World of Raids has discovered something that might give Hunters a momentary attack of Angina: Thori'dal, the Stars' Fury has been found in the current game files, and while it still looks pretty tasty, it's also look weaker than the last known stats from the Pre-PTR leak. Namely, it's lost about 10 base DPS, having dropped from 148.7 DPS to 138.8 DPS.

Now, it's hard to call this a "nerf," perse, since the bow hasn't actually appeared on any live or test server yet as an actual item. It's possible that the pre-PTR leak was a hoax (not likely though, since it got the other stats spot on), or that Blizzard's internal testing made them think they needed to tone back the damage a bit. It's a bit of a blow to think what might have been with the old damage anyway, of course.

That said, Kil'jaedan isn't even killable yet on live realms, so the stats could change again before it drops. Even if they don't, it's still an awesome bow that will make the Black Bow of the Betrayer look like a peashooter for damage, and comes with the added bonus of a free bag slot, so I'm sure there will be plenty of Hunters aiming for it, and good luck to them. My Hunter is still going to be holding out for a Legendary Gun out of Thor Modan.

You'll want to be a bit more cautious when looking up information on the game today. World of Raids reports that an unknown ad banner appearing on Wowhead, Thottbot, and Allakhazam has an embedded keylogger trojan. You don't even need to click on the banner, apparently, simply mousing over it will be enough. Wowhead says that all they know for sure is that it originates from "ad.yieldmanager.com", and will produce a redirect to "xpantivirus.com." They're working at isolating it.

The issue is known, and all parties involved are tracking it down, so it should hopefully be resolved soon. In the meantime, if you're looking for a quick way to protect yourself, I would follow the recommendation of World of Raids, and try out the Firefox web browser and the No Script extension. As long as you keep the scripts blocked, it should prevent the banner in question from forcing itself on you. This should also provide you with some protection if you accidentally click on the wrong link elsewhere, such as on the WoW general forums.

Edit: Apparently, the virus in question is not an actual keylogger, but it still does a number on your system, which is reason enough to try to avoid it.

As predicted, Enhancement Shamans got some nice buffs yesterday, including the addition of a Mortal Strike-like effect of reduced healing to the Flametongue weapon.

But the weapon hasn't quite had the desired effect yet on the PTR. In fact, as World of Raids has posted, it actually does exactly the opposite. As you can see above, Flametongue is actually adding to heals on the target of the attack, not halving them as its now meant to. No doubt this will be fixed before long, but a note to whoever's working on the Shaman class on the PTR: you should have used that minus sign in the code there, not the plus one.

The Sunmotes we've seen cropping up in the new crafting recipes and various other things are confirmed a raid drop in the new Sunwell Plateau 25-man instance.

If you're unfamiliar with this sort of drop, a good example is the Hearts of Darkness from Mount Hyjal and Black Temple. They drop off of trash mobs in the raid instances, and are fairly common. The Hearts of Darkness in BT/Hyjal were used in resistance gear for Mother Shahraz as well, so we may still run into some of that in the Sunwell. However, if we don't, expect Sunmotes to be a little on the rarer side of the spectrum since we won't need quite as many.

Sunmotes don't seem to be Bind on Pickup either, so if you don't have a 25-man raid group, there's still a chance you can buy these from an established raid group once they have extras.

My thanks goes out to World of Raids for the information and screencap!

World of Raids came across some more of those clay dolls from the other day, and holy moly are they cute. Lookit this Voidwalker! And this hearthstone! Awesome.

Her blog is all in Chinese, so it's a little hard to read if you don't speak the language, but here's a gallery of all the new pieces. And there's no word if any of these are for sale yet-- forget about Figureprints, I want one of these of my character.

PC Zone magazine has an interview with WoW Lead Designer Jeff Kaplan. In it Kaplan reveals details about Wrath of the Lich King PvP warfare as well as the epic feel players will experience when first entering Northrend. Sounds great, huh?

Unfortunately, you have to buy the magazine today to get the entire interview. They have only released a snippet of it online to send us into a frenzy of anticipation. What we learn from this sneak peek is that the Northrend PvP zone, Lake Wintergrasp, will be about the size of Westfall and will be all PvP. No PvE objectives in it at all. It will also be a static zone, not instanced. He also mentions that it will have destructible buildings and siege weapons, which we knew from his Leipzig interviews. Not much new there other than the size comparison to Westfall.

Kaplan also talked about learning from the Hellfire Peninsula experience. This entry point into the first expansion wasn't epic enough. The design team wants to raise the bar for Northrend. We know from earlier interviews that entry into the expansion will be split. The Alliance will grab their sword and the Horde will get their own damn battlecry and both head into either Howling Fjord or Borean Tundra. How Blizzard is going to raise the bar is still a mystery.

Argh! More infoz, please! If anyone gets their hands on the magazine, send us a tip with details. We'll happily give you credit.

EDIT: Clarified entry points for both factions.

[via World of Raids]

The latest 2.3.2 mini-patch on the Public Test Realm has been updated. World of Raids and MMO-Champion both have a list of the 10 changes listed in the notes. Druids and Rogues get a boost to their large damage attack out of stealth, Warmasters and Warmarshalls in AV get a stacking +20% boost to each other's max health and damage and Rogues get some more tweaks on abilities. The fact that pre-mades are available again remains the most exciting news.

And, of course, the nerf of Nagle's Algorithm. What? You haven't heard of the beast? It roams the land killing unsuspecting adventurers through its almighty lag inducing abilities. Actually, It's a method of handling information packets across the Internet. Applying it makes for slower, more efficient packet transmission, but for online games that require constant communication, it can cause lag. Bad, naughty, slideshow of death lag. Ok, not that bad, but removing it will increase responsiveness of the game. And that doesn't suck.

Class over. PTR's are up. Log in on those pre-mad- uh, with your transferred mains and their hard earned and well-deserved equipment to test it out.

Teza at World of Raids has posted some information about changes that will be coming to the "Love is in the Air" holiday this February. Apparently, a player named Mushuu has kept a stash of the pledges from last Valentine's day. Upon opening them recently, he found several new items, including the new fireworks, Love Rockets, pictured next to this article. These items have made appearances on item database sites and were added in recent patches, but their exact use and purpose were unknown up to this point.

Check out World of Raids for the full story, including pictures of the other new item, the Romantic Picnic Basket.

With todays news that Hemorrhage is being buffed yet again in the latest build of patch 2.3, I'm getting more and more excited to take out my old rogue character and use my favorite ability again. Back in the days before The Burning Crusade I used to enjoy using Hemo to succeed as a rogue in PvP when latency and casual gear would have left me at a bad disadvantage otherwise. Hemo was just strong enough that it gave me a real chance at success sometimes, and all the other buffs to stealth in the Subtlety tree made me feel like a real rogue sneaking around and stunlocking people, rather than a warrior without the heavy armor, or a backstabber who could never seem to get behind anyone or crit often enough to kill things.

Once The Burning Crusade was released, I felt terribly disappointed to learn that there were few if any more very slow main-hand weapons at the new level cap. Today there are still very few with a 2.7 weapon speed, and even fewer with 2.8, which, before the expansion, was really the minimum weapon speed you needed to start making use of Hemo successfully. This is because Hemo is not "nomalized" like other abilities; it does progressively more damage the more time passes between weapon swings. With only one high-level 2.9 speed weapon in the game (and that a legendary), and all 2.8-speeds being either too low-level to be useful or to far out of my reach to attain, I feared my preferred playstyle would be dead and useless by the time my rogue reached 70.

But now I'm not so sure. I still don't know why Blizzard didn't add more slow weapons like they used to have in the old days, but I'm hoping these buffs to Hemo will make up for the loss, both in raids and in PvP. Still, I'm hardly the best rogue theorycrafter out there. Are any of you good mathematicians able to speak authoritatively on whether this change is enough to raise Hemo from the dead?

Update: Our commenter, Rick, shared with us a link to an Elitist Jerks discussion in which they provide some good research about this change to Hemo. Among other things, it seems this new version of Hemo is now normalized, meaning that, like Sinister Strike, it won't matter what weapon speed you have when you use it -- it'll still do the same amount of damage. Many of them are eager to try it out.

World of Raids is reporting lots of small fixes in the latest PTR build of Patch 2.3, but with a few surprises as well. There's a good amount of class changes along with some Badge of Justice loot tweaks and a new Hunter volley animation seen above.

Highlights for the class changes include: Feral Druids getting their single target and group based taunts buffed by their +hit rating; Rogues getting Hemorrhage buff as well as a redesign of Shadowstep; and Priests receiving the Focused Will buff as well as Druids getting the Natural Perfection buff even buffer than we reported on earlier.

Chest spawns in Hellfire Ramparts, Karazhan: Chess Event and The Mechanar will not be lootable by anyone absent for a significant amount of the boss fights near the chests. On the upside, Heroic Ramparts and Heroic Mechanar chests will contain a Badge of Justice for every member in the party and the Karazhan cache will contain two! I can tell what two Heroic dungeons are about to get very popular.

Finally, special Engineered goggles are no longer necessary to see the gas clouds in Netherstorm for mote extraction. However, the goggles will now allow the gas clouds to be seen on the minimap in addition to whatever other tracking the player currently has up.

With Patch 2.3 background loading this week, one can only hope Zul'Aman will be available for all of us to enjoy soon and Patch 2.4 introducing the Sunwell Plateau will be served up on the PTR right after.

[Thanks Calypso!]

World of Raids found a hidden link in Blizzard's latest newsletter. That link has led them to a special page on the official Wrath of the Lich King site that you can't find on the expansion's main page.

On this special page is an extensive exploration of how the Warcraft team designed the Northrend 5-man instance, Utgarde Keep in the Howling Fjord zone. First they delve into the story elements that ramp up to your introduction to the "impenetrable fortress in the side of a mountain." Upon arriving by boat to Daggercap Bay, you will see the damage wrought by the enormous, native Viking race and their proto-dragon mounts.

Overland quests from there will tell the story of how these Vrykul have used Utgarde Keep as a staging area to wage a battle against what they see as an invading force of Alliance and Horde.

The page goes on to explain other design decisions that will play out in Utgarde: as a "starter" dungeon, it's designed to be finished quickly; it will be more mission based due to the popularity of Old Hillsbrad and Black Morass in Burning Crusade; and you will get glimpses of the end boss before finally encountering him.

World of Raids once again has the latest breaking news on the latest Patch 2.3 Public Test Ream changes! Today's class changes seem to be mostly happy buffs, especially for hunters and rogues and paladins, as well as a slight nerf to warriors beyond the jump. Also read on below for Guild Bank prices, New Arena Season 3 weapon models, a Field Repair Bot change, as well as a few new engineering toys.

Hunters:

• It looks like hunters get their version of Mortal Strike after all: Aimed Shot now reduces all healing done on the target by 50% for 10 seconds, in addition to the regularly increased damage.
• The dead zone has not been eradicated, but it has been reduced to just about 1 yard. Why not just get rid of the dead zone and be done with it? Is Blizzard paranoid about the possibility of using melee and ranged abilities at the same time through latency bugs or something?

Rogues:

• The rogue talent "Aggression" is being improved so that its damage bonus applies to Backstab as well as Sinister Strike and Eviscerate (at +2/4/6% with each rank).
• Shadowstep now has a 30 second cooldown in addition to being usable out of stealth. Its range has been changed from 0-20 yards to 8-25 yards, and its +20% damage bonus now applies to whatever special attack you make next (i.e. Sinister Strike, Hemorrhage -- even Eviscerate or Rupture). Could this make it beneficial to non-dagger rogues as well?
• Hemorrhage has received a huge buff: It now increases physical damage dealt to its target by up to 36 (increased from 10!), but its number of charges has been reduced from 30 to 10. This should make hemo rogues more desirable in groups, and also increase the benefit from having more than one in a raid -- but is it really enough?

Paladins:

• The "Fanaticism" talent in the retribution tree now reduces the paladin's threat by 30% at the highest rank in addition to 15% increased critical strike chance with all judgements.
• The protection talent "Precision" now gives a +3% chance to hit with spells in addition to melee attacks.

World of Raids is at it again. Arena Season 3 started last night on the PTR and a new Arena vendor popped up in Area 52. WoR already has screenshots of the new PvP armor sets for every class and every talent spec with images from the Dressing Room as well.

Every piece has +Resilience and has set bonuses for the same stat. Sprinkled through the armor (and the weapons/ranged slot items) are small enhancements to existing abilities for each class as well.

Head over to WoR and check it out, then let us know if you think Blizzard has made a class PvP set that works for you or is it totally off base. You can also check out all the latest Arena Season 3 news right here!

2.3 is up on the PTR, and both MMO Champion and World of Raids have broken out the Model Viewer and are ripping the new patch to pieces. Man, that bear mount looks awesome. And the engineering mount! And Zul'jin!

Spoilers ahead, as well-- these guys are pulling out all the weapons from Zul'Aman, so if you don't want to see what all the new drops look like yet, don't look now. If you want to know what I think, I'd rather see this stuff in-game rather than diving in with the Model Viewer-- it's like reading the last page of a brand new novel, in that you might not know exactly how you get there, but you'll already know just what it looks like. The bear mount above isn't that big of a spoiler-- we already know it drops from. But the weapons and armor-- a big part of me wants to wait and see them in Zul'Aman itself.

Still, if seeing the patch laid out in screenshots is your thing, both MMO Champion and World of Raids are going at it, and I'm told we'll be diving in later this evening. 2.3 ahoy! Go test those bugs on the PTR so those of us on the live realms can get it quick!

Thanks, Atryd!

With the avalanche of information from Blizzard in the last week about Patch 2.3 it's been hard to keep track of it all. Fortunately, two sites have done just that. MMO-Champion and World of Raids have both compiled all the blue notes into a theoretical Test Realm Patch 2.3 Notes list. Most of the notes listed have links leading to the official source of the information.

There will be a great deal more in the patch than what the blues have revealed so far, so take these as only partial lists. Also, a few items Blizzard hoped to get into the patch may not make it. This is the unfortunate truth in the development process.

World of Warcraft Lead Developer Jeff Kaplan, aka Tigole, mentioned that Patch 2.3 may hit the Test server this week. This seems very likely since the current patch on the PTRs, 2.2.2, must move off for Brewfest to go live on Tuesday.