If you're a long term gold strategist such as myself, you'll start stocking up on "Hallowed Wands" now for next years Hallow's End event.

On the opening day, transformations sell for over 25G a piece so you can quickly make a lot of gold on the first day before anyone else collects Wands from the Innkeeper Trick-or-Treat bags.

The next day, prices will drop to 15G, then 10G, then 5G, etc. So you'll want to advertise Achievement transformations as much as possible on the first day of Hallow's End next year.

The cooldown on "Trick-or-Treat" is 1 hour whether you're logged in or not - so just rotate through all of your realm characters and try to collect as many Treat Bags/Wands as possible and just store them in your bank. All of the other Hallow's End items pretty much expire and disappear.

With Christmas coming up, you'll also want to fill up a couple (personal) Guild Bank Tabs with the Gingerbread Cookie and Egg Nog recipes. Wait a few months after Christmas, and you can re-sell those recipes for 25G a piece or more (and there's almost no competition in Jun/Jul/Aug).

During the Blizzcon 2010, Rob Pardo finally confirmed what I had already revealed 3 months ago. =]

They have a small team working on the project (up to a total of 50 people now - most of which is artwork related), and they're not likely to even announce the game details until 2012 at the EARLIEST. He also mentioned that the team has been pretty much working on prototypes. It's funny because most websites and "professional" analysts had predicted that their Next-Gen MMO would be released in 2012 or 2013 at the latest, but I figured a 2014-2015 release date was more likely due to the little progress actually made and what my internal sources were telling me.

Also, Blizzard is doing some more charity work like what I've been eagerly anticipating in past posts. Blizzard announced during the Opening Ceremonies that a new [Moonkin Hatchling] would be added to the Pet Store in the near future, and whose sales would be donated to charity. They also plan on auctioning off used server equipment and donating those proceeds to charity as well. Past trends have shown that these types of activities occur when sales are low or they need to substantially increase revenues to impress their investors - so this initiative will probably happen during the Cata release quarter (if they're worried about sales) or during a slow month.

.. utterly predictable and very disappointing.

It's the announcement of (only) one new Diablo 3 class. That's it.

So yeah, the new class is called a Demon Hunter yay. This class doesn't dual-wield swords, they dual-wield long range weapons!! OMG! That's totally new, innovative, and interesting.

On a side note: don't get this class confused with World of Warcraft's Demon Hunter class. Apparently, it's not going to be a Hero Class any more like what Blizzard was originally planning years ago but I guess they found a new use for the name.



Even the video was very disappointing.. what happened to their graphics quality and polish?

Game Director Jay Wilson promised that the Diablo 3 announcement would be the biggest one they've ever had. Jay WTF??

No real surprises here though. Back in August though, I was fully prepared for this sort of announcement and the resulting disappointment: "I really hope it's not just the introduction of 1 new class.. but it probably will be." I was hoping there would be at least 2 new classes "revealed" based on Jay Wilson's hype.

So ummm... yeah.

This new development also answers the question as to why Blizzard changed the Sylvanas Windrunner model. They needed her for Diablo 3.