Monthly Archives: November 2009

Here’s a spooky looking offhand for current endgame casters. If you have an item you’d like to see here next week, shout it out in the comments below, please. Name: Mystifying Charm (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory) Type: Epic Offhand Damage/Speed: N/A Attributes: +65 Stamina, +65 Intellect, +57 Spirit Improves crit strike rating by 57 and spell power by 100.

It’s time once again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that would like to thank its readers profusely for the deluge of screenshots it received last week. Arcane Brilliance sent out the call, and you guys responded in droves. There were so many, in fact, that it was an impossible task to select just one for the column. Arcane Brilliance finally went with this one, apparently of an undead pimp of some type, simply because it made Arcane Brilliance chuckle. Also, the column this week is about leveling through Outland, and this is a pretty good representation of how your mage will look throughout that leg of the journey: like the mutant love-child of the entire cast of Saved by the Bell. Seriously… you guys are awesome. Sooooooo many good pictures to use. I may have to start writing like 12 of these a week, just to have an excuse to use all of them. Thanks again, and keep them coming. Even if I don’t get to use them, I just enjoy browsing through them. So many mages, so little time. Last week, our mage leveling guide hit level 58 and fled vanilla WoW for the alien landscapes of Outland. This week, we’ll tackle the 10 levels your mage will be spending there, amongst the hellboars, sporebats, and ravagers. Level 59 I’m

We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. MrVoletron is at it again over on Youtube, coming to us with a Jaraxxus remix this time around. People have been requesting this one endlessly from the poor guy, and I must say, he did a good job with it. Utterly hilarious. This past week, Blog Azeroth’s Shared Topic was RPG Nostalgia, with many World of Warcraft bloggers throwing in their two cents. What’s yours? The new information released today on Icecrown access progression makes this post a little outdated, but it’s a good read nonetheless: Matticus makes a case for the limited attempts approach in raiding. Slice and Dice teaches fledgling rogues the difference between Envenom and Eviscerate. OutDPS strikes again with their great hunter content, this time with a guide to timing your cooldowns.

We ran our livestream of the Halls of Reflection on the PTR yesterday, and other than one little hitch (I figured I’d save us all the trouble of raiding the Lich King and just jump in and take him down myself, with disastrous consequences), it went pretty well. Turns out you need to run through the main quest to unlock the last two Frozen Halls instances, so we ended up doing all three: Forge of Souls and Pit of Saron on normal, and then the Halls of Reflection on both normal and Heroic. On the way, you can see all of the bosses, dropped loot, the various lore and questlines that weave throughout the new 5-man, and the final epic confrontation. Obviously, considering this is straight video of these instances (with commentary and audio from the game), these things are full of spoilers — if you don’t want to know what happens when you enter Icecrown Citadel, steer clear. That said, the video we recorded is after the break. You don’t have to watch the whole thing (in fact, at over two hours, you’d be crazy to), as I’ve tagged the Forge of Souls run, the Pit of Saron run, and the final heroic Halls of Reflection run on their own. Clicking those links or the markers on the video below should take you to the specific parts of

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com’s daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky be your host today. Let’s get meta here folks. Zetathran asked a question about the history of this site, and it got me into a conversation with our Editor-in-Chief Liz Harper about the activities of old. WoW.com has a changed a lot in the past few years, and while the long dialog we had about past policies and editorial standards is probably of no interest but ourselves, the basic story of the site probably is, so we’ll start off with that. Zetathran asked… “How did WoW Insider start? Who were the original bloggers?” WoW Insider has been around almost 4 years now, of which Elizabeth Harper is our oldest employee. And while the real story of WoW.com is much longer, and I’m not even sure I know all of it, I can give a somewhat concise answer. WoW Insider started off as a spin off from our sister site Joystiq, which wanted more direct coverage of World of Warcraft. Our first post went live on November 23rd, 2005 – about one year after WoW was released. Barb Dybwad, who now works for Mashable, was the original producer of the site. Jennie Lees, who has moved on to other

In among all of the “omg fake pets for real money” drama from this week’s announcement, we may have missed something big: the Pandaren are now live in the World of Warcraft. The Pandaren are my favorite Azerothian race, even though they’re essentially a joke — Samwise Didier just loves pandas, and he made art for an April Fool’s joke that Chris Metzen loved so much they decided to include the bears as real characters in Warcraft III. Since then, they’ve become fan favorites (not least of all, especially for me, because alcohol and ale are a big part of their culture), but we’ve only seen hints of them in World of Warcraft. There was a rumor going around a while back that they would never appear in the game because China didn’t allow depictions of violence against the bears, but that was just a rumor. Still, the Pandaren have existed in WoW only as a Blizzard in-joke. We assume they’re out there somewhere, but until now, no one has ever seen one. Of course we say “until now” because there are now little Pandaren monk noncombat pets running around, bowing, and doing magical kung-fu. Does this mean that the future Emerald Dream expansion will have us all playing as Brewmasters? While yes