World of Warcraft Gold Guide

Every Wednesday, Fox Van Allen uses his dark, shadowy powers to take the reins of Spiritual Guidance, causing severe harm to others in the form of large, yellow five-digit numbers. Holy and disc brethren, alike — come join the dark side before his shadowfiend eats you. Fact: Priests are pretty much awesome. It’s because we’re versatile. We can DPS the living snot out of Lord Marrowgar in shadow, and then change to discipline so we can cover the raid in Power Word: Shields and Renews for Deathbringer Saurfang. Heck, we can even do both. We’re just that awesome. But awesomeness comes at a price, my friends, and that price is called the hybrid tax. It’s the term commonly used to explain why our DPS is designed to lag behind that of mages, warlocks, hunters, and rogues — the pure DPS classes. If you’re a jack of all trades, you’re supposed to be a master of none. (It’s cool though, they need the handout. It really sucks not being a Priest.) We can be forgiven, though, for looking at Recount or a World of Logs parse and thinking that whatever the hybrid tax is, it’s just way too high. But is it really? Are we finally doing

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With the Light as his strength, Gregg Reece of The Light and How to Swing It faces down the demons of the Burning Legion, the undead of the Scourge, and helps with the puppet shows at the Argent Ren Faire up in Icecrown. A quick service announcement: We will be moving The Light and How to Swing It over to Thursdays. We’ll still have the weekend spot as well. How are we doing this you might ask? Chase Christian will be doing a holy paladin only version of TLaHtSI during the weekends with my coverage of retribution and protection on Thursdays. A looting we will go. A looting we will go. Hi-ho the merry-oh, a looting we will go. This week, we’re delving into the geist filled section known as the Plagueworks. Precious and Stinky aren’t technically bosses, but they’re still fun little encounters, so I figured I’d give at least one of the puppies center stage in today’s header. Last week, we looted our way through the lower spire in Icecrown if you want to go back and take a look. Otherwise, onto the loots! Festergut’s innards Spread out, don’t blow up, jump on spores, and spread out again. Oh, and for the love of all that is sacred and

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Welcome to Pimp My Profile, the column in which the WoW.com staff turns zeroes into heroes. Don’t think you’re performing where you should be? Not sure how your class/spec is supposed to be gearing up? E-mail us with your Armory link, and you might be next to receive our help! Hi, I’m 80 and I’ve been so for weeks. I’ve been running random heroics for gear and I followed your guides for my pet specs (though I think I messed up on my Tenacity). My DPS barely cracks 1000. As far as I know, as a hunter, there is almost no excuse for this. Please help me. -Shippleton Thanks for writing in, Shippleton. You are wise enough to understand that your DPS is lower than it should be and intelligent enough to ask questions. It seems likely that you are also uncommonly good-looking, a trait shared by most hunters. You are to be applauded for taking the first step down the road to becoming a death dealer, which is the right of every hunter! Right off the bat 1k DPS seems sufficiently low that I suspect we should be taking a look at your shot rotation as well as your talents and gear. In the interest of science I went ahead and ran Utgarde Pinnacle heroic with some

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Balance druid performance has been noticeably lagging in raids. While moonkin have long had a problem being too easily +haste-capped with Wrath, there’s another issue on the not-too-distant horizon in the form of the “lunar +crit cap.” Essentially, when a lunar eclipse procs and the player turns to the Starfire portion of the rotation, the combination of raid buffs, gear, and procs make Starfire crits all but inevitable. While this may sound like a welcome DPS increase, it does have the unhappy result of the spec seeing increasingly less benefit from the +haste and +crit that exists in abundance on Icecrown raid gear. Blizzard has known about this for a while, but the issue with Nature’s Grace and the soft +haste cap isn’t easily fixable without impacting both Restoration and Starfire (where the NG proc is still useful), and the +crit cap is the effect of unintended stat inflation in Wrath. Enter Zarhym on Wednesday to announce news of a possible change to the Earth and Moon talent in a future mini-patch, granting 2/4/6% spell damage to the moonkin, up from 1/2/3%. While this isn’t set in stone (and Balance players are already aware that an

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Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all-things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com’s arena column. Listening Music: Home Video’s “You Will Know What to Do.” The video is some sweet NASA footage; try to not be mesmerized by it (difficult, I confess). When I first heard Home Video a few years ago (Citizen EP, We and In a Submarine), I thought the band might be a Thom Yorke solo project. That’s high praise from me. These guys do not disappoint. Last Week: Part V of our Beginner’s Guide to Arena. After featuring some Miles Davis and John Coltrane, we talked a bit about some of the aspects skilled arena damage-dealers excel with. This Week: We’ll be shifting gears a bit this week. Protection warriors are an important (and hot) topic within the arena community. I was thinking about publishing this article as a stand-alone and continuing the arena guide this week, but I’ve just been a tad bit too busy

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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. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. Somewhere along the line, I’ve picked up this habit of discussing games I’ve been playing (besides WoW) as my introduction to The Queue. It doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s fun. Unfortunately, I’m currently playing Bayonetta and I’m not sure I can really talk about that one here. Just look it up on Youtube, you’ll know what I’m talking about. Now before I shame myself any more, let’s get to the Q&A. Reuben asked… “How does the disenchanting option work? I find that sometimes I can choose disenchant, and other times I can’t. What determines the availability of that option?” You need an enchanter of appropriate skill in your party to disenchant things. If you have no enchanter at all, you can’t disenchant anything. If you have an enchanter that hasn’t finished leveling the tradeskill, you might be able to disenchant greens but not blues or epics. If they have skilled it up high enough, you’ll be able

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Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all-things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com’s arena column. Listening Music: Miles Davis and John Coltrane’s beautiful “So What.” We featured the Smashing Pumpkins last week. This week, we’ll be shifting gears to some brilliant jazz. You have to love the diversity Blood Sport offers in pwning music. Last Week: Part IV of our Arena Guide for Beginners. We talked about the marks of a skilled healer inside an arena battle. This Week: Not surprisingly, today’s article will be structured in a very similar fashion to our last for our bloodthirsty DPS readers. More after the break! Categories There are three fundamental marks of an amazing damage dealer in any bracket (we’ll talk about which ones are of greater importance in different brackets later — but for now, discussing and working on all areas of play is best). Pressure Burst Crowd Control As mentioned in our

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors this week goes back to Icecrown Citadel to discuss the last two currently accessible encounters, the Gunship Battle and Deathbringer. Matt Rossi kind of wishes the Deathbringer fight was just against a great big talking axe. We don’t have enough boss fights with inanimate objects. Okay, so you’ve done the first two bosses in the place. Now what? Well, now you launch yourself via poorly designed goblin explosives between flying boats and you fight the son of possibly the greatest living warrior on the face of Azeroth. And then if you’re Alliance you turn the whole thing over to a gnome with a frying pan and go raid Trial of the Grand Crusader for another week, I guess. Horde are presumably too clever to trust the opening of Icecrown to breakfast technology. Or too hungry. At any rate you’re stuck with the same content as the rest of us. So let’s get on with it, shall we? Gunship Battle I want you to go listen to this song now. The part where they’re on the chairs? That’s the Gunship Battle. What? You want more detail than that? Come on! Just imagine yelling GUNSHIP BATTLE instead of Mortal Kombat.

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October, as with August, was mostly a lot of news reporting. The patch 3.3 PTR dropped on October 1st and everyone went nuts for the last (we think) major content patch of Wrath of the Lich King. Next up? The content patch heralding the approach of Cataclysm, but with a lot of gated content between ourselves and that, we’ve got a ways to go. Ask a Faction Leader: Cairne Bloodhoof: Among all the AAFL columns he’s done so far, Sacco’s personal favorite is Cairne. Spiritual Guidance: Don’t be that priest: Matt Low not-so-gently lectures his fellow priests on the failings to which the class is prone while not paying attention or entering an encounter unprepared. Searching for the most popular server: Schramm takes a look at some data and wonders — what’s the busiest and/or most crowded server out there? Patch 3.3 PTR: New Tauren skins found: So what are those things anyway? A new set of NPCs for Icecrown? A new barbershop option? Tribal markings for the Grimtotem? Chill of the Throne: Dodge nerfed 20% in Icecrown Citadel: The debuff is quickly termed “Icewell Radiance” by disgruntled tanks everywhere. Patch 3.3 PTR: Forge of

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Two Bosses Enter … but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com’s series of fantasy death matches. Welcome to the last match of the current round of the five-man Wrath of the Lich King season. Grab a seat, and let’s get ready to rumble! Here we are at the end of our current bracket … And what a fight this last one will be! Bring your earplugs, because we suspect this fight’s going to be on the loud side: Skadi the Ruthless versus Svala Sorrowgrave. The two Utgarde Pinnacle residents step into the Two Bosses Thunderdome with nearly identical seeding. Skadi took out the venerable General Bjarngrim with 56% spectator approval, while Svala sacrificed Salramm the Fleshcrafter with 57% of the vote. Let’s review the ground rules: Why don’t we drag Svala’s altar around the corner into Skadi’s hall? As always, we’ll consider the Two Bosses Thunderdome neutral territory, where both combatants are able to access their usual encounter mechanics and abilities. If you can come up with a stylish way to do that in the comments, you may earn more votes for your chosen victor. All of the competitors’ abilities, including crowd control

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