Modk of Juggernaut has obtained the world’s first Shadowmourne! It’s the final legendary weapon in the Wrath of the Lich King expansion (at least, that we know of) before Cataclysm is due out.

The devs have been speaking a little a bit about the new mastery system coming with Cataclysm , and while they’ve kept most of the specific numbers vague, there’s been a surprising amount of information one can read between the lines about death knights. Of course, it started with the frost death knight stats. The stats were solidly DPS oriented, providing damage, haste, and runic power generation.

Patch 3.3.3 – PTR Notes Update The PTR 3.3.3 Notes . Blood Queen Lana’thel is getting slightly changed and most of the glyph changes reported last week here are now official. Nothing else really interesting in the patch as far as I can see

Frankly, the Bladestorm nerf is a minor one, albeit an extremely annoying minor one.

Patch 3.3.3 – Jepetto’s new toys! Jepettoy Joybuzz in Dalaran will sell 3 more items in 3.3.3! Your favorite toymaker added the following to his inventory: Blue Clockwork Rocket Bot 50 (Companion Pet) Blue Crashin’ Trashin’ Racer Controller 40 Tiny Blue Ragdoll 10 Blue posts Quote from Blizzard staff Alterac Valley imbalance We have discussed this numerous times. Based on the data we’ve collected over the years after all of the changes that have been made to Alterac Valley, we simply do not agree that there are any glaring imbalances in the map favoring one side over the other enough to easily sway a match one way or the other.

Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly look at the world of the death knight. With Patch 3.3.3 on the PTR and looking closer and closer to going live , the buzz around death knights is just about where you’d expect it to be, squarely on the frost talent tree . This is especially true of frost DPS

The background downloader has gone active tonight with a 77.5 MB partial file for the Patch 3.3.3 patching process. Don’t expect the patch to go live tomorrow, of course (if nothing else, scheduled maintenance isn’t long enough), but it looks like we may be within a few weeks of some nice new patch goodness, including the rise of DK frost dual wielding , Frozen Orbs , and the abolishment of battleground marks

The background downloader has gone active tonight with a 77.5 MB partial file for the Patch 3.3.3 patching process. Don’t expect the patch to go live tomorrow, of course (if nothing else, scheduled maintenance isn’t long enough), but it looks like we may be within a few weeks of some nice new patch goodness, including the rise of DK frost dual wielding , Frozen Orbs , and the abolishment of battleground marks .

MMO Champion’s got the goods on an upcoming build of patch 3.3.3 . Mounts and pets But first, check out Lil’ XT! Doesn’t your Lil’ KT want a lil’ company?

Patch 3.3.3 – PTR Build 11643 A new build has been deployed on test realms. So far it doesn’t look like there are a lot of changes out there but stay tuned, test realms can be full of surprises! Pets / Mounts Lil’ XT finally got its own model, the name is VERY similar to Lil’ K.T. and it wouldn’t be surprising to see this pet appear on the Blizzard Store at some point.

I suppose I should start with the obvious: Death Knights. Death Knights… well, they didn’t actually do so great this expansion.

[Rirri]: OH GODS WHAT IF IT’S /THAT/ PLAGUE AGAIN [Rirri]: … I can’t give myself the plague, right? [Rirri2]: … right.

T oday represents the last in our tri-partite look at the Cataclysmic stat changes.? As promised, Death Knights are the topic of today’s discussion.? Again, I’d like to make sure to note that like everything else Blizzard does, this is subject to change.? With that in mind, we’ll be looking more at the general directions they want to go. For DPS Death Knights Being a bi-functional class (tanking and DPS), we have to look at the changes in two ways.? Let’s check out the DPS stats changes first.? Here’s the old stat priority for Frost DPS: Hit (until cap) > Str > Expertise (until cap) > Crit > Haste The only two stats that are going away that we had some moderate use for are Attack Power and Armor Penetration, but as you can see, those weren’t really in our top five.? In fact, they will each now convert into one of those or stamina, so it’s all good.? As long as you’re wearing plate, you should be well itemized.? The non-plate items will be tailored towards other classes, and we will probably see less overlap, making those items not as good for us.? As a plate, melee DPS, we should just be prepared to see more stamina and more strength.? Nothing big here

We’ve known for a while that we were getting some pretty sweeping stat and gear changes in Cataclysm . The other day, the blues over at Blizzard put together a nice little post that outlined all the big points of the revamp .

Update – Updated the PTR Build info. Patch 3.3.3 – PTR Build 11623 A new build has been deployed on test realms, a couple of things have changed! As usual, these changes are from client data comparison and shouldn’t be considered as final until they hit the official patch notes

Welcome to Lichborne , WoW.com’s weekly death knight column. Daniel Whitcomb sort of wanted to call this week’s column “Neener neener, I can stand in the fire and you can’t,” but the editors weren’t too enthused with it.

In a very short answer, the devs confirmed in the recent Twitter developer chat that the new race and class combinations will not go live until Cataclysm itself goes live. In a way, this isn’t too much a surprise

Update – Added official notes update at the bottom of the post. Some of these changes aren’t on PTR yet as far as I know and aren’t included in the spell comparison below .

Welcome to Lichborne , your weekly death knight discussion center. This week, your host is playing it cool in more ways than one, what with the test server shakeups to frost DPS. Before we start into this week’s column, I do want to assure any prospective frost DPSers that I fully plan to write a frost DPS 101 guide.

Patch 3.3.3 hit the PTR last night, and if you weren’t following WoW.com throughout the night, it’s very likely you’ve missed a lot of patch news that has scrolled off of our front page already. For your convenience, below is a roundup of all of our Patch 3.3.3 coverage from the last day or so