Blizzard continues to update their minisite -- the latest newness is the posting of a new Blizzcast, in two parts. In part one, Karune of the Starcraft community team interviews Chris Metzen, Rob Pardo, and Samwise Didier about the history of Warcraft as a whole (it's celebrating the 15th anniversary as well this year), and part two has our friend Nethaera talking to J. Allen Brack, Tom Chilton, and Jeff Kaplan about the game itself. As is usual with the official podcast, there's not much new information here (especially if you've already read through some retrospective press), but both interviews are worth a listen (and/or a read through the transcript) if only to hear these guys all in a room together, joking around about old times.

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Last week, some PvP minded It came from the Bloggies got together for our first Battleground Bonanza. We split into groups according to our level brackets and had some Battleground fun. Mike Schramm lead the 20s group and I lead the 60s group. There were also teens and 50s groups. We had quite a bit of Achievement spam, daily BG quest completions and honor earning. And, as you can see from the pictures in the gallery, the requisite number of deaths.

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We were all a little baffled at the discovery of a 28 day delay in Icecrown Citadel before the second 'wing' of the instance unlocked. A whole month? That's a really long time, and if it were 28 days between every 'wing' opening, we wouldn't be facing Arthas until early April. Raiders wouldn't even have access to hard modes until shortly after that. That was not a particularly pleasing discovery.

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The story here is all about sweet, sweet ego: Aliana had a sense of entitlement while raiding -- she was angry that items she would really like to have were going to someone who could only do 4k as opposed to her 9k, thanks to a lousy so-called fair DKP system. We'd like to think Grator is a true Guildwatch fan: we just sit back, listen in, and make a delicious potion "out the QQ."

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Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the rogue class. This week, we talk about all of the new gear you can find in patch 3.3.

Patch 3.3 descended upon us rather quickly, bringing all of the new patch notes to fruition. It even brought extended maintenance and instance server outages in its wake. You can read more of WoW.com's coverage of 3.3 in our comprehensive guide. I was lucky enough to survive the instability long enough to run the new 5 man's, and they're a ton of fun.

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After a long bit of extended maintenance last night for patch 3.3, and after fighting with add-ons and general instability, many players were greeted with a familiar and disappointing message from sever.
Additional instances cannot be launched, please try again later. Heads exploded, babies cried, and anarchy ensued as people once again saw this dreaded error. We've been told for months that the cross-server instances and other solutions were supposed to fix this, that they would be the salvation to all our problems.

Not so. At least, not yet.

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Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's weekly Death Knight column, where your host, Daniel Whitcomb, continues to be caught in a bad romance with Unholy DPS.
So we're back on the scene after a lazy and luxurious extended Thanksgiving holiday, and just in time for patch 3.3. Death Knights got their fair share of changes, some minor bug fixes and some rather large adjustments, including, of course, the obligatory complete rebalancing of unholy DPS. That said, with 3.3 the last major patch before Cataclysm, we can hope for some normalcy with the whole issue. Or we can expect Patch 3.3.1, either way.

Regardless, since we're just starting out on patch 3.3, now's a good time to run down what patch 3.3 means for us, including a postmortem on the latest unholy DPS changes, and some advice on what to do with yourself in patch 3.3. Read on.
Unholy

It may be that we've more or less achieved normalcy in unholy PvE DPS once again, at least until Cataclysm. You can now go back to a full classic unholy spec and rotation, grabbing Epidemic and Reaping along with your Scourge Strike. Thus you'll be going back to a more or less classic Unholy rotation, although Glyph of Scourge Strike remains more or less not very useful so you'll still do a decent amount of disease refreshing.

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I posted last month about the trailer for this movie, so I'm especially happy to present the final release of Trev and Eroth: Episode 1 - Desperate Measures. Created by Giordano, this movie is set sometime between Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm. Troubled times force the peoples of Azeroth to take a hard look at their leadership, and Trev and Eroth are in a place to do something about it.

There's a lot to recommend this movie. Not only is the plot and scripting interesting, the visual effects are wonderful. Giordano has done a lot to raise the bar in this movie, and I'm very curious to see what he might do next. Giordano has really used new software to improve his movies, and my hat is totally off to him for expanding into new territory.

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New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. For links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's, visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide.

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Hey, folks! What are you doing sitting on the couch playing Left 4 Dead again? The new patch is out! You're not going to let a bit of lag and a few instance server crashes keep you from storming Icecrown Citadel, are you? Just look at this dude! He's sitting here, waving his spiky club and inexplicably blunt wooden axe, just taunting you. Are you going to take that from an undead Viking dude? Get in there and defend your honor! (Thanks to Azulsyr of <No Remorse> on Gilneas for the pic.)

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It's that time of year again -- if you (like me) haven't gotten gifts for everyone on your list, it's time to start scrambling to find something nice to get under the tree this year. Fortunately, you don't have to worry about finding something good for the World of Warcraft fan in your life: we've got you covered there. In the gallery below, we've got a nice bunch of gift ideas for everything Warcraft, from the cheap to the expensive, from the silly to the practical, from in-game presents you can wrap with shiny paper, to out-of-game classics that you can... also wrap with shiny paper. If you need to give a gift to a WoW player this year, you'll find it below for sure.

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Patch 3.3 is only barely out on the live realms, and already, there's a controversy with the new epic ammo recipes. Lassirra says that hunters are concerned that the requirements to make the ammo are just too high. Blizzard had promised to make getting epic ammo easier, and this still has the requirement of having a high level engineer, with the extra charge of requiring a Goblin engie for the bullets, and a Gnomish engie for the arrows. And even after you find a 450 Engineer in the right spec, you still have to get a couple of Crystallized Shadow or Earth together. That doesn't sound "easier" to me, either.

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Few were surprised yesterday when there was extended maintenance due to patch 3.3 being implemented on the live servers. Though I was briefly able to log on and grab a Corehound Pup Pet, otherwise I was at the mercy of the downtime along with everyone else. Here's what I did:

• Caught up in Cafe World -- unfortunately, my food had spoiled.
• Watched the Fall of the Lich King trailer -- more than once.
• Colored with The Spawn -- some of those new Crayola 64 color names are weird.
• Read up on the new Dungeon Finder Guide -- good stuff.


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Larisa makes an interesting observation about the Battlecry mosaic that's being assembled over on Blizzard's website. There certainly are a lot of Horde symbols there, and not quite so many Alliance symbols. The best information we have access to actually says that Alliance outnumber the Horde, and ancedotally, we know that's probably true. So why aren't the Alliance representing?

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Patch 3.3 should be available on all servers now, it's time for blue posts ... See you in a few hours for a lot of epics!

Second wing of Icecrown Citadel will open in 28 Days
Icecrown Citadel opened with 4 bosses available: Lord Marrowgar, Lady Deathwhisper, Gunship Battle, Deathbringer Saurfang.

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Already, a number of guilds have cleared out the first bosses in the lower areas of Icecrown Citadel. After taking down the Deathbringer, talking to your friendly faction hero yields some information as to when the doors will open. In Trial of the Crusader, one new boss opened every week. In Icecrown Citadel, it seems like they're increasing the time between gates. The next area will open in 28 days (which is expected to be the Plagueworks containing Festergut, Rotface, and Professor Putricide). January 5th is the target date for the next set of bosses.

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Patch 3.3 obviously is having its share of bugs, some more severe than others. People are reporting inability to zone into instances, often times met either with the dreaded "Additional instances cannot be launched" error or just flat out lagging out so long that they're ported back to Dalaran or wherever the system decides to drop them, entirely unable to enter the instance.

Some of the issues have been addressed, some haven't.

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