Tier 9 Models Preview
This is now official, the sets we posted earlier are indeed the Tier 9 Armor models and multiple classes within the same faction will share the same armor model with different textures.
Quote from: Blizzard (Source)In patch 3.2, Call of the Crusade, players will be able to work toward the all-new tier-9 class sets by competing in the Crusaders' Coliseum. To keep with the themes of the Argent Tournament, players will notice this time around that the Horde and Alliance have unique looks to distinguish them apart.
Alliance Mage
Horde Hunter
Alliance Priest
Horde Shaman
Alliance Warlock
Below are the non-official preview of the Plate Alliance and Leather Horde sets I posted a few days ago.

Horde Leather

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World of Warcraft has, as you have probably heard, been offline in China for a while now. Even though The9 originally said they'd transfer over their servers to NetEase, they later decided to fight it out, leaving WoW offline for a matter of weeks. And it isn't quite up yet, but they're getting there -- this (very roughly) translated article says that Battle.net servers are now up and running, so Chinese players can now at least sign in to Battle.net, if not into the game itself. We already went through the same thing here in the US and the EU, so Azeroth should be back online in China any day now.

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Twitter is all the rage right now -- it's the easiest, quickest way to let anyone interested know what you're up to, and because it's so popular, it's also no surprise that we've seen quite a few Twitter and World of Warcraft mashup apps. wowTwitter is a separate update service just for news about your characters, WoWHorn is a script that lets you Tweet when you hit certain achievements, and though services like PlayXpert have let you Twitter from the game before, TweetCraft appears to be the first standalone application designed to do just that. After installation, it works the same way as an addon, though it's actually not -- addons can't directly connect to the Internet, so TweetCraft instead uses an outside script to read and write tweets into settings files, which the ingame addon then reads to get and send your tweets. It gets complicated, but you don't need to know all that to install and use it -- when you run the setup app, it'll put everything in the right places for you.

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The Eastern Kingdoms were flamed and we had fun doing it. Our It came from the Blog event last Saturday was actually two events: an all levels event followed by a mounted/flightpathed event. Many players took my advice and created Death Knights, giving the lowbies plenty of protection for the run through dangerous territories. Mike Schramm, Allison Robert and Daniel Whitcomb all joined in on the fun.

The lowbie event honored all of the flames from Falconwing Square to Hammerfall, with a couple of desecrations on the side. The mounted event took to the flightpaths and completed the Flame Keeper of Eastern Kingdoms achievement. I also got the unofficial achievement for running into every fence along the way. Running + typing = hard.

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Queue, queue, queue. Everyone must be really excited for the eventual 3.3 patch, because we've got a ton of questions about Arthas and Icecrown today. What the heck, guys! BUT YEA, I SHALL ANSWER THINE PLEAS.


m_rydelis asked:
I have a question here, so as I remember from Warcraft TFT, Lich King was left to freeze on Frozen Throne, and in WotLK cinematic we see him on it, so did it just melt down, or something happend, because there is no such thing as Warcraft as Frozen throne now.

Icecrown Citadel was built over the Frozen Throne, and Arthas has apparently done a lot of construction on Icecrown Glacier since TFT and especially since the opening cinematic. The Frozen Throne likely still remains inside of the fully-constructed Icecrown Citadel, but we'll definitely see when 3.3 launches.

Cyrus asked:
Do we even know if there's going to be a 3.4? Has Blizzard announced it, or are people assuming it just based on the number of content patches in BC? Maybe progression will just go OS, Naxx, EoE, Ulduar, Argent Coliseum and Icecrown.

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Blizzard put up a preview of a couple of Tier 9 sets over at the Under Development section of the official website, and they look pretty interesting. As previously suspected, the Tier 9 armor sets seem to share visual characteristics with the same armor class. In the examples that Blizzard shows, the Horde Shaman and Hunter -- both mail-wearers -- are similar in appearance. Two other examples are the Alliance Priest and Warlock, cloth-wearing classes, who look largely similar.

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

• Fel Fire looks at Patch 3.2 from the perspective of a guild leader.
• DeathKnight.info continues exploring every corner of the Isle of Conquest on the PTR. This time we see the glory of the human catapault. I hope you like slamming face first into stone walls a few dozen times!
• Mystic Chicanery explains why they think the Caverns of Time are the most logical dungeons in WoW.
• Lorecrafted gives his take on patch 3.2's Tauren Druid revelations.
• Slow Wolf's next installment of their Creature Feature series is up, this time featuring the Gorilla.


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I want an Orc. More specifically, I want my Blood Elf Death Knight to become an Orc. I know, I should've chosen the right race to begin with, but he's now Level 80 and it's too late. I don't want a pretty boy Death Knight, which was obviously a bad idea to begin with considering they infest Dalaran and the rest of Azeroth like metrosexual cockroaches, but I made a mistake and I regret it. I seriously want to change my character's race. I'd consider rerolling, but it's a Death Knight.

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Each week, The Care and Feeding of Warriors looks at the warrior class, the dizzying highs, the devastating lows, and the agony and ecstasy of plate wearing, rage using toons everywhere in Azeroth, Outland and Northrend. Matthew Rossi is our slightly demented, hirsute guide to all things warrior. We're not kidding, the guy's really hairy. Like a sasquatch, really.

Okay, first off, a confession: I'm cheating on my fury spec.

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Good news, Europe is once again feeling some free character migration love. Blizzard has announced a week-long migration event in an attempt to balance out factions on specific servers. So if you've been looking to migrate, this might well be a good time.

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A few folks over at the Twisted Nether Wiki have done a great thing and compiled a nice full list of all of those little online WoW utilities that we talk about every once in a while. From character improvement tools like Be Imba! to resources like Kaliban's Loot Lists and even humor sites like WoWBash, if it's online, WoW-related, and worth visiting more than once, it's on this list.

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Yogg-Saron Hotfixes
Quote from: Daelo (Source)We've made one additional change to a specific element of the Yogg-Saron fight. Since the fight went live, there has been a hidden protection for players that prevents the casting of Psychosis and Malady of the Mind on targets with less than 30 Sanity. However, because Malady of the Mind has a slow missile speed and the hidden protection could take a second or two to apply, it was quite possible for the 30 sanity targeting threshold to be breached by these two random unavoidable effects.

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Shadow Priests have been up in arms all over the official forums recently, and it seems to have reached a bit of a breaking point. Rather than waiting for the official Priest Q&A in the developers' Q&A series, Ghostcrawler chimed into an unofficial Q&A thread to give some insight. Since it's unofficial, the questions asked are very direct and specific, aimed at the posters in that thread rather than the playerbase as a whole. Still, the tone is mostly the same: Don't expect major announcements while reading the thread, it's more a discussion on class direction and philosophy rather than patch news. That being said, there is some good news in the whole thing. Some bad news, too.

I strongly recommend reading the whole thing on the official forums, but I'm going to pull out some bits and pieces here.

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Blizzard just released their Warlock Q&A with Ghostcrawler and pals. This follows in the series of many others, which you can find in WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2.

Some of the highlights of this Q&A session include:

• Blizzard is considering giving different models to Warlock pets.
• Blizzard wants to make the Warlock experience more different from that of a Mage.
• Affliction and Destruction are doing good damage, Demonology is lagging behind.
• Warlocks are underrepresented in PvP currently, this needs to be fixed.
• Basic idea for the new Soul Shard system: Soul Shards will provide a combat (damage) boost, but should not be something Locks need to farm. This change will be beyond Patch 3.2., with more information ideally at BlizzCon 2009. A new Soul Should system sure would be a Cataclysmic event, right?
  
• Soulshatter cooldown is going to be lowered to 3 minutes.
  

Read the full Q&A after the break.

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Welcome to Scattered Shots. I am Eddie "Brigwyn" Carrington from The Hunting Lodge and I'll be your tour guide each Thursday as we explore what makes our Hunters tick and how we can make them better.

I've read comments here, over on the Official Forums, and other Hunter blogs and forums saying how Blizzard is forcing Hunters to spec either as Survival or Marksmanship. I always find this a hard argument to support, especially since it is Blizzard that has continued to give us three different talent trees that we can spec into. But as always, there seems to be a preferred talent spec.

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Today's WoW Moviewatch is a little bit of a repeat, but in an odd way. Shadowline1990's A Death Knight's Tale - The Battle for Light's Hope Chapel Cinematic Movie is another revisit version of the Death Knight closing cinematics. You might recognize Shadowline1990 as the guy who made The Culling of Stratholme - a WoW Cinematic Movie. This movie is, admittedly, more of the same idea.

Shadowline1990 took pieces of the in-game animations and voiceovers, and tried to make it into a more compelling cinematic experience. Shadowline1990 isn't the first person to do this with the Death Knight storyline, though, and he's very upfront to say he gives credit to Invisusira for having given the story this treatment first.

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The other day, we reported on China's recent ban on trading real currency for virtual goods, and it was hailed as the end of gold selling in the MMO world. Unfortunately, it may not actually play out that way. While this would put a stop to some gold selling, it won't stop all of it thanks to a convenient little loophole.

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Instance Capacity Update
Quote from: Bornakk (Source)We are aware of the concerns regarding situations where players are unable to zone into an instance due to an instance limit being hit, which results in a message stating that additional instances cannot be launched. This limit was implemented as a short-term solution to preserve the gameplay for players who are already in an instance and to prevent numerous issues that can happen when too many instances are active at the same time, but we are currently working on better solutions to ensure that players can get into instances when they want to.

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Although we’ve mentioned this sort of thing before it is worth mentioning again, given the goals of the current WoW world event, that there is significant profit to be made from traveling the zones of WoW. Many vendors around the world sell various items and recipes that can be resold for a hefty profit in your faction’s auction house. As you make your way through old world areas, be sure to stop by the vendors of each area and purchase the things that can be resold with a markup. Cooking recipes are particularly profitable these days as many more players are cooking than there were previously and a large amount of these players leveled cooking after they were already experience level cap and thus may have missed key purchasable recipes along the way.

A few key profitable vendors to watch out for are:

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BlizzCon approaches! Preparing for BlizzCon is your regular source for tips on how best to prepare for Blizzard's gaming extravaganza.

The last time I went to BlizzCon was two years ago and I was woefully unprepared. I regretted multiple times that I didn't have some form of business card with me. But this year I am ready if Tommy Tallarico approaches the WoW.com writers again asking for cards. Squeeeeeeee!

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Matt took this screenshot while leveling a tauren alt through Mulgore. I'm not sure if this is a bug or just a good angle, but it looks completely natural, as if the shadows themselves were encroaching on Thunder Bluff, feeding off the essence of all that is good and pure until the residents are nothing but shades of their former selves. Forgive me: I'm in a horror-movie mood ever since discovering that this abomination is apparently inhabiting the sewers under my favorite restaurant. (Warning! Link is not for those with weak stomachs or people who have recently played Dead Space and still have nightmares about amorphous blobs coming out of walls!)

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Blizzard can pull off some real surprises sometimes. This whole thing about Paid Faction Changes came totally from left field, and even though we know players have been asking for it I don't think any of us really expected that it would happen. For the precognitive among us, did you think they'd do it this way, though? For one thing, was the demand for such a service so huge that Blizzard opted to devote precious developer time to making it happen? It's definitely not an easy thing to pull off.

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World First "He Feeds On Your Tears" by Method
A few hours ago, Method managed to kill Algalon in 25-Man without anyone dying during the encounter and got the He Feeds on Your Tears achievement. Congratulations to them.


Recent In-Game Fixes - 07/01/09
Quote from: Bornakk (Source)Listed below are recent fixes we have applied to the game. Keep in mind that some of these changes may not be active until after the realm has been restarted.

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