BlizzCon approaches! Preparing for BlizzCon is your regular source for tips on how best to prepare for Blizzard's gaming extravaganza. These helpful hints are particularly suited for convention rookies. But if you are a con veteran, we'd love to hear your advice and wisdom in the comments as well.

After BlizzCon 2007, I had to apologize for assuming that forum trolls and all around funsuckers were mostly teenage boys. But the ill-mannered clods I encountered at BlizzCon looked to be in their 20s. Regardless of their age and gender, there unfortunately will be plenty of inconsiderates harshing your Blizzard buzz while you are trying to enjoy the con. Here are some things to expect and some tips on how to handle them.

• Talking during the panels: Just like at the movies, people will talk loudly during the panels -- either to each other or on cellphones. You travel across country or around the world and pay all this money to hear the latest about expansions or your class and some jerk won't shut up. Advice: eHow suggests starting with a glare and moving onto a polite request to be quiet, should the glare fail.


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Trial of the Crusader - PTR Testing
Quote from: Daelo (Source)Here's the current schedule for Trial of the Crusader PTR testing:

On the North American test realms:

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Just in case you missed this excellent post about how to use Recount to its full potential (we also snuck it in our Daily Quest column a little while back), it's definitely worth a look. Most players just use Recount to check their own damage numbers, but as 4 Haelz points out, there's definitely a lot more to it than just that. Not only can it be used to examine overall output on fights and instances, but you can use it as a tool to monitor what kinds of spells are producing the most for you, and how your damage or healing output changes over time. You can also have it track who you've healed the most, or which targets you've really gone to town on, and you can then make adjustments to your play style from there.

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I was just bemoaning that we haven't gotten a chance to see patch 3.2's new raid content yet. It looks like that chance will come sooner than I expected: tomorrow night!

Daelo has just posted a testing schedule for Trial of the Crusader (a.k.a. Crusader's Coliseum).

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15 Minutes of Fame is WoW.com's look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes - from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

There are couples who play together, and there are couples who play together. Jen and Mike, members of <The Panic Attacks> on Scilla-US, fall into the latter category - so much so that perhaps their playstyle doesn't accurately qualify as "playing together" at all. More accurately, Jen and Mike play as one, sharing the controls to seamlessly guide their mutual character, FertZane, through Ulduar and all the rest of WoW's endgame content.

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New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic.

What's with the curlicue dragon graphic wrapped around the portrait of that mob? Aren't they usually gold? This one's silver. Hmmm ... And whoa, why does that Gnoll over there have a name? He's got one of those gold dragon things, too. Do you think -- CRUNCH!

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

People responded quite well to the Patches of Yesteryear column that I started up yesterday, so I thought for today's Queue I'd use one of the screenshots of the old UI that I dug up on the internet. A few old readers (yes, you're old farts) noted that the UI featured above likely came from an internal alpha build or something way before the beta 4* when WoW went into "public" beta mode. So the above screenshot and yesterday's screenshot are quite old. Possibly as old as 2001 when WoW was first announced.

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There's Peggle the original PC game, Peggle the XBLA game, Peggle the iPhone game, Peggle: Steam edition, and Peggle the WoW addon, and so when I heard rumblings of "Peggle: WoW edition," I just figured people were talking about one of the many, many already-released versions of PopCap's popular Plinko-inspired pasttime. But no -- the folks at PopCap have released another version of Peggle: Peggle World of Warcraft edition is a standalone, free (PC-only) download that allows you to play the WoW addon version completely outside of World of Warcraft.

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We can't believe it either – Turpster has been let loose on WoW.com to bring you videos from in and around the World of Warcraft! You've heard him on the WoW Insider Show, and now see him on TurpsterVision right here on WoW.com.

First up a bit of housekeeping; thanks to all of you who took part in last week's contest -- over 500 of you! A winner has been chosen via the highly technical method of a /random in-game roll. Sorry to the others of you who didn't win this time, but who knows, maybe in the future we'll have another giveaway on TurpsterVision!

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Sorry for the low resolution on the pic above, but we thought it was still funny enough to share -- the guildleader of the guild (unfortunately, we weren't told the name or server) was a little unhappy when one of the raiders decided to leave a "whipefest" on General Vezax, and he decided to pull off a WoWBash-style /gkick.

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About a week and a half ago, we spotted the new raid lockout extension feature on the patch 3.2 PTR. It's not until this morning that Blizzard (specifically Eyonix and Vaneras) officially announced that the feature was coming, along with some clarified details.

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Yogg-Saron +0 Strategy by Stars
digmouse took the time to translate the strategy used by Stars to kill Yogg-Saron with no guardian helping. (Originally posted on ngacn.cc)

He did a fantastic job and I'm sure a lot of people want to know everything about the kill so I'll just post it on the front page, thanks again to digmouse for the translation.

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A new build for patch 3.2 hit the PTR recently, and all of the related Shadow Priest changes are things that the recent Q&A hinted toward or straight out told us to expect. Let's not waste any time here and dig right into the changes.

• Vampiric Touch now deals more damage when dispelled. (Max rank deals 1360 damage, previously 680)

Definitely not a surprise here. I've been saying for a long time that this component of the spell needed a significant buff, Ghostcrawler agreed, and doubling its base damage can probably be considered that. We'll still need to see it in action to determine if it's enough. If it's not enough, at least it's closer, and that's something.

• Devouring Plague cooldown removed, can now only be applied to one target at a time.

This is a change I long expected, and despite Ghostcrawler initially seeming iffy on it in the Shadow Priest Q&A, the simple fact that it was mentioned made me more hopeful that it would happen. And it is happening! So I'm pretty happy about that. There isn't much more to say. It'll make playing a Shadow Priest much less frustrating when it comes to encounters where you're swapping targets a lot. Yogg-Saron, I'm looking at you.

• Dispersion's cooldown has been lowered to 2 minutes.

This is a good change for the arena, and probably PvP in general. For all of our grievances with it, it does do its job in the arena. Buying you time while your partner heals or peels, stopping an assist train dead. It doesn't do anything for our grievances with it in PvE, though, which is unfortunate.

• Improved Mind Blast now has a 20/40/60/80/100% chance to reduce healing done to the target by 20% for 10 seconds when used in Shadowform.

Eh. Eh. It's a buff, a pretty useful one, but I'm pretty... unexcited about it. I mean, really? Another MS effect? And they gave one to Frost Mages in this build, too. The same one Shadow Priests get, but built into Permafrost. Whatever happened to, 'If we give everyone MS, we might as well put a healing debuff aura on everyone when they enter the arena.' We're getting pretty close to saying screw it and putting up that aura, aren't we?

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Over the weekend, America celebrated its Independence Day on July 4th. And while Azeroth may not have exactly the same holiday, certainly most folks are aware of the fireworks that happen to take place on the same day.

Maestro of Comedy Oxhorn released the new video over the weekend, celebrating America's Independence Day. The video, called Steak Sandwiches, only features two of Oxhorn's regular characters. Oxhorn and Mortuus take a break to enjoy a favorite past-time of Oxhorn's Horde. That past-time, specifically, is strapping gnomes to rockets and firing them into the air.

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Viradu of Ragnaros was simply trying to start a hunter alt when he stumbled across evidence of a horrifying crime. Five different orcs, each of a different class, were lying dead on the ground of Durotar. The corpses had been arranged in identical positions and dumped in a straight line. The Pween Scene Investigators were called, and after intensive testing on the bodies, they determined that the orcs had been dead for two to four hours and tasted delicious with hot sauce. Authorities have not identified a suspect, but believe that the murderer may suffer from a serious mental condition known as "altaholism."

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Have you just reached level 80?

Hoping to see endgame before Patch 3.2?

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The PTR is an exciting place and there are plenty of fascinating little changes. One of the smallest is also the most important - at least is if you have a twink and a PvP addiction. Once patch 3.2 goes live your beloved twink will finally be able to battle to your heart's content, to slaughter the opposing faction and steal flags/bases without fear of gaining even one tinsy little experience point.

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Cold Weather Flying Changes in 3.2
It looks like Blizzard decided to make leveling in WotLK really easier with this patch. Keep in mind that this is a Test Realm changes and it might be removed before the patch is deployed on live realms.
Quote from: Zarhym (Source)Just to confirm, Tome of Cold Weather Flight is actually a new heirloom item planned to go into patch 3.2. At level 80 players can buy this heirloom item from the Cold Weather Flying Trainer in Dalaran for 1,000 gold and send it to an alt of the same realm, faction and account. The tome can be used to learn Cold Weather Flying at level 68, consuming the tome in the process.

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Well, for one thing, they added in the Crusader's Coliseum versions of the Undying achievements. A Tribute to Immortality requires you to reach the end of the heroic-mode raid with 50 attempts remaining (possibly a placeholder quantity), and without any of the raid members dying during boss encounters. It doesn't say for sure, but I would guess this is calculated in the Ulduar style - if you down boss A without anyone dying one week, boss B the next, etc., you get the achievement.

In lieu of the now semi-traditional Proto-Drake mount, those who complete this feat are granted a black or white Crusader's Warhorse (as pictured above-right).

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Maintenance came and went today, and many people were initially pleasantly surprised to see their realm up early. However this quickly became a thing of disappointment as they found the instance servers were laggier than normal, and the realms themselves were rather unstable.

While there were a series of quick restarts to correct many of the problems, several issues still existed. And of course another maintenance period has gone by without any fix to the dreaded "Additional instances cannot be launched, please try again later," error.

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A little surprise on the Patch 3.2 PTR was discovered this evening. The Cold Weather Flying training, which previously had to be purchased for each character that wanted to fly in Northrend is now available as a Bind on Account book purchasable at the exotic mounts vendor in Dalaran.

The Use text is a little odd in that it notes the "tome is consumed when read." To me that means that the book is only a one use thing and really has no reason to be Bind on Account. If you're level 68 you can get to Northrend anyways.

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