Guide to Buy Cheap WoW Gold, World of Warcraft Gold, Accounts

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

That’s a trailer we haven’t seen in awhile, huh? It’s relevant today, I promise! Besides, a little nostalgia is always fun. If I have one grievance with Wrath of the Lich King’s cinematic, it’s that they didn’t give us an incredibly corny catchphrase to spout for nearly two years.

Discolando asked…

“Is there any substance to the rumor I’ve recently read that patch 3.3 will contain another yet unknown raid instance, and patch 3.4 will contain Icecrown Citadel? It does seem more logical to ‘finish’ the expansion with the advertised antagonist instead of a deux ex machina like patch 2.4 gave us.”

Patch 2.4 was the result of a few things going not-quite-right with The Burning Crusade. First, Wrath of the Lich King was taking longer than their original time tables said they would, especially considering how rapidly they put out Burning Crusade’s raid content. They front-loaded all of it. Black Temple, the raid zone that was supposed to be the pinnacle of 25-man raiding in BC, came out in patch 2.1 just a few months after the launch of the expansion. It was almost a full year between the release of Black Temple and the release of Sunwell Plateau. That’s a pretty long time with no new 25 man content. If they didn’t do Patch 2.4’s raid, it would have been almost a year and a half between Black Temple and Wrath of the Lich King.

Another issue is that, given the theme of the expansion (The Burning Crusade), ending on a raid that didn’t have anything at all to do with the Burning Crusade is somewhat silly. Sure, Illidan had pet demons, but he wasn’t actually a part of the Burning Legion anymore, which is what the Crusade is named for. It’s somewhat like if Wrath of the Lich King gave us Yogg-Saron last and skipped Arthas. Sure, Yogg-Saron was a villain, and a pretty big one! Entire zones dedicated to his influence! But he wasn’t in the title of the game. As much as they hyped Illidan, the title of the expansion simply wasn’t about him. It was about the Burning Legion.

Wrath of the Lich King feels much more on-pace, though we were spoiled by how much raid content was available at launch with The Burning Crusade. The Lich King will definitely be in patch 3.3 and will probably be the final raid boss of Wrath. If he’s not, it’s because their next expansion is taking longer than they’d hoped, and the filler content (the potential patch 3.4) will be a good thing for us players because it’ll give us something to do while we wait.

Mark asked…

“Is there a good guide anywhere to the differences between the Ulduar-10 and Ulduar-25 encounters? I usually raid with a 10-man, but we’re teaming up with a few other 10-man teams this week while a bunch of our teammates are taking vacations. It’d be really helpful to find a list of what’s different.”

As was mentioned in the comments yesterday, Wowwiki is a pretty good resource for this. If there are significant differences, it’ll be noted on the boss’s tactics page. Most of the differences between 10 and 25 man come down to numbers, rather than new abilities. The 25 man version makes healing and damage requirements much tighter, as in your tank is much more likely to get 2-shot in Ulduar 25 than Ulduar 10 and there’ll be significantly larger amounts of environmental damage going around. New abilities between Normal and Heroic are few and far between.

kscribby asked…

“Just courious about RaF… if I want to recruit myself, i.e. buy another account for myself, does that mean that I also have to buy all new games as well, and then own two of every game? Or can I have two accounts on the same game?”

You need an authentication code/CD-Key for each account, and you get those buy buying the base game and expansions. So… yes, you need two copies of everything if you want two accounts. If you don’t want the actual boxes laying around your house, remember that you can get the original game and the expansions on the Blizzard Store digitally. If you have a Battle.net account, you can attach both accounts to one login and have all of your game information stored on Battle.net. It’s actually a pretty convenient service for multiboxers!

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As previously reported, there were accusations that US guild Exodus used an exploit to obtain the World First of the last unclaimed Hard Mode in Ulduar — Alone in the Darkness. As it turns out, these accusations were true and blue poster Daelo posted on the official forums that the Yogg-Saron encounter was hotfixed on all servers to prevent this from happening in the future. Owing to this, Exodus’ kill is no longer recognized by some achievement trackers.

Contrary to some reports, however, Exodus released a statement on their website that members of their guild were not banned, clarifying that Blizzard meted out a 72-hour suspension for their abuse of game mechanics. They argue that the encounter wasn’t beatable to begin with, similar to the C’thun fight in Ahn’Qiraj before it was fixed, prompting the exploit. In the same statement, Exodus also points at Ensidia’s arguably hypocritical stance of complaining about the abuse considering Ensidia used similar questionable methods to achieve other World Firsts. Serennia mentions this behavior in his column at wowriot, as well, bringing into question Blizzard’s apparent double standard when meting out punishment.

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Reader comments – ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.

Wild applause! Mad QQing! The floodgates of Patch 3.2 information have opened, and the comments here at WoW.com reflect it. As much as we love a good debate, [1.Local] will be steering clear of the 3.2 threads — after all, nothing’s set in stone yet, and all the hue and cry begins to sound tiresomely similar after the third or forth topic.

Instead, let’s start off this week’s [1.Local] with a much more novel (and entertaining) method of presenting (and settling) differences of opinion: a comments rap battle.

	How will the loot go down? The rap battle edition It all begins with a single comment. Mordockk: Some people are saying that this patch could go live in one month … What do you guys think? … This patch is the definition of welfare epics. epsilon343: First off: Shut up. You give all raiders a bad name by QQing about “welfare epics” and crap like that. It doesn’t affect you, so grow up and stop bitching about what other people can get in a game. Secondly, gear from raiding can kinda be summed up by a comparison to buying technology. Let’s say you bought an iPhone, then the iPhone 3G when it came out, and now you’re going to buy the 3G S this weekend. Are you going to whine and complain to all the people who are going to buy a 3G S, just because they didn’t need to buy the other two first? You made a conscious decision to raid what was best AT THE TIME. That is no longer relevant, and Blizzard is helping to keep the raiding population relatively close to each other by not allowing the new raiders be so far behind the current raiders that they can’t ever hope to see the new content. It’s not like these people get to go line up and be handed their T8 for free. They still need to do some heavy farming just to get the gear that they need, and it won’t be anywhere near as fun. I’d rather I got my gloves by learning and fighting Mimiron than running H-Nexus for two weeks straight. But at the end of the day, those players who are good at raiding will be available to raid instead of languishing inside Naxx. Personally, the only reason I could see someone being worried about this is if they’re afraid of these new raiders taking their spot… The two readers each drop a couple of more posts baiting one another, before Mordockk pulls off the gloves. Mordockk: So you just have a problem with people like me? Because you have some preconceived notion of who I am. My post was simple: “When do you think this patch will be live?” The comment about welfare epics was a mere statement that (though the common use of the word welfare and epics may be in bad taste ) the majority of WoW players would agree on. Although I will say your comment was well thought-out and knowledgeable, I would like to point out that this must have been on your mind for a while and maybe you should have looked for someone who was also looking to argue the point you are trying to make, before you chose me to unload on. Congrats to you. Would you like to have a rap battle? Despite that tantalizing challenge, the thread turns back to the matter of loot. Both Mordockk and epsilon343 maintain radio silence — until another reader cuts through the static. impurezero: Epsilon rollin’ with the 3-4-3, Mad rap skillz will prove who the troll be. Noobs snatchin’ free epic loot like Ali Baba? To see some real welfare, just check out Mordokk’s momma! Mordockk fires back immediately. Mordockk: our rap battle would have been epic, that’s true but u diss my mama, now i gotta battle you we were originally suppose to rap about trollin whores so get off my mom, cuz i just got off of yours. u just opend a can of worms that ur gonna start tastin’ cuz my rap skills are tighter than your DPS rotation ya’ll voted my comments and turned them black so i gotta bust some rhymes now to keep my rep intact write my first post and get pwned by epsilon impurezero? that the amount of times u downed yogg-saron? downing leet bosses is the real accomplishment and test not pugging heroics for emblems of conquest say what you want. call me an elitist, call me a prick but who’s the one replyin to my posts tryin to start some sh* makin it so easy to get t8, that’s such trash should i quit now and just wait till the next patch? the only way id see this new badge system stand a chance is if you kissed my a** after i drop my t8.5 pants! that being said, i dont care what you have to say i just care about all the nerfs to my precious DK! impurezero: EPIC! I’m just glad that my crappy attempt at starting a rap battle didn’t go to waste. Mad props on this one. Jafari: Impure, we are all in your debt. Mordockk: nothin but love Considering the topic of this post, we suspect Mordockk & Co. may indeed have nothin’ but love.
	How should WoW end? We rarely cite Breakfast Topic comments in [1.Local] (What is this, anyway? The “All the News That We Rarely if Ever Print” edition?) simply because if you’re inclined to chat a lot, you’re probably going to have followed those posts closely anyway. This post about how WoW and your characters should meet their end, though, seemed to hit the “truth” button for a number of readers. Cthulu: Since I play Horde, probably me on a mountain top after an epic battle with looking into the sunset, with a Blood Elf female by my side. The truth being … the beast slain was Ghostcrawler, and the loot was a legendary Hunter weapon that everyone could equip and benefit from (but of course never use), probably named Nerf Bat. And for good measure, the Blood Elf female is actually a 32-year-old guy named Ralph, and I will be horrible scarred and dejected. What’s that tingling sensation? I do believe it’s … nothin’ but love.
	Epic achievements for normal runs PuGs that require players to show proof of epic achievements in order to earn a spot in a normal run drives some players to retreat to a more friendly environment. Peralas: This gear issue is one of the reasons I almost hung up my wand and quit WoW recently. The constant madness surrounding running instances to hopefully get gear, so you can run other instances to maybe get better gear, so you can run the hardest instances (again for better gear), is INSANE! Every time a new expansion comes out, the PvE blues you can get from questing squash the previous expansion’s epics. Will you have the “best in slot” items? No. Does it matter? To me, no! I’m not one of those who’s interested in any world first, nor do I care for Arenas. I don’t care about any Tier-N nonsense. I just want to have something enjoyable to do after coming home from work. I finally cut the cord with my old guild and founded my own guild. It’s just for my family, so we can spend more time questing together. No more multi-hour Naxx runs for me. Sanity has finally returned. And with the upcoming travel changes, I’m sure my wife and son will enjoy the “game” more. We definitely felt that. Don’t you feel the love?
	We have a tabard Our newest weekly feature, We have a tabard, is designed to help guild leaders, officers and members achieve their goals in a cooperative guild experience. The [1.Local] crowd roundly approved of the new column’s name, which provoked a round of stories about humorous guild names and tabard designs. Talia: I’m a fairly recent GL of a new guild that’s trying to recruit, and with our silly name (Vegemite Sandwiches), we’ve been pretty abused in the process, down to being called “obnoxious retards” in a forum thread. (No, I hadn’t posted anything but your basic run-of-the-mill recruitment spiel; it was definitely just triggered by the name.) The way I see it, it helps to weed out people with no sense of fun. And yeah, we have a pretty awesome tabard. We see what you did there, you with the tabard — but do you feel the love?

Nothin’ but love, right here on [1.Local] — until next week!

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Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related. Need help reading healing meters and parses? Don’t know where to begin? Let’s see what I can do!

“Are healing meters supposed to measure your ability or their inability (to stand in fires)?”

That’s a great quote I saw on the Plus Heal forums. I wish I bookmarked the thread. I can’t remember who said it.

Reading meters is not for the faint hearted. There is often an overwhelming amount of information that needs to be dissected. Unlike damage meters, healing meters are extremely subjective to various fights.

Things you need to know first

In order to critique a player’s performance, there are a number of things that you have to be aware of.

• Boss mechanics. A huge no brainer. Know what the boss does. Know the abilities. Know the damage output of all of them. Know the gimmicks. Know what can trip up, kill, or neutralize healers. Every parse is going to be subjective.
• Classes. Know the classes that comprise your healing team. Have an intimate understanding of their spells and capabilities.
• Assignments. Who is healing who? What type of damage is their healing assignment expected to take? Have an extremely clear idea of which healer is doing what at any given moment.
• Cause of death. When troubleshooting deaths, you must know what effect killed them. I rely on Recount or Expiration to echo the last few seconds in a player’s life span. Using that information, I can then figure out what went wrong and what can be done to resolve it. More on this later.
• DPS. Damage per second.
• HPS. The opposite of the above which is heals per second.

World of Logs

Let’s check out World of Logs. Out of the various parsing sites and tools in existence, this one is by far my personal favourite. Be sure to create an account with them first. If you’re interested, you can even create a guild with them as well (but remember to generate a beta key).

By raid

Here’s the dashboard. This is where you go for typical “at-a-glance” type information. When you’re checking out healers, the graph you want to key in on is the one on the right side. This shows how much damage the entire raid has taken throughout the night followed by how much effective healing was done. The line below it shows overall raw healing (including overhealing). Basically, the closer your healing done is to damage taken, the effective your healing corps is. You want the green line to sort of overlap the red as much as possible. It’s going to be difficult to do especially on progression nights but it’s a great overall thermometer for the raid.

Mousing over the Dashboard above expands the parser into other details. Of particular note here is the ones that lead to Healing Done and Deaths Overview.

Let’s start with Healing Done and check out the entire raid.

This section shows every player and every ability that a player used to heal. It will include attacks and abilities like a Ret Paladins Judgment of Light or a Death Knights Death Strike. This section will largely be dominated by your healers (as should be the case).

The graph

Here you can see a visual representation of healing done by players. Mouse over at various points at the graph, and it will list significant events throughout the parse (represented by different colored lines). The large spikes were heals done during bosses or boss attempts. You can tell a break was called at the 19:30 mark due to the lack of activity by everyone involved.

Check boxes on the side of player names below the graph allow you to see who you examine. The columns are self explanatory. The amounts show the overall healing done and the percentages represent how much healing that player contributed to the entire raid. Yes it says DPS on the side. That actually means HPS (Heals per second).

Remember the HPS takes into account everything done throughout the night.

Let’s take a micro look at a player. I’ll use mine.

By player

Clicking the player shows all the individual particulars. At the top, you’ll see some tabs like graphs, damage, healing and so forth. Healing by spell is the one you want to look at it. So on the left, you’ll see the break down of spells. Healing done is how much your spells healed (or prevented in the case of Power Word: Shield). Hits is the number of spells that connect, the average they healed for followed by the effective total. Crits and Direct Heals are self explanatory.

Yeah, that’s an obscene number of shields.

On the next page, I’ll highlight the process that I run through when doing a comparison between two players of the same class and use myself as a guinea pig.

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We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• Starman over at Casual Raid Leader has a great post about taking negative feedback during raids / WoW, everyone should read this and link it to their guildies!
• A great post from Defeat Dragons on making your recruitment work.
• It was Flow Chart Friday over at I Like Bubbles.
• Honors Code talks about the uphill battle for a fresh level 80 tank.
• Healing Death Knights can be “fun,” and Rolling Hots gives it a go.

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Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Last week, Insider Trader discussed the profession-only bonuses associated with Inscription, Jewelcrafting and Enchanting. This week, I’m going to walk you through the rest of them, and include a final summary and comparison at the end.

Tailoring Perks
Tailors have the ability to enchant their own cloaks. Other players can get cloak enchants from Enchanters, although the Tailoring ones are superior in many cases.

• Darkglow Embroidery: Chance to restore 300 mana on spell cast. There seems to be a 60 second internal cooldown, with a proc rate of 35%, which is equal to 25 mp5.
• Lightweave Embroidery: Chance on spell cast to increase your spellpower by 250 for 15 seconds.
• Swordguard Embroidery: Chance for melee and ranged attacks to sometimes increase your attack power by 300 for 15 seconds.

There seems to be a 45 second internal cooldown on Lightweave and Swordguard, meaning that for 15 seconds out of every 45 seconds (+, if you don’t proc it on the next hit, but they do seem to proc within a hit or three), you have the effect. This averages out to 83 SP, and 100 AP respectively, in ideal conditions. Depending on your luck with procs, the average decreases the longer it takes you to proc it again.

For example, after 45 seconds, each spell has a chance to proc the effect. If you managed it at the 50 second mark, the average becomes +75 SP.

Casters who are not Tailors can currently choose between Enchant Cloak - Wisdom and Enchant Cloak - Greater Speed.

Wisdom grants you a measly 10 spirit, as well as a now obsolete 2% threat reduction. The +23 haste rating is nice, but provides neither mana nor spellpower.

Enchant Cloak - Major Agility grants you +22 agility to cloak. Agility is inefficient to everyone except rogues, hunters, shamans and druid cats, who would get +22 AP from it as well as the crit/dodge/armor. In terms of attack power alone, the Swordguard enchant is the clear winner.

Leatherworking
Leatherworkers have the ability to sew fur linings into the insides of their own bracers, adding enchants that are better than what Enchanters can offer everyone else.

Aside from the resistance linings, here is what you can get:

• Fur Lining - Attack Power: +114 AP. Enchanters can provide Enchant Bracers - Greater Assault, which gives +50 AP. Therefore, Leatherworkers get a bonus of +64 AP.
• Fur Lining - Spell Power: +67 SP. Enchanters can give Enchant Bracers - Superior Spell Power, which grants +30 SP for a difference of +37 SP for Leatherworkers.
• Fur Lining - Stamina: +90 STA. Enchanters can provide Enchant Bracers - Major Stamina, which offer +40 STA. Leatherworkers get +50 more.

Blacksmithing
Blacksmiths are able to add two extra sockets to their armor, and this modification does stack with enchants. This means that you could attach the sockets to your bracers and gloves, and still enchant those items. The sockets are prismatic, meaning that you can attach any color gem. This means that however sub-par the sockets on the rest of your gear might be, you will have at least two ideal gems. Of course, the Eternal Belt Buckle makes three, but because anyone can use those, it is not a Blacksmithing-only benefit.

• Socket Bracer.
• Socket Gloves.

Harking back to the upcoming Jewelcrafting nerf, which will render all Dragon’s Eyes no longer prismatic, a Blacksmithing JC would be able to take up Blacksmithing, equip a belt buckle, and still have three prismatic sockets in order to work around the nerf.

Engineering
The Engineering bonuses are a bit odd. They are convenient in that, fun abilities such as rocket boots to boost run speed temporarily or certain trinkets are no longer items that you need to carry or equip in place of your regular armor. Now, they can be added right onto your raiding or PvP set!

Unfortunately, it seems that these fun abilities seem to use up itemization points in some cases. In addition to their quirky abilities, they offer the following enchants:

• Nitro Boosts: +16 critical strike rating to boots. The most comparable boot enchant for non-Engineers is Icewalker, which grants +12 critical strike rating and +12 hit rating. Nitro Boosts are clearly superior if you are hit capped, or if hit is not important to you, as it would not be to a raiding holy paladin.
• Reticulated Armor Webbing: +800 armor to gloves. This would be applied in place of +15 expertise rating or +35 AP.
• Hyperspeed Accelerators: These would be a huge upgrade over the above armor webbing to gloves, especially for non-tanks (or non-plate-wearers!). They grant 340 haste rating for ten seconds every minute. This is about 10% haste at level 80. You can macro this by typing /use 10. The stackability is the main point here. There are plenty of abilities that, when procced together, would make you go wild! In addition, it is useful for healers, especially for when a big heal needs to be popped!
• Hand-Mounted Pyro Rocket: This may not be as competitive, but it’s certainly fun. This will reset your swing timer. Ret paladins can use it to pull from range. The range is 45 yards, which is huge, and can also be used within melee range. Just like the accelerators, create a macro by typing /use 10. It is an instant cast, and has the ability to crit. This is especially good for PvP!
• Springy Arcanoweave: This is a cloak enchant that adds +18 SP. There is no other spell power to cloak enchant in the game. The main option for non-Engineers is Greater Speed, which adds +23 haste rating. Unfortunately, the Lightweave enchant for Tailors is undoubtedly superior.
• Flexweave Underlay: +15 agility to cloak. Unfortunately for Engineers, Enchanters can offer Major Agility to anyone, and it adds +22 agility. Of course, you can’t parachute off of things with your regular cloak, but an extra 7 agility will be more useful to raiders.

Alchemy
Alchemists get a somewhat controversial benefit called Mixology. This will double the duration of your flasks and elixirs, as well as boost the effectiveness of those consumables. Mixology only works for potions/flasks/elixirs that you actually know how to make.

Mixology affects each flask/potion/elixir differently. The main reason that I call its benefits “controversial” is that, however well they might balance with the rewards from other professions, the effects are only active while the consumable is active, whereas gems and enchants are working all the time. Of course, with a two-hour flask duration, applying these buffs while raiding, PvPing and even questing, is not painstaking. Elixir Masters especially will benefit, as they randomly create extra, free, flasks and elixirs, reducing the cost even further.

• Flask of the Frost Wyrm: Alchemists gain an additional +37 SP.
• Flask of Stoneblood: Alchemists gain +320 HP. Because it is mainly tanks that use this, this bonus is really dismal. As I’ve said before, tanks gain more benefit from stamina. This is equivalent to 32 stamina for most players, and roughly 25-28 stamina for tanks, whose talents would boost that much stamina up to around +320 HP worth.
• Flask of Endless Rage: Alchemists get an extra +64 AP, which is on par with the Leatherworking attack power to bracers enchant.
• Flask of Pure Mojo: MP5 is a stat that is currently in high debate, with most classes now preferring spirit, intellect or critical strike rating for their mana instead. Because of this, Ghostcrawler has hinted that they may make MP5 cheaper (translation: there will be more of it on your gear, and/or it won’t nerf other stats as much just by it existing on the gear), as well as other changes. An Alchemist gains an additional 13 mp5.
• Flask of Distilled Wisdom: Alchemists get an extra +20 Int. This is currently better than the Flask of Pure Mojo, even though it does not come from Northrend. This is because of the (perhaps temporary) relative uselessness of MP5.

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Spinksville, following up to an earlier post concerning a great lore moment in Vengeance Landing, concludes that as a Horde player, Howling Fjord has emerged as the single best overall zone in Wrath. The more I consider it, the more I’m inclined to agree with her. The Fjord has a mostly unified questline that slowly splits off into sub-plots concerning the Kalu’ak and Taunka, and the farther you get, the more you realize the impact your previous actions have had on that little slice of the world (and most of it’s not good). As Spinks observes, it’s a very immersive experience that does a great job of conveying both the moral ambiguity of the Forsaken’s position, and the fact that Northrend’s a continent without a lot of good options. “Forced to choose between the lesser evil and the greater evil,” she writes, “… you had better hope that the greater evil is very bad indeed because it is the only way to justify the things you have had to do.”

That said, I have to admit that Icecrown is also pretty tough to beat lore-wise (with the Matthias Lehner quests being a particularly good touch, and please don’t click that link if you haven’t run into him yet). I haven’t yet played an Alliance toon through Northrend, and Spinks is also a Horde player, so I’d like to get some input from Alliance-side players too. Is the Fjord as good for Alliance as it is for Horde, or are your best questlines elsewhere? If you’re Horde, do you agree that the Fjord was your best questing experience?

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Danny Whit is usually the one sitting here writing this thing up for your maintenance day entertainment, but he’s out of the office today. Where is he? I wish I knew. Last time I saw him he put on a pair of shades, gave me a thumbs up, then jumped out of our office window and landed on a sweet hog three stories down. He yelled something in Greek, then rode off into the sunset. So… here I am. The craziest part of it all? The window was closed. He didn’t even have the decency to open it and now there’s a draft. Thanks a lot, Danny.

Servers are down, and will remain down for a number of hours as patch 3.1.3 rolls out and many servers receive significant hardware upgrades. As long as you’re here, you might as well make the most of it. In case you’ve missed it, here’s the best of WoW.com from the past 7(ish) days.

Hot News and Features

• Blizzard revealed a few big details regarding the upcoming Patch 3.2, entitled Call of the Crusade.
• Speaking of Patch 3.2, it’s going to bring us one of the most anticipated updates to the game in the last year or two. New Druid forms! Okay, okay, so only some people were looking forward to those, but still. Totally anticipated. First they revealed the Tauren bear forms, and then the Night Elf bear forms. New cat models still TBA.
• WoW Europe now has the option to merge their World of Warcraft accounts with a Battle.net account!
• Speaking of our European friends, some of them are now experiencing cross-language battlegroups.

• While not WoW specific news, Windows 7 is on the horizon. Our own Adam Holisky took it for a test drive with WoW and let us know how it went.
• Only a select few guilds have managed to down Algalon the Observer, and only on 10-man so far. His Heroic version has yet to die. If you’re interested in a look at the boss, the Underground Kosmonavts have a video of their world-second kill on the crazy constellation.
• I’m still chugging away on Turpen, who hit level 15 last week. Keep an eye on the site today for an update! The little guy is 25 now!
• WoWInterface just launched the beta of their new addon manager, MMOUI Minion. Eliah Hecht jumped on it in a flash and has a very quick review for you.

Class News and Guides

• Hunters, our new Scattered Shots columnist is in the process of writing his first entry for us. Prepare yourselves. It’s coming very, very soon. You may have heard of him.
• Shifting Perspectives addressed some issues for Restoration Druids this past week, and does a little speculation on where the class may end up in the future.
• Arcane Brilliance proves that Christian Belt is a big baby. No, seriously. Oh, and I guess he addresses some Mage issues as well, but that first part is the more important one.
• Hey, Priests. Healing Mimiron sucks. You might want to read the latest Spiritual Guidance.
• Encrypted Text is dagger-deep in Ulduar, and has plenty of tips for you raiders. That’s part two of a series, by the way. You didn’t miss part one, did you?
• Hey, Shaman. It’s 7:30 AM Eastern. Do you know where your loot is?
• There’s a little roleplayer in all of us. Yes, even you cold-hearted Warlocks. Nick and Hakth’vug sitting in a tree, K-I-S-S-I-N-G.
• So it turns out the Warrior’s rage generation formula isn’t the formula we thought it was. Funky.
• Warrior and Paladin tanks, watch out. There could be some big, big changes coming to Block soon. Will they be good? Most certainly. Will they be scary and confusing? Yeah, probably. If you’re one of those crappy people that don’t like change. No, no, I’m kidding, I love you weirdos too.

Items, Dungeons, PvP, Professions, and More

• Our raiding column, Ready Check, has expanded to twice-a-week. Michael Gray joins Jennie Lees in writing this sweet thang. Gray’s first contribution is an in-depth look at cooldowns in a raiding environment and how to use them!
• I didn’t like how long that bullet point was going to be, so I made a new one. Jennie’s edition of Ready Check this week makes a bold statement: I’m more hardcore than you. Wait, what does that even mean?
• Do you collect recipes for whatever crazy profession you’ve picked up this week? Not sure where to find the recipes you need in Northrend? Insider Trader has you covered.
• It’s okay to be a noob. Really. It is. Embrace the noobitude. Well, not forever. It’s okay for now, though!
• The Colosseum’s interview this week is quite possibly one of the best its seen yet. Go read what Ogc the Warlock has to say about their arena experience.

Odds and Ends

• Michael Sacco has been having some fun with our Twitter account. Can you tell a story in ten words or less?
• Raynor is overpowered as hell. S’all I’m sayin’.
• WoW’s Black Jelly is made out of jellyfish. China’s Black Jelly is made out of grass. WoW.com’s Black Jelly is made out of blackberries. Go ahead, guess which of those three things I would actually eat.
• Oh, right. There was that whole Ferarro… thing.

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Since 3.1, DPS warriors (including myself) have been complaining about a lack of rage. To the point where Ghostcrawler himself chimed in recently (in a discussion of the nerf to Titan’s Grip and the effect it had on warrior DPS) to inform us that the claim that warrior rage generation was hurt by the changes was a myth created by warriors upset with the nerf.

Now we have the following post by Landsoul. I freely admit this is the kind of math that makes my eyes cross and roll up into my head. But Landsoul’s well known as a contributor to the EJ forums and frankly, his math-fu’s good enough for me. (I should also mention Hellord, the original poster who saw things were hinky.) What this means is, while it’s very possible that yes, the developers took Titan’s Grip’s decreased damage into account when they were making the changes, there was somehow another change made that cost warriors some rage generation. 25% of it, to be precise.

Bornakk posts later in the thread that they’ll take a look “as we didn’t make any intended changes recently to rage generation“. So the good news is, for warriors, if this change did happen (and again, I’d tend to trust the math from the people behind the best warrior spreadsheets) then it wasn’t a deliberate loss of 25% of our rage generation.

I’m now forced (and most warriors and possibly even druids, as well) to consider how broad this change’s effects might have been. Have tanks been affected? (Since so much of tank rage generation is in damage taken, not damage dealt, the answer is probably not.) While the recently announced changes for warriors in patch 3.1.3 should help with DPS, if the root cause for the drastically lower DPS numbers for fury warriors was a change that managed to slip past the developers, these changes could be just a band aid on a larger problem.

Now, to be fair, two of the changes are very positive and should be considered separately from the rage formula issues.

• Blood Frenzy: This talent now provides 5/10% haste instead of 3/6%.
• Bloodthirst: Cooldown reduced from 5 seconds to 4 seconds, and rage cost reduced from 30 rage to 20 rage.
• Juggernaut: This talent now also increases the cooldown on Charge by 5 seconds.

The Juggernaut change is a pretty big one with repercussions both for PvP and PvE, although it’s clearly aimed at PvP. I can’t say that I’m surprised that it was nerfed again so soon after the last nerf, as the sudden explosion of PvPing arms warriors following the introduction of the talent and their return to cleave teams made clear. The ability to charge, intercept and then charge again to keep more than one target interrupted/stunned was simply the kind of power that made a warrior very, very dangerous against casters. I’d be lying if I didn’t admit to having taken advantage of it myself when I went to PvP with my arms spec. And we all know that I am, at best, a button masher in PvP who barely knows what he’s doing. So I I managed to work this out, imagine what talented PvPers were doing with it: the potential to shut down casting (especially healing) with a warrior when combining talents like Mortal Strike, Unrelenting Assault and Juggernaut must have seem pretty ridiculous.

Do I think two nerfs in less than a month was/is justified? Well, no. Of course I don’t. It’s very annoying. But frankly, if the talent doesn’t get nerfed this way, it’s going to get nerfed some other way and I don’t want to see it get reduced to the point where it’s totally useless.

The Blood Frenzy change, on the other hand, is pretty solid. I can’t say an extra 2/4% haste is bad. It should go towards helping bring Arms DPS up to par with other hybrid DPS, although we’ll still need to see the rage formula situation addressed and fixed if needed before it can provide the full benefit. I know I already take Blood Frenzy in my arms build just for the debuff, so it’s not like more haste is going to upset me. “No no, please don’t give me a passive 10% speed increase when I make things bleed, I can’t bear it!” Not something you’re going to hear arms warriors saying.

Now, the Bloodthirst change combines a merely good one (reducing the cooldown to 4 seconds, which makes it easier to fit in with glyphed Whirlwind, a nice and positive change) with a great one (reducing the rage cost of Bloodthirst from 30 to 20 points, which is simply a fantastic change all told). Again, we still need definite action to address the rage formula change, if indeed there is one, but by itself this change should help with fury warrior rotations. Making it easier to fit in 2 bloodthirsts to 1 whirlwind and making it so it’s less harrowing (if there’s anything I hate more than having BT come down off cooldown but not having the rage to use it I can’t think of anything… well, okay, racism, I hate that more) to use the abilities properly, that’s just wonderful. A 10 rage savings on every BT will mean more rage for HS, for Bloodsurge-slams, and less chance of running out of rage and causing your DPS cycle to be mistimed.

Now, to be honest, I’d like to see more for both specs. I’d also like to see the Glyph of Rapid Charge unnerfed since the most recent Juggernaut change, but I’m not crazy enough to expect that. I’m pretty happy with how fury works now in terms of the mechanics of it (issues like rage generation aside) and the change to Bloodthirst will only make me happier with how fury plays. I’ve seen suggestions that fury needs another cooldown to use (perhaps a talent like Unrelenting Assault that would allow fury to proc Victory Rush while in combat, but to be honest I don’t think that another random proc is what fury needs when it already has Bloodsurge. That’s not to say that I wouldn’t like to see both Arms and Fury get more use out of Victory Rush, an ability that is really only useful on trash or when soloing, but I also can’t say that the lack of it is really hurting anyone.

Hopefully if the formula for generating rage is off since 3.1 it can be fixed soon, perhaps when these changes go live, and warrior DPS will finally line up with other hybrid melee. I have to admit, I found reading Landsoul’s post on the forum (and the EJ thread started by Hellord) to be extremely disconcerting and a little alarming, because they put into stark mathematical terms a change that a lot of warriors had noticed (including myself) but couldn’t figure out. Again, including myself. I did lots of parses, checked damage meters obsessively, worried over every upgrade and every change to my gear and could not understand where I’d lost so much DPS, even as my DPS climbed back up it still took a great deal more effort to even approach other classes, and I had no idea why. The 10% damage nerf simply shouldn’t have caused this big a drop, to the point where fury requires some of the best possible gear to come within 500 DPS of another melee hybrid and even arms just seems lackluster.

Of course we’re all watching to see how it all shakes out, one way or another. It could be that the forumla was deliberately changed and there’s a simple miscommuication (it has happened before, of course) or even that the forumla hasn’t changed and that all these tests and reports are wrong or missing some vital factor. I don’t believe that to be the case, and I certainly don’t believe it to be a myth, but I can admit that I’m not always right.

Next week, I’m finally going to get to talk about tanking again.

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The Jewelcrafting nerf has been the subject of a lot of hot debate and flaming on the official forums, as might be expected. As people argue whether the nerf was justified, needed, too much, too little, or the wrong way to go about it, the blues have dipped their toes into the pool more than once, and have delivered some interesting insights into the design process in the process.

If it was so overpowered, complain some, why did it take so long to nerf it? Ghostcrawler answers in this post.

It’s not that they don’t notice that something is overpowered, he says, but it does take some time to find a proper fix. Sometimes, it just isn’t overpowered until a certain gear level. Sometimes, there may be bug fixes or larger problems that need answering first.Sometimes, they may need to debate over the proper way to fix it. Finally, they may have a more ambitious long-term solution in mind, and may have finally decided they can’t delay until that’s done.

You can actually sort of see that last one in play on the Hunter Ammo changes in 3.1, where they planned a complete overhaul of the system including phasing out consumable ammo altogether, but instead had to settle for removing the need for quivers and increasing stack size.

Another argument is that they’re eliminating unqiueness and min-max potential. To that, Ghostcrawler responds, minmaxers do exist and can exist, but their playstyle should be defined by finding slight differences and little tweaks they can do to get their characters to the next level. When there’s a big red arrow pointing at a specific thing, that means something’s off and overpowered, and furthermore, takes away from the legitimate challenge of the whole thing.

These insights aren’t necessarily new to many MMO veterans, but all the same, they’re probably more or less true. It does, in fact, “suck to be nerfed” as Ghostcrawler puts it, but sometimes this type of thing is needful for the health of the game and even for the viability of the min-max playstyle in the long term. It’s also interesting to note that he says that if you think something’s off, we probably think so too, we just haven’t had a chance to deal with it yet. Depending on which way you turn, that could be one more way of saying that they don’t give in to the whiners, they just happen to see the same problems they see every once in a while.

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