Secrets of Ulduar

As we all know by now, patch 3.1 "Secrets of Ulduar" is out and churning the hell out of our hard drives. The cinematic is well worth a look, if only to deepen the dislike of the Horde/Alliance (delete as appropriate). Seems we are going into Ulduar because those whacky leaders of ours cannot agree. Oh, and for the phat lewts too.

Some highlights:

Fishing dailies. New fishing dailies! From Dalaran, no more porting to Shatt every day! Amazing prizes to be won, such as fishing rods which aren't as good as the Kaluak one, a non combat pet and some epic gems to flog on the AH for ludicrous gold, or equip in your favourite piece of loot. The rare underwater swimming turtle mount, fished from northrend pools, also deserves a mention.

Dual specs. Finally I can pick up a resto build and maybe actually use it. I may pick up this spec I read elsewhere, or some variant thereof. There is also an achievement for ponying up the 1000 gold for the dual spec.

Argent Tournament. A new grind to get 5 non combat pets, a highly expensive mount, and the possibility of paying huge amounts of gold for alliance non combat pets! I'm not sure how much of a grind this one is, I did the dailies once on the PTR then gave up. I have a suspicion the champions tokens for the vendor items will be limited to 1 per day, so 40 days for a pet or 200 for the mount. I hope I'm wrong about that too.

Some new raid instance! Not having done a lot of Storm Peaks quests, I have little clue what's going on there, but I hear there is some new place for our rabid raiders to get cracking on. Just in time too, as the guild has had their first kill on Malygos 10 and is clearing Naxxramas in like 2 days. I am, however, not looking forward to the inevitable loot/progression drama which will arise from this place... the Old God Yogg-Saron's influence reaches beyond the confines of the game world.

Noblegarden rammed right into Children's Week. The latest I read was that Noblegarden has been delayed until around the 26th, but this means it ends on friday 1st April, the same day Children's Week starts. /golfclap Good lord Blizzard, what were you thinking? Mount seekers, welcome to the busiest two weeks of your life! I can't verify these dates as the EU servers won't be up until 2pm.

Shaman changes. Quite a few Shaman changes which will let me grab Static Shock and hopefully not run OOM all the time, but I think the changes should be the subject of another post. Suffice to say, I'm hoping for an increase in enhancement DPS from this patch.

Not long to go now, come on you servers!