Okay, so we picked up this Blood DK for a 3v3 team in season 7... we've been practicing a lot and he hits like a truck launched from space. He stacks ArP and just absolutely destroys high-armor targets... so it got me thinking:

"What if I stacked ArP as well (instead of Agi)?"

So I got to thinking about my sets... do I even HAVE any ArP gear that I can run with in PvP?

Okay, so I need to keep the 4-set bonus for Feral (or do I?... yeah I think I do...), so let's see, I have the T8 helm, that has ArP on it. Sweet, I've got a ring with ArP on it. Sweet, I'm wearing bracers and feet with ArP on them...

All tolled, without looking for more gear or gemming for it, I have 201 ArP. After looking through WoWHead for ArP-grades (lawl), I find that I can farm the non-heroic ToC 5-man for a belt upgrade (I'm lazy and still have a Hateful belt >_<) with 47 ArP on it, and there are 2 easy ring upgrades with ~40 ArP each on them AND a socket a piece (which is better than my current ring).

That would put me up to ~290 ArP without gems... uh ohz...

Okay, I can get the epic ArP gems for 10k honor and a guild-mate cutting them... and I have all these arena points laying about with really nothing to use them on...

If I get these two rings, I will have 14 sockets and 1 meta... one of those gem slots has to be a green (to cover the blue/yellow reqs of the meta), leaving 13 gems for ArP... at 20 ArP rating a piece. Well blimey, that's 260 more ArP rating, which would bring me above the 550 ArP mark...

Holy hell... that's basically 45% armor ignore... before FFF which would bring it to 50% Armor Ignore.

... YEAH ... I think we're gunna go down this road...

EDIT:

DOH... there's Diminishing Returns on Armor Penetration above 7616 armor >_<
It's still extremely strong, but just not AS extremely strong.

Okay, technically it came in after I left work yesterday, but still... it seems important.

Predatory Strikes now gives your finishing moves a 7/13/20% chance per combo point to make your next Nature spell with a cast time of less than 10 seconds (can't use Revive) instant cast. Yes, this means Cyclone. Yes, this means Entangling Roots. Yes, this means Healing Touch... yes this means a little more PvP love.

Since the patch notes don't explicitly state it, I figured I would put some information here:

1) The proc gives you a buff called Predatory Strikes
2) The proc LOOKS like the icon for PS
3) The proc is a physical buff (can't be purged/dispelled)
4) The proc doesn't appear to have an internal cooldown
5) The proc lasts 15 seconds

... wait, it lasts 15 seconds and doesn't have a cooldown? Doesn't that mean that I can get the proc, wait until I have 3-4 combo points on my train, insta-cyclone his healer, and by the time I use FB on him at 5cps, the healer's Cyclone will be just about done and I can then throw one on the train?

Yes, it is definitely looking that way. This is a HUGE step forward for Ferals. Season 7 Feral control class... fantastic!

Also, I'm going to be talk a bit about Armor Penetration later today if I can find the time.

Okay, there's a LOT to go over, but I'm going to stick to the PvP-centric changes right now... I'll have more details as they come in:

* No new talents, but 5 more talent points to spend.
* Changing a lot of talents to be "more fun"
* Mastery System which will give passive bonuses as more talents points are spent IN a tree (more points in assassination tree? have some bonus crit value).
* "Path of Titans" character progression. Think "pet talent tree" but for your class, based on the path you choose. So, it's like picking "Druid of the Talon" when you're already a druid... except it's not class-based. Okay, that's confusing, interesting-but-confusing. I'll have more info as it comes.
* Worgen racial OP for arenas: Sprint
* Goblin racial OP for arenas: Blink

Another August... that can only mean BlizzCon! That's right, BlizzCon will be opening their doors very soon to the enthralled masses. We're all very excited about the changes that are going to be announced... of course I will have ALL the Druid information I can find here with discussions on the upcoming changes.

In my last post, I talked about design decisions and their impact on the game as a progressively evolving entity... it was a little crazy, I know. This time, I think I'd like to talk about some of the updates we are going to see in 3.2.2. Most notably, Feral Druids (regardless of spec... everyone takes Shredding Attacks) are getting their talents updated such that we will have 20% per combo point on a finishing move to make our next Nature spell with a cast time of less than 10 seconds instant.

Hold on... let's allow this to sink in... has it properly settled? Are you feeling giddy and little over-anxious? You should be.

Pop someone with a 5pt Rip? Guess what, you have an instant-cast Cyclone/Roots/HT/etc waiting for you for the next few seconds (I don't know exactly how many seconds... but I'm installing the PTR right now to test it out). This will DEFINITELY help Ferals feel like a better contender in the 3v3 bracket. I have hesitated posting this update until now simply because I had low hopes that it would actually make it to live.

To be perfectly honest, I still feel like it only have a 50-50 chance of making it to a public release. This is mainly due to the fact that it is simply another instance of Maelstrom weapon, which Enhancement Shammies get AND Ret pallies get (Art of War)... I suppose it's a decent way of leveling out the hybrids so that their dps specs feel a little more in control without making them too powerful, but I feel like this one is borderline overpowered.

Anyway, we tried out a new 3v3 partner last night: a Blood DK. I have to say, his damage output is extremely impressive AND we were winning a lot... I think it's mainly due to the fact that we cleave better than most cleave teams, and control teams lose control when we split out dps to control the controllers. Oh... that and he gives me Hysteria for that hilarious "cannot be blind/sapped/gouged/freezetrapped/wyvernstun/concussionshot/etc" bonus that also gives me 20% more damage. This is a straight to 2k 3v3 team, so I'll be collecting my shoulders and weapons next season after all.

I will report back with more updates as BlizzCon gets underway... I'm excited to say the least.

Hello darkness, my old friend, I've come to ...

That's right, they've announced the end of Season6, and thus announced the end of the competitive 2v2 bracket as we know it. Well, that's all well and good, actually. In my opinion, this is something that actually should be done now. Before 3.2, I was the first to start the argument for keeping the 2v2 bracket alive and well; I was the poster child of the "SAVE THE ONLY GOOD PVP BRACKET!" However, after the change to resilience, I have come to realize that killing the 2v2 bracket is the right thing to do for PvP to advance.

Do not get me wrong... I still think that the pre-3.2 2v2 bracket was the penultimate showdown of skill and ping (each being equally important... and the availability of one shows off the need of the other more stringently), but since resilience has turned all the underpowered classes with little survivability who got buffs in that vein into unstoppable juggernauts of doom, I'm afraid I just don't have it in me for another season of 30+ minute matches.

That's right, I'm talking about warlocks. They were given 6% damage reduction in shallow destro, they were given their 20% damage reduction back on Soul Link, and they just STARTED to become nigh-invincible... at the very least, you could kill their pet to lower their defenses long enough to usually do some significant damage to either the warlock or the healer's mana pool. However, once the resilience change went through, warlocks who stack resilience and walk around with their Voidwalker are invincible again. There is no dps class who can take them down, it just isn't going to happen. Their pets have resilience too, so they can't get gibbed... the locks pick up Fel Synergy and Improved Health Funnel so their pets cannot die at all, which means they always have Soul Link up... which means they cannot die...

Okay, I'm done.

That's right, done. I'll play the first week or two of 2v2 bracket just to get back to 2200 (or whatever) and sit on that for a Duelist title and rating requirements for the rest of my gear and play the 3v3 bracket.

No, I'm not happy about it... but I gotta do SOMETHING, right?

Let's transition for a moment, I would like to talk about game design, or redesign as it happens.

Do any of you remember playing vanilla? That is, there was only 1 Druid set of gear and it had healing, some crit, int, stam, etc. It was all caster gear. Now, this was a time before Boomkin was, how shall I put this nicely... implemented (Hurricane was the 31-balance spell FFS). Okay, so this is clearly bad because Feral specs don't get anything from these stats, right? So, what does Blizzard do? They make it so that Ferals share gear with Rogues come The Burning Crusade (although they implemented it kind of poorly... Strength was still better for us than Agi, so we'd take weird pieces before true Rogue pieces), and they only furthered this design model in Wrath of the Lich King.

Why do I say "furthered" instead of "improved", you might ask? Well, it is because there is a rift forming since Vanilla, and the Blizz developers only made it larger. Essentially, with every piece of gear that the Feral Druid acquires, he moves further and further from his other specializations and abilities. This is voiced loudly by some in the Druid community who view the class as a true hybrid which should be pushed to use all their abilities, rather than becoming a class who specializes in one aspect of game-play and sits there for the rest of their lives. Ferals just happen to be the most potent example of this, but it certainly exists in other classes as well. For instance, Enhancement shammies share their gear with Hunters (itemization-wise) rather than OTHER Shammies...

Doesn't this seem insane? I suppose there's a possibility that I am the only one who feels that Druids should be getting gear specialized to their class, but it just doesn't sound likely. On the other hand, I can see how Blizz saw this originally, "only one class in the game wears Leather gear with Agility on it, but there are two classes who wear Leather primarily and deal physical damage... only four specs though, three of which are rogues... let's just homogenize Ferals to be rogues but different, that'll solve the problem."

To a great extent it did... but it requires such planning, and tweaking, and retweaking because of way in which both classes scale. Didn't Blizzard already try and homogenize gear to make it more accessible for everyone? I mean, Crit is Crit, right? No longer do we see gear with Spell Crit versus other gear with just Crit, right... and we already changed Bonus Damage and Bonus Healing to both simply be Spell Power, right? So, why didn't we do that with classes? Let's break it down by class and armor type:

Cloth:
Priest
Mage
Warlock

Leather:
Rogue
Druid

Mail:
Shaman
Hunter

Plate:
DK
Warrior
Paladin

Okay, Cloth armor class is broken up pretty easily... there is spell casting cloth gear, and that's it. It makes it simple... sure there will be healer-centric caster-cloth and dps-centric caster-cloth, but largely they are extremely similar. No other armor class is this lucky...

Plate is next in line as being pretty close to perfect... there is tank gear or dps gear. There is a divide there, but at least they are close in their itemization (that is, a little hit rating on your tanking gear isn't so bad, and a little defense on your dps gear isn't the end of the world because there will be other stats which spillover into the correct category. For example, most tanking gear has strength and stam, usually it has hit/exp and dodge/block/parry/etc... so you'll get SOMETHING from the strength and the other stats are close, but not terrible). There is only one class who wears spell-power plate, but we aren't going to talk about this class just yet.

The problem I'm seeing is with Leather and Mail gear... there is physical dps gear and casting gear. The only Leather-wearer who uses casting gear is the Druid class, and the casting-aspects of this class were largely worked out in TBC (with some minor tweaks during the homogenization phase of WotLK). The same is true for Shammies and Mail gear; only ONE class wears caster Mail, it's shammies, and they had that worked out before.

We have this area, however, where ONE spec of Druids and ONE spec of Shammies end up wearing COMPLETELY different gear than their other specs (and Pallies are in a similar boat here for all three of their specs... Holy = SP, Prot = Tankplate, Ret = dpsplate). That's right, it's conclusion time... but it comes in the form of a question:

Why wasn't Feral/Enhance (and ALL pally specs) designed (or redesigned) such that Spell power gear of their armor class was used for their specs? That is, why aren't the talents in the Feral tree set up such that Intellect/Spirit were the driving stats behind Feral Attack Power, rather than Agiliy/Strength? In fact, why wasn't Cat Form redesigned such that it didn't use Attack Power at all, but rather it used Spell Power as its damage calculation. That way, there would be no need for Feral Attack Power staves, instead Ferals would use the same Spell Power staves that their Resto/Balance brethren use.

In this way, we change the model from Classes and Armor Class, to Specs and Armor Class Type. In this way, each class has an armor class and one specialization of that class which each of their specs use... so every class looks more like a pure in terms of itemization:

Cloth (all three specs of all these classes use spell-power):
Mage
Priest
Warlock

Leather:
Rogue (all three specs use Agility leather)
Druid (all three specs use Spell Power Leather)

Mail:
Hunter (all three specs use Agility mail)
Shaman (all three specs use Spell Power mail)

The ONLY other place to look would be in how the plate-wearers are changed... obviously there needs to be some similar treatment to how Druid tanking would be changed... what if all Plate gear was changed to be strictly DPS plate (except for the Spell Power Plate, obviously which would remain Spell Power plate)? Then, we would change each class in this category to use their main-stat gear for each spec, and change the specs to realize that change (that is, Prot Warriors would wear DPS plate, but their Protection Talents would be changed to "for every critical strike rating you have, you deal 1% less damage but dodge 1% more" (or something) so that the same DPS gear would be good for them without making them powerhouses in PvP! Okay, the breakdown here looks like this:

Plate:
Warrior (all 3 specs use DPS plate gear)
DK (all 3 specs use DPS plate gear, the talents in some trees will be changed to be tank-centric or dps centric as noted so that as survivability goes up, damage goes down)
Pally (all 3 specs use Spell Power Plate gear, the talents in EVERY tree will have to be redone, Retribution's changes will be similar to Feral/Enhance, Prot will be similar to DK/Warrior except Spell Power instead of Physical stats go towards survivability and lowered heal-ability and damage output, and Holy stays roughly unchnaged)

Would this take a lot of work? Sure... but now you've evened the playing field amongst all the hybrids and pures... each class has ONE set of gear that can be used for all specs, though hybrids have multiple specs which can fulfill different roles... this would actually be the reason for having the hybrid tax. "Sure, you can take a raid of full hybrids, but it won't be as strong as replacing those DPS spots with pures... but still doable." My gripe is that right now, hybrids are "taxes" for DPS because they "can fill multiple roles" when the reality of the matter is that all the hybrids have to actually acquire the gear to fill those roles... so walking into Naxx, a druid can REALLY only do what he geared himself for. I walked into Naxx with a set of budget Feral gear; I could NOT just respec to resto and heal equally well...

I know it's a crazy idea... and it would probably be fret with concerns of "what would stop Feral druids from being amazing healers in their own specs... and if you put talents in the tree which lower the ability of that feral to heal, why do the change at all!?" I don't have a good answer for this except to say that Healing and Nuking is part of the Druid design, but Ferals aren't part of this design... Feral seemed an afterthought of the Rogue design based in Shapeshifting... which is neat in theory but extremely hard to balance.

Food for thought, I suppose.

Okay, continuing from our reasonably strong showing on Wednesday, we headed into the arena against yesterday to pretty poor conclusions. Here comes a run-down!!!!

Prot+DK: Fought this team on Ring of Valor and Blade's Edge... there's just NOTHING you can do to this team if they play defensively. The prot pally has infinite mana and the DK can't be gibbed unless some truly magical luck pans out in your favor.

Prot+Warrior: This is less of a headache than DK because we can actually do damage to the warrior. We beat this team every time we play against it.

Druid+Warrior: Played poor-to-mediocre, this team is free points; played well, this team is auto-loss. The druid can drink at his leisure because he's alliance and can drop combat whenever needed. The druid spends the entire match casting Cyclone/Roots/Hibernate on me forcing me OOM and really lowering my damage to nothing. We went 1:3 against this comp... the one we won was on Lordaeron and we had to bleed the druid dry through two innervates and Guntir had to kill him because of the insane CC he can still apply to me with no mana left. Got to the top of the center while his warrior was rooted, the druid was at 100 mana, 1000 hp, I was out of energy and cooldowns, and Guntir landed a Holy Fire with his last points of mana for the kill... then we turtled and had to keep the warrior at bay for 30 seconds until Innervate came back up... we almost lost even then because of Bladeskillz. If I never see another Resto druid in the arena again, I'll be happy.

Rogue+Shadow: We are definitely seeing this team more... and we CAN win if we play defensively and we get a little lucky... I need to work on Cycloning the priest more. We basically went 50:50 against this team because they would occassionally get us into a spot where Guntir was at 50%, get hit with Silenced while I was feared for 5 more seconds, and they would do that much damage... it's unfortunate, but we CAN stop this sometimes. I'm really limited by the fact that I have to save my trinket for Blind...

Lock+Healer: I don't want to understate this... this team is back in full force. Locks are invincible now that their pets are invincible. Haunt locks just throw out TONS of DoTs (which cannot realistically be dispelled), then drain Guntir... it's a long-play team back from s2-4 and I miss/hate it. This really is a strong argument for resilience should NOT be transferred to the pets. Essentially, the lock takes 12.5% damage reduction from resilience (at the cap), then 20% damage reduction via Soul Link. THEN, the pet gets a portion of the lock's resilience, so the 20% damage that goes to the pet gets reduced further... I CALL BULLSHTEIN!

... Unfortunately, that was the extent of our matches last night. Again we were pitted against 2400 rated teams, so our losing record of 9-13 for the week STILL has netted us a gain in rating (though a loss from yesterday's rating)...

Here's what I'm worried about: someone is going to figure out that Prot pallies are invincible healers, particularly when with a second healer, who never run out of mana... someone is going to get two of these healers together and pick up the dps class with the most innate survivability AND damage output (Haunt/SL locks, imo), and run a 3s comp that cannot run out of mana or hp...

My prediction for Season7 is that Prot+Prot+Haunt/SL will be #1 team in 3v3 bracket.

Feral turkey, to be specific. What is my first impression of 3.2? AMAZING! The Feral nerfs to damage were not poorly received, I still do pretty intense damage in PvP/PvE, just a tiny bit less. The Resilience change really has made Guntir able to live through some serious burst damage (we can pretty reliably beat rogue+priest now). The DK nerfs are largely not felt (sadly, they are still tank-cannons in PvP... though we only faced Frost dks... maybe that's what the OP spec for PvP is now, haven't seen any Unholy yet).

Okay, enough of that, let's talk about our matches from yesterday, which were ALL 2400 MMR btw... not sure why we were getting teams 200 MMR above us, but that's what we got:

Rogue+Dist: we got 4 of these teams and beat 3 of them (the one we didn't beat opened up on Guntir, peeled me with a Fear (which I ate so I could trinket Blind later), and completely unloaded on him to kill him during Pain Suppression... just bad luck). Essentially, rogues in PvE gear can't do enough damage to kill Guntir without me entering into the mix, and the rogues in PvP gear simply can't kill Guntir, making the match a mana-race which we win because of Innervate. This team is actually something we're slightly strong against instead of slightly weak against. Most of the rogues we face wear all PvE gear, so while I'm still dealing the same damage I was in 3.1 to them, they are dealing 10% less to Guntir and ~8% less to me. I'm SUPER happy about the changes in 3.2 with regard to this team.

Rogue+Shadow: we got one of these opponents. It was your standard match except the beginning worked poorly... they Sapped Guntir, started stripping his debuffs, I Pounced the SPriest, switched to Bear, the Rogue jumped Guntir and popped evasion, I Cycloned him, he came out of Cyclone and tried to vanish and I hit him with Bash at the same time... so he vanished and reappeared stunned, put up a bleed, and beat them. Once rogues run out of cooldowns, they lose, particularly when you force the Shadow Priest to start healing... you're doing it right. The only trick here is that they can reset the match twice, so after this the rogue got a dispel from the priest and hit vanish#2 to try and reset, but Guntir and I just stayed in combat with the priest and drew the rogue out and killed him with Berserk + Bleeds. This match was our easiest (also our first match, so we were pleasantly surprised when Guntir lives through the damage).

Protadin+Warrior: we had bad luck on this one. Essentially, we killed the warrior twice if I got ONE crit during the Cyclone on the pally... but it never happened. Then at the end of the match, the warrior got 6 crits during his bladestorm and killed Guntir... skillz right? This isn't one we expect to lose very often (in fact, if we see these teams more I might switch back to Shred to deal more damage... but I love the Mangle spec against priest+rogue... we'll see).

Protadin+FrostDK: This is exactly the same thing as the Prot+Warrior team... bad luck with no crits at crucial times and the Prot pally doesn't OOM. One thing I tried in this match that seemed to REALLY bleed the Protadin's mana pool was that I switched targets hard and keep 5Rips up on both of them as much as possible (with SR up, of course). Prot pallies really take full damage from Rake/Rip (minus resilience and some flat damage reduction talents they have, but not much reduction in all, maybe 15%) as do FrostDKs. There was a point where both of them were at 20% hp and I had Berserk, so we Cycloned the protadin (who didn't have his trinket up... I mean this was a win!) and Berserked the DK (who didn't have IBF up either... we were gunna win) and I had all I needed, he popped his Ghoul, sac'd it for some health, got to 50%, and I just didn't get ANY crits in there. If any ONE of my attacks Crit, we win this match.

Druid+Warrior: We lost to this team as well... quite annoying really. We got the druid OOM after his Innervate (which Guntir knocked off on the first tick) and Guntir had ~4k mana... we should have won. So, I switched to the Druid (mistake #1) to keep him in combat and spending what little mana he had, and Guntir got hit by Improved Overpower, MS, SuddenDeath, a white crit, then an Execute crit... essentially he took the maximum damage he could from that rotation while healing himself for 25% of his full ability. Long-story-short: when we get to this position again (which we do a lot), I won't switch off the warrior and keep him off Guntir and just use FFF to keep the druid from drinking.

Druid+Ret: We faced this team for our first match on the new Lordaeron (which is beautiful by the way). Ret's burst is lowered significantly, but his sustained is still pretty strong. The difference is that Ret only has one defensive cooldown every 5 minutes, so we just train him and CC as needed to apply pressure, eventually we got the gib. The one thing I will make mention about the new Lordaeron is that as a Feral, I move faster than everyone else, and the crypt in the middle has been smoothed out, but the incline is now so severe that when chasing over the top, I will end up flying too far... I end up "falling off" the top instead of walking down the slope. It took me a minute to figure out how best to deal with this... just do figure-8s to avoid CC casts and it'll put you down on the ground where you can turn left/right and be next to your target.

Disc+Ret: We lost to this team... we SHOULDN'T have lost to this team, it was entirely my fault. We almost won a couple times, just didn't do enough damage while the priest was CC'd. Here's the problem: we zone in, I put on a spell-power weapon to buff thorns, and I forgot to take it off. DOH, so I'm running around this match with 3,000 less attack power. That's right, THREE THOUSAND LESS ATTACK POWER... and we almost still won. This won't happen again.

I already spoke a little about Lord, another change they did was that you start in a tunnel as opposed to an alcove now. So, there's no LoS (or bar in the middle of the entry-way) issues: ducking into the starting area cannot break LoS on anyone outside the starting area (can't duck in there and drink)... which is awesome for our team. Also changed in this patch, Sewers has become a better map in one regard that you can mount, it's bigger, and flare/DnD can't reach your stairs from their stairs, so you can stay stealthed against these comps. The one thing I noticed and hated: you have less LoS from the bottom to the top platform, meaning that using Feral Charge (Cat) from the bottom to the top only works if your enemy is right at the edge (whereas you USED to be able to get to nearly the middle of the platform... not anymore). OH, and they took the fire aspect out of the Ring of Valor: when you get to the top, the fire is on for aesthetic reasons, but turns off as soon as you can get out of the area and stays off... awesome changes all around.

So all things considered, I'm extremely happy about 3.2 thus far, we went 5-5 yesterday and gained ~20 rating (as we were playing 2400 teams non-stop), so we're going to try and grind out some more matches to climb.

That's right, my speculation on the matter was completely wrong, apparently. Version 3.2 has officially been released today AND the arena season does not end today... what fevered dream of madness is this!? I honestly could not have foreseen this; it seemed so unlikely.

Okay, let's recap for PvP points:

1) Ferals are getting SLIGHTLY nerfed in the DPS department... emphasis on slightly, you likely won't notice any difference in damage output from yesterday to today.
2) Resilience has been buffed and now specifically targets direct damage non-crits more than it did yesterday; this will likely play like a nerf to rogues/warriors/dks/rets/mages/etc and a relative buff to warlocks/spriests/ferals. Rip/Rake are STILL your bread-n-butter for PvP.
3) Resilience has been slightly nerfed in terms of its effectiveness, but it is a more attractive stat for dps classes (though rogues will still complain that it isn't).
4) Innervate has been changed from a 6min CD 20sec duration that restores ~15k mana, to a 3min CD 10sec duration that restores ~8k mana, for well-coordinated Feral+Healer teams, this will play as a buff (as dispelling innervate will still be effective, but LESS so).
5) Resto druids have been nerfed such that Innervate can be dispelled again... sweet!
6) Ferals are much MUCH prettier in 3.2
7) Ret pallies can't 2shot anyone anymore.
8) Frost dks still can, but their defensive cooldowns have longer cooldowns now, so invincibility is less of the fight.

There are a ton more changes, and obviously I can't cover ALL the bases, but these are definitely the big-hitters as far as Feral PvP is concerned.

MMO-Champion.com is suggesting, given the following quote, that 3.2 will be released either tomorrow or the next day:

Zahora Hello,

Know first, you do not need to reinstall your game you have to keep a copy on another disk and then to recopy your original hard drive to work in this way, it ' there is no installation to be done or updated.

Then, If you need to reinstall the game, just use the DVD WOTLK, your game will be completely relocated to version 3.0.1.

Meanwhile, you can go to sites like:

- (Http://www.arakkoa.com).
- (Http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors).

updates are sorted by order, you must find all the updates up to version 3.1.3 ... and 3.2 from next Wednesday. (source)

Now... if you follow the link, you will notice something funny: it's in French. Here are my list of concerns with this post:

1) It's in French... the CMs (who aren't developers) tend to get this information wrong. There is a laundry-list of blue posts in the EU boards which have been simply incorrect over the years.
2) This suggests that 3.2 is coming out soon, and using this statement as a given, Blizzard is either ending season 6 without their usual two week reminder, or they will continue season 6 into 3.2... which was all but confirmed to NOT be the case by GC some time ago (apparently before the BlueTracker was implemented... or in a [NoTracking] post; either way I can't find the source. I suppose it's possible I'm dreaming this all up, but I believe he said 3.2 = s7).

Okay, so if s7 doesn't start when 3.2 drops... I'm going to have to relearn DKs on the live arena system??? What if DKs are utterly overpowered again (or underpowered, as laughable as that notion seems)... they can't expect DKs to relearn their class with new abilities in a live competitive system like the arena, can they? However, why would this CM suggest that we are within a week of seeing 3.2 being released unless that were the case? Additionally, if they simply end the season on the nose without the usual 2 week notice period, won't some competitive teams be missing out on information leading to the inevitable end-of-season-grind-for-gladiator-fest?

Or maybe that's the point... could Blizzard be doing this in an attempt to keep people playing their hardest ALL the time, not knowing exactly when the end will be? Remember, the end of season five marked the beginning of the one-week grace period where arena points continued, but titles were being worked out and the arenas were not playable. Perhaps Blizzard is using this as a means to stem the end-of-season-gladiator-grind by letting teams use their remaining one week buying the gear they need as a surprise ending to the season without having to announce 2 weeks ahead of time that the season is drawing to a close.

All heavy-handed speculation on my end... I still don't expect to see 3.2 released for AT LEAST 2 weeks, and that is only if Blizzard decides to announce the end of season six today or tomorrow. We shall see...