Category Archives: World of Warcraft

For the final give away of WoW.com’s 12 Days of Winter Veil contests we thought we’d end big. How big? With a pack of four Steelseries gaming accessories worth $275. It includes one of each: World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Mousepad World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lick King Z-board Steelseries Siberia v2 Full Size Headset The contest is open to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, and Canada (excluding Quebec), and everyone who enters must be 18 or older. To enter, leave a comment on this post before 11:59pm ET Sunday, January 3, 2010. Please be sure to use a real email that you check often to enter, so we can contact you should you be the winner. You may enter only once and one winner will be selected randomly. That winner will receive 1 World of Warcraft MMO Gaming Mouse, 1 World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lich King Mousepad, 1 World of Warcraft Wrath of the Lick King Z-board and 1 Steelseries Siberia v2 Full Size Headset with a retail value of US$275. Click here to read the official contest rules. EDIT: Contest closed. Thanks everyone!

What better way to celebrate the new year than winning a World of Warcraft in-game pet? WoW.com is giving them away to two lucky winners. Yes, you can have your own Lil K.T. or Panderan Monk to follow you on your travels in Azeroth. The contest is open to legal residents of the 50 United States, the District of Columbia, and Canada (excluding Quebec), and everyone who enters must be 18 or older. To enter, leave a comment on this post before 12pm ET (noon) Saturday, January 2, 2010. Please be sure to use a real email that you check often to enter, so we can contact you should you be one of the winners. You may enter only once and two winners will be selected randomly. Each winner will receive 1 World of Warcraft Pet (their choice of Lil K.T. or Pandaren Monk) with a retail value of US$10. Click here to read the official contest rules. Be on the look out for the final giveaways tomorrow and don’t forget to wish your loved ones a happy New Year! EDIT: Contest closed. Thanks everyone!

Meet Me in Azeroth probably doesn’t qualify as machinima, but is still fantastic viewing for WoW Moviewatch. This video features a pair of guys rocking out to how much they prefer Azeroth to the doldrums of real life. I’m forced to agree with the sentiment, even if the musical style isn’t quite my taste. The video is clearly meant to be comedy and parody, so I totally forgive their heavy use of auto-tune. Hell, I might even have auto-tuned it a bit more thoroughly. I think the style has shown to be very effective for this kind of tongue-in-cheek humor before, and it totally had its place here. The lyrics of the video do a good job of speaking to the universal WoW experience. They also manage to give some shout-outs to certain factions among the community. For example, they poke fun at a desire to return to “ye olden days of WoW,” back before Burning Crusade even came out. Ultimately, it was a fun video, and I give the chaps a tip of the hat.

When we last talked about this on the podcast, I said we’d basically have to wait and see how it all worked, but now that players have had their hands on the Dungeon Finder out on the live realms for a while, they’re learning a few more tricks and tips about how to use it. As Rohan brings up over on the WoW Ladies LJ, it’s easy enough to keep a good player once you’ve found them through the system: as long as none of you drop group once you’re done with an instance, you can go back in and run as many as you want. Unfortunately, you can’t friend them yet (hopefully that will show up whenever Battle.net functionality does), but the comments on that post point out that if you both sign up for an unpopular instance at the same time, chances are good you’ll end up in the same group together (of course, that requires coordination, but maybe you can set up a time out of game). More tips and tricks for the new system after the break. Other tips we’ve heard: finding an instance as tank or healer will go even faster than trying to get in one as DPS, so if you can specialize into a more useful role and just want to grind out instances fast, do that. Damage meters are supposedly broken — they haven’t figured

Patch 3.3 is only barely out on the live realms, and already, there’s a controversy with the new epic ammo recipes. Lassirra says that hunters are concerned that the requirements to make the ammo are just too high. Blizzard had promised to make getting epic ammo easier, and this still has the requirement of having a high level engineer, with the extra charge of requiring a Goblin engie for the bullets, and a Gnomish engie for the arrows. And even after you find a 450 Engineer in the right spec, you still have to get a couple of Crystallized Shadow or Earth together. That doesn’t sound “easier” to me, either. Let’s not forget, however, that this is cutting edge (no pun intended) ammo — this isn’t the kind of vendor junk you just fire while leveling. It’s a 30 point DPS gain from the previous high level ammo, and that kind of increase probably does justify a little tougher requirement to make. Of course, it’ll probably work out so that other classes get that increase normally through their itemization, but that’s just the way it works for hunters. If you want the new ammo, you’ll have to find an friendly engie of the right spec with the right skill Honored with the new Ashen Verdict faction,

I support World of Warcraft’s paid services. I think they’re good for the game. I think a lot of the options that the services provide extend our interest in the game, allowing us to play when we might have otherwise lost interest. What I do worry about is how expensive everything is when you start to add them all up. I suspect I’m like the average player who has more than a few max level characters at this point, which means wanting to avail of paid services on all of them could get a little pricey. Let’s take character transfers, for instance. If I wanted to transfer all my characters to a server where my friends play (why would I want to move just one?) it would cost me a hefty sum. Add to that the fact that my wife plays wherever I play so we multiply that hefty sum by two. Imagine if I wanted to change my characters’ races to those combinations that were previously unavailable come Cataclysm… how much would that add up to? It doesn’t take an accountant to see that it could cost a small fortune. $25 isn’t a paltry sum. Specially not in these hard times. Neither is 20€, £15, or ₩24,000, which is what most services such as paid race change and realm transfers cost. Name changes are the most affordable

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