Gadzooks! Almost a month with no posts, BAD Simon!!!

World of Warcraft Patch 3.3 is looming ever closer as it looks like it’s slowly winding down on the PTR which means we should be seeing it live in the next 2-3 weeks, but what does it bring for us normal folk?

As I’m sure most of you know the main content in Patch 3.3 is the Icecrown Citadel raid which culminates in taking on the Lich King himself. Along with the introduction of Tier-10 Armour Sets.

The IC raid comes in both 10 and 25-man varieties with a bunch of hard modes that should keep the majority of guilds busy for a few weeks at least. But what about the non-raid stuff?

For those that aren’t able (or don’t want) to do 10/25-man content there is a veritable resonance cascade of more accessible content in 3.3. For a start there will be 3 new 5-man dungeons, “The Forge of Souls”, “The Pit of Saron” and the “Halls of Reflection” with the Halls of Reflection ending in a confrontation with the Lich King.

There is also the arrival of the long-awaited Looking For Group (LFG) revamp, now called the Dungeon Finder, it will now let you create groups for dungeons with random folk from any server in your battle-group (just like battle-grounds) and add extra convenience by teleporting you all straight to the dungeon as well as giving rewards for using the system.

No longer will you have to spam trade chat looking for a tank or healer (or both) to try and do an instance, and the added incentive of extra badges is always welcome.

Also this patch is the world map/quest log overhaul bringing an almost QuestHelper-lite style experience to the game. This useful feature will show where on the map quest objectives can be completed, easing the need to switch out to Wowhead or similar just to look up a quest. For many folk it will also eliminate the need to use an addon like QuestHelper or Carbonite altogether (although those addons DO differ in how they present the information and in Carbonite’s case it does a lot more than help with quests).

As well as these interface tweaks there are a lot of little added goodies, like a new fishing event, the Kalu’ak Fishing Derby, weekly raid quests, reputation gain changes for Northrend reputations, a group disenchant option, nice new nameplate options and some nice new tweaks for new (or re-rolling) players including a new tutorial system, tweaked start items/skills (like level 1 rogues starting with stealth and dual-wield).

These changes are just the tip of the iceberg, it’s a huge patch with a LOT of small changes, the usual bug-fixes and skill tweaks notwithstanding.