WOW's Echoes of Doom patch out today

World of Warcraft's Echoes of Doom - the update formerly known as patch 3.0.2 - goes live on European servers today. It will bring many of the new features of next month's Wrath of the Lich King expansion pack to all players of the game.

Servers went down to receive the patch in the early hours of this morning, and are expected back online following maintenance at 2pm Paris time (1pm in the UK).

However, if the patch day experience in the US yesterday is anything to go by, you might be waiting well into the evening to try out your new talent trees. WOW Insider reported that most servers were still offline at 8pm local time, after the target for turning them back on had been pushed back three times.

We'll check the servers again in the afternoon and let you know how they are getting on, in case you want to consider making other plans for your evening than staring at a login screen and crying quietly.

Echoes of Doom introduces new abilities and talent trees for every class; the Achievement system; the new Inscription profession and the Glyphs that can be be used to customise your abilties; barbershops for changing your appearance; two new Arenas with terrain hazards and moving obstacles; radical changes to the way Hunter pets work; and some user-interface tweaks. It also adds a harbour area to Stormwind City.

It's a monster, and the first major update to WOW since Fury of the Sunwell all the way back in March.

You can read about all the major changes in our most recent Wrath of the Lich King beta report. The expansion pack itself follows a month behind this patch, on November 13th, for Mac and PC.