Well the lead up to The Burning Crusade expansion for World of Warcraft is indeed in full swing now. Today Blizzard released the much anticipated 2.01 patch for WoW aptly named the "Calm before the Storm" patch. Indeed it is the "calm before the storm" as players gear (pun intended) up for the expansion big time. The 2.01 patch changes loads of things in the game, fixes tons of bugs/nagging things and overall changes the base game quite alot actually.
For starters PvP is given a total redo here, and its a pretty substantial update here folks. For one, the Honor system is now gone, instead we have a new system where Honor earned each day can be used as a sort of currency to buy gear/items. PvP rewards are no longer unique, two new Arenas have been added and can be played in several forms and all current Honor totals are nuked and reset. Everyone will have their talent points refunded to them when they log in tonight, as the talent trees are being revamped and changed for The Burning Crusade and the base game gets some of that loving as well. New abilities and talents are available for all classes.
A new "LFG" or Looking For Group UI thingie has been added to the game, to make things easier to find raid/instance/party partners now. A new improved enchanting UI is here, a new "Spell alert" bar which will show you when enemies are casting spells (default is off), and Auto-Loot is now available without a mod! There is just way to much to list here, seriously its alot of stuff! Its also a rather large patch, clocking in at about 490 megs! So download away (if you haven"t already) and prepare to load in to the new improved "Calm before the storm" World of Warcraft. Oh and the server maintenance should be finishing up here within minutes - hopefully.