Posted on July 27th, 2009 by admin
Earlier today, emails started going out to those who were interested in an opportunity to attend the Laguna Art Museum’s VIP Benefit Dinner, sponsored by Blizzard themselves. The benefit will take place the night before BlizzCon, at a to-be-determined location near the convention center.
For the curious, tickets are $500 each and include the meal, a BlizzCon ticket, a signed print of Blizzard artwork, two-for-one admission to Laguna Art Museum’s current WoW-themed exhibition, and “an opportunity to converse with executives, artists, developers, and community managers from Blizzard Entertainment as well as Laguna Art Museum’s curator.” If you signed up to win a chance at buying tickets, you might want to make sure you check your email sometime soon. You’ll only have a 48 hour period to buy your tickets (limit two), so if you don’t get it done soon you’ll miss your chance.
If you’re in the area but can’t attend the benefit, don’t feel too bad. It just so happens that WoW.com is doing something around the same time and we’d love to see you there.
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Posted on July 23rd, 2009 by admin
Part of the fun of BlizzCon is that beyond all of the dev panels and crazy mainstage stuff going on, there’s also the big convention hall full of things to see and do. All of Blizzard’s licensing partners usually show up, so Upper Deck usually has games going on, FigurePrints shows off their wares, and all of the computer companies usually have some fun rigs on display. And now we’ve learned that, as usual, Pocket Books and TokyoPop will have booths set up, along with their usual stable of authors and artists. Richard A. Knaak has confirmed on his website that he’ll be there, so if you’re going, be sure to bring along your copy of War of the Ancients, and maybe you can get it signed.
Our staff is hoping for a Christie Golden appearance as well, and while she doesn’t have anything about BlizzCon on the website yet (she is at ComiCon this week, though), we’re presuming that she’ll be there. Medievaldragon of Blizzplanet is apparently also presuming it: he’s included her with Knaak in his headline about the show. So hopefully she’ll be around, and Ziebart and Whitcomb can take their treasured copies of Arthas over and do
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Posted on July 20th, 2009 by admin
I would hazard a guess that the DC Unlimited series of action figures from the WoW universe is probably the least-heralded licensed product — whenever Upper Deck releases a new set of the TCG, we get multiple press releases and it gets posted on their main site, but whenever a new set of figures comes out, we always have to find it hidden in among all the other comic news and then make sure it hasn’t been released before. But these are new, or at least new to us: DC is planning to release two new Premium Series 2 action figures, including everyone’s favorite tortured Horde leader, Thrall, and a Gnome Warlock with a Voidwalker pal.
Technically, news of these guys leaked out to distributors in May, but apparently we didn’t miss the boat by too much anyway, as they’re not set to be on store shelves until next January (or February, even, depending on where you look). Does it really take that long to get these things ready and out? At any rate, there they are, and we wouldn’t be surprised to see both figures on display at BlizzCon later this year. We’ve had a few of you in the comments mention that you’d like to see a Thrall figure
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Posted on July 16th, 2009 by admin
Just in case you aren’t satisfied with one chance at winning tickets to BlizzCon, those guys from SteelSeries have teamed up with J!NX, BradyGames, Upper Deck, and Swag Dog to bring you the BlizzCon Sweepstakes. That’s like an all-star crew of geek and gamer gear companies forming some sort of super team just for you. That’s right, these guys want you to go to BlizzCon, too, and all you have to do is hop on over to their sweepstakes site, fill up a form, and you’re in. It’s that easy. First prize is a flight for two to Anaheim, 2 nights at a hotel, 2 passes to BlizzCon, and yes, even $300 in pocket money (so you can buy more of swag, I’d imagine).
Here’s where the all-star crew comes in — if you don’t get to win the Grand Prize, five lucky chaps will go away with a SteelSeries World of Warcraft mouse, a $50 J!NX Gift Certificate, and the World of Warcraft Atlas from BradyGames. The rest of the lucky guys will get $25 Swag Dog Gift Certificates, Fields of Honor booster packs, World of Warcraft-themed mousepads, and a bunch of other cool stuff. Not a bad deal at all for just filling out a form. Of course, as usual, it’s
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Posted on July 13th, 2009 by admin
Welcome to Lichborne, the weekly Death Knight column, where all Daniel Whitcomb wants is his runeblade back. But he’ll settle for a sweet axe if he must.
Ok, Casual and non-raiding 2 hand wielding Death Knights, you might want to sit down, because I have some big news for you: You may finally be able to chuck that Titansteel Destroyer. That’s right, we’re getting a new, higher level epic weapon in Patch 3.2’s 5-man Crusader’s Coliseum. The loot we’re seeing come out of the Coliseum is all epic, and all amazing, and if you haven’t even been to Naxxramas yet, either by choice or by lack of time or opportunity, you’re going to have a reason to love the coliseum.
Weighing in at a whopping 203.7 DPS with a high end damage of 856, the Edge of Ruin is pretty much the dream for any serious casual Death Knight. It’s right up there with Death’s Bite or Armageddon from Naxxramas. The only downside is that it’s an axe instead of a suitably awesome sword, and that it switches out hit rating for armor penetration, which means you may need to do some regemming to stay at the hit cap. Other than that, this is probably the number
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Posted on July 6th, 2009 by admin
When the news broke that patch 3.2 would bring new chest heirlooms, with a stacking +10% XP bonus, one commenter made an interesting suggestion: get heirlooms for your level 80 characters, and bank them until the next expansion. So far between chest and shoulders you’ve got a +20% bonus to all XP right there, and having some quality equipment always helps the leveling process.
Of course, there’s every chance that Blizzard will simply disable current heirlooms for characters past level 80, to prevent precisely this behavior. They’ve done level-based nerfing before, with items like the Riding Crop and enchants like Crusader.
The whole fate of heirlooms in the next expansion seems pretty nebulous to me, actually; will we need to go back and farm Emblems of Conquest at level 90 to gear up our alts? It’s too early to tell. For now I would hold on to any extra badges you might have, but when the next expansion nears, you may be able to make good use of them.
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Posted on July 2nd, 2009 by admin
World of Warcraft has, as you have probably heard, been offline in China for a while now. Even though The9 originally said they’d transfer over their servers to NetEase, they later decided to fight it out, leaving WoW offline for a matter of weeks. And it isn’t quite up yet, but they’re getting there — this (very roughly) translated article says that Battle.net servers are now up and running, so Chinese players can now at least sign in to Battle.net, if not into the game itself. We already went through the same thing here in the US and the EU, so Azeroth should be back online in China any day now.
Meanwhile, the poor folks at The9 have not been doing so well — they were on top of the world last year, but when World of Warcraft up and flew the griffon out of there, they lost the majority of their business. A new AP article has them revising their expected earnings down by an “estimated 55 to 75 percent.” Ouch.
Let that be a lesson, NetEase. Keep your instances running and your downtime low, because if Blizzard pulls the plug on a game you’re running, they’ll be taking a ton of money with them.
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