Lolegolas sighed and gulped the last dregs of his wine cooler with great haste. At his well-manicured feet, three humans lay unconscious. While the skilled and graceful blood elf had managed to avoid slaughtering the three, the Alliance members clearly showed the signs of a solid beating.

As Lolegolas collected his things to leave, a strange object slammed into the humans. It looked like it could be a wooden cutout of the letter "V," but a dozen whirling gears were firing at random and spinning like crazy. Small arms and gadgets rifled through the humans' pockets before, finally, the object took off back to the air. It landed with a thud in a thick, black leather glove.

"Oh, god," Lolegolas sighed. "Of course it's you."

"Halt, evil-doer! Miscreant!" the newcomer exclaimed. "Thug! Rogue!"

"Of course. All of Dalaran, and this is exactly where you are," Lolegolas said. "Throgg, what are you doing?"

"I am not Throgg!" the large orc bellowed. He was wearing head-to-toe black leather and a vast sweeping cape. "I am Bat-Throgg!"

"And what was that thing?" Lolegolas said. He gestured for the passing brewmaiden to bring him another wine cooler. "It took all the loot from the humans."

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Filed under: Phat Loot Phriday

Every Friday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting balance druids and those who group with them. This week, we are delving back into the world of betacraft as we examine what is that is making the balance rotation tick, how there might be some flaws in it, and what might patch everything back together.

Greetings and salutations, friends. Those of you who follow the Cataclysm forums or read either Relevart's or Graylo's blog know that we've had something of a discussion going on about how the balance rotation currently exists and how, if at all, it might or could be changed. While these two both posted up blogs on the matter last week, I had originally not wanted to bring that particular discussion up within Shifting Perspectives; however, I've had something of a change of heart. Note, the intention here is not to really bring up the interesting debate again -- for that, I would much rather direct you all to the thread on The Moonkin Repository. Instead, I'd rather bring up the theory behind the discussion.

Not too long ago, Blizzard finally activated mastery effects on the beta servers, meaning Eclipse now actually does something for a change. This has given the balance community, myself included, a bit more practicality in how we can test rotations. Previously, we could test Eclipse gains to get theoretical DPS fluctuations, but now we have some actual numbers to work with. This allows us to go into deep theories of Eclipse, such as whether or not using non-Eclipsed spells to extend the effect's duration is an effective DPS gain; however, there are still a few tweaks that need to go through, particularly reaching level 85, before anything really solid can be configured. There are things that we do know. One of those things is that our rotation is rather bland. The current incarnation of Eclipse is very mechanical, very predictable -- which is not to say that's a bad thing. It does allow for a certain level of "zoning out" while playing, though.

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Filed under: Druid

We're more than a little surprised that there's so little talk around these parts about the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. After all, players who've been around the gaming scene for very many years tend to have dabbled in card games like Magic: The Gathering. WoW itself would be a very different creation without the influence of games like MTG and the games that inspired it -- so let's talk about WoW's own collectible card game!

WoW.com is accepting article submissions from experienced WoW TCG players. What does it take to get started? What's the gameplay like? How do the loot cards tie in, and what's been available so far? Is the game part of the tournament scene? Your article will give readers who've never played WoW TCG a peek into the game and the world of card games.

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Filed under: WoW.com Business, Guest Posts

Drama Mamas Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are experienced gamers and real-life mamas -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of the checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your realm.

WoW may be both massive and multiplayer, but many of us play it like a single-player game with chat channels. In fact, there are quite a few people who use guild chat and whispers as chat rooms, getting very little playing done during some sessions. And some of us like to either play or chat, but not both. Playing without an invisibility option can be troublesome for those who tend toward hermitism. Hermitness? Hermitacity! Oh, let's just get to the letter.

Dear Drama Mamas,

As a RL introvert, I find it very hard to make friends and feel happiest when I'm on my own. (I went through several years of high school without so much as a single friend and was very happy that way!) But online is very, very different. I find it easy to be myself in guild and general chat and so on, and as a result I attract a lot of friends.

Because of this, often when I login, three to five people will whisper me at once, each expecting to carry a full-on conversation with me.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Drama Mamas

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

Good news, everyone. We've had such a good time with The Queue that we're not restricting it to just Monday through Friday anymore! If all goes well, you'll see another edition of The Queue on Saturdays and Sunday, too! Cool, right?

bui asked:

"Are there any creepy critters now that the world has been torn asunder? What made me think about the critters, you ask? Earlier today, there was a spider crawling on my face."

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, The Queue, Cataclysm

Those of you who've played other MMOs (yes, they exist) might recall a feature from City of Heroes (yes, CoH did it before EQ2) that let you temporarily level down your character to a friend's level, allowing you to do any kind of level-relevant content together. Well, guess what? Blizzard is going to let you do the same thing in a Cataclysm content patch, avoiding the type of situation you see above.

The Escapist recently interviewed Greg "Ghostcrawler" Street about Cataclysm. The article states (emphasis mine):

"Cataclysm may also eventually include a system that allows players to scale down their character's level in order to help newer players. The heirloom items unveiled in Wrath of the Lich King already scale with a character's level, so adjusting them to suit a downgraded character is already part of the design. Cataclysm will go one step further and replace individually purchased spell ranks with a scaleable system that allows a single ability to grow along with a character. Scaling down levels probably won't be possible when Cataclysm is released, but it's a feature that will be coming eventually and should help players of differing levels adventure together more easily."

We hadn't heard anything about this feature before, but it sounds great -- this way, you can play with a lowbie friend without drastically reducing his experience gain, and you'll always have something to do together. Heck, it could even pave the way for making old raids relevant again. I'm excited to see how this plays out!

Note: the Escapist article doesn't specify whether this is a direct quote from Ghostcrawler! Given that much of the rest of the article appears to be quoted, I'm assuming that it is, especially given the definite language used. Note the difference between this statement and ones about, say, player housing; "this is coming" instead of "we'd like to do this."

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World of Warcraft: Cataclysm will destroy Azeroth as we know it; nothing will be the same! In WoW.com's Guide to Cataclysm, you can find out everything you need to know about WoW's third expansion, from brand new races to revamped quests and zones. Visit our Cataclysm news category for the most recent posts having to do with the Cataclysm expansion.

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Filed under: News items, Cataclysm

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, who hurl themselves into the fray, the very teeth of danger, armed with nothing more than the biggest weapons and armored with the absolutely heaviest armor we can find. Hey, we're not stupid -- we're just crazy.

And so we come to this, the last in our report card series for warrior specs in Wrath of the Lich King. In some ways, arms warriors saw the greatest amount of changes this expansion. The addition of Taste for Blood and Sudden Death making arms a far more proc-reliant spec than it had been previously, while the improvement of Rend saw the bleed damage of the spec (already somewhat of a staple of the arms playstyle in The Burning Crusade) emphasized. Arms started off in Naxx as lower in damage but competitive with fury, while it remained a fairly dominant PvP spec (but saw a challenge to its popularity from protection by about the middle range of the expansion's life cycle) throughout. Arms' damage and raid viability saw its high point in Ulduar, and unfortunately (for me, as a PvE-specced arms warrior) then entered a slow decline that continues to this day.

I said last week, "I considered writing the arms report card instead, but considering the PvE state of arms, I just got depressed. 'Still OK for PvP' doesn't seem like enough for a column." While that's a fair statement, it is extremely oversimplified. Arms is a very solid leveling spec, as it outperforms fury until a certain gear threshold is met and requires less expertise (since Overpower, one of its bread-and-butter strikes, cannot be dodged, and arms has an expertise talent), and arms can generally be sure that Overpowers will critically hit due to the higher crit rate from Improved Overpower. Arms' main PvE limitation is based around the fact that as a bleed-heavy, proc-dependent spec that makes little use of Heroic Strike, it simply doesn't scale in the same berserk manner as fury once rage becomes less of an issue.

Let's look at what arms does well and what keeps it a potent PvP force while preventing it from matching up with fury in PvE.

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Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Wrath of the Lich King

Oh look, it's me again. Looks like Gray came down with another case of the "feelin' fuzzies." He didn't look good when I saw him this morning in the WoW.com war room. Gangly and green and that other thing, with the grossness. Anyway. I'm sure he's fine. Probably related to that fan art issue ...

Gray has entrusted me with the monumental task of a very special Moviewatch rerun of the greatest paladin machinima ever created -- How to Paladin IX. Shepiwot is basically the greatest machinamator that the community has ever seen. Paladins are in the news a lot these past few weeks, due to the cataclysmic (haw haw) changes to their class (again) so close to an expansion's release (again.)

Now, I don't fancy myself a great machinimator -- I made one once on a dare to make the worst best movie I could. Shepiwot makes my endeavor look like a children's finger painting class. Abstract, deep and thought-provoking, the How to Paladin series reaches deep into every paladin's heart and soul, revealing the motivations and machinations of truly being one with the class. When I close my eyes, I only see holy power. How to Paladin got me there. And it was good.

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at machinima@wow.com.

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Filed under: WoW Moviewatch

Every week, Gold Capped brings you tips on how to make money on the auction house. This article from inscription specialist Steve Zamboni has been brought to you by Seed, the Aol guest writer program that brings your words to WoW.com.

Almost all auction house tactics revolve around the undercut. It may be a single copper, a few silver or a few gold, or a freefall drop down to the price of materials. Regardless of the amount or the frequency, most undercuts share a common misconception: that you're controlling the market with your undercuts. You're not. Your competitor has the control. By undercutting, you've just let your competitor decide your price. You've let your competitor set a cap on your profits -- and more, you've agreed to accept even less with your undercut.

The inscription market sees more than its fair share of this, sometimes on a large scale. The low deposits encourage large number of postings, followed by even larger numbers of cancellations and repostings. Prices fall as each new poster accepts and trumps the previous poster's prices, until the market falls to the cost of materials and the walls go up. The final wall signals a complete loss of market control.

Once it's up, it no longer matters who built the wall. If it's your wall, you can't raise prices until the competition perched above you goes away. If it's not your wall, you can't raise prices on your auctions until someone breaks the wall. Stalemate, and out come the piña coladas.

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Filed under: Guest Posts, Gold Capped

Just like the more sentient species inhabiting Azeroth, fish have an option to resurrect at a spirit healer when they die, leaving behind just a skeleton. Unfortunately, to avoid aggroing higher-level creatures, half of the time the fish have to return to their bodies on land, with catastrophic results. (Thanks to Discoboogey for the screenshot!)

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Want to see your own screenshot here? Send it to aroundazeroth@wow.com. We strongly prefer full-sized pictures with no UI or names showing. Please include "Azeroth" in the subject line so your email doesn't get marked as spam, and include your name, guild and server if you want to be credited.

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Filed under: Around Azeroth