Now, as you might imagine, this quest is difficult for the Horde to do since they can’t buy the feed (Plus, it looks like the Horde can no longer get the quest at all, according to some), but there is a solution. If you’re on a PvE server (or know someone who can make alliance characters on your PvP server), you can have a friend (or your second account) create an Alliance character (even a level 1 can get the quest) and run it out to Saldean’s farm. They can do the quest, and when the egg appears on the ground, you can loot it to grab the egg for yourself.

If you’re new to the world of pet collecting, or have just dabbled in it so far though, you may be struggling a bit to get those last few pets for the achievement. In the spirit of helping out my fellow pet enthusiasts, here’s a few rarer or lesser known old world pets that you might have overlooked, especially if you started the game after Burning Crusade. Read the rest of this entry »

This week’s article examines the Arachnid Quarter, and we’ll be visiting the other quarters in upcoming articles. We’ll look at each boss on both normal and heroic modes, pointing out the differences (beyond HP increases). Generally, if you’ve defeated the boss on normal mode, there are only minor changes to adapt to on heroic mode (and vice versa).

Today we’ll be looking at a blast from the past, revisiting Naxxramas and providing details on the boss encounters that await those brave enough to enter the dread citadel. For those of you who haven’t had a chance to look inside the all-new Naxx, here’s your spoiler warning: look away now if you don’t want to hear about what’s in store.

Anub’Rekhan

This crypt lord is the first resident of the Arachnid Quarter, and there are no special achievements linked to him. The challenging part of the fight involves avoiding his Locust Swarm ability — you also need to handle his adds, and spread out to minimise Impale.

Locust Swarm is cast at some point after 80 seconds, but isn’t on a fixed timer, so your raid (especially the main tank) have to be awake and react when Anub’rekhan starts to cast it. The swarm lasts for 20 seconds, and any player within 30 yards of the boss becomes afflicted with the Locust Swarm debuff which not only prevents all abilities from being used, but also applies a stacking DoT. Therefore, until the swarm ends, the raid needs to move away from the boss and outrange it, while the tank also runs away from the boss. Anub’rekhan is slowed by Locust Swarm and so can be kited along the outer edge of the room — a hunter’s Aspect of the Pack, or other speed-increasing effects, can help here but aren’t necessary.

Anub’Rekhan also summons Crypt Guard adds (additionally, on heroic, he starts with two adds) occasionally throughout the fight. These cleave, apply a stacking DoT and frenzy, so they do need a plate or fur tank of some sort. As a crypt fiend spawns at the start of Locust Swarm, a good approach is to tank them on the opposite side from the kiting tank’s path. As well as the large Crypt Fiend adds, occasionally Anub’Rekhan will summon corpse scarabs from a nearby corpse. These simply need to be AoEd down quickly. Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we went over some of the new Wrath factions and the rewards they offer for Mages. If you missed that first part, you can find it here. As quite a few of you pointed out in the comments, the stuff from those factions was a bit…underwhelming. Fear not, fellow Mages, the best is yet to come. This week, we’ll hit the rest of the new expansion’s reputation rewards and highlight those that you’ll want to start grinding for now, if you haven’t already started.

So I assume that you’re all about sick of leftover turkey at this point (at least, those of you who happen to live in America, I guess), and are ready for a heaping helping of something…Magier. Fear not, for Arcane Brilliance is here to serve a steaming pile of Mage directly to you. If you top it with enough gravy, it tastes pretty good.

Knights of the Ebon Blade

Though this faction is made up of rogue Death Knights, they have a couple of surprisingly Mage-friendly reputation rewards for sale. You’ll find their quartermaster in Icecrown, at the Shadow Vault.

Dark Soldier Cape Available at level 78 and honored, this cloak is quite respectable. It has everything you want, and nothing you don’t. Plus, I think it looks cool. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve had a Warlock main for the ~4 years I’ve been playing WoW and so I’m used to playing a DPS role in raids. With the new expansion I want to start a shaman healer but the concept of keeping track of what totems are up, who to heal, which heals to use, etc. is confusing to me, is there anyway to ease the transition of being the DPS to healing the raid?

The biggest thing to ease the transition is mods, so I hope you’re not against addons. For Shaman specific abilities, TotemTimers is your bread and butter. It makes all of your cooldowns, timers, elemental shields, all of that really easy to watch and organize.

For general Healing use, try out Grid and Clique if you don’t mind investing a little time into your mods. They’re kind of annoying to figure out and set up, but once you do the Healing experience becomes much more enjoyable. As for what heals to use, just do some reading. It’s all situational, though Chain Heal is your bread and butter heal as a Resto Shaman, it’s your biggest strength.

To make the transition from DPS to Healer easier, just imagine you’re DPSing your friend. Instead of their health going from right to left, you need to make it go from left to right. Read the rest of this entry »

Argent Dawn appears to be in the worst shape, as Blizzard is sending players from that realm onto three different realms. Magtheridon seems to be the least busy — all they’re transferring off there is the Horde-side players. They’re also transferring players off of a few different realms to the newly-created one, Chamber of Aspects, so if you’re looking for a new start, there you go to buy cheap wow gold.

We’re just now coming out of our Thanksgiving turkey-induced haze here at WoW Insider, so if you’ve seen this already, forgive us, but Blizzard announced late last week that there’s relief on the way for EU characters tied up by queues — they’ve got a whole mess of free migrations in the mix. We’ve got the whole list of transfers after the break as well.

These migrations are going until December 2nd, so now’s your chance, EU players, if you’re on the selected realms and have been waiting to jump ship.

Magtheridon (Horde only) => Zenedar, Haomarush
Neptulon => Ahn’Qiraj, Daggerspine
Outland => Bladefist, Karazhan
Ravencrest => Burning Blade, Deathwing
Sylvanas => Auchindoun, Lightning’s Blade
Twilight’s Hammer => Auchindoun, Lightning’s Blade

Al’Akir => Dentarg, Xavius
Argent Dawn => Darkmoon Faire, Steamwheedle Cartel, The Sha’tar
Burning Legion => Ahn’Qiraj, Daggerspine
Crushridge => Bladefist, Karazhan
Drak’thul => Burning Blade, Deathwing
Grim Batol => Dentarg, Xavius

Training and leveling
While leveling your skill, I recommend staying in the two starting zones, the Borean Tundra and the Howling Fjord. Despite the fact that they are still somewhat crowded, the volume of herb spawns is high, and the difficulty of reaching each mob will be lessened by the fact that the mobs are in the high sixties.

If you press on into Dragonblight, be aware that the frozen herb nodes will yield a random herb, and rarely ever gives more than one. Still, it only takes one for a skill point!

In fact, you will also find your trainer in the starting zones. For the Horde, Marjory Kains resides in Vengeance Landing, and will teach you all that you need to know. If you find yourself in the Borean Tundra, then search the second level of Warsong Hold, behind the stairs, for Tansy Wildmane.

Alliance members in the Howling Fjord should seek out Fayin Whisperleaf in Valgarde near the Inn. If in the Borean Tundra, pay a visit to Kirea Moondancer in Valiance Keep. Read the rest of this entry »

Cool to see that it’s working so well. The site lets you upload screenshots of your character, and then pulls Armory data (including gems, enchants, and set item bonuses) out into the page as well. We’ll have to see, too, if Aaron is able to implement the new Achievement and stat info — maybe you’ll be able to chart your character’s gold or achievements over time.

Finally, Aaron says that he is working on support for alts and thinking about setting up “path of a guild”-type features, so you can track not only a character’s progress, but a guild’s progress as well. Definitely a cool idea to look back at where you were in the game, and see all of the things you’ve earned and achieved so far.

Path of a Hero site that we linked to a while back, sent us an email to say that the site is better than ever. It’s jumped up to 3700 users (probably more since he told us that), all the EU realms are now supported, and there are many more social updates built into the interface. Not only can you search the entire database with a new Ubersearch, but users can now comment on journal entries and even send messages to each other. Aaron tells us that stability is better than ever, and he says he’s been getting a lot of good feedback, too — people have been telling him that they wish the site had been around since they were level 1.

Is there any reason other than looks for a hunter to pick a Tenacity pet other than a gorilla? From what I’ve been hearing, gorillas are far and away the best tanking pets.

Besides aesthetics? If RP reasons counts as looks/aesthetics, it mostly comes down to utility options. The Gorilla is probably the best tanking pet overall, yeah, but you might like the unique abilities of the other pets. For Beastmasters, the Acid Spit from worms is really good if you don’t have Sunder Armor in your raid/party. Scorpid Poison is a huge pain in PvP. If you wanted a pure tanking pet, though? Gorilla is the way to go, no doubt, no question.

I can’t find any reference to this, but is there anything that will replace the riding crop?

This is something we don’t know yet. Last we knew they were trying to find a different way to handle those speed boosts that wasn’t so clunky and annoying, but I don’t know if they’re still working on it. I have to admit though, now that Riding Crops are gone I don’t really miss them. I liked it when I had it, but it was pretty annoying. Now that it doesn’t exist, I just don’t care and fly on my awesome red drake contentedly. They might reintroduce it somehow, but we don’t know yet. If they do, I hope they do it in a ’set it and forget it’ kind of way. Not worrying about it is nice.

Sorry if this has been asked before, but does anyone know why Dalaran is a no-fly zone?

They wanted Dalaran to be more like an actual city, forcing the players down into the streets. Instead of just flying over everything and skipping it all, we’re down on the roads and sidewalks passing eachother by and interacting. We see the entire city and the neat things that go on instead of just seeing rooftops and specks that may or may not be players on the ground. Read the rest of this entry »

Pretty incredible. EB Games isn’t a small company by any means, and while we knew Wrath was big, it looks like Blizzard’s second WoW expansion smashed pretty much every sequel it could in the chain, even toppling some of the console gaming records. Anyone that claimed World of Warcraft had peaked with Burning Crusade should be looking pretty foolish at this point.

We’ll have to see where Blizzard goes from here — there’s no doubt that one reason Wrath was so popular out of the gate was that it returned to the “core” of Warcraft III: the story of Arthas and the Scourge. Can Blizzard replicate that with another expansion, no matter what the setting?

One of our secret correspondents inside an EB Games store forwarded us this picture of an internal email sent out to the videogame retail company, saying that not only was the week of WotLK’s launch the biggest sales week of the year, but it was the biggest week ever outside of last year’s Christmas sales, and the biggest launch the chain has ever had. Additionally, at EB Games, Wrath was the highest presale ever, the highest single-format (which means PC/Mac only) week one sales (in just two days), and the highest day one sales of any game ever, multiformat or otherwise.

Well, arms partisans, I admit it for cheap wow gold. The spec may have been overshadowed by the sheer coolness factor of a TG build, but in terms of power and effectiveness grinding your way through mobs to get your quests done, it’s a solid spec. It’s so solid that I even respecced my 80 warrior for the holiday weekend and picked up an Argent Skeleton Crusher to replace my De-Raged Waraxe. What it lacks in prot’s pure refusal to die it gains in the excellent, underrated (by me) spectacle of unleashing a bladestorm in the middle of a three mob pull. I’m now eyeing that titansteel I have in the bank and mulling over the merits of making myself a Destroyer.

A caveat: if you do not like watching for procs, you won’t like the new arms. I leveled back in vanilla WoW as an arms warrior when MS was the top of the tree and you could raid tank in the spec. It still bears the stamp of that time (and MS is still the heart of the tree) but you’ll find overpower and execute have moved up to be equal damage dealing instants once they proper talents allow their use.

Last week we talked about protection, which I said (and stand by) was the the best leveling spec in the game for warriors, being fast, fun and powerful. A lot of people took umbrage, saying that I was ignoring how strong Arms was as a leveling spec. I’m not going to take back my statement about prot… it’s a wonderful, versatile, almost unkillable leveling spec that can do a lot of damage to groups and takes a beating and a half. I’m in love with how Blizzard has revamped the spec, making it strong for solo as well as tanking. But fair is fair, and since I have plenty of warriors, it’s not like respeccing one to arms and testing it out is going to kill me.

Arms is good enough now that, at 80 in tanking gear I was doing significant damage with it. Once I grabbed a few DPS pieces and got them properly enchanted, well, I became just as enchanted with the spec as all the commenters from last week: it requires a more focused attention on your abilities but if you can get that overpower or execute off on time, you’ll benefit greatly. Improved Rend not only does reasonable damage now, but with talents like Deep Wounds, Taste for Blood, Trauma, Unrelenting Assault and Blood Frenzy, arms is all about a cascade effect, as your bleeds not only do more damage but give you more instant attacks for more chances to crit and increase how much damage your bleed effects can do, while simultaneously increasing how much damage your targets can take from physical attacks and increasing your attack speed. Arms actually feels like you’re a slow burn, a juggernaut who just does more and more damage the longer the fight goes and your abilities all come into play. Read the rest of this entry »