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PTR
News
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PTR Patch Changes and Additions: 1-19-2011
Another week, another PTR patch! A new patch is being prepared for the PTR servers, and we've taken a look to see what has chanced between this patch and the
patch released last week
.
Talent Calculator (PTR)
|
Latest Additions (PTR)
We'll be updating this post with more information as we distill it from the batch of data, so stay tuned!
Highlights
World of Typocraft
: Many achievements, mounts, and spells had their tooltips corrected.
Mysteries of the Marsh
,
Nagrand Slam
, and
Winterspring Quests
had their quest requirements reduced slightly.
Skin of Shadow
has finally been removed from its last two recipes, making your stockpile of them worthless. Reclaim that bank slot now!
Transmute: Pyrium Bar
now only requires one
Elementium Bar
and one
Volatile Earth
.[/li
Live
Now Hiring: Content Manager
We've made an update to our
Jobs
to highlight a new job for which we are looking for candidates:
Content Manager
.
This is a
full-time, contract, work-from-home
position. If you think you're the right one for the job, check out the requirements on our
jobs page
, and then send a copy of your resume to jobs@wowhead.com.
Please include any relevant writing samples along with your cover letter, resume, and salary history in a separate document.
Thanks to you guys (our users), we're fortunate to have a group of professional enthusiasts working together to bring you a site that we hope makes your World of Warcraft experience a more pleasant one. Every time we hire a new person, I become excited at the opportunity to bring another one of you guys into the inner sanctum of Wowhead. I look forward to speaking with you further about the position. :)
http://www.wowhead.com/jobs
Live
PTR Patch Changes and Additions: 1-11-11
A new patch is being prepared for the PTR servers, and we've taken a look to see what has chanced between this patch and the
patch released last week
.
Talent Calculator (PTR)
|
Latest Additions (PTR)
We'll be updating this post with more information as we distill it from the batch of data, so stay tuned!
Highlights
All flask recipes have had their herb requirements lowered to 8 of each (down from 12), and now require 8
Volatile Life
each (up from 6).
Paladin
:
has been replaced by
Sacred Shield
, and Rebuke is now trainable.
The cooldown on
Survey
has been reduced to 3 seconds.
Superior Intellect
now increases Intellect by 40, down from 100.
A number of [url=
http://ptr.wowhead.com/search?q=d
Live
Player and Guild Experience Changes in Cataclysm
Blizzard has made some posts clarifying some of the new experience mechanics in Cataclysm. Firstly, (as intended)
guild experience will be capped on a per-day basis
, meaning that your guild will not gain experience after a certain point until the next day. Apparently, the EU realms went live without the cap enabled, but corrective measures were taken and guild experience was reset for some guilds.
Secondly,
once you reach the max-level for an expansion, you will only gain 10% experience from killing NPCs from that expansion.
In other words, once you hit 80, there will be no AoE grinding of squishies in Northrend to try to level to 82 or higher. You can still get full experience for
quests
, but you'll need to move on to the Cataclysm zones to get full experience from NPCs.
Blue posts after the break!
Live
Blizzard Product Schedule: Leak or Hoax?
A very interesting image is circulating on The Internet regarding a supposed leak of Blizzard's product schedule. The image is below, as well as the official response from Blizzard, an analysis of the source, and a general review of the info contained therein.
So, is this legit? Let's review!
Live
Thottbot Merged with Wowhead Framework
We just received this announcement from ZAM and I wanted to pass it along to you guys since some of you are probably wondering about Thottbot's future.
In a review of our World of Warcraft community sites,
ZAM Network
has decided to make some changes to the
Thottbot.com
site.
While
Wowhead will remain unaffected
, Thottbot will be sharing some of the Wowhead technology platform. A key goal was to improve the data available to the Thottbot community while retaining the Thottbot styling, navigation and community.
The following changes will occur to
thottbot.com
:
Thottbot will load its database information from Wowhead's database.
Thottbot will load its comment, screenshot, and video information from Wowhead's database.
Thottbot's blogs and forum have been closed. We will be setting up a Thottbot-specific forum on Wowhead for discussion specific to that site.
Thottbot user accounts are being deactivated. Unfortunately most of the accounts on Thottbot had no email addresses associated with them and Wowhead's technology requires an email address to register an account.
Live
Pre-Shattering WoW Database Active
A quick announcement for people recovering from their overdose of various culinary delights:
we took a snapshot of our database right before The Shattering and have made this snapshot available for users!
Obviously, this archive will not see any updates whatsoever, but with all the reminiscing about how things were "back in the day", we thought some of you might appreciate being able to link to evidence of just how far up that hill you had to walk in the snow.
Both ways, of course.
You can access the archive site either via the "Archive" link in the top left corner of any Wowhead page or by visiting the URL below:
http://old.wowhead.com
When you think of how things were back in the day, what do you remember about WoW?
Live
Patch 4.0.3a: The Shattering Hotfixes
Edit: More hotfixes! Check "November 24" below for more info!
Blizzard snuck in a few hotfixes for some outstanding issues during the chaos that was The Shattering. Check the complete list out after the break!
Highlights
Druid
: Bear form saw some damage output nerfs.
Mage
: Some proc-based abilities were fixed.
Several quest tweaks were made.
Live
Cataclysm: Old World Zone Changes
As you probably know by now,
patch 4.0.3a includes a complete restructuring of old-world content
. This ranges from
cosmetic changes
to
modifications to the leveling flow throughout both continents
. These changes have been documented in our handy-dandy
Cataclysm Guide
, but since we're all waiting for the servers to come up, we figured a primer might be appreciated.
Check out the information after the break, complete with some
entertaining videos covering the new race starting zones
courtesy of The BFF Report.
Live
Cataclysm: New Class & Race Combinations
One of the features that will be going live with patch 4.0.3a are the new Race/Class combinations
. This has been in our
Cataclysm Guide
for a while but we figured you might appreciate a nice clean table to ponder over while you wait for the servers to come back up.
Update
: To clarify questions being asked in the comments:
When maintenance is complete, you will be able to choose any of the new combinations denoted by the symbol in the "Added in 4.0.3a" table below
. However, you will need to purchase Cataclysm and wait until December 7th before you can roll a Goblin or Worgen.
Added in 4.0.3a
Alliance
Death Knight
Druid
Hunter
Mage
Paladin
Priest
Rogue
Shaman
Warlock
Warrior
Draenei
[td
Live
Live Patch (13329): The Shattering is Imminent!
It looks like a new patch will be hitting the live servers this week, and all indications are that this will be the moment we've all been anticipating for years.
If you're trying to finish up Loremaster, capture some last-minute screenshots of your favorite zones, or enjoy Barrens chat one more time before it's split into two smaller Barrens chats, you'll probably want to do that within the next 24 hours
. This is, of course, assuming that the patch gets applied on Tuesday, as per the usual schedule.
In case you have some spare time, you can check out the spell changes between the current live servers and the latest PTR patch after the break!
Highlights from "The Shattering"
A few minor cosmetic changes have been applied to some zones. Nothing you'll miss.
That class that you like to play was totally nerfed.
Mankrik still can't find his wife.
Live
Cataclysm Beta Patch (Build 13316)
Just when you think it is safe to go to sleep, another beta patch (build 13316) appears! It's not a huge patch, but it did change a few things.
Talent Calculator (Beta)
|
Latest Additions (Beta)
We'll be updating this post with more information as we distill it from the batch of data, so stay tuned!
Highlights
Many achievements were converted into Feats of Strength, including
Zul'Gurub
,
50 Stone Keeper's Shards
, and the Peacebloom vs. Ghouls Achievements
Several Inscription recipes now generate items that are bind on equip rather than bind on pickup.
Blood Fury
/
Blood Fury
now scale with level.
Death Knight
: A few self-healing abilities had their healing effectiveness reduced.
Priest
: The effectiveness of several healing abilities was increased.
Live
Russian Player Obtains All Achievements
Ревенант
, a player on the Russian realms, has earned the distinction of obtaining every single achievement in the game (as well as 78 of the 165
Feats of Strength
at the time of this writing).
Some of the noteworthy ones (as if they all weren't noteworthy) include
Insane in the Membrane
,
A Tribute to Immortality
,
Scarab Lord
,
It's Over Nine Thousand!
, and my favorite,
Avast Ye, Admiral!
(I just love the reward). He was also part of
Realm First! Fall of the Lich King
,
Realm First! Death's Demise
and many other Realm Firsts.
I don't know about the rest of you, but my hat is off to this guy. He's come the closest I've seen to beating the World of Warcraft.
Live
Cataclysm Beta Patch (Build 13277)
Looks like someone is burning the late-night oil over at Blizzard... a new beta patch (build 13277) is being prepped for a server update in the near future!
Update:
We made a few tweaks to the spell diffs after identifying an issue with how we were determining changes in class spells. The current list should be more accurate.
Talent Calculator (Beta)
|
Latest Additions (Beta)
We'll be updating this post with more information as we distill it from the batch of data, so stay tuned!
Highlights
The correction made by
Red Shirt Guy
made it into
Overthrow the Council
(<table><tr><td><b class="q">Overthrow the Council</b></td></tr></table><table><tr><td><br />Kill Representatives Moira Thaurissan, Muradin Bronzebeard and <del class='diffmod'>Kurdran</del><ins class='diffmod'>Falstad</ins> Wildhammer.</td></tr></table>[
Live
Red Shirt Takes Command at BlizzCon, Schools Lore Team
I didn't have the chance to attend the Quests and Lore panel at BlizzCon since I was trapped in the Blizzard Store Line of Pain. This morning, however,
she who shall not be named
was reviewing her Yahoo news feed and asked me if I "saw the nerd pwn the Blizzard people at BlizzCon". When I said I hadn't, she played the following video:
(
source
)
For confirmation, you need look no further than our database!
Live:
Falstad Wildhammer
Cata:
Falstad Wildhammer
Falstad Wildhammer
Overthrow the Council
I'm not super-deep into the lore of the game, but I am a fan of consistency. Way to keep Blizzard in check, Red Shirt Guy, and way to disprove the stereotype that all people in red shirts are cannon fodder for away missions.
Live
Cataclysm Beta Patch 13221 Spell Changes & Latest Additions
A new patch (13221) is imminent for the beta servers, and we've got details on what you can expect in this latest patch for the Cataclysm beta!
We'll be updating this post with more information as we distill it from the batch of data, so stay tuned!
Highlights
157 new items
found, most of which are epic top-level items from raids.
All spells that reduce the effectiveness of healing to a target (such as
Mortal Strike
) have been modified to reduce such effectiveness by 10% rather than 25%.
All resistance-based racial abilities now increasing your spell resistance of that school by one point (scaling) rather than reducing the chance you will be hit by a spell from that school by 2%.
Dual Talent Specialization
: Dual Talent Specialization requires level 30 (down from 40). <table><tr><td><b class="q">Dual Talent Specialization</b></td></tr></table><table><tr><td><br />Visit your class trainer when you are at least level 40 and activate your Dual Talent Speciali
Live
BlizzCon Live Blogs!
If you've been following our
Twitter account
, you'll notice we already have people on the ground at BlizzCon!
Well this year we're going to be live-blogging the panels as we attend them, so you'll be able to get all your updates right here as they're released! As we post them, our updates will appear both on Twitter and below the main blog post in a special section titled "Updates"! Images will appear inline in the posts as we take them, and when we're done all of the updates will automatically consolidate into one post.
If you're looking to join us on Twitter, be sure to follow all of our staff—because we have a ton of people at BlizzCon this year!
@Malgayne
@Miyari
@Pwnyx
(TheOnyx)
@Fewyn
@Poetic_Dragon
@Avenphire
@Noxychu
@Karata
Live
Non-English words? In my CAPTCHA?
People who have been adding comments or forum posts to our site recently may have noticed something peculiar about the random codes you have to type to prove you're human (a.k.a.
CAPTCHA
). We've gotten several reports that non-English words are slipping into the
ReCAPTCHA
panel, causing people to have to refresh the panel to get a new code. Obviously, having to do this at all is a nuisance, let alone several times.
I dug into the issue and discovered that, apparently, the ReCAPTCHA team
improperly marked many books as English books
. They've been weeding out the bad books and have improved their QA process beyond "view a few random pages in the book" to make sure they aren't actually trying to digitize a book that's only partially English.
In the meantime, the annoying codes that you can't type should be slowly disappearing.
For now, Wowhead plans to continue to use ReCAPTCHA as we believe it provides a useful service. In addition, as annoying as this issue was, it beats having to debug issues with our home-brewe
Live
Scheduled Maintenance: Sept 20th, 10pm-1am PST
Last week, I wrote
a blog post
about a number of things we're doing to make things a little faster on this part of
The Internets
. The installation of the new database server I mentioned will be happening tonight from 10pm-1am PST.
Oh, wait... that's when when Malgayne plays WoW, you say? Wow, what a coincidence. That sucks.
That'll teach him to break the servers.
We're hoping the maintenance will only take 2 hours, but we're building in an extra hour for all that fun stuff that happens when people mess with servers that no one ever quite anticipates will occur. We're hoping we caught everything, though. We even did an extensive burn-in test of the new server and it out-performs the existing one by a good margin. After the results of that test, I'm quite eager to get that server running!
Live
Growing Pains: or, "Why The Site Is So Slow"
I'm sure that, by now, you've noticed that our site has been having some issues lately. In case you're wondering,
it's all Malgayne's fault.
:cough:
More accurately: We've been in the process of scaling our site to better handle increased traffic. This has included updates to our existing servers as well as getting a new and faster database server set up to add to the site. The new database server is expected to be live within the next few weeks. We've also been optimizing many of our older queries to be more efficient, thus putting less strain on the database servers.
On top of that, we've been migrating to a more efficient caching system for our pages. We actually moved our forums, blog, and select pieces of our database pages over to it a few days ago. The instability you've seen since then was tracked down to a misconfiguration on one of our web servers that limited the number of connections it could make to our caching cluster. Since it wasn't able to hit the caching cluster effectively, it was trying to connect to the database, which spawned another connection attempt, which failed, which made TheOnyx something something.
The misconfiguration has been res
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