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PTR
7.3.5 PTR Speculation - Whispers of Il'gynoth (Spoilers!)
With the 7.3.5 Patch datamining, more loose ends from the story that connects Legion and Battle for Azeroth are starting to get explained, as we discover more about what happens following the
Aftermath of Antorus
.
In this post we will speculate what will possibly happens during 7.3.5 and even at the end of Battle for Azeroth, based on the already famous Whispers of
Il'gynoth
, but now using information from datamined broadcast text recently found in the
latest datamining
.
Spoilers for Antorus and beyond inside!!
Wowhead
Speculation on the Expansion Launch Date for Battle for Azeroth
Battle for Azeroth was just revealed and people are curious when it will launch. When the expansion-related novel
Before the Storm
was delayed, we wondered if it was tied to the expansion. Here's a look at the content schedule throughout Legion and our educated guesses on a timeline for Battle for Azeroth.
Note: this is just speculation, nothing is official. We're putting on our tinfoil hats!
PTR
Patch 7.3.2 New Environment Assets
In Patch 7.3.2, Blizzard added extra environment files, used as assets for the sky/stars. Check out what they look like, and how they could possibly be used, in our post.
Warning: expansion speculation and 7.3.2 spoilers in post.
PTR
Seabraid Stallion Encrypted Mount Filenames Discovered
The last encrypted filenames have been discovered for the Seabraid Stallion Mount. A few days ago, we learned more about one of the other encrypted items, the
Tottle Battle Pet
.
Warning: expansion speculation in post.
PTR
Four Playable Sub Races in Next WoW Expansion?
Players have been hopeful for more racial customization, with the addition of the Lightforged Draenei from the Army of the Light faction. Based on a discovery made by KayRule, speculation points to four possible playable sub-races.
Live
Mists of Pandaria's First Legendary: Available for Every Class
Last month we were the first to break the news
that a legendary might be coming to Mists of Pandaria. We had a lot of speculation that legendary items would affix to equipment to enhance its stats due to
Breath of the Black Prince
, making this World of Warcraft's first legendary that every class can use!
However, nothing referenced an exact item back then. Thanks to today's datamining, though, we have a better sense of what it will be. (Keep in mind that this is still speculation, with no actual items datamined yet--just icons, quests, and items that augment ilvl.)
New icons for a legendary axe, fist, gun, dagger, mace, shield, staff and sword have been datamined in today's patch
.
[
Live
In with the Newb, Out with the Old: The Future of World of Warcraft
It was an interesting week for outside sources, with
an interview featuring Tom Chilton on IGN
and
a very in-depth examination of WoW's subscriber woes at Gamasutra
.
The catch? Both of them deal with the future of Azeroth in different ways. Gamasutra analyzed the shortcomings of Cataclysm, interviewing players and even Blizzard employees to figure out what's in store. IGN took a more basic approach, going directly to the source with both Tom Chilton and WoW's art director explaining everything in their own words without leaving room for speculation.
IGN With Tom Chilton on 4.3
Chilton didn't waste time getting to the point in
IGN's interview
. He immediately started dropping juicy tidbits about the Deathwing encounter, saying: "The fight takes place in multiple different environments, you'll actually potentially get loot at different points in the encounter so it's broken up into larger scale overall. Players will start at Wyrmrest Temple and then eventually it progresses to players fighting on back flyin
Live
News Round Up: Ethereals Are Back in Blizzard Teaser
So Blizzard just posted a really weird picture to their Facebook of ethereal NPCs. A blue posted it with no explanation as presumably a teaser. At this point, it's probably a hint for either 4.3 or the next expansion; in particular, maybe it even hints towards a redone Outlands or further character customization. Whatever it does mean, though, it's pretty crazy.
Curiouser and curiouser...
4.2.2 Patch Notes PTR (August 11th)
World of Warcraft PTR Patch 4.2.2
Notes for all World of Warcraft patches can be found
here
.
Dungeons & Raids
Firelands
The visibility of Ragnaros’ Dreadflame ability has been increased.
The size of Ragnaros’ hit box during the final phase of the Heroic encounter has been increased.
User Interface
Raid Frames should
Live
Blizzard Trademarks "Mists of Pandaria," Next Expansion?
Put on your tinfoil hats--it looks like an April Fools' joke may become a reality. Last week, Blizzard filed for a trademark for "Mists of Pandaria" under computer software. This is a common practice for the registration of expansion titles; for example, the Cataclysm was filed for trademark on June 26, 2009 and its domain was bought subsequently. Similarly, a Pandaria domain was also purchased last week.
This means that it's possible that the next expansion will be announced at BlizzCon and that it will be Mists of Pandaria.
Let the speculation run wild--what do you guys think? Is this our future expansion or a false alarm? Will the pandarens be a playable race for both sides, a neutral faction even though Blizzard has said that they like factions to be identifiable and distinct for horde and alliance? Or maybe their role will be more of a lore one, focusing on them as quest hubs and a central conflict?
Click here to see the official filing!
Live
PvP Season 9 Ending as early as June 21st, Patch 4.2 Soon After
Blizzard just posted the speculative end date to season 9 for PvP as soon as June 21st. While this isn't set in stone, it points to patch 4.2 and season 10 within a week after this. As such, our bets are on the last week of June or possibly the first week of July for 4.2, but we'll see. It's most likely that Firelands will have some sort of gated content if this release is so soon as there has been no heroic testing thus far and no indication that such encounters will be doable on live. Several fights still have major bugs, too, even on normal 25-man. As someone who has tested every encounter, I can say that it doesn't feel as completed as it usually does.
At any rate, hopefully Firelands' gating is not one as painful as Sunwell's was, if it indeed has one.
Arena and Rated Battleground Season 9 is scheduled to end as early as June 21. At that point we will determine who is eligible for the end-of-season rewards, a process that should take approximately one week. It's very important for players who feel that they may be eligible for Arena titles and/or the Vicious Gladiator’s Twilight Drake to refrain from transferring their characters to anothe
Live
Patch 4.1: Map Animation, Vanity Pet Changes, and a Resort Town Preview
Fresh from a foray onto the PTR, Wowhead volunteers Neutronimity and Perculia have brought some exciting news about some notable additions to Azeroth. While they're not a new raid nor a new legendary, they're still important in their own way. After all, it's the little things that make World of Warcraft so memorable!
The first discovery was that there's a new map animation. When users open their maps, they will now
see
it. This was first brought to our attention a week ago by Wowhead user Satelitko. They even went as far as to make
a video of the animation
.
The second discovery, this time by Neutronimity, was that companion pets now stay with their owner through thick and thin. Did you hearth away? Zone? Or even log off? Don't worry, they'll stay summoned. A small change to be sure, but a very practical one; summoning your vanity pet every time you left an area was easy to forget.
Of course, we've saved the best for last. The third discovery is pretty big. It's also a little weird. Perculia discovered a brand new resort off in the mountains of the border between Feralas and Silithus while flying around on the PTR this morning. The amount of detail put into t
Live
A Look at WotLK Progression Statistics
Stompalina
from the Rawrcast tipped me off to an article they had up on their
website
that takes a look at progression statistics for WotLK.
I thought this was really interesting to look at—it tracks how quickly people progressed through the starting content in WotLK versus how quickly they progressed through ICC, and what percentage of players are actually completing the content, and draws some interesting conclusions about what we can expect to see in Cataclysm.
The article is here:
http://www.rawrcast.com/2010/05/wotlk-progression-statistics-looking-forward-to-cataclysm/
Live
Some Celestial Steed Numbers
So I was speaking with
Draknorr
, who has been doing some math about the release of the
Celestial Steed
mount pictured to the right.
His friend entered the queue for a mount, and at the time the queue was at almost exactly 100k, and the stock ticked from 91% to 90% as he watched. When it ticked down to 89%, there were 46k in the queue. That's around 54,000 mounts for every 1% of the total stock—or, I would guess, about 5 million total mounts.
So this means that every 1% of the stock, they've sold 50k mounts at $25 a piece. That's $1,250,000. At the time of this writing the queue was at 88%—making that $15,000,000 so far—
and that's just in the United States.
Holy cow.
Live
Icecrown Citadel Raid Buff Increased to 10%
The raid buffs that
were introduced
at the beginning of the month for
Icecrown Citadel
have been increased in this morning's maintenance. Originally set to increase damage, healing, absorption effects and health by 5%,
Strength of Wrynn
and
Hellscream's Warsong
have now been increased to
10%
.
Now that the first increase in the buff is now active we have an idea of how often the buff will increase. Expect the next increase (15%) on
April 27th
, which is four weeks from today.
Live
Tom Chilton Interview: Possible Raid Boss Before Cataclysm
Game Informer
published yesterday an interview with Tom Chilton, game director for World of Warcraft, looking back on the Wrath of the Lich King expansion.
They talk about how what classes we might have seen instead of Death Knights, graphical improvements, PvP, why Ulduar was chosen and even a brief discussion of the content patch between now and and Cataclysm.
Hint: It just might be a
single-boss encounter in the Ruby Sanctum
, inside Wyrmrest Temple!
For the final question, there’s been some rumors going around and I wanted to clear them up. You guys have wrapped up the main Lich King storyline. Icecrown is out there, which you guys have said is the final major raid for this expansion. But there are some rumors that there might be another content patch of some
Live
Blizzard and Upper Deck Parting Ways
As some of you may have heard on other sites, such as
WoW.com
,
Blizzard
and
Upper Deck
are not renewing the contract for Upper Deck to produce the trading card game cards. This is a big change as Upper Deck is one the biggest distributors of TCG that I can think of. Blizzard has said they will continue forward with the TCG and are continuing to look forward.
Now onto a little speculation! From what I noticed and have heard about around the water cooler (You didn't know we had a water cooler?) is that Blizzard likes to do things in-house. Compared to when Blizzard and Upper Deck first launched the WoW TCG, Blizzard has received a lot of experience in the TCG arena and they may have decided it's time to bring the project under their own umbrella. This would mean Blizzard would begin printing the cards and distributing it themselves and would have more freedom in how to handle things.
You can read the post by Blizzard regarding this after the break.
Live
BlizzCon 2010 Tentatively Scheduled for October
WoW.com is
reporting
that one of their readers has stumbled upon dates at the Anaheim Convention Center's
calendar schedule
that are listed as
BlizzCon
. The dates are listed as October 22nd and 23rd, 2010.
http://www.anaheimconventioncenter.com/eventsOpen.cfm?id=2174
These dates have not officially been announced yet by Blizzard so don't go making plans just yet.
Update: The dates have been removed from the calendar's website.
Live
Suspected 3.3.2 Patch Notes Posted
WoW.com
has discovered the patch notes for the upcoming 3.3.2 patch on the
official Korean site
.
It has some noticeable changes in it for druids, shaman, warlocks, and warriors as well as some nice fixes to help make some of the dungeons run smoother.
As we indicated
last week
, we will NOT be seeing the patch this week -- but on
February 2, 2010
.
The team over at WoW.com was able to translate most of it, but as translations are never perfect, some of the wording might be slightly off. You can read the translated patch notes after the break!
Update 01/26:
Blademeld
was kind enough and went through and fixed up some of the unclear translations for us.
Live
Arena Season 7 Ends, 8 to Start Soon
With arena season 7 coming to an end tomorrow (Jan 19), it is about time we all look forward to the next arena season.
Wrathful Gladiator
will become the new season's high-end set costing arena points and having rating requirements on most of the pieces.
Relentless Gladiator
pieces will have a lower arena point cost than the previous season and rating requirements lowered or removed. Next,
Furious Gladiator
will be moved to the honor point system. Finally the
Deadly Gladiator
set will be removed off all vendors.
New Damage/Healing Debuff?
There is also a major change that might happen for the last season before Cataclysm. Blizzard is considering experimenting a little bit, as mentioned in the recent Twitter
#BlizzChat
:
Q. If damage and healing is too much per health ratio, then why don't you have battlegrounds/arenas give a -30% damage/healing debuff?
A. We have been talking about solutions
Live
Cataclysm Alpha NOT Starting Tuesday
Several websites have reported today that the F&F alpha test for World of Warcraft: Cataclysm
may
begin this upcoming Tuesday, January 12, 2010. Along with these rumours is a DVD (as seen on the right) that is
supposedly
a copy of the alpha that will be distributed to testers instead of being a digital download to deter people from getting the data easily.
According to sources close to us here at Wowhead, we can confirm that all of these rumours are false and the alpha
will not
be starting Tuesday. Also, the supposed alpha DVD has been confirmed to be fake.
As always, be careful with what you read on the interwebs!
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