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Perhaps the biggest news in the past week — aside from ‘Cataclysm’, that is — hasn’t been Patch 3.2 itself but a service Blizzard has apparently been working on for some time. Paid faction changes. We received quite a number of tips about it and even saw our story make a cameo on Attack of the Show. Players have been asking for something like this for a while, and there have been incidents of entire guilds rerolling from scratch to defect.

Of course, with the shocking news comes a lot of questions, so Nethaera hops on over to the forums and answered a few concerns that players had. The biggest bummer for me was that I couldn’t change race within my own faction! So… let me get this straight… I can change faction and become a totally different race but I can’t swap my Blood Elf Death Knight into an Orc? Blasphemy! Unfortunately Blizzard doesn’t think choice of race isn’t something you can regret unlike faction choice. Anyway, more answers after the jump…

Q. Will we be able to switch between the races on our own faction?
A.. No. Players will only be able to switch to a race of the opposite faction.

Q. Will I be able to choose the race on the opposite faction that I want to change to?
A.. Yes, but you will only be able to switch to a race that has your class type available to it. So if you play a human paladin, you’d only be able to change to a blood elf paladin.

Q.How much will it cost?
A.. We do not have further information on this at this point in time.

Q.Will I be able to switch back to my original faction but a different race?
A.. No. You will only be able to switch back to your originally chosen race.

Q.. How will the switch between reputation, gear, mounts, etc be handled?
A.. We’ll have more details for you at a later point in time, though we plan to keep these as close to a reflection of the other faction as much as possible.

Q.How often can you change your faction?
A.. We do not have any information to share on this at this point in time, however we will have restrictions on the frequency by which players can change their faction.

Q. How will this affect the balance of Horde and Alliance on the realms?
A.. We are taking great care in how we implement this new service in order to maintain balance between the factions on the realms but do not have any further details to share.

Odd how they won’t allow race changes as part of paid character customization when faction change obviously creates a bigger impact on the playing environment. Then again, Blizzard may just be wary of players jumping to another race to min-max, such as all PvP players hopping on to Humans for that extra trinket slot. Oh well. Stay tuned!

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Hey there WoW.com readers! You’re probably wondering who the hell this guy is. And by this guy, I mean me. I’m a writer over at Joystiq, where we sometimes jealously watch all the fun stuff our sword and spell-wielding counterparts over here get to do. Luckily, and only by means of geographical location and the fact that they were showing off Starcraft 2, I got a chance to tour the Blzzard campus and take a lot of snaps if you know that I mean. Wink wink, nudge nudge.

These will be featured in a story over on Joystiq at some point today, but in the meantime here’s a sneak preview just for WoW.com readers. You may already know about Blizzard’s massive courtyard Orc statue that’s in the process of being installed in the front of the main building, but you might not know about the tenets engraved on each of the eight compass points that tout Blizzard’s mottos. There’s a peek at all of ‘em in the gallery below, and they’re also listed just beyond the break.

Read on for more, check out the statue and points gallery below, and stay tuned today for the drool-worth tour photos.

Each one of the Blizzard employees got to take home a scaled-down version of this sucker, with some even appearing on eBay, but none of them feature the massive compass that’s being installed around the statue. Although the statue was supposedly ready back in February, Blizzard had contractors on-hand last week tearing up the concrete and putting new lights in … or maybe that Orc just secretly comes to life at night and tears everything up. Who knows.

Anyhow, they were working on things while we were there, and upon closer inspection we noticed the compass points were surrounded by runes. The eight different points say (in English, who knows what those runes mean):

• Think Globally
• Lead Responsibly
• Play Nice, Play Fair
• Every Voice Matters
• Gameplay First
• Commit To Quality
• Learn & Grow

and my personal favorite …

• Embrace Your Inner Geek

Although “Think Globally” reminds me a bit of Pinky and the Brain trying to take over the world, this is some pretty cool stuff. Now I’m starting to wonder what I’d be qualified to do at Blizzard … maybe they need someone to photo-document all of their campus-improvement projects obsessively.

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Bornakk hinted about this awhile back and we knew what the reward pets were going to be but when this years Children’s Week came and went with no new content, a lot of players were a tad disappointed. Well now that the PTR is up in order to test patch 3.2, testers can find the Northrend incarnation of Children’s Week in full swing and that means lots of shiny new quests.

The new quests see you taking around a Wolvar orphan named Kekek or little Roo of the Oracles to meet certain famous people or visit various landmarks in Northend like Wrymrest Temple, Vordrassil, Dalaran and the Bronze Dragonshrine.

You then have to take them to a toy shop in Dalaran and buy them each a gift. If you’ve ever done the classic or Outland Children’s Week quests then you’ll know the drill and it still looks like a lot of fun. Check out our gallery below to find out more about what the quests involve.

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The unofficial rainbow realm of Proudmoore held a Pride celebration on Saturday, and according to Riege of <The Tainted Ones>, the event went off without a hitch. “The after party at Booty Bay was the perfect end to a day of just enjoying the game,” Riege wrote. “Alliance and Horde, gay and straight, ogre or human or gnome…it didn’t matter. We were just a bunch of people who were having fun. How often does that happen?” But Riege, where are the feral druids? Everyone knows you can’t have a good pride parade without bears. *rimshot*

Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@gmail.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, gold seller ads, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran.

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Great news for collectors of pets and mounts in the Patch 3.2 notes! Not only will the long-desired Ravasaur mount finally be available — for Horde players only, mind you — but dinosaur fanatics will be pleased to discover that they can find Raptor Hatchlings from rare and elite raptors throughout the world. For those unwilling to farm, you can also buy Obsidian Raptor Hatchlings from Breanni in Dalaran!

But that’s not all. Besides those two, Blizzard says that there are six other new unannounced non-combat pets available, not including Argent Tournament rewards.

But even that’s not all! Northrend Children’s Week will start with the new patch, which means that we’re likely to see the Gorloc and Wolvar orphans we’ve known about since Wrath launched.

All that’s on top of the new paladin mounts from the Argent Tournament, the Sunreaver and Silver Covenant mounts, and the new as-yet-unnamed Argent Tournament pet. Nice patch for you pet and mount collectors, eh?

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TweetMyGaming is a site started up by our friends over at gamerDNA (they routinely contribute to our sister site Massively, including sharing some great information on WoW’s demographics), and while the site is designed to track all mentions of video games on Twitter, one game has more or less dominated the discussion since the site debuted about a month ago. Well, actually, it was The Sims 3 — apparently as big as World of Warcraft is, it still can’t stop EA’s Sims series for sheer popularity (or top the series in sales). But still, WoW is sitting at a respectable number two in tweets, and watching the feed go by over on the game’s page lets you in on all the different slices of the game’s community, from the hardcore raiders to the folks just trying to grab some time to play.

Of course, all of the values on the site are constantly changing, and we’re sure they’re still tweaking the formula of how games move up and down the list — The Sims 3 is coming hot off of its release a few weeks ago, and while WoW has a vibrant twitter community for sure, the news about mounts and the new patch 3.2 information last week probably helped keep it up on the radar (just wait and see what happens over BlizzCon — I wouldn’t be surprised to see WoW-related topics trending over Twitter at large).

But WoW is definitely a game that people talk about no matter what’s in the news lately. Interesting, but not surprising, that it’s holding its own even among the trendiest games on Twitter.

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We haven’t done a dagger in a while, if my memory serves. Plus, this one is made of stars.

Name: Fang of Oblivion (Wowhead, Thottbot, WoWDB)
Type: Epic Unique One-hand Dagger
Damage/Speed: 271-407 / 1.80 (188.3 DPS)
Attributes:

• +47 Agility, +54 Stamina, and a Yellow Socket, which will probably let you add to crit, hit or haste, depending on what you need more of, with a +4 Agility socket bonus.
• +1869 Feral attack power, so you can do more damage in your new kitty form.

• Improves crit by 29, haste by 24, and attack power by 80. So yes, this is a damage dagger all the way. Rogues get the edge (get it? “Edge”?), but anyone who can wield daggers and likes stabbing with them will benefit. Hunters, you could use it, but there’s better stuff out there for you — even dual wielding with something else, there are polearms that will give more agility and more stats you want.

How to Get It: Drops from the Assembly of Iron in Ulduar on 25-man mode. Get your raid in there, down all of the bosses in the group, contending with their abilities along the way (downing one will make the other two stronger, and downing two will make the last one go nuts), and then win the roll/spend your DKP, and claim this baby as your own. My god… it’s full of stars!

Getting Rid of It: You would sell something made from gaseous balls of orbital fire? Oh, you would? Well in that case, a vendor will give you 23g 84s 13c for it (which seems cheap to us, but hey, you’re the one selling it). Or it’ll disenchant into multiple galaxies of space energy, all conveniently contained in an Abyss Crystal.

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When I saw slashdance vs. Ulduar for the first time, I wasn’t sure whether I should laugh or cry. This is slashdance’s version of a raid-patch trailer, something to help get its members riled up and ready to go raid. Of course, it’s obviously more of a parody about those kinds of similar movies. But this piece is much more tailored to the “rest of us.” You know, those of us who struggle a bit more with the content.

I can’t really discuss too much about the movie without spoiling the plot. But it’s slashdance, who’s very well known for the Redshift movies. The author’s eye for quality is definitely apparant here, and I like the wry sense of wit. I also have to admit, I’ve been the guy to say “You are not prepared!”

[Via WarcraftMovies.com]

If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.

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Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart answers your questions about the lore and history of the World of Warcraft. Ask your questions in the comments section below, and we’ll try to answer it in a future edition.

I didn’t intentionally choose today’s Scourge theme. Really. These things just happen. That Dragon-specific one I did all that time ago? I didn’t plan that, either. I’m just awesome enough that these things come together all by themselves. Yep. It’s my pure, radiant awesome.

What? What do you mean current game content dictates what wow goldtopics are hot or not? Pssh, that’s crazy talk. That can’t be it. It’s all me, y’all.

Briz9 asked…

“Who built Icecrown Citadel and the accompanying structures? Did Arthas build it after he became the Lich King, or was it already there?”

The massive Saronite structures that make up Icecrown as it is today is all fairly new, from what I understand. Most Scourge architecture is based on Nerubian architecture (as you can see in Ahn’kahet) but the Saronite structures in and around Icecrown seem more styled after the Lich King himself. You certainly didn’t see that stuff in Warcraft III either, but I suppose that’s not always a good indicator.

Inevitably someone will ask how the Scourge built all of that in the less-than-a-decade between WCIII and Wrath of the Lich King, so I’ll nip that one right away: Come on, it’s Warcraft. Have you seen the Scourge? You know, the endless hordes of the damned, some of which wield horrific amounts of magic and they construct mile-high monstrosities of twisted flesh, bone and metal? Yeah, sure, it would take us boring real life humans a lot longer to encase an entire region of the world in metal, but the Scourge? Those bone giants in Icecrown are half the height of the gates. They could erect one of those things in a few days provided they have the materials.

Malix asked…

“What happened to the Qiraji after we invaded their place and took out their boss? I just don’t see the Horde/Alliance completely erasing an entire species out of existence.”

You might be surprised. The Qiraji didn’t exactly have a vast empire anymore, they had nowhere to run, and our only experiences with them have been them and their God attempting to eradicate pretty much everyone. Every single living Qiraji was in Ahn’Qiraj. The way the Horde and Alliance tore up Silithus when the gates opened, they very well might have wiped out most of them, if not all of them.

That being said, I wouldn’t be shocked if we met some survivors down the road. Ahn’Qiraj is one of the current locales being used extensively in the World of Warcraft comic, but the Twilight’s Hammer has taken it over. They still can’t decide whether C’Thun is dead or not, so maybe the Qiraji aren’t dead either. Or maybe they are. Or maybe they’re not. Or maybe they are! Freaking comic.

LeafHoof asked…

“Are all Nerubians bad? Clearly there is some sort of faction because of the quest givers for Azjol-Nerub and Old Kingdom. But will Blizzard ever explore the Nerubians more?”

If my memory serves me right (and there’s a chance it doesn’t), they initially planned to do way more with Azjol-Nerub. At least their initial description of what it would be differed from what is there in Wrath. The Nerubians do still have a non-Scourged faction, but they’re few in number. According to the RPG book Lands of Mystery, the living Nerubians use a place called The Sundered Monolith as their holdout. It’s stated in that book that only 400 living Nerubians remained at the Monolith.

It’s questionable whether those Nerubians are civilized in the way we interpret that word or not. Sure, they’re not the Scourge, but that doesn’t mean they’re gumdrops and rainbows. They could be vicious and brutal in a very different way. We don’t know, because Azjol-Nerub’s representation in Wrath of the Lich King is sadly skimmed over. It was one of the things I looked forward to seeing most in Wrath, ever since I wrote Know Your Lore: Azjol-Nerub. It’s just not there, though. Who knows if we’ll ever see more.

The following question contains spoilers for Arthas: Rise of the Lich King. If you plan on reading that, you’re done. Column over. Move on with your life.

Wahsup asked…

“At the end of Rise of the Lich King, it’s heavily implied that Arthas’ mind is the ONLY mind that makes up the Lich King. This contradicts both the official Blizzard comment “Now Arthas and Ner’zhul’s spirit are one and together they are the Lich King.” and some in game text (the quest where The Lich King says something to the effect of “I used to be a shaman once.”). Which is in the right here? Is the Lich King JUST Arthas now, or still Arthas/Ner’zhul?”

The Lich King is not one or the other. The Lich King is both, and he is neither. The scene at the end of Arthas shouldn’t be interpreted literally. In the crowded mind that was the head of the Lich King, the Lich King entity (not Arthas!) killed off both Ner’zhul and Prince Arthas. It’s symbolic of the loss of individuality, and that’s what they’ve been trying to really drive home about the Lich King. The individual components, Ner’zhul and Arthas, don’t even exist anymore. They’ve become one, and in the process of becoming one, both of them were lost. So saying, “They’re both the Lich King” is pretty much the same as saying, “Neither of them are the Lich King.”

To try and give an example, imagine that you’re starting to bake a cake. You’ve laid out all of your ingredients. The eggs, the butter, the flour, the vanilla, all of that. You can point out each and every ingredient. You can point at an egg and tell everyone that it’s an egg and they can clearly see that. You can do the same with all of the other ingredients. Once you’ve mixed them and baked them into a cake, can you do that anymore? Can you take a piece of that cake and point out where in the cake the flour is? Could you still hold up a piece of cake to someone and point out the egg? No, you can’t. Sure, the things are there in the cake, but you can’t find it anymore. You can’t take take the cake apart and end up with a fully formed egg again, either. All of the ingredients have changed irreversibly. Those ingredients make up a whole, and in the process of making that whole you lost the ability to percieve each item individually.

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I don’t PvP, so I’m going off the reports of others here, but apparently Warlock and Hunter pets are often proving ineffective and short-lived in PvP. Until recently, this was often the case in PvE as well, but pets have much more avoidance now in a PvE environment.
It looks like an improvement will be coming in PvP as well: Ghostcrawler said last night that they “think it’s probably time to let pets scale, to some extent, with resilience and spell pen.” In fact, he says they have a new pet scaling system, and “assuming it works” (which seems like something they ought to be able to make work), they should be able to make the pet scale off of “all relevant stats” of the master.

Players have been asking for more pet scaling for a long time, especially resilience. Obviously how big of a change it will be depends on what “to some extent” ends up meaning, but it can only help pet classes.

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