So speculate how long until MOP? June, August, October, December or ?

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Submit Questions for the Developers
We are going to have the opportunity to speak with Cory Stockton, the Lead Content Designer for World of Warcraft soon. If you have something you really want to ask him, go ahead and add the question to the comments. We will pick the best questions and add them to our list!

Before posting take a look at the recent developer Q&As to ensure your question hasn't already been asked. (Best Buy / Reddit) Please avoid any very class specific questions about rotations or something similar, as there are other devs better suited to answer them.

Want to talk about the rest of this news post? Head over to this thread!

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Hunter and Mage Challenge Mode Gear Procs
Tonight we take a look at a little bit more flare for the Challenge Mode gear! Each set has a special proc that will go off during combat or other actions. Some of the sets even have multiple procs or slight variations depending on what you are casting.

You can find the Challenge Mode set previews on our Challenge Mode Gear page, found in the menu in the navbar. Each class has a proc for their set, so keep checking back to see your class's set!

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Sept 19 is Pirate's Day
September 19th is Pirate's Day in World of Warcraft, which means you should head on down to Booty Bay and share a drink with Dread Captain DeMeza for the The Captain's Booty achievement if you don't already have it.

Best Buy Developer Q&A
Several WoW developers answered questions on Best Buy's site tonight. You can find a list of the questions and answers here.

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Free Wrath of the Lich King Upgrade
The World of Warcraft Battle Chest now includes Classic, Burning Crusade, and Wrath of the Lich King, all for $20. Existing Classic and Burning Crusade accounts seem to have been upgraded to Wrath of the Lich King for free! You can purchase all of World of Warcraft up to Mists of Pandaria for $60 now as well.

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Patch 5.0.5 Hotfixes - September 18

General
The health of all enemies in Theramore's Fall has been doubled.
Theramore Footmen have stopped using Shield Bash.

Battlegrounds
Alterac Valley
The number of reinforcements in Alterac Valley has been reduced to 500 (down from 600).

Classes
Death Knight
A warrior's Bloodcurdling Shout should no longer affect bloodworms.
Druid
Pounce should now correctly consume only one charge of Dream of Cenarius.
Mage
Frost Armor now increases spell haste by 7% (up from 5%).
Priest
Angelic Feathers can now be used by all party members when the priest under the influence of crowd control spells, and no longer require line-of-sight to the priest to work
Penance's base damage has been reduced so that it now deals significantly less damage at lower player levels, and slightly less damage at level-85.
Shadow Word: Insanity should now deal 2667 to 2815 damage plus 290% of spellpower at level-85 (up from 2235 to 2359 plus 243% of spellpower).
Mindbender damage has been increased by 20%. It now does 80% as much damage per hit as Shadowfiend (up from 66.7%).
Rogue
Shiv no longer generates charges of Anticipation.
Shaman
Capacitor Totem should benefit from the shaman's +hit bonuses, as expected.
Warlock
Shadow Bite damage has been reduced by 25%.
Tongue Lash damage has been reduced by 25%.

Dungeons and Raids
Tempest Keep
Solarian's Solarium Priests should again be hitting for expected amounts of damage.

Items
Marksman's Blade should no longer have a larger hit range than expected.
Oracle Talisman of Ablution now diminishes in efficiency as its owner levels up.

Quests
Interacting with Zidormi in Dustwallow Bay no longer requires Mists of Pandaria.

Bug Fixes
Players should no longer retain glyph effects obtained in arenas after exiting the arena.
Players who resurrect at their corpse after being offered a resurrection by another player should no longer receive resurrection sickness.
Worgen characters who are advanced via a Scroll of Resurrection before completing their introductory quest chain and should no longer be stuck in a phased state.

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No Honor Reset for Mists of Pandaria
Your character's Honor points will not get reset on September 25th, 2012.

There is a full write up on how Valor/Justice and Conquest/Honor points will work in the weeks leading up to and after Mists of Pandaria's launch in the blog: Currency Conversion Before and After Mists of Pandaria

Favorite In Game Events
I bet this thread will be entirely "OH AHN'QIRAJ WAS GREAT" or "WRATH OMG WE WERE ZOMBIES <-- rehashed Naxx opening with extras".
I remember these events quite vividly, and I am personally very glad that I got to experience them, but I also remember that not everyone liked them.

The Gates of Ahn'Qiraj was an absolutely massive event, and it was tremendously awesome if you got to see it. It is totally understandable why so many have fond memories of this event, but it is important to remember that it wasn't peachy for everyone. This was a one-time event that was triggered by the player who held the Scepter of the Shifting Sands, so it was easy to miss out on it if you were not online when it triggered, or if you did not have a character of sufficient high level to go to Silithus. There were quite a few players who voiced their unhappiness about not getting to witness this event after having spent all that time gathering war supplies.

Furthermore, as you can maybe get from this video, an absolutely enormous number of players gathered in Silithus to witness the event. This unfortunately resulted in heavy lag for many players, and even realm crashes on some realms, which was obviously very frustrating to many as these things interrupted the fun.

The Zombie Infestation event was much more widely available to players as it was not restricted to high level players only. Since it was also spread out throughout the world of Azeroth over an extended period of time, the chance of missing out on this event was slim to none, which was appreciated by many for sure. This event is remembered fondly, but again it wasn't peachy for everyone.

Many people were very annoyed that they frequently got interrupted while being in the middle of doing things, and those people who did not have much time to play in general found that they had a hard time completing their usual daily routines within their established and regular time frames, so they were extra frustrated that they could not opt out of the event.

The Demon invasion prior to The Burning Crusade was best. Demon's laying siege to the city? Holding the line against invaders? Now that was an event. I didn't even know it was coming, and when Kruul turned up at stormwind?
That one was my personal favourite as well... although I also really liked the Cataclysm pre-launch events

Pre-wrath zombie plague, hands down. It was so damn fun on an RP server. Pity an event like that will never happen again due to all the QQ it caused. The event was like marmite. Either loved it or hated it.
Nobody says that such an event can't happen again in the future, especially if there is a good reason lore-wise to do it, but it would most likely not happen in the exact same format as the Zombie infestation. There would need to be a way to minimise the griefing, which could for an example be done through safe zones, or some sort of immunity buff, or maybe even a way to opt out of the event altogether for those who are simply not interested in it, etc.

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Mists of Pandaria Boxes
Kat Hunter and a Reddit user showed off the Mists of Pandaria boxes today.

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Paladin and Priest Challenge Mode Gear Procs
Tonight we take a look at a little bit more flare for the Challenge Mode gear! Each set has a special proc that will go off during combat or other actions. Some of the sets even have multiple procs or slight variations depending on what you are casting.

You can find the Challenge Mode set previews on our Challenge Mode Gear page, found in the menu in the navbar. Each class has a proc for their set, so keep checking back to see your class's set!

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Developer Interviews
The developers are doing interviews as we get closers to launch, so here is a recap from the first few. Thanks to ArenaJunkies, Gamespy, and wowcrendor.

Quests

• Patch 5.1 will release "shortly after the game is out".
• Phasing is only used for major events in Mists of Pandaria.
• You can see your friends while in a different phase and each of you will see a different phase.
• It will take a raid of roughly 40 players to take down the Sha of Anger. He will appear in different areas of the zone and change what is spawned around him.
• Scenarios are a replacement for group quests that you won't have to wait in queue for a long time for.
• Challenge Modes will require you to be on the same server as other players. (This conflicts with Ghostcrawler's tweet)
• Questing is less linear and you should be able to skip some of the quest hubs without missing too much of the story. Jade Forest is more linear than the rest of the zones.
• The daily quests that are available change every day and change based on your reputation with the faction.
• You have a NPC companion that fights alongside you when doing Shado-pan daily quests.
• Cataclysm was more content than had ever been done before because of the 1 to 60 revamp, but many people just looked at the 80 to 85 experience.

PvP

• Blizzard follows the player run and professional tournaments, but realizes that it is a hard to watch eSport and is hard to watch. It isn't likely that arenas will be as popular as Starcraft ever, but the goal is to make them fun for the players are are interested in playing.
• The addition of a tournament UI is still on the list of things that would be nice to do as soon as there is development time for it.
• Rating decay may not be the best solution, especially during longer patches like 4.3 when people may not be interested in playing every week. Players should play because they enjoy it and not avoid playing because they might lose rating.
• The current rewards system is working well and the improvements to PvP gear through PvP Power and Resilience should make the gear more attractive.
• The battleground queuing system is old and could use work, it may take advantage of the LFD system and perform faster and smarter in the future. This could include queuing with groups to fight other premades.
• Blizzard believes that the PvP weapons will be stronger than the heroic PvE weapons due to the PvP stat changes.
• Many players are worried that overpowered abilities will allow players to reach high rating within the first two weeks and camp it for the rest of the season. Whether or not Blizzard makes huge sweeping changes is just going to depend on the magnitude of the problem, as it really upsets players and can seem unfair after they have already formed teams and started playing.

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Ghostcrawler (Misc)

• If Ghostcrawler could change one thing about Cataclysm, he would move all the zones into one continent. The teleporting between zones didn't feel like WoW should.
• Cross-Realm zones were designed to fix lower level zones that are dead, not low population realms. The game isn't likely to support people that want to opt out of Cross-Realm zones.
• A Cross-Realm Auction House has been talked about, but it would be hard to do it right and dynamically. It is something being considering for the lowest population realms though.
• Cooking has been improved for Mists of Pandaria. Similar changes might come to other professions depending on player feedback.
• Fishing still isn't where it should be. Making it more like minigame or adding more complexity to the system might be solutions in the future.
• Burning Crusade raid progression went through all of the content, but Wrath of the Lich King made old raids obsolete quickly after each patch. Mists of Pandaria uses Raid Finder to keep older content relevant to gear up alts for new content.
• Gearing up was too fast for alts or people returning in Cataclysm and WotLK, so in Mists of Pandaria characters that are still working on normal modes when a new raid tier comes out should want to still complete the final bosses before moving on to the new raid. Burning Crusade took too long to gear up new players, making it necessary for them to go through all of the old raids.
• Players expected Theramore to be a big event, rather than a preview of how the Scenario system works. It was a systems preview and not an event.
• Scenarios have no tank, so you have to rely on your own skills a little bit more compared to dungeons and raids.
• Making challenge modes for raids is difficult because of length of raids compared to dungeons. They also make trash important, as it is much more difficult in challenge mode. Even in heroic difficulty raids the trash isn't very difficult.

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We’ve been hard at work preparing one of Azeroth’s biggest content updates, and giving you even more gameplay options in World of Warcraft than ever before. See for yourself what the latest expansion, Mists of Pandaria, has to offer in our most recent Twelve-Day Journey Into Mists of Pandaria Facebook campaign. The video provides a complete overview showcasing eight zones, seven scenarios, nine dungeons, three raids, two battlegrounds, one arena, 300 daily quests, monks, pirate monkeys, and so much more!

Head over now and if you like what you see, be sure to “Like” it on Facebook and share it with your friends, guildmates, vague acquaintances, random strangers, and anyone else you think would enjoy seeing some of the wonders that lie waiting behind the Mists of Pandaria.

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Cross Realm Fishing Derby
We’ve looked into this issue and have a fix in the works to make the fishing tournaments behave in a more predictable manner. Unfortunately, this will require a patch in order to take effect, so we are disabling the fishing tournaments until we can deliver the fix for them in a future patch.

As a side-note: we’ll be posting about some larger CRZ concerns in the very near future, so hang in there. We’re listening, and we’re working to address those concerns just as quickly as we can.

Stormstout Brewery Challenge Mode
Our thanks and congratulations go out to all of you who tested the Stormstout Brewery Challenge Mode with us. Here are the top six times we recorded on the beta servers:

#1. Time: 14:49.1
#2. Time: 16:40.6
#3. Time: 18:34.4
#4. Time: 20:57.9
#5. Time: 28:13.7
#6. Time: 30:19.2

Scenario Difficulty
Just read a quick word on scenarios @ mmo from blizzard twitter, where i became rather.. confused by a certain statement

"Scenarios aren't intended to be particularly challenging endgame content. Similar to old group quests"

No one is asking for endgame content difficulty, however facerolling through trash for 5 minutes can't be considered challenging in any way. Old group quests such as ring of blood in nagrand actually required certain tactics back in burning crusade, you couldnt just faceroll the elite mobs, some had certain tactics, one ressurected, one absorbed spelldamage and did more damage to the tank ect.. none of this exists in the theramore scenario.

We agree that Theramore's Fall was too easy, which is why we have increased the HP of all enemies in this scenario through a recent hotfix. It is not our intent that scenarios should be steamrolled like what we saw with the release of Theramore's Fall.

It should be said that scenarios in Mists of Pandaria will be more tuned for players in quest gear and dungeon blues, and as such will not be tailored for players in raid gear.

Challenging Content In Mists of Pandaira
Regarding challenge modes specifically, there're a few bits of information that the developers have commented over the past days on live chats and social media, which I believe might be interesting for you:

Challenge modes have no lockout (so you can try them as many times as you want in a single day).
These are harder than level 90 heroics, you can't outgear them (gear will be normalized inside), and certain things, such as set bonuses will not work. Trinkets do, though. At least for now.
The developers hope that the time required to get "gold" in challenge dungeons is similar to achieving Gladiator in PVP. Meaning, someone sporting a whole set of challenge gear should be akin to seeing someone in a Gladiator mount.

The theory is that challenge modes will fill this niché, but if past experience is anything to go by it will either be too easy or will be subjected to nerfs. Still, can always hope.
The developers have commented this several times. They do expect that most players will be able to achieve Bronze as long as they play properly. Silver is a step up in that regard, but you might still be able to stop and consider your next move before further progressing on the instance.

And finally, the design philosophy for challenge dungeons is so that the developers don't intend to lower the bar to get silver/gold.

Problem with challenge mode is it is restricted to 5 man. 25man guilds will have to pick the best and make groups. If this was in raiding part of wow then yes players would be happy.
Well, on raiding, as it's been mentioned on the thread, you'll be awarded a Feat of Strength for defeating the final bosses of each raid instance without the debuff. And the Protectors of the Endless encounter in Terrace of Endless Spring has even better loot if you defeat Protector Kaolan last (which makes the encounter harder, in a similar way as it happened with the Iron Council in Ulduar depending on your kill order).

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Mists of Pandaria Characters
Blizzard is displaying some information about Mists of Pandaria characters on their Facebook page.

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Rogue and Shaman Challenge Mode Gear Procs
Tonight we take a look at a little bit more flare for the Challenge Mode gear! Each set has a special proc that will go off during combat or other actions. Some of the sets even have multiple procs or slight variations depending on what you are casting.

You can find the Challenge Mode set previews on our Challenge Mode Gear page, found in the menu in the navbar. Each class has a proc for their set, so keep checking back to see your class's set!

[chaos5061]

General
Cross-realm zones no longer bring together players who are more than 3 timezones apart.
When Tol Barad and Wintergrasp battles commence, cross-realm zoning should now cease for the duration, and resume after the end of the battle.
Cross-realm zones no longer behave erratically when a party changes leader.
The organizers of Azeroth's fishing tournaments have temporarily shut down their weekly affairs. Fishing tournaments will return soon.

Classes

Druid (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Starfire damage has been increased by approximately 3%.
Starsurge damage has been increased by approximately 3%.
Wrath damage has been increased by approximately 9%.
Non-Restoration Druids will now properly get a mana discount when casting Cenarion Ward while Heart of the Wild is active. Feral and Guardian Druids will also properly gain increased healing.

Hunter (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Glyph of Scattering should no longer cancel DoTs on boss creatures, but does still still remove all DoTs from non-boss NPCs and enemy players.

Mage (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Arcane Blast damage has been reduced by approximately 3.5%.
Arcane Missiles damage has been reduced by approximately 3.5%.
Arcane Barrage damage has been reduced by approximately 3.5%.

Priest (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Immunity to Fear will no longer prevent Void Tendrils from landing on a target.

Rogue (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Sanguinary Vein now provides at 16% damage increase (down from 20%).

Shaman (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Lightning Bolt damage has been increased by approximately 8%. This also applies to Overload Lightning Bolt and Echo of the Elements Lightning Bolt.

Warrior (Forums / Skills / Talent Calculator)
Mortal Strike now does 165% weapon damage (down from 185%).
Overpower now does 105% weapon damage (down from 120%)
Slam now does 190% weapon damage (down from 215%).
Raging Blow now does 190% weapon damage (down from 215%),
Bloodthirst now does 90% weapon damage (down from 100%).
Wild Strike now does 195% weapon damage (down from 220%).

Items
Overseer's Handaxe now hits for 1307-2428, with DPS increased to 1167.
Gurthalak, Voice of the Deeps should again only spawn a Tentacle of the Old Ones when expected.

Quests
Major Samuelson should no longer despawn before a player who has attacked him can earn credit for killing him in the quest "A Villain Unmasked".

Bug Fixes
Tanks in Theramore's Fall are no longer skinnable for leatherworkers. They can still be dismantled by engineers.