Boubouille from MMO-Champion has recently posted this "leaked" screenshot of Kil'jaeden in-game. According to the sender, this shot of Sunwell Plateau's final boss was leaked from a GM.

"Keep in mind that it could be a fake, it's not "that" hard to get the 2.4 running on an emulated server and spawn Kil'jaeden, in this case his scale on live servers could be different," warns Boubouille.

Kil'jaeden the Deceiver, as we all know, is the eredar Supreme Commander of the Burning Legion, perhaps only second to Sargeras in the badass pecking order. With his appearance in-game and a chance for 25 intrepid mortals to "take him down", the lore implications are interesting. Granted, we only get to deal with "half" of him (the rest of him is submerged in the Sunwell), but lore-inclined raiders will certainly be itching to take a shot at him, at least until Arthas/Ner'Zhul/the Lich King makes an appearance in WoTLK.

I'm not certain of the authenticity of the screenshot myself, but Killie definitely looks constipated and evil enough here to be the real deal.

Hard to believe that this friendly soul over to the right stabbing what appears to be an entire planet was once not just a good guy, but indeed, the goodest of the good guys, huh? (Goodest of the good guys? What, am I a drunken five year old all of a sudden? Sheesh, that's just horrible.) But it's true: the ultimate big bad guy in the Warcraft Universe, the ultimate evil, the guy who comes up with plans that involve possessing babies was once the champion of the Titans themselves, before he started stabbing planets and possessing babies.

I guess there's no evil, be it big or small, that Sargeras won't engage in personally. He's a real hands on villain.

So what's the deal with Sargeras, exactly? How did he go bad? Why did he assemble the Burning Legion in the first place? And what's he up to nowadays? With the Legion running around being killed for loot and Marks of Sargeras in Outland (seriously, what is the big plan for Outland, exactly? So far all the Legion seems to be doing is being mad at Illidan because he promised to be Kil'Jaeden's BFF and then went back on it. Did they pinky swear? I bet they pinky swore. That seems like the kind of thing Kil'Jaeden would do) you'd think ol' Sargy would be in the thick of it, but instead his sidekicks are running the show and he's nowhere to be found. Why?

It doesn't help that some of Sargeras' history has changed in the telling. (Hey, I like the Draenei a lot, but you guys really changed the lore around.)

Well, you may have a hard time believing this, but it turns out that his whole baby possession scheme wasn't such a good idea after all. I know, I know, how could picking on an infant have gone so horribly wrong? But rather than dwelling on that, why don't we start talking about Sargeras' early days.

The Caverns of Time are a pretty neat place. With the recent announcement of Old Stratholme, we'll get to go back and preserve the timeline through four different events: Medivh's opening of the Dark Portal, Thrall's escape from Durnholde Keep, Arthas's purging of the city of Stratholme, and Azeroth's victory at the Battle for Mount Hyjal. The mysterious Infinite Dragonflight is trying to disrupt the timelines for unknown reasons, and we have to keep things the way they were.

But why? Yes, any change in the past will have a ripple effect on the future, bla bla bla, but there are people who would definitely prefer that events went down differently in three of the four CoT instances. Blizzard doesn't show us what happens when we wipe, fail or simply choose not to preserve things in CoT ... so we've had to fill in the blanks ourselves.

The Battle for Mount Hyjal: Okay, no one really wants to see history changed for this one. Heck, it even looks like the Infinite Dragonflight may not want to change it, since we see none of their members in the battle. If history was changed ... actually, I'm not sure what the Burning Legion really would do if they won the war. Destroy all the mortal races in their quest to bring chaos to the universe? Enslave all the playable characters and force them to become an invading force for another world? Man, that would be awesome. For the Legion. Not so much for Azeroth. The Burning Legion winning at Hyjal is like a big Game Over sign for the Warcraft universe.

It just goes on and on my friend. Jbangalanga, Weaslelawd, Spiked and Deunan started playing it, not knowing what it was, and they continued playing it for ten hours and twenty minutes just because ...

Yes, you heard right: there was a 2v2 arena match that lasted for over ten hours. According to Weaslelawd, the DPSers of the teams -- the warrior and the warlock -- got killed in the first few minutes. This left Weaslelawd, an orc resto shaman, and Spiked, a night elf resto druid, to battle it out. Neither healer could out-DPS the other's heals, and both were too stubborn to give up. The druid was unable to rez his own partner due to cooldown restrictions, but stayed alert enough to interrupt any attempts from the shaman to rez the warrior.

Jbangalanga created a character on Spiked's server to try to negotiate a settlement, but talks fell through as neither Weaslelawd or Spiked was willing to throw the match or /roll for it. Weaslelawd actually talked to a GM halfway through, but unfortunately chose to host the picture on imageshack, where they can't be seen due to excessive bandwidth usage.

Eventually, it hit 5 AM in Spiked's area and he began to zone out. Also, he said, eight pieces of his gear were broken. He emoted to Weaslelawd that he was ready and let the shaman kill him. Weaslelawd walked away from his ten-hour match with ... 15 added to his arena rating. Wow.

Spectators on both Burning Legion and Shadowmoon have suggested that both teams deserve a couple thousand arena points and a Manly Man award for a ten-hour fight. I would probably have given up around the twenty minute mark. What would you have done in the same situation -- fight it out or give up?

The Burning Legion are probably the villains that we fight the most in WoW. Sure, the Scourge put up a good battle in a few instances, and the spawn of the Black Dragonflight dominated the level 60 raids, but the Burning Legion has really come into its own in the (duh) Burning Crusade. From Hellfire Peninsula to Shadowmoon Valley, we're constantly fighting demons. But who's leading the Crusade? We never see any of their higher-ups, unless you count Balnazzar (the secret mastermind behind the Scarlet Crusade) and Kazzak, who doesn't really do much but sit on his new throne and yell.

With that in mind, allow me to introduce the current Lord of the Burning Legion and a hell of a guy, Kil'jaeden!

Who: Kil'jaeden the Deceiver, acting Supreme Commander and Lord of the Burning Legion, former Special Operations and Recruitment Manager for the Burning Legion. Much like evil organizations everywhere, the Burning Legion has tons of bureaucratic titles.

Hey, everyone who complained about the Scourge world event being too wussy -- the Burning Legion sends its regards. Eliah Hecht has documented that Highlord Kruul is owning everything on most servers, but no one has answered the question: Is it possible to kill this guy?

Short answer: Yes. He appears to be a renamed Kazzak with most of Kazzak's abilities, plus he has Kazzak's loot table. He seems to hit harder than Kazzak and enrage sooner, but an organized, or even slightly disorganized, raid of 40 people can kill him. WoWWiki has a good strategy guide for Kazzak. Exo and Trans killed him on Smolderthorn, as did groups on Illidan, Medivh and Kalecgos, apparently.

Long answer: Probably not, at least if your server's anything like mine. Kruul heals massively every time he kills a player or pet. So if Kruul spawns near a major city, it's nearly impossible due to the number of deaths. Unless you can clear the area of everything but organized 60s working in a raid group, just get naked, sit back and watch the carnage.

Blizzard is rolling out new hardware for several US realms this Thursday, and the process of transferring the realms means - you guessed it, extensive downtime.  The migration will begin on Thursday at 12:01 AM PST and may last as long as 24 hours.  Those of you on effected realms will receive an extra day's credit to your account, which is, I suppose, better than nothing.  Following the migration, Blizzard plans to open character transfers from existing realms to new realms (yet to be opened) to further help with performance and overcrowding issues.

Realms transferring to new hardware are Archimonde, Dalaran, Khadgar, and Mal'Ganis.

Other affected realms include Aggramar, Andorhal, Anetheron, Burning Blade, Burning Legion, Dentarg, Duskwood, Earthen Ring, Eonar, Eredar, Executus, Gilneas, Gorefiend, Haomarush, Kargath, Laughing Skull, Lightning's Blade, Llane, Malygos, Scilla, Shadow Moon, Steamwheedle Cartel, Thunderhorn, Thunderlord, Turalyon, Ysera, Ysondre, and Zuluhed.  While these realms are not receiving a hardware upgrade, Tseric explains that current equipment configuration requires this.

Update: The schedule has been pushed back to Thursday.