Our good friend and talented WoW crafter Manaprincess is back, and she's gone from Etsy to break out into her own World of Warcraft crafts store at manaprincess.com. She's got the usual Hearthstone key charms, as well as the WoW soaps up there, and a new section of "potion pendants" -- Health, Mana, or Rejuv potions to wear around your neck, just in case. And she says that all the items have been redesigned, so even things you've seen before may look a little different.

And as a thank you to you WoW Insider readers for all your support, she's having a sale just for you: from now until August 31st, you can put in the code "wowinsider" without the quotes at the checkout screen to get 25% off your entire order.

Manaprincess is definitely one of the best vendors in the crafting community, and it's great to see her up and running in a brand new store. If you're looking for some fun WoW-related gifts or crafts for yourself, her store is definitely one of the places to look.

You may remember that we recently told you that Worldwide Invitational attendees would be receiving a Tyrael pet as part of their goodie bag haul as soon as patch 2.4.3 went live. The PTR servers when down for a little bit of an update a while ago, and when they came back up, WoW Insider commenter Darkra came through with the picture of my new favorite pet, which you can see above.

It's actually pretty strange, he looks both cute and bad ass at the exact same time. I'm not sure how it pulls it off, but I suppose that's just the awesomeness that is Tyrael. Congratulations to all you WWI attendees on what is surely the coolest non-combat pet to date, and for those of us unlucky enough not to make it to the WWI in person, let the Ebaying begin!

If you're an Ace mod fanatic like I am, you may use Parrot for your scrolling combat text needs. If you've used Parrot since 2.4, you've noticed, like I have, that the dang thing just plain doesn't work. Even though the ever handy WoWAceUpdater continues to update it, there's some block of data it's missing. And that means that when I get into combat and look for my scrolling information... nothing happens. There's no pretty numbers to the side of my characters. Hey, that's fair enough. 2.4 was the patch of the great combat log change, and it's understandable that not every addon is quite caught up.

That said, I like how I have Parrot set up, and I didn't really want to try to find and install a new mod, or heaven forbid, use Blizzard's base system. So, I went searching, hoping to find some way to bring back my beloved Parrot.

This is the best bug I've heard about in the game yet so far-- Drysc has confirmed that there is a known bug in the Blade's Edge plateau area which will cause everyone, when someone starts up the Bombing Run quest, to stop eating and drinking and stand up. It's a respect thing, you know? Stand up for the cause!

No, it's just a really, really weird bug, and a fix is on the way in an upcoming patch (I'm a little surprised they don't aim to fix it earlier, but apparently all that will be lost is the food anyone sits down to eat at the wrong time in Blade's Edge). Once again, I am dumbfounded at trying to figure out just how Blizzard's code works-- seems like they have the absolute weirdest bugs happen to them sometimes.

What's up with the Armory lately? I've always had a problem getting in there (the pages load super slowly, although I'm pretty sure that's just all the database pinging they're doing), but lately, players have been reporting lots of character progress missing from The Armory. I spent all day yesterday on my Hunter ploughing through Hellfire Peninsula's big gear giveaway, and none of that new gear shows up on my profile. One of WoW Insider's writers hasn't even seen one of her alts on the Armory-- that's 40+ levels worth of missing info.

To be fair, the Armory is more or less an extra service, and Blizzard knows there are problems and is supposed to be working to fix them, so there's not that much to complain about, really. Unsubstantiated rumors being passed around say Blizz is working on updating the code to allow level 80 characters (for the expansion), but the fact is that we don't know what's going on-- they could be adding in even more features that we don't know about (like, say, what the Figureprints folks get, or a nifty little API system). But, as a WoW Insider writer told me, at least there always is one way to see what's up with any character in the game: make an alt, run out to where they are, and /inspect away.

Thanks to everyone who sent this in!

Update: Looks like we lit a fire under somebody over there-- the Armory is redirecting to a maintenance page at the moment.

For a big chunk of the gaming population, addons are mysterious things you download and hope will run. But for many talented people, they're an opportunity to help the community and make things easier for the rest of us.

Well, some of the tedium has been taken out of addon writing with the help of Microsoft. What?? Yep, you read that right. Microsoft loves WoW, too. Using CodePlex, their open-source project site, they have helped create an Addon Studio for WoW based on the Visual Studio package. The download contains everything you need to create addons, so don't worry if you aren't the owner of Visual Studio already.

So what does this mean exactly? The project team has converted the addon writing process from text and code to drag and drop. You get the look and feel of common programs like Visual Basic but with the command structure of WoW. By having the process be graphic, you just pick and choose what you want from the list.

Specifically, Addon Studio will provide an interface that allows addon creators to build in familiar surroundings. You'll also have the ability to auto-generate items like the table of contents or lua events. Error checking for FrameXML and Lua parsing also helps to speed the addon process up. Likewise, they have included Ace2 templates so you can still tap into one of the most commonly used addon libraries and updater systems.

Long-term, this should open up addon creation to those that enjoy dablling with programing, but don't have the time or skill to build them without a bit more structure. And that can only be a good thing.

[Thanks, Jason!]

So as you've probably noticed by now, 2.2 is not coming today. Bummer-- that means I was wrong on the podcast. First time for everything, I guess (I'm kidding!). Now I have to hope it won't come for a while, since next week I'll be way too busy playing Halo 3.

But the CMs are sharing some info about why the patch is so delayed. The main culprit seems to be the voice chat system, and more than that, the fact that Blizzard completely updated their sound engine while including it. Blizzard, like many other companies, didn't write their own sound engine for WoW. They licensed one called FMOD, by a company called Firelight (the same engine used in Bioshock, Metroid Prime 3, Heavenly Sword, Crysis, and many other games). Firelight just released a new version of FMOD-- their website mentions 4.08 as the latest, though I'm not sure that's the exact version Blizzard is using in 2.2 (Blizzard may be a version behind, just to make sure there are no problems with the system before they push it out to all 9 million clients). 4.08 also just dropped a few days ago, it seems, but maybe Blizzard, as one of Firelight's biggest customers, had access to the new version before anyone else did.

At any rate, that's why 2.2 is taking so much longer-- they're working on code, not class balance. Hopefully, whenever we do see this patch drop, it'll sound that much better.

First Orc males, then Draenei, and now Night Elves? It appears that Night Elf shoulders have shrunk (just a bit-- not nearly as dramatic a change as the Orc shoulders were) over on the PTRs. We talked about this on the WoW Insider show last week: what is up with Blizzard's code that changes like this are happening? What variables are they editing that makes the weird stuff like this happen?

At any rate, there is good news. Hortus says the issue is unintentional, and will be fixed in an upcoming PTR build. So your Night Elf will still be able to wear his broad shoulder pieces with pride.