One thing that has been frustrating cloth, leather, and mail wearers for quite some time is the ability for players with a higher type of armor cherry picking through their armor. In some cases, this is due to poor itemization in the intended gear range while others are abusing gear scaling and the ability to sometimes double-dip into stats. However, this will likely stop in Cataclysm for several different reasons.

Bornakk revealed on the forums that gear will start having incentives to make you wear the appropriate type of armor. This means that holy paladins who are currently rolling on cloth and mail items will have incentives to stick to plate. What are these incentives? We don’t know. It could be as simple as something like the current gem socket bonus system or a little more complex like a percentage increase in a particular stat. This could even be a generic spec based set bonus that gave you something if completely geared in class appropriate armor. We won’t really know until more details are released.

This also comes on the heels of the post Bornakk made at the start of the thread warning that a lot of the tricks people use to eek those few extra dps through itemization will stop working in Cataclysm due to the stat overhaul. While this is technically old news, it doesn’t hurt to remind people. Attack power as a stat on armor is completely going away (with the possible exception of things like rings, necklaces, and trinkets). So, any plate damage dealers currently strutting around Dalaran in leather chaps might want to start building a second set of gear for when the expansion hits or they’ll be sorely disappointed when trying to level up to 85 using inappropriate gear.

Titles; they are cool, they are wonderful, and in a not-inconsiderable number of cases, they are very hard to get. Almost without exception, every single title in the game is also linked to an achievement. Today we’re going to examine how you can get (or, in some cases, how it was possible to get) about half of the 19 titles currently available from dungeons and raids. Next week, we’ll cover the last half, going in alphabetical order.

If you’re a skimmer, the two toughest achievements are actually at the tail end this week, and if you’re currently in Icecrown Citadel, there’s two currently-unobtainable titles that may interest you here (in addition to another set next week).

Argent Defender (requires A Tribute to Dedicated Insanity under special conditions)

Getting Argent Defender requires you to do Trial of the Grand Crusader on 10-man without padding the difficulty with 25-man gear. But that’s kind of misleading, due to the interaction of the 10-man and 25-man loot system in Tier 9. With Trophies of the Crusade available to both ToGC-10 and ToC-25, someone who’s been running ToGC-10 exclusively can wind up with a gear set that’s almost indistinguishable from (and in some cases, better than) a ToC-25 geared player.

So what on earth can you wear? Daelo, the Lead Encounter Designer, explains here.

Difficulty: If you’ve already been farming Trial of the Grand Crusader-10, the difficulty of Argent Defender lies mostly in ensuring that each member of the raid is appropriately geared. Otherwise, you just need to proceed through the instance a little more carefully, without the margin for error afforded by better gear. If you’re learning ToGC-10 from the ground up, it’s a lot harder.

Bane of the Fallen King (requires defeating the Lich King on 10-man heroic) or The Light of Dawn (requires defeating The Lich King on 25-man heroic)

These rather poetic titles are yours for the taking after you manage to defeat Arthas in ICC-10 or ICC-25 heroic. How tough is this going to be? Nobody knows. We only have a little data-mined information on what’s going to occur during the Lich King encounter, and Blizzard’s been silent otherwise.

Difficulty: Your guess is as good as mine, but it’s safe to assume that the last boss of the expansion on heroic mode is not going to be a cakewalk.

Champion of the Frozen Wastes

Champion of the Frozen Wastes is easily within every player’s grasp these days, although it was a bit tougher back when Wrath originally shipped. Getting a kill on every end-boss in Wrath heroics will happen eventually through the Dungeon Finder, and if you’re sufficiently patient, eventually Malygos and Sartharion will turn up as weekly raid quests too.

Getting a Kel’Thuzad kill will be the real sticking point, as Naxx just isn’t run that frequently these days. You should be able to convene a group of like-minded souls to scrape together a kill on some idle weekend, and I believe it’s now possible to skip most of Naxx and go directly to Frostwyrm Lair.

Difficulty: Not difficult so much as time consuming, given that tier 7 content has been outclassed by badge gear.

Champion of Ulduar (10-man) and Conqueror of Ulduar (25-man)

After the RNG nightmare that was The Immortal in tier 7, Blizzard changed the equivalent achievements in Ulduar to evaluate your “immortal” status on a boss-by-boss basis. That is, if you go through the instance with clean kills on Ignis, Razorscale, and Hodir, but lose people on Freya, Mimiron, and Thorim, your “immortal” status still counts for those first three bosses. So you’ll just need to focus on keeping people alive through any boss you don’t yet have an “immortal” on the following week, and the week/s after that if necessary.

Unfortunately, this does mean that you usually kiss any other achievements that week good-bye, because there are some achievements (like I Choose You, Steelbreaker) where people have to die, and other fights (like Firefighter) where not losing someone would be a small miracle.

Difficulty: There’s still a big heaping dose of RNG to Ulduar “immortal” achievements — it just can’t be helped if somebody goes offline on Mimiron, natch — but these are a lot more manageable than their Naxx equivalents.

Conqueror of Naxxramas (requires Realm First! Conqueror of Naxxramas)

Unless your server is really behind the times, there’s no way to get this anymore; it’s only available to people who participated in the first 25-man kill of Kel’Thuzad per server.

Difficulty: This depended a lot on the individual raid. Quite a few realms had multiple guilds already familiar with Naxxramas and able to level in Northrend with the benefit of Sunwell gear. Consequently, getting the Realm First! titles for tier 7 boss kills became a race to see who could get to 80 and field a working raid the fastest.

Death’s Demise (requires Realm First! Death’s Demise)

Yogg plus 4 keepers right now is extremely easy, especially with the benefit of badge gear. Yogg plus no keepers right now is…slightly easier than it was, but phase 3 is still a horror. Losing Freya’s Sanity Wells hurts. Losing Mimiron’s Destabilization Matrix really hurts. You’ll understand the value of Hodir’s Protective Gaze in the moments immediately following a one-shot from a Crusher Tentacle while under the effects of Malady of the Mind. But it’s losing Thorim’s Titanic Storm that turns phase 3 into an absolute screaming, gibbering nightmare, where an ever-increasing number of completely unkillable Immortal Guardians spawn and will heal Yogg unless you can get them away from him in time. If that’s not enough, you also had to beat everyone else on your server to the first kill.

On the plus side, the reward for being among the first people on your server to do this was a Lovecraftian title inspired by the famous couplet from “The Nameless City:”

That is not dead which can eternal lie,
And with strange aeons even death may die.

Difficulty: Is “absolute screaming, gibbering nightmare” not sufficiently descriptive?

Grand Crusader (requires Realm First! Grand Crusader)

Anub’arak on ToGC-25 is no joke, even now. Your raid faced (and on some realms, still faces) three difficult and time-consuming hurdles:

• Gearing a tank or tanks in what’s usually referred to as “the +block set” for Anub’arak’s adds. Bears and death knights need not apply.
• Getting everyone in the raid comfortable with kiting Anub’s spikes during phase 2 for as long as possible. You know “that guy” — the one you prayed didn’t get Shadow of Death on Teron Gorefiend, the one who couldn’t kite Doomfire on Archimonde, the guy who died on every Thaddius and Heigan kill? He’s still in your raid now. Have fun with that!
• Phase 3, where the encounter gets really hard, and your healers have mere tenths of a second to react to Penetrating Cold targets, all while keeping themselves and the raid hovering at just a sliver of health while the tanks are getting crushed under a mass of bugs.

Oh, and the fourth:

• The title was only for being the first raid on your server to get to Anub’arak with 50 attempts remaining (i.e. one-shots on all four preceding ToGC-25 bosses), and then one-shot him as well.

Difficulty: I wouldn’t necessarily rank this up there with Yogg+0, but a ToGC Anub-25 kill even under ordinary circumstances is extremely tough. The encounter is made more difficult by the fact that everyone in the raid has to be reasonably competent at kiting Anub’s spikes on phase 2, and you’re likely to have a lot of mistakes along the way. This usually limits the number of clean phase 3 attempts you see, which means the healers don’t always have an opportunity to get experience with the most difficult phase of the fight. Unfortunately, the learning curve just restarts with every new person brought to the encounter.

Last Week: Resource mechanics in arena, part I. Last week, we considered rage, energy, and its green-headed stepchild focus. Our discussion revealed rage to be a mixed bag in most situations, while energy/combo points had many more benefits than detriments. Focus, basically, is slower energy without combo points.

This Week: We’ll be talking about the death knight resource system (runes/runic power), and mana for dps casters. Why not healers? Read on after the break to find out!

Disclaimer: This column is about arena PvP. Even though the author has extensive raiding, soloing, and battleground experience, this article has the perspective of a gladiator. The benefits and detriments described therein prescribe to these conditions, as they would be quite different in other scenarios. In short, if you’re going to write a comment about how an ability or resource is different in another area of the game, you’re not doing (reading) it right.

WoW’s death knight rune system borrows heavily from rage, energy, and combo points. When we understand this, we can more easily comprehend the benefits and detriments of runes and runic power.

Runes

A rune bar isn’t unique, it’s just a complex energy system. Runes replenish over time, just like our well-known yellow bar — so we get most of the benefits of energy: infinite, replenishes while crowd controlled, etc. We can save our runes by not using global cooldowns to create burst with a rune dump as well.

Runes, however, are far more complex than energy. Runes come in three different flavors. There are two of each kind of rune. Certain spells cost only one rune of a certain type. Other abilities cost two or three different runes. On top of this, death knights get certain talents that turn runes into death runes, which can be used as any type. Confusing? Compared to the other resources, definitely.

Runic Power

Runic power is something in-between rage and combo points and is much more unique. A class could actually be built using nothing but runic power, even though it would be boring.

Runic power starts at zero, just like rage. It also slowly deteriorates over time. However, unlike rage, runic power does not scale based on how much damage the death knight generates or absorbs.

We have two different kinds of abilities — ones that generate runic power (builders), and abilities which use the runic power that has been generated (finishers). This is starting to seem a lot like combo points.

In essence, the death knight is running around with a complex energy bar (runes) and a really whacked out rage bar / combo point system (runic power). This combo-point-rage-bar, however, is pretty awesome because it allows the death knight to use it gradually. Combo points have to be used all at once, and drop completely if you begin to use builders on something else. Also, if you want, you can use it like a damage dump and store it all to burn through when your runes are regenerating.

It’s pretty much the best of all worlds.

There is a downside. Compared to the other resource mechanics, the rune system requires a lot of diligence and attention. There’s a lot going on with that resource system. Six runes of three different types which can occasionally turn into runes of any type — on top of a blue bar that works completely differently. Wow.

A benefit of PvPing as a death knight is that your opponents don’t know what runes you have available. Our very own Zach Yonzon talks about the finer points to defeating opposing death knights in this week’s edition of The Art of War(craft). Check it out if you’d like to read more.

Pros: All the great parts of energy, rage, and combo points. Opponents don’t know what runes you have available.

Cons: Exceptionally needy for attention.

Mana

Mana is the only resource mechanic available to healers. We won’t be talking about healers in this article (they all use the same resource system, and it’s probably the best one for balance concerns). Healers need to go oom. Mana Burn needs to be an effective spell and strategy — if healers never went oom, many or most of our games might go to the 45 minute mark.

Other games have had healers use other mechanics, so the possibility to see an energy-based healer exists if WoW decides to go that path for a future hero class. We won’t be discussing those implications today — perhaps another time. Keep in mind that we’ll be talking about dps in arena that uses mana.

Compared to energy (2), rage (2), rune system (1), and focus (0 — 1/2 if you count hunter pets), lots of dps classes in arena use mana (7). In no short order:

1. Priests
2. Warlocks
3. Mages
4. Druids (balance)
5. Hunters
6. Shamans
7. Paladins

Mana is without a doubt the worst resource mechanic in arena PvP. Eevery class listed above has to sacrifice something in order to get their resource back, with one exception.

Hunters have to sacrifice damage with Aspect of the Viper. 50% reduced damage? Seriously? When’s the last time you saw a death knight cut his damage in half to get back some runes?

Mages have to sacrifice time and damage with Evocation. The spell is also on a long cooldown, has a long cast time, and can be interrupted. Rogues don’t sit back and channel Adrenaline Rush. While Mana Gems have helped mages considerably, the casters still suffer in long games.

Warlocks might have it worst of all. Not only do they have to sacrifice time and damage (lots of globals), but health too (Life Tap)! Warlocks actually help their healers go oom. Warriors would be furious if they dropped in health every time they generated rage. (Yes, I know about Bloodrage — the ability is there to serve in times of rage lull, not a default way for a warrior to generate their resource like Life Tap).

Innervate can be dispelled (and costs a global). Mana Spring Totem can be killed. Water Shield replaces a more effective alternative and the shaman still goes oom frequently. Shadowfiends can be kited or killed. Dispersion makes it so the priest can’t attack or cast spells. Oh, and each of those abilities take time to cast and most of them are on fairly long cooldowns. You can fill in the other stuff I haven’t mentioned, there’s plenty to go around.

Dps classes that use mana are completely useless once they go oom. A mage without mana and no way to regain it is as good as dead. “Drain teams” in The Burning Crusade would often drain the mana of opposing spell dps, correctly realizing that once their mana is gone, your match has devolved into a 5v4.

So, with that said, let’s talk about the single exception to the rule.

Retribution paladins have a ridiculously easy time getting mana back and don’t sacrifice anything. A normal rotation allows them to have ample mana to do lots of damage (as well as other utility). Thank you, Judgements of the Wise. If they absolutely need to, they can sacrifice something for a short period of time by casting Divine Plea, switching to Judgement of Wisdom, or even Seal of Wisdom — but such a case is rare.

The retribution model is fantastic, it’d be nice to see something like it on the other dps specs on mana classes in Cataclysm.

Pros: Least attention-based…until you get low.

Cons: All your best abilities have long cooldowns. You’re also constantly on global cooldown. The possibility exists of becoming completely useless (oom). All mana users except retribution paladins need to sacrifice something to get mana back. Opposing teams have abilities to decrease your resource mechanic (Viper Sting, Drain Mana, Mana Burn).

Next Week

We’ll probably be getting back to our arena guide for beginners! We got a tip through our tipline that Blood Sport should define some terms (great suggestion). I’ll probably be preparing a glossary for us to look at. Take care until then, and enjoy the new arena season.

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.

This is usually the part where I try to be funny and write an eye-grabbing intro to The Queue. Today, that goes right out the window. Why? Because I’m busy. Busy doing what, you ask? Picking our new columnists! We have some good ones this time around, folks. Keep an eye out.

Anonymoose asked…

“Why does Keristrasza always yell “Preserve? Why? There’s no truth in it! No, no, no!” whenever you engage? How is it relevant, lore-wise, to anything we did for the Red Dragonflight in and around the Nexus? Why is she frozen there in the first place?”

Go to Coldarra in Borean Tundra and do all of the quests. That area explains everything that happens in the Nexus and Oculus. If you don’t do them, you’re doing yourself a disservice. I won’t spoil it, because it’s a really interesting questline.

Task asked…

“I just went to www.wow.com on my iPhone. It immediately changed the address to i.wow.com, does this mean what I think it means?”

Possibly. It seems to be functioning (and a little more intelligently than it was originally) but before we make a real, official announcement that it’s working again, we want to touch base with our techs/designers to make sure they’re done tinkering. So go ahead, feel free to use it, but don’t be surprised if it randomly stops working again. We’re not completely sure it’s “done” yet. When we are, we’ll put up a post letting everyone know.

Many asked…

“When are the Creative headsets we won coming?”

When Creative releases the product. The ball is in their court on that one.

Dameblance asked…

“Has Blizzard ever had any idea’s/plans about customizing the way gear looks on female characters? With some of my characters I don’t mind the soft-porn look of gear, but for instance my female dwarfs and tauren look totally ridiculous in the unavoidable bikini-and-thong designs of some armor. Would be nice if you were able to choose between the male and female look of any given item.”

Yes, I’m answering this question again, since people weren’t happy with the answer Adam supplied yesterday. My answer is: There’s no reason for them to make this happen, because I haven’t run into a single piece of armor that causes this in a couple of years, and all of my characters are female. The worst thing they do with armor these days is maybe midriff or a little cleavage. Sure, the cleavage is silly, but it’s a far cry from the days of bikini-and-thong. If you’re running into that problem, I assume you’re either in your 50s or managed to land the one really absurd piece of cloth armor in Outland that shows off endless leg. And booty, I suppose. You can’t forget the booty. Level up a little and it will all go away. I don’t think there’s a single piece of armor in Northrend like this, and the last time you see it is if you pick up an unlucky green in Outland.

I’m a guy in real life, and I play female characters. I can say with pride that I’ve managed to avoid this issue on every single one of those characters. If I’m not happy with the midriff on my badass female paladin, I put on a tabard. She’s an ironclad juggernaut. She has never worn a plate thong. It’s simply never been necessary, it’s completely avoidable. +1 Strength on a green isn’t worth wearing a plate thong when you’re level 52. Just skip it, and you’ll most likely never run into that problem again unless you specifically seek it out.

WoW is pretty good about dodging the ridiculousness of the plate thong. There were a few that plagued vanilla WoW but that’s about the extent of it. Exposed belly button is about as bad as it gets these days.

The latest buzz out of Hollywood is that the fourth installment of the Spider-Man movie franchise has hit a snag. Director Sam Raimi is apparently in the midst of some major creative differences with Sony Pictures executives over the script and the villain lineup. A little bit of drama in Hollywood is nothing new, of course, but in this case its become bad enough to delay the movie, with the May 6th, 2011 release date now in serious doubt.

But what does this have to do with WoW, you ask? As you may recall, Raimi has also been tapped by Blizzard to direct the upcoming Warcraft movie. While the Warcraft movie is still in the very early stages of production, to the point where we have almost no idea of the details beyond the fact that Sam Raimi is the director, the fact remains that you need a director to make a decent movie.

So now that Sam Raimi is tied up with script disputes in Spider-Man 4, what happens with the Warcraft movie? As you might imagine, rumors and speculation abound. Gamespot believes that this will simply push the Warcraft movie back a few more months, as current scuttlebutt suggests the Spider-Man movie will be pushed back to Summer 2011. Blizzplanet’s Medievaldragon is a bit more hopeful, suggesting that Raimi will perhaps decide to work on Warcraft instead while Spider-Man 4′s script is rewritten to solve the dispute.

Part of the problem with speculating too much on all of this is that we still know so little about the Warcraft movie itself. All we can really say for sure is that Sam Raimi will direct it and Legendary Pictures will produce it. We’ve heard only the vaguest rumors of a script, and certainly there’s been only very basic rumors on casting news. In this vein, I actually think that speaks better for Gamespot’s theory than Medievaldragon’s. If the other pieces are not in place, Sam Raimi won’t have anything to direct, after all. For all we know, they haven’t even slated actual shooting to begin yet. Besides, Sony’s probably not going to let Spider-Man sink so easily. Raimi’s probably going to be tied up for a while.

Still, regardless of all that, you know I’m all for Raimi dropping the Spider-Man movie and heading into the Warcraft movie. Don’t get me wrong, Spider-Man was a boyhood hero and all, but I’m more of a Lantern man these days, and I’ll give up either for some good old fashioned Humans vs. Orcs.

Regardless of what happens, stay tuned here. The minute all this Warcraft movie buzz consolidates into something solid, you’ll hear about it on WoW.com.

Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we discuss how a few stats interact with various rogue specs.

Have you ever had a problem finding a group as a rogue? My own rogue isn’t immune to this issue, and I sometimes find myself without a raid group on a Saturday night. The rogue population has been steadily growing since its sharp decline right after the launch of Wrath, and that means increased competition for the coveted melee DPS raid slots. With the plentiful bounty of Death Knights and Ret Paladins vying for the three different two-hand weapons that drop from just the first 4 bosses of ICC10 and ICC25, it can be tough finding your place.

However, with hard work and good performance, most raid leaders will see the value in bringing back quality DPS. To ensure that you’re on the reinvite list, doing as much damage as possible will leave the most tangible evidence of your efforts (as well as being your overarching goal). Sometimes this means doing more with less, and using the gear you have to its highest potential before you’re able to reap the benefits of the great 251/264 epics that you’re working towards.

Your rotation:

Due to the uneven scaling of every ability (as no ability functions exactly the same as another), it’s truly impossible to know what the best rotation for any given rogue may be. Each case must be examined individually to see if the stats are above or below certain ‘decision thresholds’. This has been evident as we see Combat rogues nearing the armor penetration soft cap dropping Rupture from their rotation, as well as Mutilate rogues dropping Rupture to bring about higher Envenom buff uptime. The fact is that without the proper gear to support armor penetration, dropping Rupture from your rotation may very well be a DPS loss.

A rogue-playing friend of mine recently reactivated his account, and is sporting 4/5 Tier 8 with nearly no armor penetration on his gear and agility gems in every slot. He had been reading on Elitist Jerks that Ruptureless was the new favorite rotation and whether or not he should take his points out of Blood Spatter and Relentless Strikes. I worked with him to explain that due to his particular gear setup, agility and rupture were more valuable to him than a rogue in full ArP gear with an ArP proc trinket. What’s good for one rogue may not be good for another, and so knowing which stats benefit you the most will ensure you make intelligent gear choices.

Haste:

For rogues, haste is essentially a split between a white/poison damage boost and an energy regeneration bonus. Haste gives you more white swings, which in turn gives you more poison procs, making it very valuable for Mutilate’s poison-centric damage model. It also yields more Focused Attacks and Combat Potency procs, making it the only stat to boost your energy production. Because both Combat and Mutilate value energy in different ways, there is again a difference in value for each spec.

It’s not a bad stat for either, but Mutilate typically sees the greater benefit from energy-based attacks. On a recent Saurfang fight in ICC25, my Combat rogue had about 26% of his damage coming from energy-based attacks (Sinister Strike and Eviscerate), while a similarly-geared Mutilate rogue saw 30% of his damage from Mutilate mixed with Envenom, which did not include the bonus Instant / Deadly procs he saw from the Envenom buff. I won’t shy away from haste, and I recently purchased the Herkuml War Token, but I also realize that haste is not my ‘favorite’ stat.

Armor Penetration:

Armor Penetration can be a confusing stat, because its value rises as you stack more and more of it. The damage bonus you see when moving from 5% to 10% ArP is nowhere near the damage bonus you see when you move from 95% to 100%. Due to this scaling mechanic, you almost want to avoid Armor Penetration on your gear until you have a gear set which would bring you close to the soft cap (including an Armor Pen trinket), and then switch all of your gems at once.
In addition, Combat sees a much higher gain from Armor Penetration than Mutilate can expect. My Combat rogue deals about 70% physical damage, meaning 70% of everything I do is affected by Armor Penetration. A Mutilate rogue, on the other hand, will only see about 45% of their damage coming from melee attacks. Because Armor Penetration benefits a Combat rogue, they are also more likely to have a higher ArP value, further pushing ArP towards Combat and away from the Haste-loving Mutilate builds.

One trinket to rule them all:

Enter Deathbringer’s Will, which is the very fun trinket that Saurfang25 drops if you can topple him. With 155 Armor Penetration on the trinket as a passive boost, Combat Rogues (along with Blood Death Knights, Warriors, Feral Druids, and Marksman Hunters) will be salivating immediately. Every once in a while you’ll have a brain-dead Ret paladin (is that redundant?) try rolling on it, which should be quickly squashed by the true physical DPS classes quickly.

Clearly it benefits a Combat rogue’s 70% physical damage more than a Mutilate rogue who would see it affect less than half his damage, but it even gets worse. The random procs are different based on the class you’re playing, and for Rogues, ArP is one of the possible options. An ArP passive with a possible ArP proc is not very valuable to a Mutilate rogue at all, while it’s Combat rogue Heaven. The other two rogue procs, AP and Agility, are fairly vanilla and are great for both specs (as long as the Mutilate rogue is avoiding the crit cap).

It was discovered that Death Knights actually receive different procs based on their spec. A Blood DK, which does largely physical damage, scores ArP from the proc. An Unholy DK, who’s damage is mostly magical, gains the better stat for Unholy: Haste. Why doesn’t it work this way for Mutilate? Haste for Mutilate and Armor Penetration for Combat would be the best of both worlds, even if the passive boost is slightly lackluster for a Mutilate build. This idea was brought up on the Damage Dealing role forums, and apparently is actually going to be looked at and possible revised!

Conclusion:

Knowing which stats are valuable to your class AND spec, and knowing how to balance those stats around caps and minimums becomes a large part of a raiding rogue’s required knowledge. You’re not alone in this, every rogue will struggle with this at some point in their lifetime. Consult a spreadsheet first for guidance, make decisions based on your gear on hand instead of what works for the best geared rogues in the game. Especially for the rogues who are just starting at 80: make sure you’re looking at what’s best for YOU instead of a general plan for every rogue. Knowing what you’re doing at every gearing level will provide you with the best damage results you can achieve, which is like an upgrade in itself!

Holy Toledo, this has got to be the most effort I’ve ever seen anyone put into an Around Azeroth submission. Wikiwand of <Hellions> on Cenarion Circle wrote the following Shakespearean parody to accompany this screenshot from the Undercity:

Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wow.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, Val’kyr on mounts, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran. Older screenshots can be found here.

2009 was a pretty good year for machinima. We saw some new work, new artists, and new ideas hit the WoW movie scene. We even saw the resurgence of some friendly old faces, as well as the completion of a few legendary projects. This was a transformative year in many ways, and I’m excited to see what might come around as a result in 2010.

What follows behind the cut are about 10 memorable movies from 2009. They are in no particular order. Since so much is in the eye of the beholder, I didn’t even try and consider a “best of” list for 2009 machinima. There’s no doubt important movies that aren’t on the list, so I’m not even saying these are the 10 most important. These are just 10 movies (and creators) who have stood out in the minds of WoW.com’s team of crack journalists.

One of the things that jumps out at me while reviewing September is that it was a fantastic month for Moviewatch. Apart from that players were occupied with the new version of Onyxia, the Argent Coliseum, still discussing some questions raised by BlizzCon, and arguing over whether Garrosh was a jerk or what.

WoW Moviewatch: Warrior’s Dream: My nomination for the best Moviewatch of the year. A lovely film, well-made, beautifully scored, and it crammed a thoughtful story (and insight concerning the sometimes-uncomfortable perspective on ourselves granted by nightmares) into 5 minutes.

Faction change service now available: A feature players had been wondering about getting for years suddenly went live. Did things go crazy? Maybe a little.

A critical examination of Garrosh Hellscream: Garrosh, as we’d previously observed, is not among the more well-received NPCs these days. Rossi asks — how did this guy go from the demoralized Orc we see in Nagrand to the arrogant jerk we find in Northrend?

Ask a Faction Leader: Garrosh Hellscream: On the subject of Garrosh, personally I found this AAFL to be among the funniest in the series. If that whole Warchief bid doesn’t work out for him, Garrosh has a bright future as an interior designer.

Yogg-Saron in blues: A sterling rebuttal to the idea that epics make the player.

Conclusions from the WoW.com faction transfer survey: We’ve heard (unofficially, of course) that our reader polls tend to be a fairly accurate gloss on numbers Blizzard sees internally, and we decided to ask readers if they’d used the new faction change service and (if so) what they’d done.

12 reasons why you don’t want to play a priest: Matt Low turns a critical eye to his beloved class and admits — not all is rosy.

WoW Moviewatch: Ulduar: Defiance: We’d really been impressed by the trailer, and Atraira delivered.

Drama Mamas: My GM is a succubus: Fascinating Drama Mamas about a GM unwittingly destroying her own guild, but guaranteed to enrage you if you’re a female player who hates her attention-ho counterparts.

Additional instances can now be launched: One of the headaches plaguing Wrath has been overcrowded instance servers — or, more accurately, Blizzard’s efforts to keep them from being overcrowded by limiting the number of people who can occupy them at one time. By September, they’d completed a long, arduous process upgrading the servers to reduce the odds of the dreaded “Additional instances cannot be launched” message from appearing.

Why Blizzard should make authenticators mandatory on Battle.net accounts: A strong argument for more widespread use of authenticators, which would not only cut down on the stress experienced by Blizzard’s customer support, but would also reap benefits for players (in addition to the near-immunity to account hacking) in the form of faster tickets. Waits for a Game Master these days number in the days-to-weeks, and it’s almost entirely due to the number of compromised accounts.

WoW Moviewatch: How to win at PvP: Wowcrendor hits battlegrounds, Wintergrasp, and arena with hilarious results.

Ready Check: Onyxia: Rossi, an old hand at the original Onyxia, faces her later incarnation and returns to school readers on why standing in front of her is only for the quick or the dead.

WoW Moviewatch: Quest: Impossible: One of the most polished and well-made 2009 Moviewatch features.

The Queue: Trinket-palooza 2009: A lot of people had fun with this edition of the Queue, where we listed raid trinkets from the classic game that you might still get some use from at 80.

The Colosseum: A basic guide to the Arena rating system: The rating system for arena is a pain in the ass to navigate. Michael Gray walks you through it.