A new scent is in the air in Azeroth.  Is it love, or is it the diabolical designs of a rogue Royal Apothecary member trying to weaken the resolve and purpose of all the nations of Azeroth to pave the way for an upcoming invasion?  Only brave adventurers can find out.  Spend the holiday exchanging love tokens and friendship bracelets with players and NPC's.  Shoot players with special arrows to watch Kwee Q. Peddlefeet fly around them!  Then, participate in the great Valentine's Day city leader popularity contest (vote for Sylvanis now!).  And while you're at it, an investigation into the strange perfumes and colognes that people just can't seem to get enough of might be in order.

Another maintenance patch was released today that fixed these urgent problems:

General
- A new Guild Recruitment channel has been added. This channel will be
on by default.
- Fixed a bug that could cause players to appear to be porting around
in a small area.

Paladin
- Divine Shield removed from the game

Mac
- Addresses a timing accuracy issue on Intel-Mac systems that affected
the perceived speed and/or progress of transports and other moving
objects in the world; PowerPC-Mac systems were not affected.

Just kidding about the Divine Shield thing.  However, the release of each patch always brings up the question, "What changes weren't included in the patch notes?"  Ladies and gentlemen, start your testing!

The World of Warcraft 1.9.3 maintenance patch is released, which for a maintenance patch hold quite a number of changes.  Several bugs were fixed involving player skills (no more bugged Shield Block -- sorry warriors!), items, and quests.  In addition, many changes were made to Zul'Gurub, including the elimination of some of the trash mobs and the alteration of several boss fights.  Yes, it's true.  One might actually have to directly damage Hakkar and even use two tanks during the fight.

Several recent posts have come out with preview information on the 1.10 patch.  One of the more tantalizing tidbits is the revelation that there will be new quests aimed at the more casual player that will allow players to upgrade their equipment to a new mixed rare and epic set.  In addition, Blizzard will be adding new bosses to some of the old dungeons and reitemizing those dungeons.  As Tigole writes:

We've been hard at work at Patch 1.10 and I'm excited to bring you a small sneak preview of some of the content. We'll be offering a series of quests for maximum level players so they can obtain a really good, class-specific armor set. This should prove to be a great way for non-raiding players to upgrade their gear. Here are some highlights:

• Characters follow a new quest line to obtain an armor set
• The armor sets contain 4 rare and 4 epic pieces
• Some of the pieces can be obtained by soloing (including one of the epic pieces)
• The most difficult pieces to obtain require a UBRS level group
• We are adding new bosses to existing dungeons
• Some of the existing dungeons are being re-itemized

In addition, 1up.com gives information from an exclusive interview with Blizzard's Jeff Kaplan.  The interview itself has little information in it, but the screenshots of the new weather effects and some of the new armor set pieces are pretty neat.  Check it out.

Ladies and gentlemen, start your downloads!  The long expected 1.9 patch as arrived complete with the additions of Ahn'Qiraj, paladin talent changes, linked auction houses, and much much more.  Read more about what fellow Lurkers think of the patch in nobbie's Lurker Lounge thread on the subject.

But as Zarathustra reminds us, it's time for Lurkers to "get to work" and find and report those always abundant undocumented changes.  Among those undocumented changes are that Hakkar will cast Corrupted Blood randomly on raid members, guards in Booty Bay will now net fleeing enemies, and that mage polymorph has received a huge stealth nerf in that the sheep are now roaming over a far larger area than they used to roam.

Purported scans of a yet-to-be-issued game magazine have caused quite a stir in the World of Warcraft community as they claim to reveal the new Alliance race that will be released in the expansion:  those loveable cuddly Draenei.  Fans who hoped that the new race would be the Worgen or even Pandarians are quite disappointed.  Some people are holding out hope that the scans are forgeries.  Join in the discussion in Nobbie's Lurker Lounge thread.

For a long time, the debate has raged about whether mind controling spellbinders in Blackrock Spire and using them to give significant buffs to your party's fire resistance was an exploit or not.  Today, Caydiem finally gives the definitive answer (and may have previously, but I missed it before).  It is not an exploit.

This is a creative use of game mechanics... not an exploit. It wouldn't be on the mind control options if we didn't intend for it to be there. Funny, isn't it, how these spellcasters are located right inside an instance that's very, very close to two raid dungeons where fire resistance plays a big role, hm? ;)

Who would have thought that we'd be wishing the Dark Lord a happy tenth birthday, but there you have it. With the Diablo game sporting a 1996 copyright, 2006 marks the ten year anniversary of its release! Although Blizzard hasn't announced plans as of yet to mark the event, some of the D1 faithful have gotten together to suggest what they'd like to see happen. Check this thread at the Griswold's Shop in the Lurker Lounge http://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=7041 or this thread at Jim's Forum: http://p205.ezboard.com/fthedsfcommunityfrm1.showMessage?topicID=383.topic  

Food for thought: what changes would YOU like to see implimented if a tenth anniversary edition of Diablo were to be released?

And hello, Diablo faithful -- this is Attika here, taking over from Lemming who is moving on to other things. A deep bow to our previous administrator for all his efforts these past three+ years at the Lurker Lounge Diablo site. Three years! We should be wishing him an anniversary! Thanks for all your past work, Lemming.

Now that we've given Diablo our kudos, time to give him the edge of our blades! For all those Dot@Level, Living off the Land, or just plain Ironman adventurers, check out Sabra and Attika's post on Unique items that can kill Diablo over half the time whilst in the hands of a clevel 22 warrior. The research for this took over 8 months to complete and required a small Mod be constructed (by Lemming; thanks once again) to do it in any truly reasonable amount of time. If you want to know what weapon your IM team's warrior should have when facing Diablo, checking out this weapons' test will give you some good ideas.  http://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=3117

Sabra writes in with an amazing series of tests using Fire-damage bows! She notes their ability to stop monster hit point regeneration, and also notes how you can accidentally cause the monsters to begin their regeneration anew! Plus information about how multiple players on (and off) the level affect monster hit point regeneration, tests determining that monster hit point regeneration is stopped even for monsters whose movement routine supposedly includes allowing them to regenerate hit points faster, the fact that fire-bows stop hit point regeneration in "fire-immune" monsters, and other interesting bits of information. For those of you thinking about buying that merciless bow of burning at Wirt's, take a gander at this post first.  http://p205.ezboard.com/fthedsfcommunityfrm1.showMessage?topicID=264.topic

Most every Diablo guide simple calls Phasing a "random Teleport" spell -- and yours truly found out that the truth is anything but! Again, for the LoL or Dot@Level player, if you need to use Phasing, you need to read this report.  http://www.lurkerlounge.com/forums/index.php?showtopic=6597  Be careful of the buggy nature noted in some dungeon layouts when trying to use this spell!

After all these years of game play Nystul discovers a previously un-remarked and certainly un-recorded bug in Diablo -- the rare case of the reappearing foe! Turns out that if a monster (or monsters) is destroyed by a trap (exploding barrels, arrow-trapped coffins, etc.) and you leave the level, when you return that monster "killed" by the trap will be revived by the game! Whoa! To get the story directly from the source, read here.  Amazing pick up on that bug, Nystul!