Blizzard's tentative imp dates for Patch 2.3 and S3 Arena

Just a quick heads-up for those interested. This is a quote pulled from the WoW General Discussion Forums regarding the planned impelementation dates for Patch 2.3 and Season 3 Arena:

Quote :

While testing continues and a delay could possibly change these dates, we are currently planning to start Season 3 on November 20 once the realms come back up from their weekly maintenance. This means that Season 2 will come to a close when the realms come down for maintenance on November 20. During that maintenance the final standings are taken and the end of season rewards are distributed.

The start date for Season 3 is purposefully planned to be one week later than the release of patch 2.3, which is currently scheduled for November 13. We will be closely monitoring the testing of the 2.3 patch, and if it looks like it won’t make the November 13 date, we will announce a delay.

The full thread can be found here.

My WoW has been patched up to 2.3 - just waiting on the servers now...

Should be up in a few hours or so. If you want to kill the time reading-up on all of the new changes (arena S3, Zul'Aman, new heroic rewards, quests, skills, spells, loot tables, etc., etc.), you can check out the mmo-champion website.

Looks like a bunch of new things to waste our time on! =)

P.S. - And why does Blizzard insist on making such fugly armor sets for mages? I may have to go with arena S2 gear instead just so I don't look like a complete idiot. Not that the Spellfire set looks much better... Vanity ftw!

It looks like they are now extending the maintenance by two hours (not that I'm surprised). A list of things I'll try to do today:

get main and alts the waypoints for Mudsprocket and northern Stranglethorn Vale
run main over to Ghostlands to get the waypoint for Zul'Aman
do my first daily cooking quest
try to fish a "Fish Tracking" manual out of Zangarmarsh (not sure if there will be any large crowds trying to find flotsam)
train the shield +resilience enchant for my main
grab remaining Heroic keys on my main

Also, Shamans are getting changes to the Enhancement tree, including:
Two-Handed Axes and Two-Handed Maces are now trainable by all Shaman
at the appropriate weapon masters. The Enhancement talent has been
replaced by Shamanistic Focus.
Shamanistic Focus (New Enhancement Talent): After landing a melee critical
strike, you enter a Focused state. The Focused state reduces the mana
cost of your next Shock spell by 60%.

However, I haven't been able to find any information on whether shamans will get a free respec (I have a lvl 39 shaman alt). Does anyone have any previous experience with how these situations are handled? Yes, I know it's not that much gold, but I'm just curious.

syssillith wrote:

However, I haven't been able to find any information on whether shamans will get a free respec (I have a lvl 39 shaman alt). Does anyone have any previous experience with how these situations are handled? Yes, I know it's not that much gold, but I'm just curious.

Just a followup on this: no free respec. My shammy got the talent point back from 2-handed weapons, and got the 2 skills from the weapon trainers (2-handed maces and 2-handed axes) for free.

Quote :

Everyone is preparing for the start of the third arena season and we’re excited to get new items, rewards, and fresh competition going for everyone participating in the arenas.

As we approach the previously announced start date we’ve had growing concerns of what the new season requires of us to actually launch, and its proximity to the Thanksgiving holiday. Everyone wants the launch go as smoothly as possible, and in order to have resources available to tend to any issues as soon as they may spring up, we’ve decided to delay the Season 3 start date to November 28. One week after the previously announced date.

This allows us to have the quickest response time to any issues should they occur. While making everyone wait another week obviously isn’t the optimal outcome, in the end we decided it would be much worse to start Season 3 so close to the holiday and potentially make players wait longer until a problem can be resolved. Ultimately it allows us to provide the best possible service for everyone as we launch the new season.

It looks like the start of season 3 has been pushed back by a week. Another week to farm honor!

I'm actually really glad to hear that! I needed two weeks for the item I was saving for. Yay for Thanksgiving lol.