• Clear trash. Keep Bonecrushers stunned and Tidal Shaman interrupted. Tank adds in fire pools, they take damage.
• Towers will open as Demolishers appear. Send 1 tank, 1 healer and around 3-4 DPS to the towers. South, then North, avoid frontal cone so you don't get knocked off. Someone stay to man the turret.
• Ground team kill adds and Demolishers.
• When Galakras lands, stack up. Try to kite the fireball through other people.

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Filed under: Raiding

• The crafting UI has had a lot of updates to make it more intuitive
• You can now hit spacebar to quickly open a pack after unwrapping your last one
• You'll now be spammed notified when your friends complete arenas or open legendary cards
• Play, Practice and Friendly Play modes will now default to the custom deck selection UI if you've previously created a deck

And most notably, a big step in the right direction as far as gold income in-game goes:

• Gold gained in Play mode has changed from 5 gold per 5 wins to 10 gold per 3 wins.

It's not as much as we'd hoped, the general WoW Insider consensus was 5 gold per win, instead of 3.33, but it's a big improvement from 1 gold per win. Hit the break for the full notes.

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Filed under: Hearthstone Insider

When you've been playing a game as long as some of us have been playing World of Warcraft, you get some unusual moments of realization. One of them occurred to me recently, when talking about the upcoming 9th Anniversary of the game this November 23rd. The person I was talking to said "Yeah, my mom showed me how to play, I used to fish for her on her hunter" and it came out that said person was 21 years old, and that she has been playing the game since she was thirteen. She has effectively grown up in Azeroth, at least part time - nearly half of her life has been spent playing this game.

Meanwhile, with each expansion the game has lost some players and gained others - there are people who started playing in Cataclysm and even people who started play this year (I know, I've met quite a few of them) and many of them have no idea how to even go about absorbing all that happened in those nine years. To people who've played all along, it all happened - it's part and parcel of the game, it's history we experienced. But to new players, the sheer volume of it all can be daunting - I've had players comment with disbelief when told about 40 man raiding, who don't really grasp just how many times class mechanics have been changed and revamped and altered. One healer simply couldn't grasp the concept of an out-of-combat resser, a healing character who stood back out of range of boss fights and resurrected people who died over and over again. For me, the trippy part of that conversation was reading a 21 year old relate stories of Molten Core to this newer player and realize they were stories of what she was doing in grammar school.

Of course, for me WoW is a game I discovered in my 30's. My early thirties, come to think of it, and now I'm well out of that decade. So we're all aging, but the proportion of time we spent playing the game is different - for me WoW is just one of many games I've played, and certainly not almost half of my lifespan.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria

The big patch to the closed Hearthstone beta will be happening today. After you can log in at 6pm PDT (9pm EDT) you'll find that all of your cards have reset and everything is as if you've just logged onto the game for the first time. Except any money that you spent has been converted to in-game gold, which you can then spend on card packs and tournament entries.

This patch has been expected for awhile, and the card wipe itself has been known since day one of the Hearthstone announcement. Furthermore, Blizzard has said that they do not expect to perform any additional card wipes -- the cards and progress you make now will carry over to the live game upon release.

Blizzard's full announcement is as follows:

Hearthstone Maintenance

The Hearthstone closed beta test for the North American region will be down for maintenance on October 2nd, from 8:00 AM to 6:00 PM PDT. The Hearthstone closed beta test for the European region will be down for maintenance on October 2nd, from 6:00 PM to 10:00 PM PDT. This maintenance will contain the recently announced closed beta patch and all Hearthstone account information, including card collections, will be wiped during this maintenance.

source

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Filed under: Hearthstone Insider

Every week or two, WoW Insider brings you Encrypted Text for assassination, combat and subtlety rogues. Scott Helfand (@sveltekumquat) will be your shadow on this treacherous journey; try not to keep your back turned for too long, and make sure your valuables are stashed somewhere safe.

Alright, then. Now that introductions are out of the way, let's roll up our sleeves, sharpen the knives we've got hidden within them, roll our sleeves back down again, and get to business.

As you may be somewhat aware, some patch or other happened a few weeks ago. All's I know is, my rogue passed out on a Monday night and when she woke up on Tuesday, her strikes felt suspiciously more sinister.

In all, nearly three dozen class-specific changes greeted us when Patch 5.4 went live (and a few more drifted down from the Azerothian heavens in the form of post-patch hotfixes). Nearly all of them were buffs, bug fixes or quality-of-life improvements of some sort.

That sounds pretty outstanding. But the real question is: What will all of these changes actually alter about the experience of playing a rogue? How many of these differences are noticeable?

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Filed under: Rogue, (Rogue) Encrypted Text

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

I hope that minion card coming with the virtual ticket doesn't have as much disaster potential as Gelbin Mekkatorque. Thanks for turning my Lord of the Arena into a chicken, bro. Now get out of my deck.

globalsmitty asked:

So, the 'Crusader Murloc' reward for purchasing a virtual ticket to Blizzcon, a clue to the next expansion maybe? The much suspected return of the Burning Legion?

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Filed under: The Queue, Hearthstone Insider

Submitter Ralthen of SWC on Turalyon (US-H) writes,"I was exploring the Timeless Isle, heading over to the pirate ship, when I thought, 'I'll just see what's down below. This isle has so many hidden things, why not here?' Little did I know that I'd find a secret cave hidden away. There were no monsters, no NPCs, only an odd little fire, with four chairs around it and glinting sand. In the shape ... of a heart."

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Filed under: Around Azeroth

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You're playing the game, you're fighting the bosses, you know the how -- but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.
- F. Scott Fitzgerald, "The Crack-Up"

While I make no claim to being even a second-rate intelligence, I am occasionally capable of holding opposed ideas. I wrote last week that the destruction of the Vale was going to happen. That it was necessary, to end the reign of the Sha of Pride over Pandaria itself and the stagnation it allowed to fester in the heart of the island continent for over ten thousand years. I still believe that to be true.

But something can be necessary and still be horrific, and moreover, still someone's fault. What happened in Pandaria, the escalation of the Horde and Alliance conflict that led to the Vale's destruction, may have been necessary. That doesn't excuse us for having helped make it happen, for failing to find a better way. For failing to even try to find a better way.

One of the arguments advanced after the Siege of Orgrimmar is over is the concept that the Alliance and Horde strengthen one another, that if one side were to utterly win and destroy the other, it would be weakened for the loss of that which it tests itself against. To this I make a counter response - there are many ways to strengthen one another.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Lore, Know your Lore, Mists of Pandaria

• The Wowhead Client will let you collect data for Wowhead and upload it at your convenience
• The WoWDB Profiler addon works in conjunction with the Curse Client to contribute to WoWDB

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

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Filed under: AddOn Spotlight