue post made throughout the day.

Now personally, I don't like theirs compared to MMO-Champion, World of Raids, or WoWRaid. All those have a nice layout that allows for quick viewing and easy summaries of posts. It's much preferable to the "tool" Blizzard has put up.

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We here at WoW Insider are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• Vodka, currently one of the top raiding guilds in North America, has put out their Ulduar preview video. Give it a watch, then just try and tell me it doesn't excite you
• Children's Week is quickly approaching, and the Hunting Lodge wants to bring the holiday into the real world. Head on over to the Hunting Lodge and give Child's Play a helping hand!
• Of Teeth and Claws talks Druid DoTs in Patch 3.1. DoTs of the Feral persuasion, mind. You Moonkin are out of luck on this one.
• Wonderland has some sweet, sweet baked goods for all of you to salivate over. If you want more cakey goodness, don't forget that we have our own World of Warcraft cake gallery.


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CM Crygil has posted a very general thread over on the forums asking players what they think of the various class roles out there: "Ranged/Melee/DPS, Tanking and Healing." As you probably have noticed, those three roles make up what are often called the Holy Trinity in role-playing games and MMOs: either you do damage, prevent damage, or recover from damage, and those three roles make up the basics of most roleplaying combat systems, including the battles in World of Warcraft.

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The World of Warcraft is waiting on abated breath tonight for the official announcement of Patch 3.1 going live tomorrow, and it appears that announcement will be coming soon.

WoW Insider has a few sources that are all pointing towards tomorrow as the release date, save some major internal mess up at Blizzard HQ. MMO-Champion also has some (Are our sources the same? The world may never know.), and Bibi is running a similar announcement over there. While these are by definition just rumors, they are taken quite credibility by many of us.

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On the podcast last Saturday, our friend NinthBatter (maker of the WI Song's machinima) gave us an on-scene report from the PETA event that took place earlier in the day. As you might expect, it was chaos -- while PETA's plan was to roll Alliance and attack a few Horde bad guys, lots of folks rolled Horde instead, and started up a guild called the "Seal Cub Clubbing Club." Many, many seals died, as you can see in the few pictures below.

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Aurdon over at I Sheep Things spotted this great collection of comparisons between real-life environs and the in-game places that they inspired. Not all of the comparisons are pitch-perfect, obviously (there are no Nagrand-esque floating islands in the real world, and the Crystalsong Forest picture shows trees covered in ice rather than the mystical wood that grows in-game), but lots of the pictures are really dead-on, and they show you really well how Blizzard uses a kind of hyper-realized version of Earth to create what seems like a very real Azeroth.

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Dual specs are coming, probably only a week away, and I suspect that many Holy and/or Discipline Priests out there will be picking up a Shadow build as their second spec. Priests, like most classes, can have many little build variations to fit your playstyle: Raiding, soloing, doing Battlegrounds, doing arenas, all of that. I'm going to look at a couple of good PvE specs to use in patch 3.1, but unfortunately avoiding the PvP specs for you arena junkies in our audience. Trust me, you don't want to take my advice there. Discipline PvP maybe, but not Shadow.

PvE Shadow - Raiding
MMO-Champion has a great tool for setting up talent specs, because you can include your glyphs as well, so we're going to be using that. This spec (14/0/57) will be a fairly cookie-cutter raiding build in patch 3.1, with only very minor variations from person to person. The Shadow tree isn't a very complicated one. Either a talent boosts your DPS, or it does something else. For a raiding spec, you want all of the DPS talents and you can skip all of the 'something else' talents unless they're mandatory for a DPS talent. It's pretty straightforward. Even in the Discipline tree the ultimate goal is to pick up the DPS talents, Twin Disciplines and Improved Inner Fire. Meditation isn't a direct DPS talent, but having no mana is certainly a DPS hit.

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Sanctuary! Sanctuary! Save me Jebus!

Oh, why did I teach him that word?

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It's time again for Blood Pact, your weekly Warlock column, detailing the dastardly deeds of Warcraft's demonologists! Nick Whelan returns once again this week, to finish what he started. And this time, it's personal!

Last week, I wrote a column filled with tips for Naxx-10. Specifically, tips for Warlocks, because that's who Blood Pact is written for. But my list ended up being so long that I was only able to write about the Spider and Plague wings of Naxx before the article started to feel a little bloated. So I chopped it in half, and now it's time to conclude our tour of the dread citadel with the more difficult sections of the instance: the Construct, Military, and Frost wings!

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For the record, we believe that Blizzard has at least one more week to implement the 3.1 content patch due to the recent rescheduling of the Noblegarden event on the PTR. With a long-standing history of releasing content “when it’s done”, and the allowance of an extra week to meet the Noblegarden deadline, we speculate that patch 3.1 is more likely to be released during the maintenance period on Tuesday, April 21st than it is likely to be released tomorrow, April 14th.

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Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

I've covered account sharing before. I gave some details about Blizzard's policies on it and how it could affect your guild. This week, I received an e-mail from someone who found out that an officer of the guild he was applying to shared the account with his girlfriend. He's wondering if he may have overreacted to the situation.

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EU Blue Wryxian is once again patrolling the forums, dropping hints that patch 3.1 "is coming ... soo ... er ... promptly."

Through crystal-ball gazing, the application of logic and, in some cases, sheer desperation, the general consensus has been that the Secrets of Ulduar patch will be dropping this week.

Europe's favourite Blue appeared on the forums this morning and left a carefully worded comment:

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A good time was had as always on last weekend's WoW Insider Show -- Adam Holisky kindly stepped into the broadcasting booth with Turpster and I, and we answered some emails (including whether it's OK to give cloth drops to leather wearers, as long as it's an upgrade, and more on which tanking class is the best to take with you), and talked turkey on the biggest stories in the World of Warcraft. We chatted about what might be in store for the next content patch and expansion, what's up with WoW's numbers still going up, and what's new with Wintergrasp in 3.1. We also had a straight-from-the-scene report about the PETA event -- stay tuned for more about that later today.

And we got some interesting Ret Monkey pictures -- the one to the right is by Hydralol of EU Magtheridon, and the other one in the gallery below is by Abbort from Hellscream. Both of these, and any other pictures that you can come up with of the Ret Monkey or any of us who work on the show can be eligible for our Fan Art contest, so enter that if you'd like.

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Selserene actually released In For A Penny: Part Two "The Thorne of Rose Streeet" this past Friday. Since Moviewatch runs only during the week, we were faced with a dilemma. Do we feature this work immediately, to get the good news out to everyone as soon as possible? Or, wait until Monday, when the most readers would be available to see Selserene's movie? After enjoying the twenty minute installment, your intrepid Moviewatch team had their answer. We wanted to get it in front of as many people as possible. Everyone -- and I mean everyone -- should have the opportunity to see this series.

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In the wake of the announcement, the authors of several popular mods announced that they would no longer be developing and/or distributing their addons, while other addons (Carbonite being a notable example) are switching to an entirely free model.

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Patch 3.1 - Compiled PvE Loot List
The old Ulduar Loot Summary page has been removed from the menu and replaced with the Compiled PvE Loot List. This list include:

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Andres writes in, "Ahhh, the gorgeous sunset of Stranglethorn. It's nice to view. Right before you're ganked trying to make it towards the Zandalar tribe. Don't stand idle for too long staring off into the distance. That sound? Wasn't the wind. Best be on your way." In before "I thought you said no more sunsets!" The rules have changed, my friends, and we can all use a little sun occasionally.

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3.1 is looming ever closer and most of the players who aren't storming Ulduar are probably going to be hitting Icecrown for the Argent Tournament thanks to the promise of new mounts and, of course, the zone-specific pets!

Now I love pets, I once gave a guildmate all my gold and asked him to go all the way to Netherstorm to get me a Blue Dragonhawk Hatching. Admittedly, I don't have that many and while I normally whip out Frosty or Mini Tyrael when we're in instances, I'm usually found exploring Azeroth with a much simpler pet, my Orange Tabby Cat.

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There weren't any blue posts of interest last night; it was mostly stuff related to PTR bugs.  Expect some site updates later today and tonight as we gear up for 3.1 going live.  It's possibly going live this week, so stay tuned!

103 sec. Patchwerk Speed Kill - Elîte of US-Stonemaul

We've seen a few Sartharion speed kill videos, and even have a Hall of Fame for it, but I wanted to remind everyone that there's also a Patchwerk Speed Kill thread on the Raids & Dungeons forum; you can submit your kills of Patchwerk there.  While the video below isn't the fastest reported (Premonition clocks in at 97 seconds), it's one of the fastest kills I've actually seen a video of.  Elîte of US-Stonemaul killed Patchwerk in 25-player Naxxramas in 1 minute 43 seconds.

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Patch 3.1 this week?
Tons of people are going to ask anyway, at the moment we can't know if Patch 3.1 will be deployed on live servers this week. Everything happening on Blizzard's side is being heavily monitored and you'll be the first to know if Patch 3.1 is going live.
Quote from: Wryxian (Source)The patch is definitely coming... shortly. The "severe lack of info" might simply be because we announced it, gave further details about it, put it up on the PTR for testing and now we are basically on the verge of releasing it.

We certainly haven't been quiet about it. It is coming. And it is coming... soo... er... promptly.

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