It’s time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that loves nothing more than to gaze down upon the whole of Northrend from one of the floating chunks of stone around Dalaran and realize that at some point, a mage has probably killed every living thing down there. At least the targetable ones, anyway. And the ones you can’t target? I’m sure more than one mage has certainly tried.

So I’m officially nominating patch 3.3 for “best patch ever” status. Here’s a short list of the highlights of this patch:

• Three highly challenging, fun, lore-filled 5-man instances, full of sweet loot
• A massive new raid, with four gated sections, 12 bosses, and the promise of eventually being able to shove a Fireball up the Lich King’s tailpipe
• The incredible, game-changing Dungeon Finder Tool, which is responsible for peace in the Middle East, has brought an end to the recession, and has cured cancer
• A few choice mage buffs, including a PvE viable Frost spec
• Quest Tracking without the need for an addon
• Quel’delar and Shadowmourne
• A swiftly approaching new Arena Season
• Weekly raid quests
• The Kalu’ak Fishing Derby
• Perky the Pug
• A host of little changes for low level characters
• Rocket bare

Not shabby, right? And best of all, Blizzard has managed to deploy the majority of this new content without also deploying a host of bugs, glitches, and instability, or otherwise making the game unplayable for awhile as we’ve come to expect from patches this large. There were some log-in issues and bugginess on day one, but by day two, everything was running relatively smoothly by day two. I’m being relatively conservative when I say that Blizzard, in my personal opinion, has hit this one out of the park.

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Kebina Trudough here, offering you the best gold making secrets they don’t want you to know about! I was like you once, poor and homely, before I discovered my patented system. Now you too can fill your pockets with the good stuff without ever breaking a sweat! Why spend all your time toiling when you could be vacationing in the Hot Springs? I’m not offering these tips for 100 gold, or 90 gold, or even 50 gold! No, not even 20 gold! My system is yours for FREE! Satisfaction guaranteed or I’ll give you a full refund (handling charges may apply). After all, Time Is Money.

The new Dungeon Finder that was added in Patch 3.3 has been garnering a lot of attention lately – and for good reason! But did you know that you could use it to make money?

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Following up on their neat entry for Ulduar, Blizzard has released their newest Bosstiary, this time for The Frozen Halls, the collection of new Icecrown 5-man dungeons coming with Patch 3.3. The site serves as an encyclopedia of information on the many and varied bosses of the Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection.

The Bosstiaries often have information that the dungeons never really give you; for example, who knew that Auriaya was the Titans’ librarian? Nobody, that’s who. We just wondered why the heck she was wandering around Ulduar with a bunch of cats and a bad attitude. But now you can go into the Frozen Halls and know exactly who you’re fighting and why, replete with marks on the map indicating the position of the bosses and the instance entrance.

The Forge of Souls sees us freeing the souls of innocents from Arthas’ Soul Grinder machines, run by Bronjahm, Godfather of Souls. Guarding the machines and preventing souls from escaping is the Devourer of Souls.

The Pit of Saron is Arthas’ saronite mining operation; Krick, a leper gnome, oversees the operation from atop his abomination, Ick. Forgemaster Garfrost shapes the saronite into weapons of destruction under Arthas’ command, and Scourgelord Tyrannus lords over the pit with his fearsome Scourge powers.
The Halls of Reflection are Arthas’ private quarters, guarded by his lieutenants in life, Falric and Marwyn. Inside, Arthas himself keeps Frostmourne locked away from those who would try to use it against him.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com’s Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

It seems like every Wrath patch brings with it more items than the last by an order of magnitude. It was eight hundred of ‘em for 3.1, between the Argent Tournament and Ulduar, and now Ghostcrawler says that 1400 more PvE items will be packed in every box of Patch 3.3, including our big orange buddy up there.

Given the recent interview with Cory Stockton and our man GC, it seems like there’s a lot of attention going into itemization for all of the Icecrown gear, and thus it’s actually a little surprising that there’s so darn much of it. And there’s a ton of new kinds of procs, set bonuses, et cetera, building on the “Epic. Cool things. Proc’y stuff.” mentality that GC says Icecrown items are all based on.

Then again, with what’s going down with items in Cataclysm, fourteen hundred new items seem downright mundane in comparison. It must seem that way to Ghostcrawler, too, given that this whole comment off-handedly came out in a post where someone was loudly complaining about an itemization bug on a piece of Icecrown gear. That’s casual conversation for ol’ Greg. “Yeah, put the finishing touches on 1400 new items today. Figure later I’ll get the number of that waitress at Applebee’s. Tomorrow I personally reitemize all of the old-world quests for Cataclysm. I’ll get up around noon, probably leave work at 3:30 or so.”

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com’s Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

Ah, Kirin Tor rings. We’ve come to rely on these old standbys as gear that’ll always be there for us. Especially if “we” are elemental shamans. But what’s going on with them in Patch 3.3?

Surprising no one, Bornakk confirmed recently that there’s a new set of Kirin Tor rings on the way for those with lots of disposable income in Patch 3.3. With an item level of 251, they’re a significant upgrade to the 226 ring you upgraded back when Ulduar came out. You should expect the upgrade process to cost about as much as the last one — that is, 1000 gold pre-faction discount.

Good to see that they’re seeing this ring thing through to the end of the expansion. The initial investment is a bit steep, but hey, free Dalaran portal, and the upgrade price is pretty reasonable as you go.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com’s Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

Ancilorn over at the European forums has confirmed that the armored Frost Wrym mounts mined from early builds of the Patch 3.3 PTR will be rewards for achievements in the Icecrown Citadel raid. Much like past raid dungeons have awarded mounts for completing meta-achievements, such as the Ironbound Proto-Drake for Ulduar, the Frost Wyrms will be “up for grabs,” for dedicated raiders.

MMO-Champion previously unearthed this armored Frost Wyrm model along with spells named Frostbrood Vanquisher and Frostbrood Vanquisher Flight, which could give some insight into some Icecrown Citadel encounters. Despite the confirmation of new reward mounts (expected to grant 310% flying speed, as well), there is currently no word on the removal of the Ulduar reward mounts, which Blizzard has said to stay for “the foreseeable future”.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com’s Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

The latest build on the PTR has uncovered the stats of the World of Warcraft’s newest legendary weapon, the two-handed axe Shadowmourne. Apparently bandied around by random GMs on the PTR, players were able to see the highly impressive stats of this weapon, which requires an epic quest to complete. MMO-Champion also has it in its database, the entry of which can be viewed here.

Notable among its features, aside from the ridiculous +223 Strength and 344.1 DPS, are three red sockets and an interesting proc. The sockets can combine for a total of 68 Strength when socketed with Bold Cardinal Rubies and obtaining the +8 Strength bonus. If we understand it correctly, the proc also stacks Strength for a total of 360 before firing off a damaging effect, presumably resetting the Strength bonus to 0. Needless to say, even without the proc, this Item Level 284 weapon is the best two-handed melee weapon in the game and should serve players well into the next expansion.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com’s Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

Wowhead has been a go-to site to track what’s going on on the PTR for quite some time, and now there’s even more reason to go there. Their improved new items in patch 3.3 page features the following improvements:

• Categorization by item level, with breakdowns for the five levels of items that are coming at us (219, 232, 251, 264, and 277).
• You can now filter the new items and search within them.
• Items are also sortable.

And this isn’t a new feature, but it bears mentioning, at least if you’re a major news geek like me: you can get an RSS feed of the new items added to the Wowhead database. If you wanted to you could probably hook this up to Twitter, or put it on your blog, or whatever.

Anyway, if you want to know what items are coming at us along with Icecrown Citadel, I think there’s no better place to be. What items are you most excited about?

The latest patch 3.3 build on the PTR has yielded tier 10 purchasing information. When players were purchasing tier 9, they had to to use badges to pick up the item level 232 iterations. But to get the next rank up, they needed badges and a token. When purchasing tier 8, all you needed was a class specific token which dropped from different bosses.

That will not be the case here. Tier 10 purchasing has been streamlined further, and I think this is the best solution as it contains elements of both tier 8 and tier 9 models.

Now when you want to buy tier 10, you have to use Emblems of Frost to purchase the item level 251 variants. This is the lowest version of tier 10 you can get. In order to get the next level which is item level 264, you’ll need to get a class specific token which presumably drops from Icecrown Citadel on 25. It could drop from Icecrown Citadel 10 after taking down Arthas or doing some heroic versions of bosses. We have no idea yet.

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According to Eyonix, the background downloader for patch 3.3 will begin its work soon. There were some reports that it was turned on yesterday for a short time, when it began to deliver a roughly 450mb pre-patch file. However this time, Blizzard is turning it on for good.

Eyonix points out that the background downloader should provide a faster download than normal. Go into the preferences of the downloader and check “Don’t throttle background download” to see the new speed in action. However, this option has often been known to interfere with WoW and other applications accessing the intertubes, so I recommend you only turn it on when you’re not going to be doing a lot of online activity.

This does point to patch 3.3 coming soon. Whether or not that soon is next week is too early to tell, but usually Blizzard runs the background downloader for a couple of weeks before rolling out a patch. But who knows — we haven’t heard anything yet on (or off) the record.

Update: Many readers are reporting that the downloader is now active.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to Arthas. WoW.com’s Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.