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WoW Insider has the latest on the WoW: Cataclysm expansion!

Gregg Reece

Antioch, TN - http://www.wow.com

New Blizzard community website, forums begin testing in November

The announcement came out this morning on the EU forums that Blizzard is getting ready to roll out its new community website and forums for World of Warcraft some time in early November. Anyone who has been to the community site for StarCraft 2 will already be aware of some of the new features including a more advanced forum system than what we have now. Features will include the ability to report a post for trolling or spam without changing pages, being able to see a quick summary of the thread by mousing over and letting players up- and down-rate responses.

The current forums will be set as locked during the beginning of the transition and then will be completely removed toward the end. This means that if there are any old guides, posts or fun things from days of old that you want to see moved to the new forums, you should copy them to your own computer now.

One thing that is curiously missing from the announcement is what alternative Blizzard has developed to its original Real ID forums concept since it was thrown out. StarCraft 2 has a centralized handle that is associated with your Battle.net login, and it is the same handle/avatar that's used for multiplayer games. Hopefully, they'll provide more details on issues like this as things start to lead up to the changeover.

The full blue post is after the break.

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Filed under: Blizzard, News items

BlizzCon 2010: Closing ceremonies

As BlizzCon 2010 comes to an end, Paul Sams (chief operating officer of Blizzard) started out the ceremonies. A series of intentionally bad gamer jokes followed as he got the crowd ready. He then took it to a serious note and thanked attendees both attending in person and at home.

Blizzard used this opportunity to bring out the tournament winners. Warcraft 3 winner Remind (night elf) from South Korea and StarCraft 2 winner NEXGenius (protoss), also from South Korea, were presented with $25,000 for being grand prize winners. They will also be getting an eSports ring customized to their game that's the size of Superbowl rings. The WoW Arena tournament was still going on at this point (*aAa* vs compLexity.Red), so there was no winner to announce for it yet.

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Filed under: Events, Blizzard, BlizzCon

BlizzCon 2010: Emerald Dream and/or Nightmare in the future

There are a lot of questions that come up from the WoW community at events like BlizzCon. Will we ever have player or guild housing? Why doesn't Blink work right? Where's my moose? One question that keeps coming up is will we ever see the Emerald Dream or its corrupted version, the Emerald Nightmare?

While there is no announcement for an exact date or even which expansion it will appear, Alex "Valnoth" Afrasiabi (lead world designer for World of Warcraft) has finally answered this for us, and that answer is yes. The problem comes down to a matter of finding the right place to fit it in. This might mean something in patch 4.2 or all the way in patch 6.2. It really comes down to when it will fit in the game storyline.

At least we now know that it is something they will do.
BlizzCon 2010 is upon us! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. We're bringing you liveblogging of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

Filed under: Events, Blizzard, BlizzCon

BlizzCon 2010: DirecTV Ghostcrawler interview

Between panels, the DirecTV folks had an interview with Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street (lead systems designer for WoW) on some various aspects of both Cataclysm and the recent 4.0.1 patch.

Just a warning, this is essentially a live blog and a lot of things will get paraphrased to get it out. We'll try to clean it up a little bit on a second pass, but just think of it as a live blog and you should be golden.

Everyone wants to know where their moose is.
They can't handle the moose.

Are wintersabers still available or should we get them before the sundering happens?
No, they'll still be available. We're not doing anything with them.

What about the mounts in AQ that we use in the instance? Now that it's going to be a zone, can we use them there?
AQ or ZG? AQ mounts will still be there. So you can still get them.

What is getting ready to happen with the sundering? Are we going to be able to watch it happening or are the servers going to go down and when the come back up it's all done?
Pretty much that assuming all goes well. The two old continents will go away and the new ones will just appear almost over night. Players will experience that and then shortly after that Cataclysm will go on the shelves and people will be able to level their goblin, worgen, or go up to 85.

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Filed under: Events, Blizzard, BlizzCon

Breakfast Topic: BlizzCon Day 2 -- just wait, there's more

First off, the Cataclysm: Cinematics panel is today. The cinematic for the expansion is awesome and I'm not sure we really need to talk about anything else. Wait, yes we do. There are other panels ... what were they again? Oh, the class Q&A and some other stuff. Let's take a closer look and see what all is going on.

For WoW panels we're just going to be sitting at the main stage for the first half of the day. We have the Cataclysm: Cinematics panel at 10:30 a.m., WoW Class Q&A at 12 p.m., and the WoW Open Q&A at 1:30 p.m. After that, we swap to the development stage for the WoW art panel at 3 p.m. If you keep watching the development stage you'll see -- or rather, hear -- a panel called Blizzard Sound that should touch on the making of the cool sound effects we're going to be hearing in Cataclysm as well as other Blizzard games.

The night will be finished off with a performance by Tenacious D at 6:30 p.m. As Mike Morhaime warned us during the opening ceremonies yesterday, this band isn't not suitable for some audiences ... and possibly all audiences, but they should be a fun act to watch.

Remember that all times and chai are Pacific. No, I wasn't mainlining caffeine when I wrote this last night. Well, maybe just a little.

BlizzCon 2010 is upon us! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. We're bringing you liveblogging of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

Filed under: Events, Blizzard, Breakfast Topics, BlizzCon

BlizzCon 2010: Outland and Northrend revamps eventually planned

One of the problems with changing the world in Cataclysm to bring all of the classic storylines up to date is that you suddenly go to Outland for an event that happened in the past. You also follow this up with going to Northrend and fighting back the undead which were already shown to have fallen back in the content before you ever went to Outland.

Chris Metzen discussed the fact that this really doesn't mesh well and the internal Blizzard lore folks aren't really happy with it. They plan to eventually go back and make Outland and Northrend fit with the revised storyline. The problem they ran into is purely a lack of time. As an example, Wrath of the Lich King had around 1000 quests in Northrend. Cataclysm has 3500 quests without touching either Outland or Northrend.

So, these changes to make the lore line up are planned, but there is absolutely no schedule as to when they will be implemented.


BlizzCon 2010 is upon us! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. We're bringing you liveblogging of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

Filed under: Events, Blizzard, Lore, BlizzCon

Headless Horseman and cogwheel crash workaround

If you're one of the many players who is having issues with the Headless Horseman pumpkin locking up your game client or any other cogwheel type item doing the same sort of thing, there is now a workaround while they look into fixing this bug. Kill your tooltips.

That's right, tooltips are the cause behind this rash of client crashes. There are two ways you can get around this particular issue. One is to just disable tooltips. You can do this by setting up a single macro and putting it on your action bars.

Stickied post by player Deyneth of Wyrmrest Accord (US-H)
/script GameTooltip.Temphide = function() GameTooltip:Hide() end; GameTooltip:SetScript("OnShow", GameTooltip.Temphide)
/stopmacro [btn:1]
/script GameTooltip:SetScript("OnShow", GameTooltip.Show);


This will disable tooltips when you left-click the button and re-enable them when you right-click the button.

An alternative is a simple addon called CogFix which disables the simple addons which are causing this issue, but will allow complex tooltips (like when you mouse over a player or NPC) still remain visible. Any custom tooltip addon could possibly protect you from this bug, but your mileage may vary.

The developers are working on permanent a fix for this issue, but have to test things to make sure that the fix doesn't cause issues elsewhere.

Filed under: Events, Bugs

BlizzCon 2010: Patch 4.1.0 brings enhanced dungeon maps

Cory Stockton (World of Warcraft lead content designer) announced an unexpected feature that will be coming in patch 4.1.0. It has been revealed that Blizzard is adding maps for all dungeons from Burning Crusade all the way back to classic in order to match the features that the current Wrath of the Lich King and Cataclysm dungeons bring with them.

The new information is that they're planning on taking those maps up a notch. Instead of just a stylized skull icon marking where the bosses are on the map, we'll be getting enhanced information about each boss encounter.

This will include a 3D portrait of the boss, a brief bit of lore about why exactly you're fighting them and a list of what all loot drops. While all that is all well and good, this is not where the new features end.

The interface will also give you a listing of what abilities each boss uses. That doesn't mean that you are given the strategy, but instead you'll be able to find out what things to look for during the encounter and react a little faster. You'll know if a debuff will be something that you must cleanse immediately or something that you'll be able to ignore for a moment while healing and then get to when you have a moment. These features will not only be for 5-man content, but will also be available in 10/25-man raids as well as heroic content.

Their reasoning behind this is two-fold. First, a lot of players already tab out to check sites like Wowhead to find out loot and boss abilities. Secondly, when presented with a new dungeon a player doesn't have to have as many things explained by the dungeon guide. We'll see how this develops when 4.1.0 starts to get closer.

BlizzCon 2010 is upon us! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. We're bringing you liveblogging of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

Filed under: Events, Blizzard, BlizzCon

BlizzCon 2010: Moonkin Hatchling mini-pet going on sale in November

There has been some data-mining in the past couple weeks which found mention of a Moonkin Hatchling in the beta game files. During the BlizzCon opening ceremonies, Mike Morhaime (Blizzard CEO) announced that this new vanity pet will be available for sale from the Blizzard store coming in November. We still don't have any idea how adorable this pet will look, but if it's anything like the other hatchling pets the cuteness will be epic.

They also announced that their Pandaren Monk pet when it donated all proceeds to charity when it was first available made $1.1 million for the Make-a-Wish Foundation. We're curious if this is a sign of more charity vanity pets to come in the future as that will make a serious impact for almost any cause.


BlizzCon 2010 is upon us! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. We're bringing you liveblogging of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

Filed under: Events, Blizzard, BlizzCon

The Light and How to Swing It: Protection and retribution builds in 4.0.1


Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com.

Hi. I've got a quick thing to report on before we get to the meat of the article. If you were tanking those first couple days of patch 4.0.1 and you seemed to be taking extra damage, almost as if you weren't crit-immune, there is a reason for that. There was a bug that made us vulnerable to crits in 4.0.1. It should be fixed now, but I received a couple emails about it from people who were extremely concerned about their survivability. Try things again and see if you're still having issues.

We really need to talk about talent builds. I know we're a week after the patch at this point, but due to how much we've changed throughout the course of the beta, I've developed an innate fear of committing to talent builds. Part of this comes from having had talents moved between trees each build. Other parts of this come from seeing talents keep the same name yet be completely changed as far as what they do. I really wanted the patch to drop before doing this, because I didn't trust Blizzard to keep things the same from the PTR/beta build to the live build. However, that is in the past. Let's look toward the future.

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Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

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