Tournament registration is open and you should be registering! The tournament will start on March 31st, 10AM (next Monday after the weekly maintenance sounds about right). Oh and here’s the link, scroll down and hit that register button.

Looks like some States will not be eligible, so hope you’re in one of the eligible States or have relatives in one. I also found the following to be particular interesting:

Canadian residents are not required to pay an Entry Fee in order to enter. Instead, Canadian residents may enter by submitting a 250 word typewritten essay comparing the video gaming culture in Canada to the video gaming culture in the United States on 8 1/2 x 11 inch paper and mailing their essay to Essay Entry for The North American Blizzard Entertainment Arena Tournament, P.O Box 18979, Irvine, CA 92623. Essay entries must be received no later than March 31, 2008 in order to be eligible.

Tags: PvP · News

Below is a list of all the PvP related changes (LONG), important changes are in BOLD. You may view the full notes here.

General

Characters will now retain talented spell ranks so when they retalent they do not have to relearn the spells from trainers.
Spell Haste: Spell haste now reduces the global cooldown on spells, down to a minimum of 1 second. This change does not apply to melee and ranged abilities.
Resilience: Now reduces the magnitude of mana draining effects by the same amount that it reduces critical strike damage. The Tooltip has been revised to reflect this.
Non-self % based haste spells will no longer stack with each other.

Read More

Tags: PvP · News

Looks like patch 2.4 should be around the corner with PTR disabled and the patch on the background downloader.

In order to gather additional logging information for the Tournament Test realm we will be taking down the regular 2.4 PTRs until further notice.We encourage everyone to check out the TTR to help us test our new hardware configurations.

You can find more information regarding the TTR and post your feedback in the Tournament Test Forum. - Hortus

Some final PvP changes:

Druid: The range of Cyclone has been reduced to 20 yards. (was 30 yards before)

Rogue: Shiv can now be dodged and miss.

Some funny responses when the Shiv change was reported, shows how lack of game knowledge/awareness (Shiv has been this way since 15 months ago) blizzard employees are…

Unless you have a different version of Shiv than I do, the ability doesn’t say anything about not missing or being dodged. As it is not a finishing move Surprise Attacks does not apply to it either.

Am I missing something here? - Hortus

Later the guy comes back after a quick trip to the other building:

I’ve spoken with the devs and shiv not being missed or dodged is a bug and was never intended. The changes to the combat log revealed some problems with how this spell is coded and it is being worked on. - Hortus

For those of you that wanted to see Season 4 already (many being decked out in S3 for over a month), you won’t be getting it any time soon

One thing that’s more certain is that Season 4 isn’t going to start for quite a while. - Drysc

Oh and if Shadow Priest is your thing, here’s something that’ll make you want to kill or cry:

I do pretty well in battlegrounds(LOL?) with mine, but if I’m going to want to be viable in higher end competition then I would be well advised to respec. That isn’t to say that shadow priests won’t one day be more viable than they are now in PvP, or that changes may not come for other specs to help them become more viable. The point is that not every spec for every class should be expected to be as viable as the next for each aspect of the game.

[edit]I’ll qualify this statement and say that this is our general take on spec viability for now, and isn’t necessarily intended to be taken as the end all look at spec comparisons in various aspects of the game for all future balance and development. That possibly was not made as clear as it should have been in my original post in the other thread, and certainly not very clear in this one. - Drysc

So for those of us that actually spend MONTHS getting full Shadow gear, apperently we were never intended to be viable!!! Why don’t they just remove Shadow gear from the vendors then? The “zero exceptions” rule their lovely in-game GMs have on replacing gear doesn’t help a bit neither.

Tags: PvP · News

PTR Patch notes from the official website has been updated again!
After Shaman and Warlock, Blizzard is now turning their attention towards Druids. But considering what had happened before, I wouldn’t worry about it until it’s *tested*, we all know Blizzard staff are tend to be indecisive when it comes to class balancing. =P
Those of you who count on running the druid OOM from casting Regrowth, well today’s notes definitely isn’t on your side =/
Anyways, so here are the notes:

General:
Non-self % base haste spells will no longer stack with each other.

Druid:
Lifebloom - The bonus coefficient on the final bloom effect has been reduced by 20%. This spell will no longer cause error messages when interacting with Spellsteal or while the druid is under the effects of Mind Control.
Regrowth - The mana cost of this spell has been reduced by approximately 20%.

Hunter:
Improved Mend Pet now has a 25/50 (was 50/100) chance to remove one Curse, Disease, Magic or Poison effect, up from 15/50%.

Paladin:
Illumination - The mana energize from this talent no longer has a chance to set off other triggered effects.

Also, Kalgan has revealed a little sneak peek on possible future warlock ability in the expansion. But like Kalgan said himself, until the ability is actually out, it has every possibility of being changed entirely. But anyways, here’s what he said:

“We definitely feel the need for warlocks to gain some sort of active defense so we don’t have to try to balance them around the assumption that they’re “tanking” melee classes. For example, an idea we’re running with internally is the concept of a warlock being able to cast a spell that places a circle of demonic power on the ground. The warlock would be able to teleport to this location from within a relatively short range (ie: 40 yards), and would also be able to summon demons more quickly if they’re standing within the circle.

Note: this idea is intended as a sneak peek, it’s not something that we’re planning for 2.4, it would be more likely as an expansion ability, and may change entirely before said time.”

Blizzard has finally decided to do something regarding the biggest issue on TTR (Test Tournament Realm), which is clicking non stop for nearly an hour to get ONE bandage. They announced earlier that they will be pushing new data to the TTR sometime today and after that, players will now be randomly spawn into:

Northshire
Stormwind
Coldridge Valley
Ironforge
Shadowglen
Crash Site
Valley of Trials
Razor Hill
Sen’jin Village
Orgrimmar
Camp Narache
Deathknell
Sunstrider Isle

And eventually more spawn locatons will be added, and capitol cities spawn points will be removed.

Finally, they will be having 3 of every vendor available except armor vendor. So maybe it’s time for me to get my old laptops out of the closet, I will be expecting 3 bandage out of one hour of clicking instead of 1 now!

Today’s push will make capitol cities only have vendors outside the city limits, and only battlemasters within the city. (Except Exodar). They will be adding a fight promoter at every spawn location where players can:

- Bind to the location
- Teleport to another city (Again, Exodar is the exception)

Blizzard states that their ultimate goal is to have vendors in every immediate town surrounding a capital city.
They said: ” using Stormwind as an example, Northshire, Goldshire, and Sentinel Hill in Westfall will eventually all be filled with vendors.”
I guess that’s why you get a epic mount to start with, so you can run around and pray the next location won’t be as crowded as the previous one.
And last but not least, all existing characters will be wiped with the coming of the next build.
Blizzard explained that there are 3 reasons for this:

1) There is a new character template and it needs testing.
2) We want to continue to test random spawning.
3) We want to test spawn locations.

So everyone be ready for more clicking!

Tags: PvP · News

Looks like Blizzard is going to give the tournament a practice run! PTR tournament server will be given a real run through on Sunday, 12-3pm PST.

Originally Posted by Blizzard
Are you ready to take on the world in the arenas? The World of Warcraft team will be testing the WoW Arena Tournament on the Tournament Test Realm, and you are invited to be a part of the action. Players in all regions will access the same realm, so the call is going out to all PvPers in North America, Europe, and Korea to log into the Arena Tournament Test Realm and participate in all-out PvP action!

The Worldwide Arena Battle will take place this Sunday between 12PM to 3PM PST, and members of the Community and Development teams will join in the fray, including a head to head match between community managers from around the world for world dominance. The results will also be posted on the Tournament forum!

No character copies will be needed for this unique event as you will get access to the character and gear of your choice just by logging in. The 2.4 PTR patch will provide access to the Tournament realm so download it soon and we’ll see you on the battlefield!”

Source

Tags: PvP · News