BlizzCon Tickets On Sale Today!! (6/2 7pm Pacific)
Just in case Wednesday, June 2 isn’t circled on your calendar, here’s a quick reminder that BlizzCon tickets will be going on sale today at 7 p.m. Pacific Time — keep your eye on the ticket sales page for the
World of Warcraft Patch 3.3.5 PTR is up!
Head on over to the World of Warcraft patch 3.3.5 PTR and check out the new “Onxia/Sartharion” style raid The Ruby Sanctum! MORE DRAGONS! RAWR! Below you will find the PTR patch 3.3.5 notes. Please bear in mind these changes are not exhaustive and are subject to revision at any time during the 3.3.3 testing phase. When these notes are updated, we will attempt to highlight any sections that have been added or altered in this post for your reference. Please note that, due to the manner in which test realm patch updates are applied, some of the changes reflected in the PTR notes may not appear until the next test build is released.
Blizzard developer Q+A via Twitter!
Today the Blizzard team consisting of Bornakk, Ghostcrawler, Aratil,  had a Q+A session via Twitter and the results are some really great insight onto things coming in the game.  Check this out! Q. If damage and healing is too much per health ratio, then why don’t you have battlegrounds/arenas give a -30% damage/healing debuff? A. We have been talking about solutions like that. It might feel a bit awkward, but it might also solve the problem and maybe it’s okay in the last season before an expansion to experiment a little bit. Q. Is there talk of a fire shield spell for elemental shaman to use like water shield for restoration shaman? A. Not at this time. Q. Do you still have plans to implement guild housing? A. Guild housing isn’t a priority. Aside from the huge development involved it gets people out of cities and into these private areas other players can’t see. We like cities to feel populated. But I’m not sure anyone expected WoW to be going as strong as it is after five years, so who knows in the future.
Blizzard Account Administration told not to restore hacked characters
In a stunning revelation from a veteran account administrator at Blizzard, WoW.com has learned that account administrators are being told by Blizzard managers not to restore people’s characters and items after their account has been ransacked by gold sellers and keyloggers. Instead, account administrators are being told to give people a “care package” and get them to accept the package in lieu of total account restoration. If the player does not accept this care package, they are then forced to go into a character restoration queue that is consistently several days to weeks long. According to sources familiar with the situation, this “care package policy” has been implemented in order to lighten the work load of those Blizzard employees who perform account restorations. Similar policies have existed at other times account compromises have been high, such as during the transition from Vanilla WoW to The Burning Crusade.
Why there are no Cross-Realm raids… yet.
Let me preface this with what Blizzard’s viewpoints are on this. Bornakk - Doing this is a bit more complicated than the 5 player dungeons. For 5 player dungeons it’s not a big deal to allow the random heroics to skip lock
A Deeper understanding of the New Need/Greed System
Like most times that new things have come up in WoW, there are certain areas of gray that require the player base to “use its best judgement”.  This has come up a lot with the new LFD loot system.  Yes, I realize this isn’t restricted to LFD, but it is where it shows up the most.  Many people are confused about certain situations about when to need or greed or now disenchant. Blizzard has actually been pretty good about clarifying some things for us.  Granted, they’re not the best at making sure the information gets as far out as possible.  The forum-goers usually get the information first and it trickles down very grassrootsy to what I’d like to call the “have-nots” or non-forum-goers. Take it away Bornakk -
Blizzard hints at hidden Wintergrasp bonuses
I know this system has been in place for a while now, they’ve actually hinted at it before a couple of times. This is actually the first time a Blizzard employee has actually started a thread on the topic. Judging from the amount of ‘wha?’ going on in the thread, its pretty obvious that there are still many people that aren’t aware of this particular mechanic. So, I’ll give you the gist of it. When Blizzard first talked about Wintergrasp at BlizzCon ‘08, they knew the biggest question on peoples’ mind was “What if I’m seriously outnumbered?”. The answer to that was the Tenacity we all know and love. A buff recalculated at intervals that culminates in a buff to health, healing, and damage. Presumably, this would allow a single player to take on many opponents (or a multiboxer taking on an entire team) when their own team is seriously outnumbered. There are people on both the giving and receiving end of the buff that will point out the flaws and argue whether or not it even works as intended. However, Blizzard has only hinted at a far less quantitative buff that is in place in case a faction seriously “outmatches” another.
Blizzard Healer Discussion for Cataclysm
Ghostcrawler has been busy in a rather length thread about healing in World of Warcraft now and into Cataclysm.  Sure a lot of it has been mostly rehashing on concepts that have been gone over time and again, but its always nice to be able to take a look into their heads.  Some of the things that have been discussed are mana management, downranking, and health vs healing vs inc damage.  The thread has been going for over a week so there is definitely a lot of reading to catch up on, so let me start you off here. The general theory behind healing in Cataclysm is that you’ll no longer (see also less often) be spamming heals like a mad-man.  To accomplish this, Blizzard is making it so tanks won’t be one or even two-shotted.  At the same time, healers will not be able to one or even two-heal a tank from low to full health.  This will, of course, lessen the stress of healers to heal or die.  And at the same time, the efficiency of healing compared to mana pools will be significantly reduced, making not healing an important aspect of the healer’s job.  Sort of a pick the time and place of your heals.
3.3.0a Hits the Live Server
If you haven’t played in a few days (does the daystar still burn?), you may have missed the mini-patch that came down the pipes.  What it actually does is anyone’s guess.  Supposedly, there are a few bug fixes.  But since Blizzard didn’t feel it necessary to tell us what is actually getting fixed, I’ll just have to make my own patch notes.
Blizzard extends their support hours.
For any of you that may have had your accounts compromised (as I have) you’d probably have noticed that you got hit either late friday or early saturday.   Of course you would’ve had to wait until you could give Blizzard a call on monday morning.  And while you waited, you had no access to your account or been able to stop those pesky hackers from spamming around the community under your name. Well, those days are closer to over.  Blizzard has extended their service hours to seven days a week.  Now, you can get your account back in a matter of hours, instead of days.  And best of all, no hours of busy signals on mondays.