So as BlizzCon fades further and further from view in the rear window, I’m getting more and more excited and impatient for news of Cataclysm, so much so that I’ve sort of forgotten to get excited about Patch 3.3. I want Worgen, and new conflicts, and new lore, and a redesigned old world that offers a massive leap forward in the story as things change forever and the Horde and Alliance finally shrug off all pretense of peace and rush headlong into a war that has really never truly ended.

But then I start thinking. The combo I really wanted to play, Worgen Paladin, looks like it won’t make it in. It seems like Worgen may not get their own capital city (instead, said city will become a battleground under siege by the Forsaken), which may put a damper on how much their awesome quasi-Victorian scenery and architecture actually features in game. While some zones are getting complete revamps, others are only getting minor tweaks, which makes me fear there may be some zones that still feel out of place and some old lore story lines that still remain unresolved or out of place.

Now, I don’t mean to be a complete downer here. I still love Blizzard and the dev team, but sometimes I don’t agree with them, and sometimes, some stuff just plain turns out to be a disappointment. Sort of like Vehicle combat, which is clunky and jarring and bug-filled and also ubiquitous (seriously, 7 jousts for dailies back before Patch 3.2, plus more jousting just to get through the latest dungeon?), or the Argent Tournament, which has brought the story of Wrath to a grinding halt while simultaneously making Tirion look like an incompetent hypocrite and Arthas look weak and ineffective.

Of course, at the same time, sometimes expectations are just too high. Which, I think, is the case of the Death Knight. Some people assumed that “hero” class would mean “overpowered,” and are now almost angry that the Death Knight has been bought back to earth. Of course, Blizzard never promised overpoweredness, nor that Hero classes would ultimately be more powerful than normal classes.

But hey, just to keep it all balanced, I’ll ask more than one question this morning. Of course the first is obvious: When has some feature or event in WoW not met your expectations? Do you think your expectations were too high, or did the dev team just fall short? But also, when did Blizzard exceed your expectations?

Since I have some extra time while I wait for my Mage to finish his looting animation, I thought I’d post a quick primer on the Mage changes patch 3.2.2 has brought us. There are only three (well, three and a half, I guess), but all three are of significant import. I posted about them in an Arcane Brilliance column way back when this patch first hit the PTR, but a lot has changed since then. Let’s look at each change in turn.

Arcane

• Arcane Blast: The buff from using this ability now stacks up to 4 times instead of 3, and each application increases mana cost by 175% instead of 200%. In addition, the duration of the buff has been reduced to 6 seconds.

Though not nearly as drastic a change as it was at the start of the PTR, this is still very nice. That fourth stack means whatever spell you throw out to consume the buff will do a whopping 60% more damage, and the mana cost increase isn’t nearly the killer it used to be, even with four stacks. Plus, none of that matters anyway, since you won’t actually be using any mana on the spell you consume your Arcane Blast buff with, because that spell will be free. “Why,” you ask? Because that spell will be Arcane Missiles. “But Arcane Missiles costs a buttload of mana,” you say? You’re right. But you’re also so, so very wrong:

• Missile Barrage: The effect from triggering this talent now removes the mana cost of Arcane Missiles. In addition, the chance for Arcane Blast to trigger this talent is now 8/16/24/32/40%. All other listed spells continue to have a 4/8/12/16/20% chance to trigger it. This talent no longer has a chance to be triggered when spells miss.

See? Two things here:

1. The proc chance is much greater for this when you cast Arcane Blast than it will be with other spells. By the time you stack four Arcane Blasts, you’re almost guaranteed to get a Missile Barrage proc.
2. When you cast a gatling-gun Arcane Missiles with this, not only will it be super speedy and awesome-looking, it will also be free. As in, no mana cost. As in yay.

So what does this mean?

It means that I get to be the first to introduce you to your new Arcane spell rotation, and I really hope you like each other, as you’ll be spending a lot of time together:

Arcane Blast–>Arcane Blast–>Arcane Blast–>Arcane Blast–>MIssile-Barraged Arcane Missiles

Repeat as necessary.

If the gods hate you and Missile Barrage somehow refuses to proc through four consecutive 40% chances for it to do so, you’ll simply continue to spam Arcane Blast until it does. There you go. It’s not sexy, but it’s powerful, and mana efficient.

And to prevent wasting a Clearcasting proc on a spell that will already be free, we get this little change:

• Arcane Missiles: Casting this spell while both Missile Barrage and Clearcasting are active will cause only Missile Barrage to be consumed.

Now, there are many of you who are calling this boring, and you’re right. Spamming Arcane Blast isn’t any more engaging, really, than spamming anything else. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t beyond giddy about the fact that I can throw out mana-free machine-gun-missiles pretty much whenever I want to. The rotation will undoubtedly grow stale, to be certain, but until it does, I’m going to watch my DPS rise, and my mana consumption fall, and smile the whole time like the guy in the back of the bus who just cut one and is trying not to laugh while it works its way up the aisle. My only desire right now is for Blizzard to find a way to buff Arcane Barrage just enough to make it PvE viable again but without making it overpowered in PvP. I miss that spell. It was fun.

And the third change is perhaps my favorite of all:

Fire

• Combustion: This talent now also increases the critical strike damage bonus of Fire spells by 50% while it is active. In addition, Living Bomb periodic ticks will no longer interact with the count or the charges on the talent.

This means one thing and one thing only: Combustion–my single favorite talent from the pre-Burning Crusade era–is back, baby.

Not only will it do what it always did–give you a stacking crit chance buff with three charges–it’ll also be more reliable and be a clear DPS boost. It’ll be more reliable because you don’t have to worry anymore about it wasting charges on a Living Bomb tic crit. It’ll be a clear DPS boost because it will give those three crit charges a 50% damage bonus. Triggering Combustion used to mean “I am about to blow stuff up good.” More recently, it has meant “I am about to get a couple more crits, maybe, to go with all the other ones I get anyway.” Now, it’ll mean “I am about to make that Warlock’s corpse unrecognizable.”

This patch is a positive one for us, guys. All of those changes are helpful. Nothing got nerfed. What do you think, Mages?

There’s not much that says “festivities” like a pirate drinking ale. At least, that seems to be the general WoW.com opinion on the matter. There’s more than one or two of us who’ll be knocking back a pint and donning our very best Arrrrrrrr! for the weekend.

While last weekend was a time for many of your intrepid reporters to hit DDO Unlimited, we’re all returning home to check out Brewest and Pirate’s Day. Really, I think it’s the ale. It’s a little bit of the inner dwarf coming out in all of us.

Well, except for Adam. He’s going to be off having a real life and such. No Pirates for him!

• Adam Holisky: (@adamholisky) – The weekend began for me on Wednesday when we saw @thatkevinsmith in Minneapolis, and for the actual weekend we’re going to the Minnesota Renaissance Festival and catching one of the last Twins games in the Metrodome. As you can tell, this is a WoW free weekend. Why? Because I value my significant other and saying anything like “damn Resto Druids” or “OMGWTF? l2tank” would pretty much ensure that I’d be going to these events by myself next year.
• Alex Ziebart: (@aziebart) – I’ll be doing Pirates and drinking as much as possible. With my small legion of gnomes, it will be difficult to not spend all weekend turning into tiny little swashbucklers.

• Allison Robert: Heroics and cursing the day that that miserable achievement School of Hard Knocks was added to the game, because it’s the only thing standing between me and a violet proto-drake after Brewfest goes live. Do I sound bitter? I might sound bitter.
• C. Christian Moore: Tonight I’m taking the wife out on a nice date. She’s been sick the past few days, hopefully she’ll be over it today. I’ll probably be writing a lot this weekend too.

  In-game, I’m going to hit up Gnomestock on Saturday and continue leveling my mage. I’m also going to celebrate Pirates’ Day with It came from the Blog.

• Daniel Whitcomb: (@danielwhitcomb) – I’m gonna get my Pirate Day and my Brewfest on, for sure. My Death Knight needs to wait for Hallow’s End to get his Protodrake though, alas, but he’s still on track for it! Of course, part of me isn’t sure I want to give up my awesome Blue Protodrake either.
• Dominic Hobbs: (@DMZduffry) -Brewfest! What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been! Violet Proto-Drake! ToC 25 man heroic.
• Eddie Carrington: (@Brigwyn) – Hi-ho! Hi-ho! It’s a leveling I go! I’ll be leveling up with my new guild.
• Gregg Reece: Brewfest, Fighting at Tavern Brawl (an SCA event), and then tanking an
  Ulduar run.
• Matt Low (@mattycus) – For me, it won’t be WRUP. In fact, it will be WRUR! I picked up a copy of Dan Brown’s latest book the Lost Symbol. I’ll be heavily engaged with that over the weekend. Maybe I’ll even write a small review of it. I can’t wait to get started!
• Matthew Rossi (@matthewwrossi) – AV on the shaman in between bouts of sick
• Michael Gray (@writegray) – A pair of Guildmates of mine are getting married over the weekend, so I’ll be stealthing around that event. Also, Death Knight.
• Robin Torres: (@cosmiclaurel) – Pirates and brew. Duh! I’ll be at the It came from the Blog Pirates Day event, will you?
• Zach Yonzon: (@battlemasters) – Finally home from an extended trip that began with BlizzCon. I think that means I’ll actually get to play some WoW this weekend, as well as actually get to freaking write! Also drawing some pretty cool things…

Well, that’s it. What about you? You got your pirate’s hat ready?

Our podcast is back on the air yet again this afternoon — Turpster will join Amanda Dean, Adam Holisky and I to talk about the biggest posts of the past week, including (but not limited to) why even Priests dislike being Priests, the new race/class combos and how they’ll be explained, why Blizzard is so secretive (and why they probably shouldn’t be), and what kinds of things we learned from that faction transfer survey. And of course we’ll answer your emails — you can send those along to theshow@wow.com anytime.

It all starts up tomorrow at Sunday, Sep 13 at 3:30 AM in your time zone GMT+8 right over on our Ustream page (or you can tune in on the embedded feed right after the break), so do be sure to join us if you’re available. And of course, as usual, we’ll probably have a little music during the preshow, and a little fun during the aftershow (where we turn off the recording and just chat with the kind folks in the chat channel about whatever comes up. See you there!

We’re receiving reports that servers on the Whirlwind and Emberstorm battlegroups, located in the Seattle datacenter, are currently experiencing downtime. These were the same battlegroups that were scheduled to recieve their local power supply upgrade today, so there may have been some unanticipated issue in the process.

Don’t panic! It’s likely only temporary and they should be back up soon.

We’ll update you guys with more info when we get it. The full list of affected realms is under the cut — feel free to hit us up on Twitter @wowinsider if yours comes back up and we haven’t reported on it yet.

UPDATE 4:18 AM EDT:

Blizzard has posted a thread regarding the issues on the Battlegroup forums.
Anub’arak
Blackwater Raiders
Bladefist
Borean Tundra
Cairne
Cenarion Circle
Cenarius
Darrowmere
Drak’Tharon
Drenden
Echo Isles
Farstriders
Fenris
Garrosh
Hydraxis
Hyjal
Korialstrasz
Lightbringer
Maiev
Misha
Mok’Nathal
Moon Guard
Nazgrel
Nesingwary
Nordrassil
Quel’dorei
Ravenholdt
Rivendare
Shandris
Shu’halo
Sisters of Elune
The Forgotten Coast
Tortheldrin
Uther
Vashj
Winterhoof
Wyrmrest Accord