Filed under: BlizzCon

If you subscribed to the DirecTV feed for BlizzCon 2010, then you should run and check your email. We've had multiple confirmed sources report the redemption code to receive Deathy has been sent to viewers.

Once you redeem the code, the pet will appear in your characters' in-game mailboxes. Go check it out and show off your murloc pride with this half-dragon, half-adorable pet! With Cataclysm right around the corner, now's the time to let Deathy see the world as it is before it gets torn asunder by his inspiration: Deathwing. Don't worry about him acting strangely -- the little guy is already out of rehab.

The email will come from blizzcon@rayv.com, which is the DirecTV publisher for the event.

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BlizzCon 2010 is over! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. You'll find our liveblogs of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

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Yes, that's right. During the ATVI earnings report conference call today, Mike Morhaime, president of Blizzard Entertainment, announced that the Moonkin Hatchling will be available for purchase later this month, as he had already stated at BlizzCon. In addition, 50 percent of the proceeds from the sale will go to charity. The last time Blizzard did something similar, it raised $1.1 million for the Make-a-Wish Foundation. Can the hatchling possibly dethrone the Pandaren Monk as the most adorable charity money generator?

Gregg's speculation on whether or not we'd see more charity pets seems confirmed. Were you already planning on picking one up, and if not, does this news make it any more likely?

I'm actually writing the first paragraph last this time around. What follows is a discussion of J!nx clothing and a big thumbs-up to its ever-evolving lines of licensed Blizzard goods, as well as a bit of a manifesto on geeky nerd shirts, clothing and audience. From here on out, J!nx is Jinx, not out of disrespect for the brand, but because that many exclamation points within the article would probably give my editor a heart attack, and I'm usually liberal with the exclamation points.

Jinx has, over the past few years, become ubiquitous in the geek community as purveyors of fun clothing and merchandise, licensed and original. It was only a matter of time, really, until a company founded on geeky wear had to make strides into broader clothing lines. If there's one thing that Jinx showed at BlizzCon this year, it was that it is growing.

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BlizzCon 2010 is over! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. You'll find our liveblogs of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

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Deathy's identity crisis will be over before Cataclysm, according to Nethaera. His days of thinking he's Grunty the Murloc will be over once he goes through "rehabilitation" of some sort. Judging from the words Nethaera uses, Deathy will be fixed in patch 4.0.3.

Nethaera

For those of you who attended or watched BlizzCon 2010 and claimed a Deathy pet, you may have noticed that he's acting strange. In fact, he seems to think he's Grunty the Murloc Marine. This is an unintended consequence of the groupthink from which all murlocs suffer. Deathy will be undergoing an extensive rehabilitation program and should be acting appropriately destructive once his idol, Deathwing, shatters the world in an upcoming patch that will debut prior to the release of World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.

source

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BlizzCon 2010 is over! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. You'll find our liveblogs of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

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Bashiok has just posted on the official forums to let people know that any items purchased through the BlizzCon pre-sale have been delayed up to two weeks.

Bashiok -- Pre-Sale Shipping Delays

Due to an error in our shipping process, BlizzCon items ordered during the pre-sale have been delayed by approximately two weeks. We're expecting all items to now be shipped by November 3.

The intent of the pre-sale is of course to allow you to buy your items ahead of time, and get them as close to BlizzCon as possible, if not before. These issues, while unforeseen, are entirely regrettable and we apologize for any inconvenience they've caused. We're working to get you your goodies as soon as we possibly can.

Thank you for your patience.

source

I ordered a horde towel at the beginning of the pre-sale, and mine came a few days before BlizzCon. Maybe some items had an issue in the warehouse, or one of the vendors was late. Who knows! But you should be receiving your items sooner than later. Thank you, Bashiok, for the update.

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BlizzCon 2010 is over! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. You'll find our liveblogs of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

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Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Even weeks when your shadowy messiah, Fox Van Allen, is nursing one heck of a headache -- along with, presumably, everyone else who's still suffering from the non-stop party atmosphere of BlizzCon 2010.

Let's start by saying that BlizzCon 2010 was an absolute blast. I met most of the WoW Insider crew, got to smell Mike Sacco's hair yet again, got some amazing swag and got to eat at Jack in the Box no less than five times. The best part, though, was probably meeting Orkchop (pictured above with WoW Insider's moonkin blogger Tyler Caraway, who can only aspire to be as amazing as Orkchop). The dude is an internet celebrity. For real.

But enough about how awesome Orkchop is. Let's talk shadow priests, and how awesome they are.

Now, I'm not good at sugar-coating things, so I'll just come out with it: BlizzCon 2010 was pretty disappointing in terms of World of Warcraft-related content. The biggest news out of the convention was the new loading screen for Cataclysm. Really. That was the big news. Seriously. And it's just a palette-shifted version of the Sindragosa loading screen.

Despite the lack of earth-shattering news, I made sure to take note of all the shadow priest action. There wasn't a heck of a lot of it, but what little ground was covered was hugely important to the future of the spec. The good, the bad and the non-answers -- we'll go over it all after the break.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Please send screenshots as well as any comments to my email at gregg@wow.com.

So this is pretty much going to be a collection of blurbs from the BlizzCon 2010 class Q&A panel. Some questions that were asked throughout the day were things that have come up in the past, but others had new information that hadn't even hit the beta servers yet. The panel members from left to right consisted of Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street (WoW lead systems designer), Kris Zierhut (WoW senior technical game designer), Owen Landgren (WoW game designer), Ion Hazzikostas (WoW game designer) and Chris Kaleiki (WoW associate game designer).

I went back and tried to do a much more thorough job at transcribing the information than we do in our live blogs (because none of us can type as fast as Ghostcrawler speaks). Also, I've added a "too long didn't read" (TLDR) version of each question at the beginning for those of you who don't read the whole post before commenting. For the rest of you, there is a full transcript as well as links I've found to videos of the panel on YouTube and linked directly to where the question is asked, if you want to actually see what was happening. This isn't official video, so it might get pulled for copyright issues, but until then, it's a great reference.

Starting at 10:00 a.m. Pacific time tomorrow, Oct. 28, through the same time Nov. 7, folks who purchased the BlizzCon 2010 virtual ticket from DirecTV will be able to order official BlizzCon 2010 merchandise from the Blizzard store. The $39.95 virtual ticket delivered extensive coverage of the event, with live streams of the panels and competitions in the four halls plus bonus content in between. The high-definition stream allowed Blizzard fans unable to make their way to Anaheim to enjoy the event, with all the talks and even Tenacious D's concert that closed the two-day convention viewable live or as replays on demand (you can skip all the awkward parts). This feature was extremely helpful to WoW Insider's BlizzCon team in bringing you liveblogs and transcripts of chats with the devs.

Fans who purchased the virtual ticket can now get one step closer to the actual BlizzCon experience, as the exclusive merchandise becomes available for a limited time while supplies last. There will also be BlizzCon-exclusive Tenacious D shirts alongside the StarCraft, Warcraft and Diablo swag. These ticket holders must simply visit the Blizzard store and visit the More Products section throughout the sale period and log in using the Battle.net account associated with the ticket purchase. It's the next best thing to being there -- probably even better, because there are no long lines, no tired legs and (we hope) no convention funk!

Welcome to your daily dose of The Queue. With your usual hosts suffering from post-BlizzCon fatigue, The Queue was left unguarded and once again captured by Fox Van Allen. All members of the Van Allen faction shall enjoy a 5 percent buff to damage and experience for the 24-hour duration, and Spirit Shards may now be collected.

The powers than be here at WoW Insider are still licking their BlizzCon-inflicted wounds, so they requested I once again write The Queue. And since Holisky, Sacco, et al. probably won't even have the energy to edit this, I'm spilling the beans on what happened at BlizzCon 2010. Not the boring stuff. The awesome, seedy stuff that could get everyone fired.

First of all, I cannot believe what happened after [REDACTED] ended. [REDACTED] stayed a little bit after, and once we all got a few photos, all of us took turns [REDACTED]ing in the [REDACTED]. You know how [REDACTED] seemed awful friendly during the [REDACTED]? Yeah, you guessed it, he was totally [REDACTED]. Like, really [REDACTED].

On a somewhat related note, I'd really appreciate it if those of you who were taking the pictures of me when I was [REDACTED]ing [REDACTED] would stop uploading them to Facebook. Or at least stop tagging me in them. I mean, my grandmother can see that stuff. Come on.

Oh, and P.S.: [REDACTED]'s hair smelled exactly the way you'd have expected it to -- like [REDACTED].

[Nice try, Fox. – Ed.]

Dark Finch asked:

Does WoW Insider plan to redo the "(Place Spec Here) 101" articles to match the current talent trees and abilities? If so, will you do this before or after Cataclysm launches?

Please note: The rest of this article contains heavy Cataclysm spoilers. If you wish to avoid any content reveals, veer away now!

Not only is BlizzCon a great place to get the latest news straight from Blizzard's mouth about Warcraft, StarCraft and Diablo, but all of the exhibitors and vendors are showing off their official merchandise and some of the new stuff coming out soon. Being the interface guy around here, the powers that be thought it would be nice if I checked out some of the vendors showcasing their interface products -- mice, keyboards and more. There is a lot of exciting stuff to show.

On Day 1 of BlizzCon 2010, I got to run over to the Steelseries booth and meet with Philippe and Kim, both awesome designers who gave me the grand tour and showed off their products -- and, to my great interest, their design philosophies for their hardware.

Salutations fellow WoWers! BlizzCon 2010 has come and gone, and the IHOP workers of Anaheim give a collective sigh of relief as they no longer have to deal with massive parties of 30+ people invading at 4 a.m. While most BlizzCon-goers busied themselves attending class, raid, art or lore panels, a smaller group of individuals and myself found a new event to indulge in.

For the first time this year, Blizzard introduced the BlizzChat: Community Live!, a neat little side event where anyone was welcome to come in and debate various topics of the game alongside a Blizzard moderator. The intent of this new "panel" was to bring the internet forums to life, in a sense, and allow the players to openly bounce ideas back and forth between each other with a direct line of communication to Blizzard present.

Although it wasn't as glamorous as having Ghostcrawler down in the trudges, the feedback that was being tossed around was taken seriously by Blizzard and the discussions themselves were highly informative. The discussions were so engaging that I ended up missing several of the panels down in the event proper that I had planned on attending, simply because the other players present were that engaging. Topics ranged across all spectrums of the game, from achievements to professions, PvE balance to PvP tactics, leveling and questing to the lore of the game itself.

There was a lot of skepticism about hosting this type of forum and to how effective it would actually be, but I can attest that there is nothing better than a room full of players from all walks of WoW actually talking about their gaming experiences and the changes they would like to see for the game.

Deathy the murloc, BlizzCon 2010's exclusive companion pet, is currently without his own animation set. At this point in time, Deathy occasionally will make the rifle sounds that Grunty, his space-faring murloc counterpart, usually makes. In addition, his sound emotes are the same as Grunty, and some of his animations include those of the murloc suit.

At the World of Warcraft art panel during BlizzCon, however, we were treated to a sneak peak of Deathy's custom animations, including jumping up into the air and scorching the ground in a torrent of fire breath. Suffice to say, it was really awesome. Hopefully we will get an update soon or, potentially, with 4.0.3.

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BlizzCon 2010 is over! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. You'll find our liveblogs of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

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BlizzCon 2010 is over! WoW Insider has all the latest news and information. You'll find our liveblogs of the WoW panels, interviews with WoW celebrities and attendees and of course, lots of pictures of people in costumes. It's all here at WoW Insider!

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