While surfing the forums this morning, I came across a little gem of a thread protesting against Blizzard for the following:

1. Breaking "our" addons and mods.
2. Incorporating features from popular addons into the default User Interface, and thus breaking addons and mods. There's also a sentiment that Blizzard is "stealing" these ideas rather than being innovators.
   
3. Fixing "their" bugs which in turn breaks "our" addons and mods. The suggestion is that they don't care, or could take steps to prevent this.
   

As you can imagine, all sorts of responses cropped up, including the usual people who get into arguments with other posters, players in agreement, joking and sarcastic responses, and of course, an awesome string of blue responses.

Tipster Pzychotix has uncovered some new class changes in the latest round of patch notes, and some of them are doozies:

For Druids, the Lifebloom healing coefficient has been reduced. It'll be interesting to see how much. Rolling Lifeblooms have been the healing method of choice for most discerning trees, but if the nerf is severe enough, perhaps we'll see some return to Regrowth and Healing Touch. In other changes, Feral Druids are heading further and further to side of agility, with Nurturing Instinct now increasing your healing spells by up to 100% of your agility, and increasing your healing received by 20% of your attack power while in Cat Form. This seems like it may make Cat Druids at least a bit less squishy in PvP, if they're paired with a healer or can find a spare second to duck out of the fray and heal themselves.

Lots of additional changes after the break!

Patch 2.3.2 has been out on the live realms for a while now, which can only mean that it's time for patch 2.3.3 on the PTRs! Late last night Blizzard launched the 2.3.3 PTRs to little fanfare. No pre-mades are available this time around, so expect to see more testing and less random dueling with epic'd out level 70 characters on the 2.3.3 PTRs. The patch notes are sparse, containing a couple of bugfixes and some improvements to load time, but as with all patches, you never know what unintended (or unmentioned!) changes might have slipped in. MMO Champion has the latest on the patch notes, though their version differs very little from the official version.

Interested in trying the test realm out for yourself? Head over to the official site to download the client and copy one of your existing characters! (Having trouble getting on -- WoWWiki has a great guide to setting up the PTR client.)

IncGamers has a great tip for those of you who were on the last Public Test Realm, and can't wait for the 2.3 PTR to come up (and I know you're out there-- you're like PTR locusts!). Make sure to, right now, delete your WoW test realm folders, so that when the new realm comes out, it'll automatically download to the right place and you won't have to worry about anything getting mixed up.

In Windows, apparently Blizzard is recommending that you do a Find Folders and Files (Windows key + F) for "wowtest," and delete everything that pops up. On the Mac, everything is neat and tidy (as usual)-- it's all in the /Applications/World of Warcraft/WoWTest folder. Delete that, and you're good to go for the 2.3 PTRs.

I don't know if this is really required-- it seems to me that the WoW PTR Client would likely just overwrite anything whatever you had in those folders, and your PTR download would still work. But you never know-- maybe files will be left behind if you don't delete, so it's probably best to clear everything out and start over with the new download (and I bet it'll be a big one-- this is a big content patch). Plus, you can feel like you're all ready for patch 2.3: bring on the new PTR!

As any long-time player of World of Warcraft knows, the public test realms open up to allow players to help out Blizzard QA by giving future changes a good stress test. The test realms open as soon as Blizzard has a stable build of the upcoming patch and the test realms close as soon as Blizzard is satisfied that their patch is as polished as it's going to get. Hortus announced this morning that the PTRs were going offline, concluding public testing for patch 2.2. To me, this means we're going to see patch 2.2 coming our way very soon -- perhaps as early as next week! However, we have known Blizzard to close the PTRs weeks in advance of an official patch release, so a final date continues to elude us.

So what major changes should you expect come patch day?

• An updated sound engine
• Voice chat (on select servers -- it will be rolled out in stages)
• The continuing shrinking shoulders adventure (Night Elves, Draenei, and Orcs to the best of our knowledge)
• Movie capture for Macs (sorry, PC users!)