Important - Patch 3.3.2 is not this week
After checking with a few people, I can confirm that Patch 3.3.2 will not be deployed this week. It also means that Season 8 will not start this week either, as the season cannot start without the patch.

At this point I'm not sure if it means that we will also have to wait one more week to fight the Lich King. It all depends on whether Blizzard wants to release the encounter and the new season on the same day.

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Curse Client version 4 for Mac has been in open alpha for some time now, and I'm happy to report it's pretty good -- far better than version 3 ever was. I have no idea how the Windows version is, but the Mac one is probably better than WoWMatrix ever was, from a usability standpoint, without that nagging "steals bandwidth from hosting sites" issue.

• It's pretty fast. It doesn't lock up for seconds at a time, and it doesn't max out my CPU.
• It works well with links on the Curse site to install addons; it also makes it pretty easy to get new addons from within the updater.
• It's easy to update all your addons; one click does it.
• The changelog for a new version is pretty easy to bring up, in case you're wondering whether to update.

Things I don't like as much:

• The icons on the "Update All," "Install/Update," and "Uninstall" buttons are completely unintuitive, especially the relationship between "Update" and "Update All." Since when does a circle mean "all"?
• There are still some addons that aren't in Curse's database. That's not really Curse's fault, but it does hurt how useful the app is a bit.
• The fact that you have to mouse over an app in the preferences dialog to see the path to the app is absurd. The path should be below the app name in (possibly smaller) gray text.
• "Get More Addons" should not display addons you already have.
• The icon is too shiny. (I know, I know. But it is.)

As you can see, though, the points I like are much bigger than the points I don't. Most of the minuses are little details. It's worth noting that I think the Update All functionality is limited to premium accounts (which Curse seems to have given me one of for free); I tried to make a regular account to test, but that one seemed to be flagged as premium too. I'm not sure what the deal is there.

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Blizzard, perhaps jumping the gun a little, has posted the patch notes for the upcoming Patch 3.3.2 mini-patch on the official Korean site. We've translated them for your convenience. Lots of changes to heroic dungeons, some class buffs (warlock, shaman, druid), and some class nerfs (prot warrior). All this and more, after the cut.

Disclaimer: Translation is hard! Some of these notes, especially more complex ones, may be slightly off. We'll post the official English notes when they're posted as well.

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I've pointed this out previously to people curious about WoW's in-game demographics, but Armory Data Mining is really a fantastic but underappreciated site. To be specific, there are actually two sites of interest here -- the actual Armory Data Mining and its related blog. Zardoz, the creator and maintainer of both, uses the former to collect and update statistics on class, race, and sex popularity in WoW (in addition to reports on class battleground performance and profession popularity), while the blog is often used to look at smaller issues or questions like the effort to distinguish between bear and cat specs through the Armory.

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Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all-things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com's arena column.

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I think at this point it is absolutely safe to say that Blizzard has taken on a stance of giving us more notice about maintenance periods, and everyone here at WoW.com is very appreciative of it. Blizzard representative Draocel hit the forums Sunday evening to let us know that tomorrow's maintenance period will begin at 5:00AM PST and last until 11:00AM PST.

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With Icecrown Citadel's unpopular Chill of the Throne debuff, or as we like to call it, "Getting out of Dodge," tanks have had to re-prioritize in terms of avoidance and mitigation stats to the point where tier 10 gear might not be as desirable as Blizzard intended. Thankfully, they appear to have realized this, and change is coming! To tier 10 tank gear, anyway. Blizzard CM Zarhym posted a note on the official forums announcing their plans for said gear: "We recognize that many plate tanks are making their gear choices based on the amount of armor they're provided, as this is currently the most preferred stat. In order to make the tier-10 plate tanking sets more desirable, we will be adjusting the stats on the gloves and chest pieces in order to inflate the amount of armor they provide in the next minor patch. This will apply to all item levels of the tier-10 death knight, warrior, and paladin tanking gloves and chest pieces." He also noted that Emblem gear will continue to be comparable to the tier gear in terms of stats and, for those concerned about Feral tanks, they'll be keeping an eye on gear scaling on druid tank gear as well.

Hundreds and hundreds of applications later, we have selected (most of) our newest columnists. It was quite difficult to choose among the top entries and we want to thank all of you who applied. Your enthusiasm for both the game and our site was truly awe-inspiring.

Now, on to the new hires. As you will see below, some things changed during the application review process. There was much debate over the final choices, and we think the new writers we are bringing on are the best of the best.

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Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "So this is hell. I'd never have believed it. You remember all we were told about the torture-chambers, the fire and brimstone, the "burning marl." Old wives' tales! There's no need for red-hot pokers. Hell is--other people" ~ Jean-Paul Sartre

While I try not to read Arcane Brilliance if I can help it, I did notice that the one on January 16th had a lot of comments and an intriguing title. While I didn't expect Mr. Pants to actually start flaming mages I did hold out some hope for all those comments. Anyway, the piece inspired me to write a similar article. Not so much because there are a lot of warlocks that need improvement but rather they need a place to point others, so they may learn how to play with a lock.

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In a follow up to the thread we discussed recently, Ghostcrawler discusses where the buff to protection warrior DPS will come from (sorry, guys, but it sounds like a buff to Devastate to me, yay for spamming) and a whole lot more. The discussion indicates that while they're interested in single target DPS increases over AoE increases that they don't think tank DPS is that big a factor in boss fights (and to be fair, he's right, it isn't a major factor although the fact that players will overreact to minor factors and stress out their tanks over their DPS, that is) and moves on from there.

The discussion about Devastate (that it's an easy ability to adjust) is fair enough but ignores the even easier solution of simply reducing the defensive stance penalty. To be honest I'd like to hear why there's still a penalty there when abilities like Righteous Fury and Frost Presence suffer none. I find the idea that buffing defensive stance would cause big problems for PvP balance kind of absurd. Battle stance grants 15% ArP and Zerker grants 3% crit, at most people would pop into d stance when focused, like they do now anyway. But we're likely to see buffs to Devastate, so just get used to it. My suggestion? While we're buffing Devastate, also have it queue Heroic Strike for us so that's one less button to spam and I can retire my macro.

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

It's no secret that tanks are generally in short supply. Blizzard has admitted as much and even designed the Death Knight class specifically to entice more people to taking up the tanking role. They've gone away from fights like the notorious, original implementation of the Four Horsemen encounter that required 8 fully geared tanks and given us more fights like Rotface that only require 2. But for a 25-player raid, you generally need 3.

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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.

On January 24th, 2008 at 9:27 p.m. central I was officially welcomed into the WoW Insider family. At 9:52 p.m. central that same evening Alex Ziebart was brought on board. Between the 25 minutes that I was on staff and Alex wasn't, I had already leaked three Blizzard secrets, pissed off Blizzard PR four times, got an angry email from Ghostcrawler about calling warriors the redheaded step children of WoW, and was fired and rehired at least five separate times by Liz Harper.

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Sharm's I Kissed An Orc was stuck in my head for days after I heard it. I admittedly spammed it on Trade channel, in Wintergrasp, and even in an Icecrown Citadel. Sharm's outstanding voice and flair for effect parody makes I Kissed An Orc a solid, outstanding WoW song. Sharm's musical talent is absolutely amazing.

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It's fortunate that Edtin of Ysondre is a shaman. He's fallen into a water tank while running heroic Steamvault, and without Water Breathing, he'd be sunk (horrible pun intended.) Still, he's going to eventually run out of fish scales, and then we'll get to see whether those saltwater tanks preserve corpses as well as formaldehyde.

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Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

We hunters are a misunderstood class in so many ways. Other classes don't understand how our bond with our pets reaches beyond logic and min-maxing. They don't understand that though our class is insanely easy to solo and level with, we are one of the most difficult ranged DPS classes to play well in raids. They don't understand that we're just, well, cooler than them.

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When team Canada's Olympic roster for the men's hockey team was announced, I was extremely excited to check out who had made the cut and who didn't. For the most part, I agreed with all the choices. I'll admit a few of the selections had me wondering why. I had to ask myself why a player like Brenden Morrow (captain of the Dallas Stars) was selected over other players. The more I thought about it, the more I realized that it wasn't always about the goals or the points. There were people that brought in certain intangible qualities that just could not be measured.

I started thinking about raiders and my guildies for a moment. Who was valuable and what did they contribute? Sure they didn't exactly bring dominating numbers into the game, but they were able to hold their own in a race. For example:

• Theorycrafter: That guy in the guild who happens to hold a degree in math or physics? Yeah, he will theorycraft the heck out of you and anyone else who asks him for advice. Not only will he tell you what gems and enchants to get, he'll even write up a multi-page theorem indicating the balance of stats required for optimum performance.
• Veteran raider: She's been around since Molten Core and remembers what its like to wipe for weeks and even months on end for one boss. Still believes that the new content isn't as bad as it was back then. Instills a sense of calm in the raid during the most turbulent of raid nights when things don't seem to be executing. Also happens to be your grandma who makes the world's best chocolate chip cookies.
• Diagnostician: This is the player who can accurately recall every wipe and the series of events that led up to it. Just give him a few seconds to double check his information on some death logs and review his videos. Yes, not only can he give you a good explanation as to why and how a wipe happened, but he has it on tape in case anyone tries to dispute it.


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Moderators Recruitment Update
Good news everyone! The recruitment was fairly succesful and most of the applications I received (between 250 and 300, if you want to know) are processed by now. The recruitment is closed for the moment until we figure out who's going to be a moderator and who isn't. Due to the insane amount of applications, I won't be able to reply to everyone and I will just make an announcement in a few days to claim that my forums are now full of love and awesome moderators.

Also note that if you got refused it doesn't necessarily mean that you are awful, a few decent users won't be selected just because they didn't post enough on the forums. Moderators aren't just here to ban people, they're here to keep their forum alive and make it a wonderful place of happiness, people who already had sticky posts on a forum and contributed regularly have 90% chance to become a mod, but the ones who didn't even have an account on the forums and mailed me to become a Global Moderator to ban people probably won't be selected. (Yes, it happened)

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Okay, so by starting off with "trolling" in the title, you're probably expecting some kind of subtle guide to how to troll the official forums, or maybe how to avoid some of the worst drama. But when I use the term trolling, I'm speaking to the base root meaning: how to inspire a reaction. In our case, how do you inspire a roleplay reaction from the people around you?

The basic idea here is that in order to ferment roleplay, you have to start it yourself somehow. You can't simply expect to walk into Mordor all in-character and hoss with your well-thought-out plans and storylines, expecting to find a town full of roleplayers. No, my friend, you're usually going to have to get it started yourself. Let's just assume that "if you RP it, they will come." Once you get the roleplay started, you'll find other roleplayers showing up around you.

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