It's patch day, and as you know, patch 2.4 is bring us a new zone, Quel'Danas. Quel'Danas(and the region it directs you to in Hellfire Peninsula) is going to be packed and probably pretty laggy, but there's new content elsewhere, too.
Shattrath City and the surrounding regions also have a handful of new quests that will probably be less crowded as everyone flocks to the new zone. Daniel Whitcombcovered a few of these awhile ago in detail, but here's who you want to be looking for: Inside Shattrath, you will find Emissary Mordin(for herbalists, miners and skinners), Lord Torvos, and Harbinger Haronem.
Just outside of Shattrath, master anglers can talk to Old Man Barlo for some fun Fishing quests, and there's also a new quest for PvPers in Nagrand. Garadar and Telaar both receive a daily quest for slaughtering the opposition at Halaa. A similar quest can be found in your faction's respective towns in Terokkar for the Spirit Towers.
So don't worry, even the potential soul-searing lag of Quel'Danas won't ruin your enjoyment of patch 2.4! There's plenty of new stuff to do even outside of that zone.
The contest is now closed. Thanks for playing! We'll get a hold of winners as soon as the patch is released.
We all know that World of Warcraft's patch 2.4 is coming soon -- the only real question is when. And that, dear readers, is what we're asking you! Any time in the next week you can leave a comment on this post with your guess on when patch 2.4 will officially be released. When the patch comes out, we have four 60-day game time cards (worth approximately $30) to give to the readers who guessed correctly. (If more than four people guessed the correct date, we'll randomly choose four correct entries as winners. If no one guessed the correct date, we'll award prizes to those closest to the correct date.) All entries must be received before Monday, March 3rd at 9:00 AM EST, though we can't select winners until 2.4 has officially launched.
But Wait! There's more!
I'll even make this easier for you by using some of that good ol' mathematics. After some research, I've compiled the dates and lengths of previous patches. Take a look after the break for not only your chance to win some free game time, but also for an educated guess at when patch 2.4 will go live!
According to Blizzard's schedule, the realms should have been back online about 20 minutes ago. So it should come as no shock that today's maintenance has been extended for an extra hour. (Or, to be precise, an extra sixty-one minutes. Why the extra minute? We can't say.) This isn't exactly a surprise, as patch deployment usually takes a bit longer than a normal maintenance cycle (and it seemed odd, earlier, that the login screen announced only a normal maintenance window). And to the European players in the audience -- this is what you get to look forward to tomorrow!
Update: Realms appear to be back online as scheduled!
Is patch 2.3.2 going live today? Though there's no official word, signs point to yes. US realms, currently undergoing maintenance, have a generic downtime message on the login screen (as seen above) and no patch download starts for those attempting to log on. but if you try to log on, the patch 2.3.2 download (approximately 5MB) will start. However, European players, whose maintenance doesn't start until tomorrow, are getting a different login screen message: This Wednesday there will be an extended maintenance to apply patch 2.3.2. Please note that all European realms will be offline from 03:00 until 11:00, Paris time (CET).
Since we've never seen a patch go live in Europe that hasn't gone live in the US, this is pretty strong evidence that today is patch day. Patch 2.3.2 will include some class tweaks (primarily for Hunters, Mages, Shamans, and Rogues), some UI changes which may mean you have to pick up updated addons, bug fixes and more. See the full patch notes (linking to the PTR notes, as the live notes aren't up yet) for official details.
Update: The patch is now downloading for US players.
It's the end of the day (or nearly there) and, if you've logged on at all, you've patched WoW up to the latest version. Oftentimes, patch days are fraught with server instability and all sorts of other issues in game. On top of those problems, UI mods get thrown out of whack and usually must be updated in order to avoid screens filled with annoying error messages.
Personally, this patch day was one of the smoothest I can recall in recent memory. Once the servers came back up, I was able to log on right away with no queue and no apparent latency. As the afternoon wore on into evening, there were a few rough patches of lag, but they smoothed out after a little while, never to return. My most important mods were already updated and I can live without the rest for a couple of days. I purposefully try to avoid a reliance on UI mods, which is always helpful on patch days, so I'm not sure that my experience was shared by many other WoW players. Even so, my guildmates who rely on mods more than I do also seemed pretty happy with the transition to the new patch, so hopefully things went well for the majority of WoW fans. How did the patch treat you today? Did you bother logging on at all? If you did, have you had a good experience thus far?
As I'm sure you're all aware, patch 2.3 will be coming to the live realms after tomorrow's maintenance. When you log on to your characters tomorrow, there will be so many new things to do that it will be difficult to decide what to pursue first. From new recipes and items to collect, to new quests to complete and a whole new dungeon to conquer, this patch really delivers a ton of new content. Will you be logging off somewhere special tonight in order to jump right into the new content as soon as you log on tomorrow?
As you can probably tell from some of my previous articles, I enjoy farming up new items and recipes, so it's tempting to log off in Shadowmoon or Blade's Edge for the new jewelcrafting and engineering recipes. I'm sure some of my guildies will be camped in front of Zul'Aman, and I hope the server is stable enough for them to make some progress in there. I'll probably just log off in Shattrath in order to check out the new daily quests that are being added there and to avoid the mass farming of recipes elsewhere. Where will you end your adventures tonight?
As you may have heard, patch 2.3 is hitting live realms tomorrow (at least for our US readers -- for the EU, I'm afraid you'll have to wait until Wednesday)! So over at WoW Insider, we'd like to celebrate our last pre-patch hours by going over what we're most looking forward to in patch 2.3. So, what can't you wait to see? Guild banks? Zul'Aman? Tweaks to your class of choice? The improved leveling curve for mid-level players? We're here, we've got chips and dip (the breakfast food of choice, right?), and we're listening. What are you looking forward to in patch 2.3?
It looks like we'll be getting another patch tomorrow, according to Nethaera -- Brewfest is coming! That'll be two consecutive patch weeks, for the first time in my memory. We've seen Dan's Brewfest preview, as well as some info from Blizzard, and all of it looks like it's going to be pretty fun.
The irony for me is that I don't drink any alcohol in real life. This may sound odd, but I usually try to avoid it in the game too, if for no other reason than I don't know exactly how my characters should act when they're drunk out of their minds. I've tried roleplaying it before, though, at the Darkmoon Faire, and I guess I was believable enough! It's not that hard to just be uninhibited. Still, something tells me that Brewfest isn't actually about getting drunk. What's the significance of this holiday for you?
Ahh, patch week. You know the time-honored dance by now: enable your outdated mods, and log in to see what explodes. As many of my guild-mates and I were discussing on Tuesday, different classes really have different UI needs. I know when I used to run my Mage as my raiding main, Decursive was one of the biggest mods that I simply couldn't live without. Now that I've shifted to my Rogue as my raiding main, it's a whole different ballgame mod-wise. (I couldn't even tell you the last time I thought about Decursive.) As such, I thought I'd take this patch week to open the floor to the discussion between Rogues of what mods are absolutely crucial for us, and what mods are just "nice to have."
It's patch day, and as you know, patch 2.4 is bring us a new zone, Quel'Danas. Quel'Danas(and the region it directs you to in Hellfire Peninsula) is going to be packed and probably pretty laggy, but there's new content elsewhere, too.
The contest is now closed. Thanks for playing! We'll get a hold of winners as soon as the patch is released.
It's the end of the day (or nearly there) and, if you've logged on at all, you've patched WoW up to the 
As I'm sure you're all aware, 
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