According to our tipster Gwwfps of the blog Potato Skin, World of Warcraft distributor The9 has manually set all the quests in the Isle of Quel'danas to be fully completed -- that is, all quests on the Isle are now open to all players as though Phase 4 had been opened. With the help of Babelfish, as far as I can make it out, this decision was arrived at to "make up several weeks the partial servers to appear returns to the files question for generally to play the loss which the family brings". If my Engrish serves me right, this means that the move was a drastic resolution to having massive downtime for numerous servers which resulted in realms-wide progression rollbacks. Some servers reportedly had their Isle of Quel'danas progress rolled back several times over the course of one day.
Gwwfps explains it better in his blog, noting that Patch 2.4 resulted in poor server performance across the board. Apparently, WoW China has been suffering from performance issues for quite some time and some have suggested that the servers upon which the game runs aren't quite up to par with Blizzard's standards. Others argue -- with good reason -- that the forced unlocking of the phases makes the game "less immersive." The sweeping measure also demonstrates an apparent lack of industriousness on the part of The9, who in theory could simply roll back individual servers to specific progress levels. On the other hand, players can probably get all ecstatic about getting their hands on epic gems so early (blast my slacker server!).
Remember a few weeks ago when it was discovered that the Armory was listing the new Badge of Justice-reward epic gems at 10 badges each? Yeah, turns out that was just an Armory bug (which we knew was a possibility). They're 15 Badges after all, as they were on the PTR. The way we know this now is that Proudmoore-US, first in all things Shattered Sun, has done Discovering Your Roots enough times to unlock Shaani, the vendor who sells you the gems. Thanks, Proudmoore! Grinding for knowledge. And everyone else, get on that quest. It's a fun one -- everyone gets a pet so they can pretend they're a hunter for a little while -- and you'll help your server along.
Assuming the epic gems sell for around 500 gold, which seems reasonable given the order-of-magnitude increase in price between uncommon and rare gems, this yields a 33 gold per Badge conversion rate (if you buy gems with your Badges and sell the gems; they're not bind-on-pickup). That's right on target in terms of gold per hour. I figure it takes about 20 minutes on average to earn a Badge, which means 100 gold per hour -- pretty much the same rate I make through dailies or grinding. And given that any activity that earns you Badges (i.e. raiding or heroics) gives you a chance at gear as well, it looks like the PvE endgame is fairly rewarding right now.
Phase 4 is now well underway, with about 50 servers having it unlocked according to us.gorgonnash.info at the time of this writing. There's still a few more things to unlock, but for the most part, the Sunwell Isle is complete, and what you see is what you get as far as resources and places to fight. So, once again, it is time to ask the question: How do these quests fit into your busy up-to-25-daily-quests-to-do lifestyle?
We've known for a while that we've been getting a gear reset in WoTLK, and just this morning, we've discussed and speculated on how it will affect people as they transition into the 70-80 game, especially alt-o-holics. Here's some news that should strike a lot of people as good: Bornakk confirmed in a thread yesterday that we really won't be seeing quite as large a gear gap in the jump from Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King as we did in the past: No more doubling of stamina values this time, guys.
This should be good news for raiders who feel like their epics don't mean that much anymore (although to be honest, I was using a few of my BWL and AQ40 drops well into my late 60s, so I don't think the gear reset was that bad after all). If the gear jump isn't that bad, your shiny new epics should still work pretty well. Heck, same goes for badge runners. I've suspected for a while that the new Badge of Justice gear was meant to be a partial preliminary gear rest ahead of time, and I'd bet this more or less confirms it: If there's not going to be as much as a jump, these Tameless Breeches might last my druid longer than one might think.
I think it's definitely a good middle road to take. We'll get a gear reset so alt-o-holics and casuals can jump right into the Howling Fjord, but the gap won't be quite as great, meaning that raiders and badge gear savers won't need to feel like they're watching months of work go down the drain when that first level 71 green drops.
Scant hours after the false alarms from the Burning Legion and Area 52 servers, it looks like we have a true winner in the race to Phase 4 of the Shattered Sun Offensive on the Isle of Queldanas. Continuing their streak, the Proudmoore Server activated phase 4 early this morning. Currently, it looks like they're the only ones legitimately at Phase 4, with Cenarius 2nd with 86% accord to us.gorgonnash.info.
Congratulations to Proudmoore on continuing your streak. Be sure to check out our Phase 4 daily guides for all the information you'll need to finish strong. The rest of you, check out our Phase 2 and Phase 3 daily guides to get the edge you need to power up to Phase 4 yourself.
Gallery: Badge vendor open for business on Proudmoore
Apparently, the Burning Legion is either as deadly and implacable as the army they are named for, or as false and tricky. Us.gorgonnash.info is now reporting them as having come from behind to unlock Phase 4 the first of all servers. Given that they are a PvP server, this would be an especially amazing show of determination and server togetherness.
However, given that, until only a few hours ago, they were only 37% according to the site, according to Trade chat on the Burning Legion server (Thanks, Zulama), and according to a poster on this thread, it seems more likely that someone tampered with their upload file to fool the site.
It's honestly rather disappointing that someone has decided to tamper with a trustworthy group effort like the gorgonnash.info website. I know we're all better than that. So to all of you who've been faithfully uploading legitimate info to the site, and to all of you who have been working hard to help your servers unlock each phase, I say congratulations, and thank you. Hopefully, one jerk from the Burning Legion server doesn't dampen our spirits.
Gallery: Badge vendor open for business on Proudmoore
Edit:Thanks to Unagieater of the Burning Legion server for confirming via screenshot in the comments that this is a hoax. The server is only about 41% complete with Phase 3 as of this edit.
Each week or so, Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player who has 2 hours or less to play at a time.
Let the raiders have fun with their world firsts, Blizzard also kept those of us with limited playtime in mind when designing the Sunwell activities. If you are level 70 and haven't gone over to the Isle of Quel'Danas, get thee to a Flightmaster in Ironforge or Silvermoon and get in on the fun.
You may think with all the hubbub about the new bosses like Brutallus that the new Sunwell zone is raider-only territory, but you would be wrong. The daily quests there are fun and easily doable solo. You earn a lot of money, a lot of rep with people who will give you cool stuff, and you help your server progress through the new content. There has never been a better time to be level 70 and casual.
So when patch 2.4 came out, you might remember a certain line in the patch notes: "Added several new tradeskill items to the new Sunwell Daily faction vendor: Three jewelcrafting recipes to cut gems with spell haste from Dawnstones, Talasite, and Noble Topaz."
Here's the problem: Those recipes actually don't currently exist anywhere in game, or at least haven't found their way to any Jewelcrafters. You can find Quick Dawnstone, Reckless Noble Topaz, and Forceful Talasite on all the WoW item database sites, but the recipes themselves seem to have gone missing, and aren't on Eldara Dawnrunner, nor do they so much as appear to drop from any mob.
Don't worry though, Jewelcrafters, all hope is not lost.
I think my favorite part about a new patch is that it always seems to inject new life into WoW. Don't get me wrong, I love WoW all the time. I think it's a great game. But there's something about a new patch that always seems to invigorate me. There's new stuff to do, maybe a new twist or two to one of the classes I play, or at least to one of the classes I play against. What's even more interesting to me is that it sometimes makes even the old stuff feel brand new.
This puts the first gate opening time at just about 2 weeks (the patch went live on March 25th, as you recall). If the next two gates come down just as fast, we may see a world first Kil'jaedan kill somewhere around early May. Then again, I imagine Blizzard wants to drag stuff out just a tiny bit so that they don't need to put out a patch 2.5 with new content between now and the release of Wrath of the Lich King.
Let the lore geeks at WoW Insider help you out a bit. We've put together a scene by scene analysis of the lore behind the Fury of the Sunwell trailer, and we're presenting it to you here. Hopefully, it sheds some more light on this whole "Did Kael'thas go crazy or didn't he, and what is up with Kil'jaedan anyway?" thing.
While Blizzard has made some steps to homogenize the playstyle of the Horde and Alliance a bit with the whole Paladin/Shaman swap, they've also done a bit of experimenting in the Burning Crusade with allowing people to make choices about certain paths, namely the Aldor and Scryer factions.
While patch 2.4 has bought as an "end" to the Aldor/Scryer rivalry lore-wise, the mechanics remain the same: You cannot enter the other side's tier without being attacked, you can't use the other side's bank, and the item and shoulder enchant vendors will still only sell to those with proper faction. In addition, there's a new twist to the sides from this patch: At exalted reputation with the Shattered Sun Offensive, you can purchase 4 different neckpieces that have seperate bonus that depending on whether you're Scryer or Aldor.
Patch 2.4, much like most other things in WoW, has managed to bring the worst out of some people. The mask of anonymity strikes again!
No, I don't mean the node-stealing, ninja-tapping, mob-training stupidery(which is a word as of right now) you see all over the Isle of Quel'Danas. I refer to the standing-on-NPCs-while-PvP-flagged griefing. If you're lucky and haven't seen this happen on your server, what most servers are seeing is a bunch of Blood Elf and Draenei players standing directly on top of Shattered Sun Offensive NPCs, so players accidentally, unknowingly, right click on them instead of the quest NPC. This results in inadvertently hitting the player, and then getting destroyed by the SSO guards.
Phase 3 is now in full swing on many servers, including mine, and this time, we're working on taking the Sun's Reach Harbor as well as opening up the long awaited badge loot vendor. How do the quests stack up this time around? Does the near flawless run for great dailies from Quel'danas continue? I've had a few days to try out the runs, and I have to say that there's a few rough spots, but you can continue to grow your list of dailies with confidence as the new phases come on.
Phase 4
So, now that the Daily quest limit is up to 25 and we have a whole 
I think my favorite part about a 
While Blizzard has made some steps to homogenize the playstyle of the 
Phase 3
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