It is my understanding that come patch, many achievements will no longer be available. For example, the ZA bear mount will no longer be attainable.

Faux

Only Feats of Strength, and even then those are mostly available.

Anything that is an achievement (and will be displayed when a character is examined and shows as being not completed on the character) can be finished after the patch. That includes any old-world raiding and all the TBC dungeons.

Old-world Naxx will be gone though, having flown to Northrend.

Correct, and I believe the only actual achievement associated with old Naxxramas is the Feat of Strength for completing Atiesh. There isn't even a "Kill Kel'Thuzad" achievement, presumably because Blizzard doesn't want it confused with the level 80 version. We're just trying to enjoy Naxx while we can and while T3 still exists, and run the other 3 for achievements, rep, gear set completionism, and what have you.

My guild did Kalecgos and Brutallus last night on PTR. We had no mods and alot of giddy raiders trying out their new abilities, glyphs and the such and in no way were even close to taking it serious and killed him in 3 minutes.

WWS doesn't work for PTR so one of our officers found a similar site that would let us upload. Here's the link, albeit loads slow:

WOW Meter Online �*�兽数据在线 - More logs!!!!!!

The most blatant thing to notice is the overall dmg dealt, which is 7,357,601. Since we had no idea how things might be different except knowing that bloodlust now had a 5 minute debuff attached to it we lusted almost on inc so it would come up near the end of the pull. When he died we still had 3 minutes left on the debuff.

So unless something was massively bugged, they chopped 30 percent of his HP off. We saved Kalecgos just after the 4th port, and as expected trash died insanely fast.

MMO Champion just quoted Zarhym. The current arena season will end with Patch 3.0. All rewards, like titles and Netherdrakes will be given out based on a snapshot on the night before Patch 3.0 So it seems that the time between 3.0 and the addon will be a lot smaller than 2.0 to Burning Crusade.

Source: MMO-Champion BlueTracker - Wrath of the Lich King Arenas

Every single mob and boss in raidinstances we saw on PTR has had its maxhp nerfed by 30%. We have visited Kara, ZA and Gruul's lair. Kara wasn't even funny in T6 and badge gear with 9 players. Just pull together everything and aoe, basically.
Mob damage seems to be unchanged, at least Halazzi still did ~9K split saber lashes.

Edit: I don't know why they nerfed the mobs so much. Most probably they are afraid of some classes/specs having trouble sustaining adequate DPS/HPS before LK talents and gear are available. This might be just a "workaround" to avoid those problems completely.
I'm not amazed that bear mount will no longer drop from the 4th chest in ZA, with these nerfs it's a pushover to beat the timer. An ilvl141 ring has dropped from the 4th chest, looks like it has the same loot table now as the 3rd chest.
Tank aggro is awesome, I can't remember a single bear run where most DPS were not around 100% of tank threat on all bosses all the time. Now they were around 60% tank threat.

It seems like they want to encourage struggling raiding guilds to experience the TBC raiding content before it is entirely obsolete. Guild alt run of Sunwell, anyone?

Wonder if they changed anything about Kil'Jaeden. Still need to kill him and hope to do it in an unnerfed state.

MMO-Champion BlueTracker - End of Arena Season 4 Coming Soon

We’re currently planning to end the fourth Arena season on October 14, 2008, and as always -- this date could easily change. This Arena Season is only ending in respect to the ladder, meaning we'll be taking a snapshot of the season's ladder and then go through our normal process to determine who is eligible for the end-of-season rewards.

... is it just me or the Date of 3.0.2 is accidentally exposed to be 14 October?

Accidental? Probably not.

Did some Eagle Eye jumping in Sunwell just after the patch.

Wow. Well, I'm glad that the group I raid with got Brutallus down last week. We'll have a LOT more time to work on Felmyst soon.

Also a fairly logical change -- lets face it, if you don't get whatever boss kill you were looking for before 3.0 hit, then you'd feel like you hadn't achieved your goal anwyays with all the new talents and such going in. It's as good a time as any to knock HP down across the board and let a broader spectrum enjoy the zone in the last few weeks before WotLK.

One likely reason for the health nerf, assuming it goes live, is to balance out the change in mana regen. With lower mob health across the board, fights will be faster. If they didn't do this, there are likely some fights that would become dramatically more difficult simply because both healers and nukers would be running out of mana before the fight was done. With the impending restriction on potion use, and change to how quickly mana can be filled up from Shadow Priests (and other classes, now) it seems likely that they wanted to make sure fights were shorter on average.

I agree with this, it is a quick and dirty fix so they do not have to retune all the fights for 3.0 mechanics. We will have four weeks of 3.0 before wrath goes live, and some people will want to raid in that timeframe.

Figure that DPS will probably go up across the board, as will threat generation. Healing numbers are staying even or going down, down-ranking goes away and in many cases baseline healing costs actually increased.

Mitigation is a little wierd. Baseline and lower gear mitigation gets better from the new talents, pretty much across the board. However, high end mitigation is either staying pretty much equal or dropping (assuming they nerf bears a little more like they said they are going to), even after you remove sunwell radiance from the equation. This is due to the diminishing returns on avoidance stats, leading to 10-20% decreases in overall avoidance for the tanks. Warriors/paladins make much of this up with the new shield block mechanics, and bears have protector of the pack. Best case it ends up a wash, but more likely they will take more damage - albeit less spikey and easier to heal damage.

Raiding in 3.0 will be interesting before wrath, just to see how the mechanics of the classes play out now.

That would be excellent if true.

I doubt they would do that, Would be funny to have it as an extra drop from the 4HM though.

It's just me or they removed 1 glyph, unlocked only at 80 now? I'm pretty sure before last build al 3 major were available.

Well, when it rains, it pours.

ImageShack - Hosting :: wowscrnshot100108190233sf2.jpg

If patch is released the 14th, basically feature freeze for the patch will be next week?

Heh, it's a shame you hit the jackpot in the beta. I guess it's theoretically possible to win the 100 million dollar lottery twice though. :P

Does anyone know if Badges are made BoE in this patch by the way? I seem to remember reading something about it a while back, but can't find it now.