Aside from the usual laughs and story developments, this week’s hot topic seems to be the new virtual pets for real money feature from the Blizzard store .

Filed under: Patches , Analysis / Opinion Tonight we’re pleased to bring you a live stream of the Iron Council as presented by the Area 52 guild Symbolic Logic . You can just click “play” on the widget above to play the stream, or head over to their UStream page to watch it and participate in the chat

Filed under: Warrior , Patches , Analysis / Opinion , PvP Matthew’s caught up in the tangle of this thing called RL, so don’t be surprised to have a different voice going over the Warrior changes this build.

Filed under: Druid , Patches As far as druids are concerned, Build 9658 is a Balance build. Sure, there are a few token changes for the other two trees, but Boomkins get by far most of the attention here.

Filed under: Patches , Death Knight Evidently, this is the build where they noticed that Death Knights could tank competently, and decided to do something about that. Where by “something” I refer to the six seven separate tanking nerfs that have ensued. Oh yeah, and they cut Fallen Crusader in half

Filed under: Cooking , Patches , Analysis / Opinion , Wrath of the Lich King It’s being reported that high end Cooking has received a bit of an overhaul in the latest Patch 3.1 PTR build. Well over 20 recipes have been changed so they won’t go grey quite so early, making the trip to 450 Cooking a much easier process

Filed under: Paladin , Patches , Analysis / Opinion So the new PTR build dropped, and it doesn’t look very pretty for Holy Paladins. Before we get into the grim side of things, it looks like Aura Mastery has been made baseline. Does this mean a new talent will be popping up in the Holy tree

Filed under: Warlock , Patches , Analysis / Opinion A new build went up on the PTRs today, and there’s a little bit of good news for Warlocks . Some lingering questions are answered and some fears are put to rest.

Filed under: Priest , Patches , Analysis / Opinion , Wrath of the Lich King As I’m sure many of you have heard already, another build has hit the PTR this afternoon. Information on what’s contained within is still slowly filtering in, but many of the class changes are already known thanks to Boubouille . Most of the Priest changes are just number tweaks, but there’s some good stuff in there for potential Holy Priest PvP viability.

Filed under: Druid , Analysis / Opinion , Death Knight , The Queue Welcome back to The Queue , WoW Insider’s daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Filed under: Paladin , Forums After admitting that Retribution DPS isn’t quite where they want it to be in the current build of Patch 3.1 , Ghostcrawler illuminates us a little bit about the direction they wish to take with the spec.

Filed under: Patches , Raiding Streaming live video by Ustream Symbolic Logic of Area 52 is streaming their live Hodir raid tonight via the Patch 3.1 PTR. You can check them out above and at their UStream page

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion , Events , Odds and ends , Blizzard , Wrath of the Lich King , Achievements Elizabeth’s wishes have been answered — in-game Easter holiday Noblegarden has been extended to a full week according to the calendar on the PTR.

Filed under: Patches , Mounts You may have noticed an interesting little change in the 3.1 patch notes : ground mounts are now able to swim! This made us curious: how does a Mechanostrider swim? How does a Kodo swim?

Filed under: Patches , News items The official patch notes have been updated for the Patch 3.1 PTR. You can see a complete list of changes after the break, or take a look at the fully updated notes .

Filed under: Patches , Analysis / Opinion , Wrath of the Lich King , Inscription One of the things Patch 3.1 is supplying in spades is glyphs and glyph changes. Every class is getting a ton of them, and it’s really hard to keep up with them there are so many. Priests are coming out alright so far through the whole process, with a lot of our current glyphs being improved and our new glyphs being legitimately useful, if situational

Filed under: Patches , Analysis / Opinion , Events , Wrath of the Lich King , The Queue Welcome back to The Queue , WoW Insider’s daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today

Filed under: Patches , Analysis / Opinion , Instances , Raiding , Classes , Wrath of the Lich King , Forums You have heard Blizzard’s motto for raiding in Wrath of the Lich King , ” bring the player not the class .” The intent is to steer away from strict raid composition and shake things up. Encounters are being designed so that no one single class is necessary, although the 25-man Razuvious fight currently requires at least one priest, preferably two or three, with at least one specced shadow

Filed under: Blizzard , News items , Forums Alright, so they killed ghetto hearthing . Blizzard never intended the instance boot system to be used as means to travel back to one’s home city while Hearthstones were on cooldown, so they’re setting things right in Patch 3.1 by making it port players to the nearest graveyard, instead.

Filed under: Patches , News items , Raiding , Galleries It’s been just two hours since we first heard Blizzard would be opening Ulduar for testing , and after a rocky start (filled with crashes of all shapes and sizes) we’re in game and collecting screenshots. If you can’t get into Ulduar yourself, why not take a moment to peruse our gallery ? Gallery: WoW 3.1 PTR: Ulduar Patch 3.1 brings us Ulduar , dual specs , significant changes to all the classes, and more! We’ve got you covered from top to bottom with our Guide to Patch 3.1 .