After doing some digging in Patch 3.2‘s latest PTR files, I’ve assembled a gallery of the new Horde Tier 9 plate sets. The shoulders are slightly unfinished, or at least looked like they were in WoW Model Viewer. The gallery includes Death Knight, Warrior, and Paladin themed sets. In a move that bodes well for Alliance mail armor, the Horde Paladin sets are blood elf themed, so we’ll see how that goes for our Draenei Shaman friends (read: me).

I’m not too upset about the looks, myself. They look very Horde, even if the helm screams “Onslaught“, and the colors are quite different for each class — even more so than on the Alliance plate pieces.

Have a gander and enjoy! I’ll dig through every new PTR patch that comes out looking for the Horde cloth and Alliance mail and leather sets, so keep your eyes open for updates here.

Filed under: Paladin, Warrior, Patches, Galleries, Death Knight

Patch 3.2: Horde Tier 9 plate armor set gallery originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:50:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Lead Encounter Designer Scott Mercer, a.k.a. Daelo, posted an updated testing schedule for the Crusader’s Coliseum on the Patch 3.2 PTR today. The good news is that EU players get to try another set of bosses — this time the Faction Champions. The bad news is that the US PTR instance servers are still broken following last night’s aborted testing attempt. Not good.

The updated schedule is as follows, with Daelo’s full post after the jump:

Here’s the current schedule for Trial of the Crusader PTR testing:

On the European test realms:

Faction Champions – Saturday Night, July 11, starting at 19:00 CEST.

The issues that were preventing raid testing on the North American PTRs are still not fully resolved. We’re looking into alternative means of enabling testing on these realms. I’ll update this thread when I have more information.

Continue reading Updated PTR Crusader’s Coliseum testing schedule

Updated PTR Crusader’s Coliseum testing schedule originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 10 Jul 2009 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

The Patch 3.2 PTR has been updated to build number 10083, and with it comes a list of interesting changes to the official patch notes — some not-insignificant class changes (Wind Shock not sharing a cooldown with other Shocks, Earth Shock no longer interrupting), a buff for Val’anyr, and lots more. Thanks to MMO-Champion for nabbing these.

Some samples are below, and the rest of the notes are after the jump.

• Arenas
• Beginning with season 7, players will no longer have access to the newest season’s weapons or shoulder armor and will not qualify for the Gladiator title/rewards with ratings from the 2v2 bracket alone. Ratings obtained through 3v3 and 5v5 game play will be required for these rewards, while the rest of the newest season’s items will remain available to players in all brackets (standard rating restrictions still apply).
• Items: General
• Resilience: No longer reduces the amount of damage done by damage-over-time spells, but instead reduces the amount of all damage done by players by the same proportion. In addition, the amount of resilience needed to reduce critical strike chance, critical strike damage and overall damage has been increased by 15%.
• Death Knight
• Blood of the North: Reduced to a 3-point talent. Increases Blood Strike and Frost Strike damage by 3/6/10%. There is now a 33/66/100% chance whenever you hit with Blood Strike or Pestilence that the Blood Rune will become a Death Rune when it activates.

Continue reading PTR build 10083 official patch note updates

Filed under: Patches

PTR build 10083 official patch note updates originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:15:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

As dear Wryxian announced earlier today, we’re getting a new build on the PTR. The unofficial notes for this build are already making the rounds, and they’re… not very interesting! Perhaps the most notable change is that the change to mount casting speed, previously only applied to ground mounts, now affects flying mounts as well.

When the casting time change to ground mounts in Patch 3.2 was announced, Eliah Hecht, Michael Gray and I had a long debate about why they wouldn’t have applied the change to flying mounts as well. We ended up coming to the conclusion that they were avoiding it for PvP reasons; only needing to be out of combat for a second and a half to mount up and zoom off to escape a fight that’s not going your way would be a little… cheap. The outlier here was the Druid Flight Form, which is an instant cast spell. Everyone but Druids hate that though, right? It’s pretty freaking annoying when you get into a scuffle, you gain the upper hand, and then the Druid just runs in circles like a headless boomkin spamming their flight button and hoping it eventually takes. So we figured that didn’t count. It was a perfect example of why being able to fly away quickly was a bad thing.

Boy, are our faces red. Flying mounts get the 1.5s cast time now as well. Sometimes trying to figure out Blizzard’s reasoning doesn’t really pay off. I’m not going to complain that much, though. I certainly appreciate being able to get into the air faster!

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Mounts

Patch 3.2 lowers casting time on flying mounts originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 10 Jul 2009 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Lorecrafted is one of my favorite blogs these days. If you’ve been reading this site for awhile, you probably know that one of the things I enjoy most is geeking out about lore, both positively and negatively. I love picking things apart, speculating on random story snippets, and all of that sort of thing. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to spend much quality time with Know Your Lore due to other commitments, so Lorecrafted replaces that void in my life at least a little bit.

Just recently, Greyseer (the author behind Lorecrafted), finished up a three part speculation series on what he would like to see come out of a Maelstrom expansion. Reading over it, you realize just how many different forces could be at play in the expansion. I don’t think everything will play out the way that he thinks they’ll play out, but that just lends more weight to just how much could happen in the Maelstrom.

There are plenty of people that think Warcraft dies with Arthas, but when you look at the game world beyond the events of Warcraft III, Arthas is actually relatively small character. He’s not even the most dangerous thing Azeroth has seen. The threats that lie within the Maelstrom have proved themselves to be far more destructive… as in, caused Azeroth to sunder into the various pieces that make up the world today. Let’s see the Lich King do that.

Continue reading Lorecrafted tackles the Maelstrom

Filed under: Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Expansions, Lore

Lorecrafted tackles the Maelstrom originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 10 Jul 2009 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments