Or when we were last to get any info about tier 3? :p

Lacerate and Spirit Bond (I don't care what you have to say, it had such limited utility) are examples of how awesome our last-minute talent implementation was pre-release. If the same thing happens in Burning Crusade, that Blood Elf Rogue is looking mighty tempting. Hell maybe a Blood Elf Mage... they both do more DPS in raids and look crazy good in PvP now.

One thing I'm curious about, however, is whether Backstab is really being boosted to 175% of weapon damage, or if that's just another one of the supposed "interim stats" like the 14% crit on Master Spellstone. Well, I really do hope that Master Spellstone is only 14% crit in alpha.

Assuming it's true, Master Spellstone is +14 crit rating, not +14% crit, based on the curse-gaming spell info (which appears to be in the range of 2% crit).

Also, old Spirit Bond wasn't as much a bad idea as much as that it was very badly balanced. Lacerate was pretty clearly just tossed in there at the last minute when they realized they didn't have a 31 point survival talent yet, though.

Spirit bond in PvP was way overpowered tho. It was somewhat like soul link, close to useless in raids, PvP and PvE, but very good in small scale content or duels/2vs2 PvP.

But yea I don't really get why Blizzard hates hunters so much, why are they always last to find out about stuff. I'm not 100% sure but didn't hunters get their T2 updated graphics late too or some story like that? Not like I was waiting for anything but a purple dragon armor, I knew they'd go for the FFXI Dragoon epic set style ^^

Well can't deny when they made the hunters revision, we jumped from worthless to pretty damn good. Itemization and scalability made the hunters what they are now, but back then I was dominating all damage meters in MC and BWL and I could count the number of people who could kill me 1vs1 on one hand. I only hope we can keep the trolls on hunter's boards for more than 4-5months after the expansion... :)

However seeing new ranks of aimed shot, I don't have much hope for PvE, keeping the 3secs cast mechanics on what will probably still be the best mana investment for pure damage means they'll have to make weapons slower than 3.3 or else they'll just be fancy stuff for people who don't like the current best weapon type. That and the possibilities of Burst DPS it offers in PvP will make it impossible to balance correctly. But considering I probably will quit raiding with the patch and concentrate on arenas, that's fine with me, just give me a silence cloud trap or a knockback shot and I'll be happy ^^

Right..."the same". As in, Warriors will get nerfed, but then given "buffs" in the form of new talents and skills to put them back to where they were prior to the expansion. In the meantime every other class around that can deal DPS gets a true upgrade.

QQ

I am glad there is a plan for a Crusader-type enchant for Hunters/Rogues, and if it stacks that would be pretty neat.

Also the 2% crit scope looks interesting.

It's also nice to see more varied weapon enchants becoming available for casters (Sunfire, Soulfrost and Spellsurge).

Hihi ZP. I did it too =]

Apparently BC alpha client found its way to mom-and-pop torrent sites along with barebones server emulator, so there will be loads of unofficial screenshots and videos available very soon. And of course data miners are going to have a field day with it.

they've pretty much already passed the thanksgiving date. remember for retail software boxes it takes 8-12 weeks to produce enough copies, so the gold masters would be getting ready for finals very soon. Sure they can delay gold masters a bit but then it'll mean everyone downloading huge patches after they install the CD, and nobody wants that.

Remember 1.11 was on test server over 2 months I believe. And that was a relatively minor change compared to TBC. Even in best conditions we're looking at 6-8 week closed beta, 3-5 week open beta (release code frozen at this point), and 10 weeks to get the kits made. Thats already 4-5 months. If they want to have any hope of making thanksgiving they will start the closed beta next week or week after and take a lot of shortcuts and release with a number of bugs.

The good thing for them is they can pretty much ignore all the 25 man level 70 raids on release, they'll have at least 2-3 weeks after release before people will step into those. Or longer, depending on how much of karazhan needs to be done to get into the 25 mans (if you need to run karazhan 10+ times to gear up, it may be months before 25 man raids are explored).

The reality is that given Blizzards horrendous QA system and absolute disastrous patch days (indicative of poor release management) and indications so far that important parts of TBC are still simply NOT DONE (empty instances, lack of 70 priest/hunter new skills/talents, etc) its likely the expansion is not going to be released this year. I for one hope to be proven wrong but just look at blizzard's history of patch-concept to path-release and you can get a good idea of how far off it is.

8-12 weeks from gold to retail would be extremely long time for a game, more in scale of product release like Windows. For comparison, Doom 3 went from gold to stores in about 2 weeks. Also, instances appear to be unpopulated because right now unofficial screenshots come from emulated server.

I used to work for a company called Dynamix which was a sister dev-house to Blizzard under the Sierra brand. OF all the criticisms that can be laid on Sierra (now vivendi/havas) their fabrication/distribution chain is not one of them. We regularly had products go gold on a Wednesday-Thursday and be on shelves within a week country wide. If they have anything that even remotely resembles a gold master by week 3 of November they can get it in stores by Thanksgiving.

This is just for America btw. I have absolutely no idea how the distribution chain worked in other parts of the world.

http://forums.elitistjerks.com/viewtopic.php?id=8143
Lets keep things neat.

Yeah, as much fun as hitting 200k views on a thread would be, this is just a chatroom at this point and you can't really get any information out of it.