5punk

If any of you played WoW before The Burning Crusade you will be vaguely aware of Blizzards system of firing out big downloads immediately prior to the release, and you may be aware of the way they name their patches (1.x.x pre burning crusade, 2.x.x post burning crusade)

As of last week I started downloading 3.0.1 - a whopping 992MB. Which, if past history proves correct, can only mean that Itchy Ring is about to hit our machines sometime in the next 3-4 weeks.
After a bit of digging I discovered that 3.0.1 was the patch version that unlocked the Itchy Ring beta version and that other large downloads will be killing our bandwidth pretty soon (16th Sept for the next one if rumours are true)

My personal prediction is a release date sometime around the start of October, and I plan on making a deaf knight called a. Marvin b. VanGogh or c. hellenkeller on Emerald Dream.

***EDIT***
WOW Insiders homepage now has ad space devoted to the release of itchy ring, apparently 13th November is the day.

See here

Are we to expect the graphics updates with these patches?

Dog Pants wrote:Are we to expect the graphics updates with these patches?

I think I should explain how blizzard distribute their downloads.
What they tend to do is send out the downloads a few weeks in advance of the actual date, this means that people have chance to DL the patches ready for the execution date. This also means that they can bundle patches together for one big update on whatever date they decide. The itchy patches will probably be bundled like this.
The graphics updates will probably be included in this big update, but as I said, won't be executed until Blizz are ready. The news article about the graphics updates said that they were going to introduce them gradually, so expect them to be filtered in afterwards when they are fixing all the things they broke.

look forward to being able to getting all your talent points refunded too as they are altering the talent trees - free respec!

Free spec - and aaargh confusion. I've only just got my head around tanking stats and they're changing it all. No more Block Value, no more crushing blows, and strength is becoming the primary mitigation and threat stat for warriors. I hope the quest greens in Itchy Ring are useful, cos all my hard earned T6 gear just went up the shitter.

Didn't we have to pay for TBC?

I've noticed on the pre-gaming loading window thing that the "Wrath of the Lich King" logo is displayed before the news is loaded over the top.

/edit
The new logo is there now.

http://www.wowwiki.com/Patch_mirrors

is always handy.