And there’s more: Tate’s Wikipedia page says that not only has she spoken out strongly in favor of DRM, and not only has she taken talking points directly from Clear Channel in trying to work on the Sirus/XM merger (a government official speaking the words of a corporation, that’s just what we need), but she has also blamed television for childhood obesity. Nice one. One more reason why we are thrilled to see that we may finally get some folks in the FCC who actually know what they’re talking about when it comes to online gaming.Deborah Tate is an FCC Commissioner (and will be for another three years at least — she was appointed for another five year term in 2007), and claimed in a speech about telecom policy and regulation last week that “one of the top reasons for college drop-outs in the U.S. is online gaming addiction — such as World of Warcraft — which is played by 11 million individuals worldwide.”

Never mind that World of Warcraft, is a game, not an addiction, and never mind that most of those 11 million people play it and are completely healthy socially and financially, and never mind even that any evidence you’d find that World of Warcraft causes dropouts is anecdotal at best. Can you really blame a game for someone making the choice to leave college? We, as you might have guessed, think not.

 Either you’re in a Hunter’s barrage or you’ve closed to melee and they’re not a threat. If they can put the sting back in melee, GC says (within a few patches — this is long term), then they’ll give them more viability “to flee or stand and fight.” We’ll have to see what Hunter’s think about that one when we get more specifics.When the Hunter changes dropped earlier this week, I understood the Volley change, and I even got the Kill Shot cooldown drop, but the one I really didn’t understand was the Deterrence change. Like BRK said, it seemed pretty useless: sure, becoming immune to damage for five seconds helps survivability in the Arenas, but what’s to stop people from just continuing the kill after that. And the directional effect was just perplexing as well. Read the rest of this entry »

For poops and giggles, if I stack +Spell Power in my rogue, will my poison damage go up?

I actually don’t think it will. If you asked that question a few months ago I would have said yes, but as of Wrath, poisons scale with Attack Power, not Spell Power. I think the top rank of Instant Poison gets 10% of your AP, but not benefit from spell power. All of the poisons have their own coefficients, I just picked the least mathy as my example. All scale with AP.

Has there been any word from Blizzard about increasing the daily quest cap? I’m a casual player and so only at 75 so far but I’ve already got a list of about 20 daily quests that I could run through to help push my rep and xp (leaving more quests at 80 to try and pay for all the really expensive shinies I can’t justify right now) and I’m sure there will be plenty more coming in all the zones I haven’t touched yet. Read the rest of this entry »

Mounts! A subject near and dear to my heart, having been one in my past life. With today’s posting of the patch notes for PTR patch 3.0.8, we’ve discovered that mounts are no longer restricted by race, which means that any mount available to your faction is yours to ride as you see fit. Tauren, this means you can ride that skelly horse you’ve been after, or even a choc–err, hawkstrider. It also means that if you’re a human, night elf, or draenei, you can ratchet the ridiculousness level up to eleven and ride a mechanostrider if you so desire.As the newest member of the WoW Insider team, I thought it’d be a good idea to introduce myself before diving right into news, news, news. We might not be total strangers, though! I was the blue poster formerly known as Belfaire (the talbuk). A good number of you may be familiar with my work already, and may have even wondered where I’d gone off to in the past two months. Now you know!

That’s right–I’ve given up the animated avatar and moved on to greener pastures. I’m still the same incorrigible talbuk you knew, though, and my unique experiences make me a real…WoW insider. Read the rest of this entry »

I like the “group by slot” especially, for quick access to gear lists. Another set of solid updates by the Wowhead team, making the best database even better. Thanks, folks!Although Wowhead has a blog now, and those of you who (like me) are huge fans of the site are probably reading it already and thus have already seen this news, I figure a good many Insider readers would be interested: Wowhead has released another round of new features.

• Filters have been reorganized to cut back on clutter and scrolling.
• When using stat weightings, you can now group gear by slot (example). If the stat weightings are solid enough, this provides a much prettier (IMO) alternative to sites like Lootrank.
• Stat weighting presets are updated for Wrath. If you have any suggestions on how the new presets could be improved, please drop by the thread on Wowhead’s forums.
• Combat ratings (hit, crit, and haste) have been combined across melee, ranged, and spell, to reflect changes made in the 3.0 patch.

Argent Stand is one of the two major hubs in the zone. Gurric is the flight master, at 42,65.
Maaka (60,57) provides flights from Zim’Torga, which features a delicious Blessing of Kings-bot and some good questing.
Rafae is at the small camp near Gundrak (71,23), providing easy access to that instance (which I haven’t run more than once, still). We’re starting to get into zones where you’re more and more likely to have your own flying mount, but I will press on through Sholazar, Storm Peaks, and Icecrown in the days ahead. Stay tuned! Previously posted: Howling Fjord, Borean Tundra, and Dragonblight (Horde/Alliance); Grizzly Hills.Continuing on from Grizzly Hills, we come a bit north to Zul’Drak, a zone that’s apparently one giant troll city. I’m a big fan; some people don’t seem to love it much, but presumably everyone needs to know how to get around, so let’s get into the flight paths. All the hubs in Zul’Drak are neutral (generally Argent Crusade-aligned), meaning there’s just one list for both Horde and Alliance.
Light’s Breach is where you typically start in ZD. Danica Saint at 32,75 handles the air traffic there.
Ebon Breach is the starting point for what is (in my opinion) one of the best questlines in the zone. The flight master there is Baneflight, at 14,74. See what they did there? Baneflight? I assume that’s hilarious if you’re a ghoul or something.

it’s not all buffs we see in the 3.0.8 notes, but there’s certainly a lot of them. Let’s examine how 3.0.8 will affect you and your plate-armored dreadnaught.And then a few unfortunate nerfs. Shadow of Death, I can live with. The Bone Shield change is probably the most painful one, though. Good death knight tanks realized that the bones only disintegrated with melee attacks, so it was possible to keep your mitigation up for a considerable amount of time against certain mobs/bosses. Sorry, tanks. It’s probably for the best.

The pain from nerfs to the main Unholy and Frost tanking mitigators (IBF, Bone Shield) are lessened somewhat by the big mitigation boost from Frost Presence (which any respectable tank will be in to begin with). The change to Vampiric Blood and Heart Strike mean Blood tanking came out the best of the three where this patch’s changes are concerned.

All in all, we made out pretty well. There were a few tanking nerfs, a few tanking buffs, and most everything else is of good-to-fantastic benefit to the class. It’s a good time to be dead. Read the rest of this entry »

FeralGlass offers a variety of punctuation, including yellow, gold and blue question and exclamation marks. If you’re looking to enhance your home away from Northrend, you might find these WoW-themed glass and brass garden sculptures to be right up your alley! Constructed with solid brass, these stakes are said to be wind and water proof.

Every Thursday, Shelbi Roach of The Bronze Kettle guides you in creating WoW-inspired crafts using real world mats with World of WarCrafts.

Elemental Precision lost the Elemental and will work on all spells, and Improved Blizzard got a slight nerf, with the snaring effect percentage reduced. The full list of changes is after the break, but here’s a quick summary: Evocation cooldown reduced to four minutes, with Arcane Flows also reducing the cooldown even further. Arcane Blast got an overhaul — will now increase the damage of your next Arcane spell by 30%, or you can stack it, for a higher mana charge. So you can use it to buff Barrage, or use it as it is now, just upping the Blast and mana costs every time. Interesting.

Mages, your changes for the next patch are out, and there’s good news for the Arcane among you — GC says they’re buffing the spec to bring it up to par with the rest of the Mage options. On the other hand, they’re being careful about PvP, so Arcane Barrage is getting closely examined — you might want to Iceblock it whenever you can to avoid aggro on that one from the devs. Read the rest of this entry »

Mounts used to become available at level 40. Now that the game extends to level 80 and early character progression has been sped up, you get to speed up at an earlier level, too.

There are two parts to getting yourself into the saddle. The first step is training your riding skill. Upgrading your riding skill as you level gives you access to faster mounts: Apprentice riding at level 30, Journeyman at level 60, Expert (regular speed) and Artisan (epic, or faster speed) at level 70, plus Cold Weather Flying in Northrend at level 77. (Because some of the game’s content is accessible only by air, you’ll want to get a flyer if you want to see the entire game.)Hitting level 30 is a major milestone in today’s World of Warcraft: the level at which you get your mount. Up to this point, you’ve spent plenty of time hoofing it, getting to know the lay of the land. On the back of your trusty steed, you’ll be able to zip across increasingly larger zones and quest areas in style. You’ll start off on a standard ground mount, such as a Horse, Wolf or Kodo. Later, you can upgrade to faster versions of those creatures and eventually to mounts that can fly (in Burning Crusade and Wrath content).

Read the rest of this entry »