Each week Matthew Rossi lovingly hand-crafts Totem Talk from a single switch of aged Barrens scrub pine. This week, we try and calm some fears and discuss what changes we're still hoping might make it into patch 3.2. This week's image comes from Protein, a restoration shaman on Bladefist (he didn't specify US or EU realm).

Before we get rolling on the changes that shamans haven't seen yet in the various notes to patch 3.2, let us take a look at what notes we have seen, especially the most recent ones.

• Shaman
• Earth Shock: Redesigned. This spell no longer interrupts spell casting, but rather reduces melee attack speed by 10% for 8 seconds (exclusive with similar effects such as Thunder Clap).
• Wind Shock: Has been renamed Wind Shear and no longer shares a cooldown with Flame, Frost or Earth Shock.
• Maelstrom Weapon: Now also has a chance to reduce the cast time of Hex.

Hardly massive changes, but at the same time pretty welcome. The fact that ES gives a form of Thunder Clap is weird since pretty much every tank has or will have that debuff in patch 3.2 (Thunder Clap, Icy Touch, Infected Wounds and the incoming paladin ability) so it seems odd from a PvE standpoint to give it to a non tanking class. If this is intended as a PvP ability... well, it's not terribly impressive. If your choice is between ES or Frost Shock against melee, you're probably going to try and snare them instead of debuffing their attack speed.

Still, not having to use ES as an interrupt will be a positive boon for elemental shamans who saw their DPS nosedive every time they had to keep that cooldown open for Earth Shock instead of Flame Shock, and it's not going to terribly impact enhancement in PvE at all. So I'd definitely call this one, on the whole, a positive change. And having Maelstrom affect Hex is just hilarious. Hex is kind of the poor man's poly in PvP, a combination snare and disarm that can be trinketed out or dispelled.

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.

"Cower in fear, puny mortals! Maintenance time is upon you!"

Maintenance time ho! Yes Europe, it's nearly the middle of the week again. I'm honestly not sure how that happened but once more unto the breach. Unfortunately the downtime is a little longer than normal this week, hence poor Serisa quaking in fear in the picture above. Blizzard has announced that all European realms will be offline from 3:00am until 1:00pm (CEST) tomorrow.

So, that makes a good few hours in which to kick your heels. Kind of annoying but it's a necessary evil. Once more coming to our rescue, Daniel W. has got a nice round up with a heavy focus on the cataclysmic news from last week. Cataclysmic, get it? Anyway, last week was quite news intensive and if you start to get withdrawal, what about hitting the PTR for a bit and trying out all the juicy Patch 3.2 goodness.

Videogamer.com has a nice long interview with World of Warcraft Producer Tom Chilton about everything from patch 3.2 and the Argent Tournament to the future of the game at large. They caught up with him at the Warcraft Regional Finals 2009 tournament in Germany this past week, and in part one, he talks about the upcoming patch and what Blizzard is expecting to get out of it. He says the Isle of Conquest battleground is their most "epic-feeling" instanced PvP setting since Alterac Valley, and that they want it to feel nuts, with players fighting each other via air and land. He also mentions Arena, and says that it was originally designed to be "a fun side PvP activity" that they went a little overboard with during Burning Crusade. Finally, he talks about twinks, and says that neither Blizzard nor twinks, apparently, want to see other players crushed by those who have the time or money to max out their low level characters. Even twinks, says Chilton, want to see competition against each other, and the option to turn XP off will let them do that. I'm not sure I agree with that last one -- many twinks seem to beef their characters up just for the chance to lay waste to "normal" players, but Chilton says Blizzard believes otherwise.

The second part of the interview is more general -- he talks a little bit about the next expansion (with the same speculation we've already heard: Gilneas, the Maelstrom, the Emerald Dream), and says that designing a race is tougher on artists, but designing a class is tougher on designers. He admits that because we had a new class in Wrath, it's unlikely we'll see another class so soon in the next expansion, but "not impossible" of course. And he does note that Blizzard tries to "pre-seed" the races before they use them as playable races, so if they are adding in races, chances are we've already seen them (which, you may note, wasn't strictly true with the Draenei in BC). Finally, he talks about the future of Blizzard's MMO in general, and says it's still wide open to them: they plan for the game to last for years, and what they do between now and then, whether that be more expansions, microtransactions, or even a free-to-play model, will have to depend on what they want to do at the time.

Very interesting interview. Chilton doesn't really reveal anything, but you do get the sense that save for a very skeleton plan of one or two years in the future, Blizzard is really playing it fast and loose with World of Warcraft. Even he admits that the game may look very different, depending on how things go, in another four years from now.

When the news broke that patch 3.2 would bring new chest heirlooms, with a stacking +10% XP bonus, one commenter made an interesting suggestion: get heirlooms for your level 80 characters, and bank them until the next expansion. So far between chest and shoulders you've got a +20% bonus to all XP right there, and having some quality equipment always helps the leveling process.

Of course, there's every chance that Blizzard will simply disable current heirlooms for characters past level 80, to prevent precisely this behavior. They've done level-based nerfing before, with items like the Riding Crop and enchants like Crusader.

The whole fate of heirlooms in the next expansion seems pretty nebulous to me, actually; will we need to go back and farm Emblems of Conquest at level 90 to gear up our alts? It's too early to tell. For now I would hold on to any extra badges you might have, but when the next expansion nears, you may be able to make good use of them.

The other day, we posted that Blizzard had trademarked the name "Cataclysm," and right after that, the community exploded with speculation: is it the name of WoW's next expansion, Blizzard's next-gen MMO, or some other project? Nothing is guaranteed yet (is it ever with Blizzard?), but the Internets have pretty much landed on the new expansion as the answer. "Cataclysm" actually means "a momentous and violent event marked by overwhelming upheaval and demolition," but it also has a pretty specific relation to water, and that's got lots of people thinking that it's the name of the Maelstrom expansion. In fact, The Sundering, or the world event in Azeroth's history where the Well of Eternity was destroyed and the Maelstrom (that swirly thing in the middle of the map) was created, was referred to as "the Cataclysm." So there you go -- pretty solid evidence, even though, as I said, nothing is guaranteed until we hear it from Blizz.

Stropp's got an interesting piece of speculation that says though "Cataclysm" is still probably the next expansion, the event the word refers to has yet to happen. He claims that if Blizzard really wants to speed up the 1-50 leveling process, they should just destroy Old Azeroth as we know it, and just have all the new characters start at level 50. That would be pretty nuts, but then again, Blizzard's never shown a real affinity for the old content, and by the next expansion, we'll be heading up to level 90 or even 100.

I love this comic from the very talented miggy over at WoW Ladies, not only because it's funny, but because she's got a point. Back when the Battle for Mount Hyjal instance in the Caverns of Time appeared in game, we all wondered why we were going there in the first place -- unlike the other CoT instances, there were no dragons to fight or strange factions messing with the continuum. All that could happen in there is that we'd screw everything up and ruin time as we know it (and given all the wipes that went on in there, we probably did). But with the Argent Tournament, Blizzard seems to have gone even further: not only is there no clear reason for us to do it, but we're actually ignoring the threat at hand.

As you know if you've read Sacco's excellent (and completely spoilerrific) guides to the Coliseum raid and the Tournament 5-man, there is a tacked-on reason we're doing all of this stuff, and it's that the Horde and Alliance want to send their strongest people to go after Arthas, and the Tournament is a way of sussing out who's most worthy. But though that makes for some great lore cutscenes, doesn't it still undermine Arthas' strength? How powerful can the guy be if there are so many people lining up to kill him we have to fight over it?

Don't get me wrong, we're definitely looking forward to the Coliseum, and it's definitely brought some interesting things and rewards to the game. Just like CoT, in the light of the lore and the MMO genre at large, it's a great addition. But it is funny that the great Lich King's main tactic seems to be to have us fight it out between ourselves way before we ever bother taking a shot at him.

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

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.

The plan is for there not to be a 3.4. Blizzard has stated time and time again that the plan is for Arthas to be the final boss of the Wrath cycle and for Icecrown Citadel to be the final content patch of the Wrath cycle. The next expansion should be approaching much sooner than the wait between vanilla and BC (and BC and Wrath) as well, so this timeline could work out fine provided that the 4.0 train keeps rolling as it should. Blizzcon should clue us in as to how things are progressing in that regard, so keep your eyes open.

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.

I have to admit, o' faithful Queue readers, that I considered pawning off answering questions today to someone else so I could have more time to catch up on other work. Patch days can get quite busy around the WoW.com head quarters.

Last night for example. Alex, Mike Sacco, and I had heard that there was a new raid lockout extension feature in place, so we rushed onto the Patch 3.2 PTR to grab some screenshots. Of course that meant we had to deal with the thing crashing every few minutes. And once we finally did make it into ZG to get a quick boss kill, Sacco disconnected and the server announced a shutdown in 5 minutes. But hey, we got the kill off and the screenshots captured with 15 seconds left until the shutdown. We won!

Aideros asked...

"When are more "hero classes", like the Death Knight, coming out? What are the speculations? Has anything been said about them since WotLK?"

Like many other Blizzard fans, you're probably super excited about the upcoming release of StarCraft II -- it was "about time" when we first heard about the game, and now, this close to actually having the game out, anticipation is higher than ever. So why have you been waiting so long? According to Eurogamer's latest interview with Rob Pardo, you can blame none other than World of Warcraft for the delay. He and StarCraft II's lead designer both confirm that quite a bit of the RTS team were called back in to working on Blizzard's MMO. Artists and class and map balance guys alike were put back on WoW, resulting in the StarCraft title's delay for more than a year. Taken at face value, they're saying you could have started playing the new RTS last November if it wasn't for the whole Azeroth thing.

It's worth noting, though, that when they say "working on WoW," they don't mean developing the Crusaders' Coliseum or even Outland -- they're talking about the original design of World of Warcraft for the release way back in 2004. Even though Blizzard didn't announce the next StarCraft until a few years ago in 2007, production actually started seriously (with multiplayer first, strangely enough) right after the launch of WoW, in 2005. Which makes the choice all the more intriguing: they decided to delay the RTS even before they knew WoW would be the runaway success that it is today.

Guess the choice paid off. The beta of StarCraft II should be kicking off any day now (you all got keys at last year's BlizzCon, remember?), so even though that year delay was caused by WoW way back at launch, we'll see if they've had the time since to make a game that'll meet players' expectations.

Ahh the smell of fresh loot in the air, it must be summer. Well, fans of loot cards and the official Trading Card Game, I bet you have your calendar marked. Tomorrow sees the release of the latest - and possibly greatest - TCG expansion Fields of Honor. Yes, you too could have your very own El Pollo Grande, the greatest mount in the entire history of Azeroth. We've mentioned this thing was rarer than a spectral tiger's tooth, right? Indeed our very own Turpster has been raving about his (insert slightly rude giant chicken joke here) all week.

The best part that is the cards were activated in an earlier patch so you can use them as soon as you find one. No more waiting for 3.1.x or even 3.2. Just to recap, the Fields of Honor loot consists of El Pollo Grande, the Ogre Pinata and the groovy Path of Cenarius. You can also take a peek at Upper Deck's loot card preview page for some really cool screenshots.

But here's the best part. After the success of our last EU giveaway, Upper Deck International here in the UK have very kindly given us a set of shiny European loot cards. Isn't that nice of them? We certainly think so! We're going to give them away during this week's maintenance so check back then.

Reader Chad forwarded us this screen shot of a conversation that takes place over on Elder rise in Thunder Bluff between two Tauren on the patch 3.2 PTR. Apparently it actually begins with a new quest by the Dalaran Portals, as pointed out in this thread at Scrolls of Lore, and while the quest leads nowhere, you do get to hear the linked dialogue.

In it, Aponi Brightmane, a wounded warrior who wishes to return the front lines in Northrend, and Tahu Sagewind, a Druid, speak together about the history of Druidism, the moon, and the sun. They speak of Elune, whom they know as Mu'sha, one of the eyes of the the Earth Mother. They mention that it seems strange that if Tauren were the first Druids as their legends claim, that all Hamuul Runetotem teaches is the moon power of the Night Elves. Tahu wonders if Druids themselves, because of this, are out of balance. The idea segues back into the idea of the world out of balance due to the influence of the Scourge, wondering if sitting idle in Thunder Bluff is really a good idea when the Northern front is so bleak, wondering if balance must needs to be returned by action.

As you may or may not have heard, the World of Warcraft is currently offline in China, thanks to a fight between the game's former licensee, The9, and its current licensee, Netease. Yes, if you think a day or so of downtime is bad here in the US and the EU, that's nothing compared to this: the game has been down since June 7th, and neither Blizzard nor Netease have given an estimate of when the game might be back online. An analyst from China does say that they expect most players to return to the servers once they return, but in the meantime, many players have spread over into Taiwan's WoW server. We don't believe that Blizzard allowed transfers during this time, so they've likely started and leveling brand new characters over there.

And don't think that other games haven't noticed this unique window of opportunity: there are currently millions of MMO players looking for something to do in China, and there are at least three big other games looking to give them something to do. Aion, which is currently in beta here in the US but is apparently up and running in Asia already, is making as much of a play as they can, and there are two local Chinese games, Zhuxian Online and Chibi Online, both developed by a company called Perfect World, that are also aiming to steal some of China's WoW players.

Very interesting situation over there -- imagine how much the MMO world would be thrown off here if WoW just completely disappeared for multiple weeks, if not longer. Blizzard is likely scrambling to get things moving over there as fast as possible.