Whether you're a new player yourself or you have friends who are just starting to get in the game, our Rookie Guide is the place to find all of WoW Insider's new player coverage in one easy-to-bookmark place. New additions to the guide include a section on gear, items, and professions as well as a section on new player class guides, to help the WoW newbie in your life find the right class to play. Looking for something we haven't covered in the guide yet? Drop us a note and we'll look into covering it for a future WoW Rookie! Just because you're a newbie doesn't mean you can't bring your A-game to World of Warcraft! Visit the WoW Rookie Guide for links to everything you need to get started as a new player, from the seven things every newbie ought to know to how to get started as a healer or as a tank. Tags: featured, guide, how-to-play-wow, new-to-world-of-warcraft, noob-guide, rookie-guide, world-of-warcraft-guide, world-of-warcraft-help, world-of-warcraft-noobs, world-of-warcraft-rookies, wow-guide, wow-help, wow-noob-guide, wow-noobs, wow-to-play-world-of-warcraft

Yesterday, we asked you what your best guess was for the arrival date of patch 5.3, and at the time the article was written, the PTR build was still a test. Since then, it has been updated, as many commenters mentioned, and is now a release candidate.
What does this mean for a potential release date? Looking back at patch 5.1, WoW Insider reported that a release candidate was live on November 13th, and the patch released on November 27th, a fortnight after the first release candidate went up. Patch 5.2 went to a PTR release candidate on the PTR on February 26th, and the patch dropped on March 5th, just one week later. We can't really discuss earlier patches, thanks to Blizzard's new, improved patch cycle, but these two indicate that the patch may well drop within the next fortnight, so May 21st or 28th, perhaps the first week in June at the latest.