Fishing for profit

I’m an admitted and proud fishing junkie, but had long ago resigned myself to the fact that my favorite ingame pasttime was never going to be a source of revenue. But Alterac Volley has a great post on the degree to which fishing has actually (gasp, shock, horror) become a moneymaking endeavor in Wrath. While I’ll grant that on most servers it’s probably nothing compared to, say, Mining or Herbalism, there’s gold to be made in them there streams — and this is all the more true if your server hosts a large raiding population. AV observes that there are four types of fish most likely to be lucrative, and it’s no accident that three of them (the Musselback Sculpin, the Glacial Salmon, and the Nettlefish) are the main ingredients of the Fish Feast, a valuable (although generalized) raid buff. I spend roughly an hour a week fishing up the materials for these to cover our raids and had never even looked to see what they retailed for. After reading over AV’s comments, I took a peek at my server’s AH and had a /headdesk moment discovering that my

Isle of Conquest gameplay screenshot gallery

The new Battleground coming with Patch 3.2, the Isle of Conquest, is live on the 3.2 PTR as we speak, and we’ve been running some games on said Isle to see how it measures up to the current BGs. We’re pretty happy with it so far — it certainly looks great, as you’ll be able to tell by checking out the screenshot gallery we’ve compiled for you. It shows the BG and all its sundry parts in action. We’ll keep you up to date with new Isle info as we get it. If you’re on the PTR too, then be sure to queue up — who knows, it might just be one of us you’re ganking!

Patch 3.2 Argent Coliseum details

Yay for more Argent Coliseum news! Our European brethren get the lowdown on the Argent Coliseum with a brand new under development page highlighting what is to come from this patch 3.2 raid and dungeon instance. As we were already given to believe, it’s similar to the Ring of Blood/Amphitheater of Anguish questlines from BC and WotLK. Also, in order to access the ‘hard mode’ 10 and 25 man heroic versions of the raids, you apparently first have to defeat the normal mode version. In the “Heroic” version of the Crusaders’ Coliseum, you and your raid only have a limited number of attempts for each raid lockout period, and each time your raid wipes, one of your attempts will be used up. To embark on the epic Trial of the Grand Crusader, you must first prove your worth by clearing either the 10 or 25 player version of the Crusaders’ Coliseum’s normal mode. After you have dealt the killing blow to the coliseum’s final heroic mode boss will you be able to collect the Crusaders’ Tribute, and the fewer attempts you needed to complete

Patch 3.2 bringing Strand of the Ancients coin toss

We mentioned this issue a while back — since it was introduced to the game, Strand of the Ancients has started Alliance on attack first, and that’s caused problems. Due to the way the map is set up (a back-and-forth attack and defend map), the team that starts attacking has an advantage in terms of farming honor — they only have to play until the other team loses rather than having to keep up a defense the whole time. That means shorter battlegrounds for the Alliance, which means more honor overall for them. The problem was that Blizzard couldn’t just flip a switch to randomize the battleground’s spawn points: they were hard-coded into the moving ships that players appear on, so it took much more coding to use a coin-flip start. However Zarhym now confirms that the coin flip is coming to SotA. And though he didn’t say when in the original post, the Patch 3.2 notes tell us that it’s coming in that patch. Hopefully Blizzard will have learned their lesson for the Isle of Conquest — although since it’s closer to Alterac Valley from what

Around Azeroth: It’s only a paper moon

Jed sends in this screenshot of his paladin taking a nostalgic ride through Westfall at nighttime. Remember the early leveling quests in places like Westfall and Redridge? Where you didn’t have all this story and meaning, and all you had to do was deliver messages from one lazy jerk questgiver to another, or try to find a boar with an intact liver among dozens of boars with hepatic failure? On second thought, the early levels can go hang. Chasing Arthas across Northrend is way more fun. 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@gmail.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 —

Vote for your favorite fan-made Arena

Arena Junkies has an appropriately-themed contest going on over at their site where they asked their community of high-rated Arena players to design their own Arena. The community was quick to whip out everything from pencils to 3D programs and came up with a pretty good selection of possible Arena maps. How good were the maps? Well, let’s just say I’d take any of the submissions over the awful Ring of Valor Arena. Alright, so maybe that’s not a good gauge… but it’s worth going over the entries to see what creative ideas the Arena-enthusiastic community have come up with. The top three winners will receive tickets to BlizzCon while registered Arena Junkies users who vote for the winning maps have a chance to win a Blizzard Authenticator. Pretty cool prizes for a pretty cool contest, so head over to their site and register if you haven’t already. New Arena maps would be a welcome addition to the game and conceivably not too much work considering no new mechanics need to be in place unlike the Battlegrounds, which have different objectives. In fact, new

Blood Pact: Return to the depths of the third tree!

Warlocks had best beware! Blood Pact preys on people who wander too deeply into the dark depths of the internet! Author Nick Whelan apologizes for being a tad late this week — sometimes final projects just don’t go smoothly, ya know? It’s no secret that I haven’t exactly been in a PvE mood lately. I don’t know what it is, but every year around this time I just…lose all motivation to progress. I’ve come to accept it as the natural cycle of my WoW-life, but lately I’ve been thinking I want to get back into it. I’m not ravenously trolling Dalaran looking for a raid, but I’ve been doing some heroic pugs to dust the rust off of my shadowbolting finger. Frustratingly, though, I’ve been having an exceptionally difficult time getting back into Affliction. Not only does the rotation and casting style fail to engage me, but it feels like far too much of a struggle to dish out DPS. Back during that golden age between patch 3.0 and patch 3.1, Affliction was a zen thing for me. My rotation was so deeply ingrained that typical spell

June’s Brew of the Month: Blackrock Lager

It’s the beginning of a new month, which means a new brew! This time around it’s the Blackrock Lager! This is a hot hot hot beverage to kick off the summer season. Drinking the Lager sometimes procs something that sounds like it should be a Mage talent: Internal Combustion. While you have this buff (which lasts 5 minutes), your face gives off an eerie red glow like you’re seeping fire out of every orifice. Except that one. And that one. Okay, you people are gross. Just the ones above the neck. After 5 minutes (or when you click off the buff), you get what you see in the image above. You belch a great load of fire! And that’s it. Pretty straightforward. I always try to find little factoids about the various brews these are based on, but a lager is common enough that I don’t think it’s necessary or interesting to anybody but beer buffs. Instead, I’m going to point out how awesome some of the Blackrock/Dark Iron themed brews are. This one makes you belch fire, but there’s also the Dark Iron Ale that you can use to get a pet from the Darkmoon

The curious case of Ferarro

We, along with many of you, have been monitoring the curious case surrounding one of the most prominent Paladin bloggers, Ferarro. We originally did a 15 Minutes of Fame with Ferarro on May 26th. The article was about her life as a blogger, a paladin, and a game tester for Blizzard. After the article was written, a few things happened. First, Jagoex posted a story on Ferarro’s use of pictures from the website TechDarling. Ferarro was claiming she was the person pictured, when in fact she wasn’t. Sarah Townsend, the author of TechDarling, has stated she doesn’t know who Ferarro is. Secondly, Ferraro’s blog, Paladin Schmaladin, suddenly switched over to privacy mode blocking anyone from reading it who didn’t have an invitation directly from Ferraro. Her Twitter account had the message “Stalkers are cool,” and was then locked until it was deleted completely a day later. Her WoW character disappeared via a likely server transfer, and her contributions at RetPaladin.com were removed completely. Update: After this article was posted, Ferarro has once