Hello and welcome to the 12th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For this week’s column, we’re going to do some speculating. On Thursday, August 6^th at gamescom, Blizzard will unveil the newest expansion for WoW. If you’re like me and there’s 15+ hours of flight between you and gamescom, they’ll be livestreaming it on their dedicated gamescom page. Now the question is: where will this new expansion take us and what changes will it bring to the game? Quick spoiler alert for those who haven’t fought Archimonde at the end of Hellfire Citadel and seen the cinematic afterwards – we’ll be talking about that right after the jump.

Hello and welcome to the 11th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For this week’s column, I’m going to be taking another look at one of patch 6.2’s features, Timewalker Dungeons. I finally had the chance to try my hand at a few of them with this past weekend’s Wrath of the Lich King Timewalker bonus event, so I got to have that blast of nostalgia while getting a little gear for one of my tank alts. I’ll also be taking a look at how the other game I’ve been playing lately, Final Fantasy XIV: Heavensward, has a similar system and talk about the benefits and drawbacks of both.

Hello and welcome to the 10th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For this week’s column, I’ll be talking about my experience with patch 6.2 so far… which has been extremely limited due to working on Final Fantasy XIV for the Heavensward review. When the forums say that it’s about 20 to 30 hours to do all of the main story quests in FFXIV before you can even start on the new Heavensward content, they’re not kidding; they also aren’t joking about the fact that there’s 70 minutes of cutscenes at the end of the 2.55 questing. For those who are interested in how all that’s going, I’ll have a review down the road as well as impressions of the new jobs once I’ve had the chance to take all of those for a spin, but for the rest of you let’s get back to Azeroth and talk about the Shipyard and Tanaan Jungle.

Hello and welcome to the 9th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For this week’s column we’ll be talking about patch 6.2, which is coming to live servers… today! Last Wednesday, Blizzard released the patch cinematic and gave a release date of Tuesday, June 23^rd. Coincidentally that was about two hours after I’d already agreed to write the review for the Final Fantasy XIV expansion, Heavensward, which also comes out on the 23^rd. It’s amazing how Blizzard just coincidentally keeps releases patches when other games are coming out, despite claiming not to… in all seriousness though, if I were them, I’d do the same thing.

For those of you who aren’t going to be bouncing back and forth between games, you’ll have your hands full with everything in this patch. If your guild has long since finished with Blackrock Foundry or your 5-man group is ready to have a new challenge, your wait is over. Well, unless you forgot to turn on the Background Downloader or to kick off the Battle.net launcher before you went to work.

The topic of flight (or lack thereof) has been a hot issue latelyin the World of Warcraft community. In the latest Dev Watercooler blog post, Lead Designer Ion Hazzikostas has laid out what players can expect in the future of flight.

Hello and welcome to the 8th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column for Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For this column, we’re going to take a look at last week’s preview of Hellfire Citadel from the official WoW site. Patch 6.2 will be taking us back to Tanaan Jungle where we’ll be not only invading the stronghold of the Iron Horde, but we’ll be doing so against their newly fel-empowered legions of soldiers.

Hello and welcome to the 7th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For this column, we’re going to take a look at a couple of articles that came out last week. The first is a new Dev Watercooler on the main site, focusing on itemization in 6.2. The second is an interview Polygon ran on Friday with lead designer Ion “Watcher” Hazzikostas about Tanaan Jungle, future Warlords of Draenor content and some major news about flying in 6.2 and beyond.

Hello and welcome to the 6th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For this column, we’re going to take a look at some of the features from the patch 6.2 Public Test Realm. Last time we talked about the new 5-man options coming in 6.2: Mythic and Timewalker. When I was describing Timewalker dungeons, I mentioned that they would be limited to specific extended weekends (Friday through Monday) on a rotation schedule of bonus events where Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King Timewalker dungeons would make up two of the possible seven events.

In addition to all of the discussion about whether or not locking Timewalker behind weekend events was the best way to go about things, there was the question of what those other five weekend events would be. That question was answered last week with the Bonus Events and Adventure Guide on the official site. So what other events will patch 6.2 bring us to entice us into running different content?

Hello and welcome to the 5th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For this column, we’re going to take a look at some of the features from the patch 6.2 Public Test Realm. Right after I posted my previous column on the remaining bosses of Blackrock Foundry, Blizzard announced the PTR was coming up for the next patch – and here I thought I’d be doing something on Garrisons or pet battles for this week’s column.

Along with the PTR announcement came the first set of patch notes, which were massive. Since then we’ve seen a few iterations on those patch notes, datamined information from Wowhead and other sites, boss videos from guilds trying out the new raid encounters and so much more. I won’t try to cover everything that’s shown up in patch notes and build update posts in a single post, despite what the length of some of my columns might imply. Instead we’ll focus on a couple of new features from the PTR notes that immediately caught my eye: Mythic and Timewalker Dungeons.

Hello and welcome to the 4th edition of Formerly Hardcore, ZAM’s column on Blizzard Entertainment’s World of Warcraft. For our fourth column, we’re continuing our look at WoW’s latest raid, Blackrock Foundry. So far we’ve covered eight of the ten encounters in BRF, as well as some talk about my experience with using WoW’s Group Finder tool and Looking For Raid difficulty. That leaves us with two bosses to go.