WoW.com

One of the more controversial parts of the Patch 3.2 PTR was the decision to remove the 2v2 bracket from serious arena play. In the 3.2 patch notes thus far it was said that "The newest season of Arena gear can only be purchased if you meet the requirements with your 3 or 5-player team rating. Rating requirements from 2-player teams can still be used to purchase the previous season of gear."

That effectively killed off the 2v2 bracket.

However today, Blizzard has done an about face on the issue. Sort of. Not that this is a bad thing, mind you. They're listening to feedback and this patch is in testing. The fact that they're willing to make such a major change based on feedback they've received is a great thing.

So as of today, your 2v2 rating will count towards your ability to purchase gear, etc... It will mean something. However the following exceptions apply:

• The current season's weapons will not be available for purchase with your 2v2 rating
• The current season's shoulders will not be available for purchase with your 2v2 rating
• Your 2v2 rating will not count towards the Gladiator title/rewards

The full announcement after the break.

Read more →

Filed under: News items, PvP, Arena

Adroit machinima fans are probably already aware that Myndflame has been diligently working on the third installment Illegal Danish. The premise of this new Illegal Danish is that Van Kraken has created his ultimate brew, the Flask of Ten Thousand Souls. The flask is so powerful that only by combining it with the power of the Illegal Danish can it be consumed without fear of death. The bad news for Van Kraken, though, is that it can only be used by a gnome. So, obviously, Van Kraken needs to find and corrupt a gnome to do this deed. The new movie looks to be the same riotous fun as the previous Illegal Danish films, so it was pretty exciting when we learned Myndflame released the Illegal Danish 3 Prelude.

The prelude focuses on the star character, an ambitious gnome named Dirti. In this series of events, he undergoes a dark transformation into "Dirti G", making him incredibly powerful under the supervision of the sinister Van Kraken. If you didn't realize it right away, this prelude is a parody of Blizzard's own preview for StarCraft 2. I'm obviously a pretty big fan of the video, and it actually made me (briefly) considering a new Rogue.

Check out the preview yourself by clicking here. It's definitely worth your time.

---

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, WoW Moviewatch

David Perry is one of those game developers who doesn't do anything small -- he started out with a company called Shiny Entertainment, responsible for great old games like Earthworm Jim, MDK, Messiah, and the Enter the Matrix movie tie-in game, and nowadays he's moved on to the MMO market, where he's developed all kinds of crazy ideas (including, we're not kidding, a dance MMO). This is the kind of guy who has ideas and chases them down.

His latest idea is a system called Gaikai, a "game streaming service" that allows players to jump right into any PC games they'd like, no installation or hard drive space necessary, online. There are a number of services like this springing up lately, including the much-discussed OnLive, where instead of depending on your local hardware to render and produce the game you're playing, you just send and recieve information with a remote server. As you can see above, Gaikai is focusing on PC games, and anyone who's planning on running a PC gaming service has to include World of Warcraft. Starting at about 6:00 into the video above, he shows off a version of WoW that requires no installation or loading at all; just sign in and play.

Read more →

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Blizzard, Hardware

No one denies that trolls are naturally cannibalistic, or that they seem to spend half their time making war on other troll tribes. So how did they get to be one of the most populous races in Azeroth? Our submitter Fakawot accidentally discovered the answer to this question when fighting Broggok in Hellfire Citadel. The beholder boss mysteriously perished while trying to devour Fakawot alive. Trolls must secrete some sort of toxin, similar to that of the poison dart frog, that is deadly to everything but other trolls. I suspect it's some sort of potent combination of patchouli and bong water, but that's just a guess.

Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We'd love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word "Azeroth" in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing -- use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, gold seller ads, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran.

Filed under: Screenshots, Around Azeroth, Galleries

Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com's series of fantasy death matches. This season's bosses come from the five-man instances of Wrath of the Lich King.

It was a bloody job, but someone had to do it – and that someone was Moorabi. The High Prophet of Man'toth made a mammoth mess as he gored Trollgore in this week's Two Bosses Enter, One Boss Leaves. Sixty-five percent of readers handed this week's deathmatch to the Ice Troll. Spectators Heilig, Rowan and Grinton mulled it over from the stands:

Heilig: You're all forgetting the adds. Moorabi has no way to deal with the adds. If he ignores them, Trollgore gets buffed dramatically as the adds stack up and the Consume stacks to ridiculous levels. If he kills them, he gets raped by Corpse Explosions. There's a reason you tank Trollgore away from the person handling the adds, you know. Moorabi has no way to deal with this. Trollgore wins by a mile.

Rowan: He has Quake and Ground Tremor -- that's two AoEs! With adds being non-elite, he can easily pulverize them before they get too close to Trollgore. Moorabi wins this, hands down.

Heilig: Ground Tremor is close range, and Quake is primarily a stun. The adds wouldn't die until they got to Trollgore, whereupon he would explode the corpses right into Moorabi's trunk. Game over.

Grinton: What this fight comes down to is a battle of tusks. And though Trollgore would start off with the upper lower-bite, it's hard to beat what that pachyderm is paching (badum-tish!). Also, to respond to Heilig, Moorabi has two abilities to control adds. So between the stomping and the tusks, Moorabi wins by a long shot.

Read more →

Filed under: Features, Lore, Bosses, Two Bosses Enter

New tier sets and Arena gear are cool, new 5-man content is awesome, and a new Battleground is almost too good to be true. We're being hit with a flurry of new content it's easy to forget that Blizzard still has to introduce those new dances they teased us with before Wrath of the Lich King was released. I just remembered all of this when the world saw one of its pop icons pass on last week, the inspiration for the unmistakable Night Elf male dance. The King of Pop will be missed, and I'm happy that he at least got an homage in my favorite game.

Just like the Night Elf male dance, many of the racial dances are inspired by some real world choreography -- Tauren males rock out like bananas dancing Peanut Butter Jelly Time; Draenei males do the Tunak Tunak Bollywood-style; Orc males can't be touched while doing the hammertime; Blood Elf females do their intoxicating Britney moves; and Blood Elf males relish every opportunity to display their Dynamite masculinity. As you can see above, the female Night Elf dance is a poor man's version of Alizée's live performance of J'en Ai Marre.

If and when Blizzard does manage to put out those dance studios, what new dances would you like your characters to learn? Maybe something from Ok Go? How about some modern dance as a nod to celebrated choreographer Pina Bausch who recently passed on? Too avante garde? Perhaps Chubby Checker's twist deserves an homage, too. If that April Fools joke wasn't so downright silly we might even see some Azerothian Jabbawockeez. Share your thoughts with us, and even if you're not all that interested in dance, you have to admit that French pop isn't the worst way to start the day.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Breakfast topics

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.

As with all third-party applications, you should install and run this one at your own risk -- the FAQ has more information if you're wondering how things are stored or whether the app is secure. The app is completely open source, which means anyone who wants to can read the code, so if the author of the app was doing anything sneaky, we'd know about it. And yes, right now the app is not violating the ToS, but of course that's enforced according to Blizzard's whims, so again, use it at your own risk. If you're not interested in using this app, you can always update your status here on WoW.com using our own addon -- it's not Twitter, but it will let your friends keep track of you in Azeroth!

But TweetCraft does look to be a clever, solid way to access and post to Twitter from right inside your World of Warcraft game. If you've been looking for a one-stop solution like this, there you go. Do be sure to follow us over on Twitter, too, if you haven't yet -- you never know when we might tweet something you'll want to see.

Update: Apparently the app on default tweets all kinds of things you probably don't want to (like changing zones). There is probably a settings switch somewhere, but as always, user beware.

Filed under: Fan stuff, Odds and ends, AddOns

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.

Meanwhile, the poor folks at The9 have not been doing so well -- they were on top of the world last year, but when World of Warcraft up and flew the griffon out of there, they lost the majority of their business. A new AP article has them revising their expected earnings down by an "estimated 55 to 75 percent." Ouch.

Let that be a lesson, NetEase. Keep your instances running and your downtime low, because if Blizzard pulls the plug on a game you're running, they'll be taking a ton of money with them.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Blizzard, Economy, Hardware

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!

---

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!

---

Filed under: Patches, Items, Blizzard, News items

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.

Read more →

Filed under: Patches, Expansions, The Queue