As mentioned sometime ago patch 3.2 will bring us Children’s Week Northrend edition. I still think that it’s strange that they didn’t make this part of the scheduled Children’s Week this year but maybe it’s because it wasn’t ready yet at the time. It did seem strange that this year’s regular Children’s Week didn’t have anything to do with Northrend at all except for the eating of cake that you can buy in Dalaran.

Oracles

Thanks to MMO Champion, we can see what this Children’s Week in Northrend will be like. What I can say is that it’s nothing really great. It’s just like what you’d expect for Children’s week but it’s something new and it has a different flavor so I guess we’re willing to take that. The fact that it’s going to award a pet after completion is reason enough for some people to participate.

Unlike the Children’s Week of Azeroth and Outlands, it seems like it won’t be an Alliance/Horde thing. The orphans that you will be showing around will be either a Curious Oracle Hatchling or a Curious Wolvar Pup, obviously from the Oracles/Frenzyheart rivalry going on in the Sholazar Basin. I’m guessing that the orphan you show around depends on what which faction you’re aligned with but of course I could be wrong. After all if you haven’t aligned yourself with one of the factions yet, what then?

The quest chain to show around the orphan in Northrend starts in the Orphanage area that will be added when patch 3.2 comes out. The quest has you visiting the Winterfin Retreat where King Mrgl-Mrgl is in the Borean Tundra, the Bronze Dragonshrine in Dragonblight, Grizzlemaw in Grizzly Hills, Queen Alexstrasza in Wyrmrest Temple in Dragonblight, Hemet Nesingwary in Sholazar Basin and then purchasing a paper zeppelin from the Wonderworks in Dalaran. After finishing the chain, you get a pet oracle/wolvar in the mail.

As you can see it’s nothing really that great but it’s pretty much what you’d expect for a Children’s Week celebration.

One of the biggest announcements in all WoW history was made this week concerning a paid service to be able to switch your WoW character’s faction. Once this is made available, Horde players will be able to switch to the Alliance and vice-versa. Players will not keep their race in the faction switch as some people were thinking. instead you will have to switch a race in the opposing faction that carries your class. Therefore you’ll never see a Human Paladin turn into a Tauren Paladin.

faction switching

According to CM Nethaera, while cross faction transfers are going to be allowed, inter-faction race switching will not be allowed. This is a bit shocking for me since logically switching races within your faction is a smaller step than crossing over to the other faction. I remember reading their justification (can’t seem to find it anymore) went something like this. Making a mistake on faction choice is a more forgivable mistake than a mistake on racial choice.

It’s definitely sad that we won’t be able to switch races between our faction. I know several people who would have wanted to change races. Even I was thinking of changing my Blood Elf warlock to an Orc. Who knows though? If they’re allowing faction switching already, it just might take a little time before they give in to inter-faction race switching.

Patch 3.2 will bring us the Crusader’s Coliseum and with it a new tier of gear for all players. According to the PTR patch notes, the new emblem gear will be purchasable by the new emblem type Emblem of Triumph which drops off the Coliseum raid bosses (and I guess the upcoming new boss in Vault of Archavon). But here’s where things get interesting. unlike the other emblem types, the Emblem of Triumph will also be a reward for doing the normal and heroic dungeon daily quests!

argent tournament grounds

This move is quite creative in my opinion because it gives players a certain element that the Sunwell badge gear gave players back in TBC but not giving the whole thing outright. As we know, the Sunwell badge gear did give players a way to bridge the gap between the lower content and the higher content but it also was a bit too much since players could just farm the dungeons for gear as good as the raiders who worked so hard to get theirs. The new idea with Emblem of Triumph gives players a chance to bridge the content gap but at a harder climb and a slower pace. This also allows 5 man dungeon content to become more relevant again. I’m guessing that this is what CM Zarhym was talking about when he announced that new things were in store for the emblem system .

MMO Champion gives us some info from the PTR about more of these new things. According to them, instead of having several tokens corresponding to a certain gear slot, the tier 9 gear system (item level 245) is going to be a one token for any gear slot system. According to them, item level 232 and 245 tier 9 emblem gear can be bought with Emblems of Triumph.

The upcoming patch 3.2 is filled with a lot of cool content and features as it is and we’re finding out quite a bit more from the PTR. A few days ago we learned about the feature that will allow us to trade BoP items to other eligible players for a duration of time. Now we find out, again through MMO-Champion, that we’ll be able to extend the lockout period of our raids by one more week if needed.

Kologarn raid extension

As we all know, raids currently have a lockout period of one week where the raid timer resets every Tuesday. This means that every Tuesday, players can get fresh runs for their raids. But this also means that if you’ve been working on some raid progression during the week, it will reset every Tuesday whether you like it or not. At least that’s how it is and by patch 3.2 that will change. Imagine the frustration of a guild working to get to Yogg-Saron for a whole week and by the time you get to him, the raid is tired and sleepy and forced to call it a night but the next day the timer resets!

We still don’t know the details about this feature but all we know is that the option to extend the lockout period is there for us by patch 3.2. We still don’t know how this will affect the members of the raid when the lockout gets extended. Imagine the chaos if the raid leader wants to extend but others want a fresh run. imagine a PuG group leader extending the lockout and thus saving the other members for another week unnecessarily. If I had to guess, to prevent situations like this members of a raid will have their timers reset as usual and if they want to join an extended run they’ll have to get saved all over again.

We’ll just have to find out later on exactly how this works but it’s already safe to say that it’s nice that this option will be available to us in the next content patch.

Blizzard stunned the World of Warcraft community by dropping a bombshell on us all. It’s one of those announcements that would make sense if it were April Fools but sadly it’s not. Blizzard announced that they’re working on a service that will allow players to switch factions. this means that for a fee, players will be able to go from Alliance to Horde or Horde to Alliance. This is so shocking since this was one of the things Blizzard has repeatedly said in the past that they wouldn’t allow.

faction switching

According to CM Nethaera, this service is going to be made available because of several requests by the players mostly because they have characters that are on opposite factions from their friends. I’m curious how they will be able to reconcile all the factors that go with a faction transfer. How are they going to deal with reputation levels for example? Let’s say you’re a Human priest who’s exalted with Stormwind and Ironforge, how will that translate when you become an Blood Elf priest?

Another thing I want to touch on is this. Providing a faction transfer service should mean that you can choose what race you want to become in the opposite faction (unless of course you’re a druid or a horde shaman who wants to go to the Alliance or an Alliance paladin who wants to go to the Horde). It would really suck if you get assigned a race instead of choosing one yourself. That would lead to more problems. So assuming that you can choose your race when you switch factions and since we already have a service that can switch your character’s gender, wouldn’t it only be logical that this service should extend to switching races within your faction? Race switching within your faction is a smaller leap than a faction switch. If such is the case, then I know that a lot of people who would like to avail of the service because they’re tired of being a certain race.

What do you think will happen, more Alliance switching to Horde or more Horde switching to Alliance?

Blizzard hasn’t officially gone into much detail about the boss fights in the Crusader’s Coliseum coming in patch 3.2 but that doesn’t stop us from finding out more things about it using other means. MMO Champion has released some sort of a more detailed preview on the bosses for both the 5 man dungeon and the raid dungeon based on the information currently at the Public Test Realm (PTR). Based on what I’ve seen, it looks quite interesting and could provide a lot of insight into the Wrath lore but I still think that it might seem quite underwhelming after coming from a raid like Ulduar.

argent tournament grounds

The 5 man dungeon is quite interesting and in fact at this point it intrigues me more than the raid encounters. First of all, all the bosses players encounter are not strangers since they’re right there in the Tournament Grounds. According to the achievement Heroic: Trial of the Champion from MMO Champion [Alliance|Horde], players will face the champions of each race for your faction while also fighting the Black Knight (him again!), Eadric the Pure (the guy who gives the Threat From Above Quest) and Argent Confessor Paletress. I’m guessing that the Black Knight is the only one we really kill while the other two we just defeat in combat since they’re with the Argent Crusade. The Confessor encounter is interesting since we get to experience memories of famous encounters in World of Warcraft such as Van Cleef, Nefarian, Prince Malchezaar, lady Vashj, Heigan, Cyanigosa and even Hogger!!! This is based on the achievement <strong>Argent Confessor and some data mining MMO Champion did. Now since the preview given to us by Blizzard said there will only be 3 encounters and there are 5 champions + 3 more bosses, I’m not sure how these fights will be. Perhaps one champion, the Black Knight and Eadric for the three and then the Confessor will be a 4th heroic only boss? Read more

According to MMO Champion, there’s a new feature now in the patch 3.2 PTR that will allow the trading of BoP items. It’s not what you think though and I actually think this feature could do more good than harm. It’s a great feature and will make things more convenient.

no more looting mistakes

When you loot a BoP item, the following message comes with the item text: “You may trade this item with players that were eligible to loot this item for the next {time remaining}” as shown in this picture from MMO Champion. This means that you can’t trade BoP items to people who didn’t earn the right to receive such an item. So for example in a raid, you can only trade the item only to people in your raid who were part of the fight that dropped it. You can’t go shouting in Dalaran right after a boss kill and selling such an item to the highest bidder. This is obviously a move made to give players more power to do something about items that were part of a looting mistake. With this feature, players won’t need to hound the game masters as much.

Another thing this feature can consequently do is when someone “ninjas” an item you’ll be able to tell if looted it by mistake (since he can give it to the rightful winner of the roll) or if he’s really a ninja. This will make things a little more honest in terms of loot rolling. I tip my hat to the devs for putting in this feature in patch 3.2.

I’m not sure why I missed it while I was scanning the new additions to the patch 3.2 notes yesterday but anyway I’m glad that they’re finally adding a quest helper of sorts to the game. For people who already have addons that do this, the addition of a built in version gives players a choice to stop using the addons or not. For those people who don’t use addons like this, it would definitely be of great help to get some assistance while questing.

quest log

The new feature will allow players to see where the objective of the quest can be found on the map. To be more specific, the following will be available to assist players:

* A skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures players must kill can be found.
* A glowing skull graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where creatures can be found that drop quest objects.
* A gear graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must loot objects found in the world.
* A chat bubble graphic will be placed on the map in the general area where players must interact with a specific NPC.
* X marks the spot on the map where players must reach, discover or explore a designated area.
* A yellow question mark graphic will show on the map to provide the location of a NPC whose quest the player has completed.

I never really had a quest helper addon but I used a coordinate mod to help me find things and people I need to find for quests and such. I would look up the coordinates in wowhead then look for it on my world map using the coordinate mod. Even with a coordinate mod, this takes time and sometimes the coordinates alone don’t help you find what you’re looking for right away. the kind of detailed assistance mentioned above will really help players do their quests, especially for those people who don’t use mods at all for quests.

After looking at the updates to the patch 3.2 patch notes, there are some things that were added that were quite interesting. MMO Champion has a listing of things like new stuff you can buy with emblems, patch 3.2 achievements, Coliseum loot, and even new profession stuff.

Eventide

But now I want to focus some of World Environment changes/additions that were added to this patch.

Northrend Children’s Week has arrived in Dalaran! Players can find out more by visiting the Eventide District.

Wow Children’s Week again?! But at least it’s finally also in Dalaran. Does this mean that if you missed doing some achievements in the past Children’s Week, you can do it when this goes live? If so then why didn’t they just release this for Children’s Week a few weeks ago? That would have made the event more meaningful especially for level 80’s. Are we getting death knight kiddie orphans? LOL

Portal areas in all major cities now offer a portal to the Blasted Lands near the Dark Portal.

I remember just recently that they said Orgimmar and Stormwind were going to have portals that lead directly to the Stair of Destiny, the first thing you see when you enter the Dark Portal. I guess they might have scratched that and made the portals available to all major cities that lead to the Blasted Lands near the Dark Portal. That’s a nice swap, walk just a bit further but you get to travel to the Outlands more easily with a portal in each city.

The local Postal Service has grown tired of walking so far each day to collect mail and has decided to install a large number of new mailboxes to Stormwind, Undercity, Darnassus and Orgrimmar.

More mailboxes is always nice. Silvermoon City (and I think Exodar) showed that having several mailboxes in a city is very convenient and that cities like Undercity that had only one mailbox can be a pain. The fact that Dalaran has a LOT of mailboxes is REALLY convenient since if you need to get something, you can get it right away. Nice move to add mailboxes in those cities.

If you read my post yesterday about this year’s Midsummer Fire Festival, you would have seen that I’m not that interested in participating in this year’s festivities. I never really was that enticed to do so in the past and aside from Achievements, Blizzard didn’t do anything to convince me to participate this year.

Midsummer Fire Festival Flame

To make things worse, players who wanted to participate were hampered by the bug that wouldn’t allow players who completed the quests in the past to do them again this year. This is a problem since you need to complete them all to get the achievements. Thankfully, there’s a fix that’s being implemented in today’s restart to address this issue. Unfortunately, CM Bornakk has some bad news for those people who were already working on these quests:

We are in the process of applying an in-game fix that will restart all of the quests associated with the Midsummer Fire Festival event and allow players to complete them once again. If you are in the process of completing an achievement such as Extinguishing Kalimdor, this fix will reset your progress and you will need start over. This fix will require realms to be restarted. source

So if you’re in the process of completing an achievement, the progress will be wiped. but what if you’re already done? Is the fact that all these achievements are all part of the Flame Warden/Flame Keeper meta achievement mean that absolutely everything a player has done so far is all for naught? That’s what I’m not sure about but we’ll just have to find out.