For those of us who like to collect stuff in WoW, one of the cooler announcements for patch 3.2 was the inclusion of a whole new set of raptor hatchling pets, dropped around the world by rare and elite raptors. Of course, it was also an announcement of dread for serious collectors who can tell horror stories of killing thousands upon thousands of slimes and dragons for rare pets before. But will it be all as bad as that? WoW fansites have been on the case.

Mania, maven of Hunter pets, has also been looking into the drop rates and drop mobs, and has compiled a handy chart on her blog. Between Mania and the news on Warcraft Pets, it seems we can mostly confirm that the rare raptors (such as, for example, Takk the Leaper) will always drop their pets, while those that drop only off elites have a very rare drop rate more similar to the aforementioned slimes or dragons.

As we've heard, patch 3.2 will seriously streamline the Emblems system, allowing players to pick up Ulduar-level Emblems even just by running Heroics. Though lots of the other patch 3.2 changes have taken the spotlight lately, the Emblems change is definitely still a big deal, and while lots of "hardcore" players are up in arms about the changes (they had to raid for the same gear that people will now be able to get just by running Heroics, and even the brand new Emblems of Triumph gear will be attainable through Heroic dailies), other players are just confused by the whole thing. Fortunately, if you haven't yet wrapped your head around what all the changes mean, Clearcasting has a really excellent, thorough writeup about the Emblems changes, both explaining what you'll be able to get from where, and why Blizzard has decided to do things this way.

The biggest fear seems to be that players who have never raided before will start walking around in Ulduar- or even Coliseum-level gear, and they'll get invited to raids based on their gear, only to find that they're clueless about what to do. But I like Arioch's point there: does that mean we don't have clueless raiders now? Of course we do -- the gear you're wearing doesn't say anything about what you've done now, and it'll say even less after the patch. Players are already requiring achievements, and even that doesn't necessarily guarantee you're a good player.

Will there be bad PuGs after the patch? Of course, and there are bad PuGs now, too. But this is definitely a helpful change for anyone with alts, and while yes, it will allow non-raiders to get better gear, and it will probably bring raiders back into Heroics more often, it still won't affect those who are raiding at the highest levels. They'll still get the best gear earlier than everyone else, so if that's what's important to them, they've got nothing to complain about.

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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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.

The good news with these faction-specific armor is that the design team has put a decent effort into making the sets somewhat distinguishable from one another. For example, the Horde Shaman's shoulders are reminiscent of the Earthfury Epaulets from Molten Core, distinct from the chitinous design of the Horde Hunter. The Alliance Priest and Warlock designs are a lot closer to each other, however. But don't take my word for it... head over to the Under Development page and check out the previews for yourself. I'm pretty stoked and can't wait to see the rest of the sets!

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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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.

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.

I have been since the option to have dual talent specialization came out, actually. See, I tanked all through original WoW and The Burning Crusade (to be fair, I tanked as an arms or fury warrior because I could in MC and BWL) and so I figured, what the heck, I'll go prot for my offspec and tank some heroics. After an initial hiccough where I actually specced arms for some fights and fury for others, I settled back into a standard prot build for tanking heroics for friends. Then summer hit, and we all know what happens in summer: people suddenly want to go outside and froilic in the sunshine and you're sitting there waiting to raid with 22 people and no tanks. So what do you do?

Well, you strap on all that offspec tanking gear you collected 'just in case' and you tank Ulduar, that's what you do. Over the past couple of weeks I've tanked more than I've been DPS That's not the problem, however. It's not that I've been tanking that has me bothered... it's that I liked it. A lot.

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.

The first big thing that jumped out to me was in response to a question regarding Haste and DoTs. Have they considered DoTs scaling with Haste? Ghostcrawler says... yes! It's something they're apparently actively discussing. That doesn't guarantee we'll see it, but the fact that they're talking about it is promising.

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 how to play a Rogue in 3v3.

As part of the new design for the upcoming Arena Season 7, Blizzard is planning to remove the ability for a player's 2v2 rating to count towards their eligibility for the current season's rewards. This means that unless you're playing in the 3v3 or 5v5 arena brackets, you won't qualify for any of the newest gear. As a class who's dominance has always been most prominent in the 2's bracket, I believe this change hurts the Rogue the most.

We're one of the worst classes in 5v5, and that's a trend that has continued since Season 1. Luckily, we do have viability in 3v3. When combined with a caster and a healer, Rogues provide the leverage it takes to give their teammates an opening to unload powerful spells into the target while stunned and their healer is Blinded. While our problems with low survivability are more evident when there are 2-3 DPS pounding on us, with intelligent cooldown usage and an aggressive playstyle, Rogues can conquer the 3's bracket.

When I'm not playing WoW, I'm usually found indulging in manga and have been devouring the Warcraft series ever since the Sunwell Trilogy came out. Of all the characters introduced through comics and manga, the most tragic next to Anveena has to be Trag Highmountain. I've watched over the last year as more characters from the print franchises began to appear in-game, and there's something about seeing them translated into the game which gives me an amazing thrill.

We've met Anveena and her soul mate Kalec, Tyri and Jorad as well as Broll and that Blood Elf chick whose always hanging around Varian, so I've often wondered when Trag would turn up. It's inevitable given how his quest to Icecrown is in keeping with Wrath of the Lich King. Imagine my surprise when I logged on to the PTR for the first time this morning to find one Tauren Death Knight standing guard over one of the incapacitated forms of one of the Coliseum bosses.

Yes, it's our old friend Trag, now a level 80 NPC. While seeming hostile, he makes no move to attack the Alliance or speak, he just seems to stand near Gormok the Impaler. I'm sure he'll get some lines by the time Patch 3.2 goes live though. Having not yet read Warcraft: Legends' final volume, I'm curious to find out what happened to him but it's nice to know he's finally free of the Lich King's thrall.

I'm sure lots of you guys who trust datamining saw MMO Champion's list of changes in the latest PTR update for Patch 3.2 and raised an eyebrow at the Headless Horseman's Mount being instant cast. "And lo, thus did the Horseman's steed become the de facto PVP mount!", you exclaimed, prostrate in exultation.

Well, I have good news and bad news. The good news is that you may have just found out what "prostrate" or "exultation" mean. The bad news is that the mount isn't instant-cast. Zarhym explains:

The Headless Horseman's Mount has a variable cast time depending upon how it is used: 1.5 seconds as a ground mount and 3.0 seconds as a flying mount. However, due to technological limitations the tooltip reads as if the spell were instant.

The question of how the cast times will function in areas where flying isn't allowed came up, and he clarified that as well:

Yes, the cast time will depend on your riding skill and the area you're in. So, if you're in Outland or Northrend (no-fly zones excluded), the mount will require a 3-second cast time. If you're in Azeroth, a no-fly zone or do not have a flying skill, your cast time will be 1.5 seconds.

Well, cool! It's not instant-cast, but it'll do. Nice to see that Blizzard is making sure your vanity mounts kept up to speed with the rest of the rapidly-evolving World of Warcraft.

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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Hot on the heels of yesterday's great news about Engineering in Patch 3.2, Community Manager Zarhym has clarified a number of changes and what they mean for Engineers.

The first clarification was for those concerned about how to acquired the schematic for Jeeves, the new multitalented robot butler. The list of changes indicated that the schematic could be acquired from "inside" another Northrend mechanical. Zarhym expounded when pressed about it:

Just to clarify, the Jeeves schematic has a chance to be "skinned" by engineers off of any level 70+ mechanical units. The drop rate starts incredibly low, but increases substantially based on the level and difficulty of the mechanical unit. So Ulduar bosses that can be "skinned" by engineers have a much better chance of dropping the schematic than lower-level mechanical units found in Northrend.

That's great news! It's available for non-raiders at (Zarhym says) a very reasonable drop rate, but since raiders will get the most use out of it, mechanical raid bosses are much more likely to drop it than a mechagnome in Borean Tundra.

Following that, he also announced a number of changes, which are listed after the break.

The heat is on here in the UK and we've actually got a summer. Shocking, I know. But, rather than send people outside to soak up the rays the blistering heat and humidity has forced most inside. Suddenly Azeroth is that much more appealing, you can't get sunstroke in there, oh no. After Alex's terrible German accent last week (I'm really sorry about that, German readers, it won't happen again), things have settled down and we're back to the normal cycle of weekly maintenance.

Of course, this means that rather than rolling restarts, all the European realms will be offline from 5:00am until 11:00am, Paris time (CEST). But that's not all, Blizzard are also going to be performing maintenance on their website (this includes the Armory, the main website, the forums and the Blizzard Store) between 3:00am and 7:00am Paris time (CEST). So if you want to check Turpster's stats, buy Diablo II, whinge about (insert class here) being nerfed or just recruit a friend, you might want to do so outside of these times.

Daniel has once again crafted a fantastic little post to keep you entertained and don't forget we'll be giving away some shiny Fields of Honor loot cards in the morning, just for you (don't tell the sleeping Americans). Just keep your eye on the front page and you could win your own chicken mount. In honor of that, I finally met the virtual form of Turpster on the PTR (you can find us both on Fordring). He wanted to practice the lesser known sport of chicken jousting but this mention of that noble and ancient sport caused the world server to crash. As I starred at the blank screen I couldn't help but wonder. Do you think he's trying to compensate for something? What could it be?

You're a pet and mount maniac. You've hunted down every noncombat pet you can find, gotten a lucky roll on every rare mount you can possibly pick up, and after long last, you've earned both the "Lil' Game Hunter" and "Mountain o' Mounts" achievements. But still, you want more for some reason. More pets, more mounts, more achievement points.

Good news: Bornakk says that there will still be more to find. While he says they won't be upping the achievements every time they bring out a patch that has more pets and mounts to collect, they will definitely add in new achievements periodically for collecting both noncombat pets and mounts (and, though he doesn't say so, we'd assume they'll add in extra rewards besides the achievement points, including extra pets or mounts to be earned at each level).

So if you are in fact a collecting master and have already earned the 75 pets and 100 mounts (a much easier feat than it used to be) for both maximum achievements currently in the game, just be patient. There'll be new goals to go after soon.

Okay, gonna say this right now.

This article is so full of spoilers you'll think you're in a movie with Paul Walker and Vin Diesel. The Argent Coliseum will be so spoiled that its parents bought it a car before it could drive. There will be less mystery to the Argent Coliseum than in M. Night Shyamalan's "The Village."

There. So. Thanks to Boubouille of MMO-Champion's help, I've spent the past few days digging through the spell and NPC data in patch 3.2's current PTR game files, slogging through thousands of new entries to find out how exactly the new encounters in the Argent Coliseum will be like (and who they'll be!). Well, I've been mostly successful in that regard, and I'm prepared to spoil about 90% of the Coliseum's encounters for you. But that's not all! This latest PTR patch was also kind enough to provide me with a ton of sound files related to the Coliseum and its set of instances, which has given me a very firm insight into what happens around the encounters. This particular article will focus on the 5-man instance.

Basic caveats apply: The encounters could change at any time, datamining isn't an exact science, I could be misinterpreting files, etc, etc. But I'm pretty solid on what I've written down, and anything I'm speculating on will be noted as such.

Any spell or ability listed in this guide will likely be a random rank, given the spell database's knack for throwing me 10-man and 25-man spells in the same area! Don't assume that the damage values are accurate for your favored raid size!

Remember, BIG SPOILERS AFTER THE JUMP. But if you can't contain yourself, then go right ahead, dear readers. Let's go down the rabbit hole.

And here are the Night Elf forms! I think I've avoided some of the annoying audio issues from the video on the 3.2 Tauren Druid forms, and I've also included an extended shot of the NE cat form's run animation, as it's one of the things that really distinguishes the bigger, sleeker cat model from its live counterpart. Unfortunately, they haven't fixed the bug where one of the bear models (the one linked to the NE's green hair) is unavailable (you'll get the black bear form instead), so only 4 of the 5 new bear colors could be included here.

If you're unable to play this with audio, the pertinent commentary is that: a). I tried to keep the camera as close as possible to help people appreciate the detail, mostly because: b). A lot of the subtler color distinctions just don't come across very well on the capture, and I think I spent too much time trying to get every angle as a result: c). The forms are really gorgeous, and the NE cat in motion is lovely, and: d). I'm still a dork.

UPDATE: A new PTR build went live late last night after the video was completed and uploaded, and Blizzard fixed the bug where one of the Night Elf bear forms was unavailable. I've included pictures past the cut.

For years it has been a running joke that the level 11 elite Hogger should be a high level raid boss. Every server will have heard talk of a 40-man Hogger run or re-rolling a bunch of level 1's just to tackle this insurmountable foe. He is surely the scourge of Alliance toons everywhere simply because he is the first elite we encounter as we explore Elwynn. Well, it seems Blizzard have listened, Boubouille over at MMO Champion has been datamining the 3.2 patch files and has discovered tidbits about some of the bosses we'll be fighting. Indeed the most interesting part involves memories of past encounters -- including Hogger. Yes, you can also fight Algalon, Onyxia, Illidan and Edwin VanCleef but Hogger is the most important. What confuses me though is whose memories are you fighting? Those of your own past encounters or those of one of the Argent Crusade? If it's the former, what happens if you've not fought said boss? What if you're Horde?

But I digress. While you can bet Hogger won't be a level 11 anymore, it's a shocking revelation. While we know Blizzard pays attention to what WoW players are saying, it's nice to be reminded of that. So I want to know your reactions? Is it a good thing for Blizzard to pander to player's whims? Do you think reminding players where they came from and their past triumphs is a good thing? Not so keen? Is it just an excuse to be lazy and rehash old content? Tell us, constant readers, and drop your thoughts in the box below.