Posted on December 29th, 2009 by admin
Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. Winter Veil is winding down, and as we here at the WoW.com offices fight over the last carton of eggnog, we’ve been taking a lot of time to look over the past year and celebrate. Of course, here in the Tuesday Morning Post, we generally look at the past 7 days or so. So yeah, there’s plenty of the navel gazing stuff, but there’s a good smattering of news too. Nothing too major, I suppose. Even the dev team likes to see their family over the holidays, I guess. But it’s there. And in the meantime, a little bit of a navel gazing never hurt anyone. Our navels are pretty awesome anyway.
Join me for the last Tuesday morning of 2009 and catch up on your WoW reading. The usual list is after the break.
Hot News and Features
Could the building blocks for the Cataclysm world event be right under our noses?
As Wrath winds down, we remember the abandoned and half-finished things.
We know why ICC’s gated. You can, of course, always blame the gnome.
The 2009 WoW.com best stories showcases our personal picks for the best articles of 2009.
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Posted on December 24th, 2009 by admin
When we’re talking about Raiding in 2009, the story actually starts in 2008. Okay, sure, you could talk about raids going all the way back to the opening of the game, and how things have changed, and grown out of each other, and it could go on forever and a day and never actually end and it’d be like a run-on story just like this sentence.
But if we’re going to keep the conversation manageable, we’ll start in 2008. It was a cold and frigid night in November 2008 when Blizzard released the newest expansion to World of Warcraft. With much hullabaloo, the Wrath of the Lich King hit the shelves with a brand new paradigm.
That paradigm was that end-game raiding should be accessible to everyone. Raiding — and the gear associated with it — was no longer the sole province of people who had many, many hours to farm potions, reagents, and hone their skills every single night. This new idea of accessibility would change the way raiding in WoW has worked ever since. The changes were pretty thorough, so let’s start breaking it down behind the jump.
In this
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Posted on December 21st, 2009 by admin
In backchannel team discussion, Dan O’Halloran asked us to nominate our best stories for the year. “I don’t mean the most popular or even the most commented on,” he wrote, but “editorials, class columns, analysis, or even funny or touching posts,” the ones we were happiest and/or proudest of writing. I’d like to think that our list captures (or at least tries to capture) the zeitgeist of the player community, and how things evolved from the very beginning of Wrath to the patch where players will (eventually) face the ultimate boss of the expansion.
Yesterday we realized that, as of today, there are 12 days to go until 2010, so we though what we’d do is break down our favorite posts into each month of 2009.
Today, obviously, covers January. Wrath was less than two months old when the new year rolled around. While most players were still leveling their mains, gearing them up, and taking their first steps into heroics, others were already steamrolling Tier 7 or trying to steamroll things like Glory of the Raider.
January 2009
In no particular
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Posted on December 17th, 2009 by admin
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. Michael Sacco will be your host today.
It’s officially Winter Veil, and you know what that means! Azerothians donning their yuletide apparel and decking the halls with the blood of their enemies. Is there anything more demoralizing than getting decapitated by someone dressed like a holiday centerfold? And just think, without achievements, this activity would be naught but a holiday novelty. Technology is a wondrous thing.
Daniel asked…
I have noticed that dark ranger hanging around in Dalaran, and decided to look them up, and noticed that they were neutral hero unit in Warcraft 3:The Frozen Throne. I was wondering, could, it be even remotely possible, that in the future we have that class introduced into the game that will be neutral?
Extremely unlikely. There are also some dark rangers wandering around the Undercity post-3.3, and it appears that they’re there as a buildup to playable forsaken hunters in Cataclysm. Sylvanas herself
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Posted on December 14th, 2009 by admin
Like many of you, I’ve been spending the last few days happily hitting up the new dungeon finder over and over again. The rewards are pretty amazing for the time involved, and the whole system is usually pretty painless. I’ve picked up a few tips and tricks along the way, on top of what was covered in Saturday’s post by Mike Schramm, and here’s what I have to share.
If your dungeon pops and then gives you the dreaded “additional instances cannot be launched,” you can try again by simply selecting “teleport to dungeon” from the DF menu on your minimap (the eye icon).
If you have a full group (of guildies, say) and want to do a particular instance, you can use the DF to queue up for just that instance, and thereby gain the ability to teleport straight there. Sure beats flying.
Damage meters are not yet working reliably cross-realm. This is because the channel that addons use to communicate with each other is not cross-realm, and meters only scan in a small local range aside from the channel. Mike mentioned this, but it’s worth
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Posted on December 10th, 2009 by admin
Once upon a time, a long time ago, in a world… in a land… there was a zone-specific Looking For Group channel. Then Blizzard saw fit to make it realm-wide so that no matter where you were — whether questing or gathering or hanging out in big cities — you could have a channel to make group requests to anyone in your faction not in an instance.
The unintended, though easily foreseen, consequence was that Barrens/Elwynn chat spread to all zones like a plague. And Blizzard took it away, eventually, claiming that it was adding functionality by stuffing it in their new (at the time) LFG functionality. Some protested and created their own LFG channels, but most were satisfied to keep it in the big cities and take it to Tradechat, transforming it forever.
Blizzard has tried to clean up Trade Chat since then. They created the Guild Recruitment Channel, which was supposed to take recruitment spam out of Trade. But it only turns on automatically for unguilded characters, therefore preventing guilds from luring already guilded players away from their current home. And now
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Posted on December 7th, 2009 by admin
If the quest for bigger and better loot leaves you craving still more, maybe you need a guild that takes things to the next level: a shot at WoW loot you can wear in real life, too. Enter The Swag Dogs, a brand new guild created by our friends at SwagDog. The Blizzard-approved apparel specialists have created a family-friendly guild where players can make new friends, get in on raiding groups on the ground floor — oh, and get a shot at free WoW swag and BlizzCon tickets.
You’ll recognize SwagDog as the folks behind those sweet guild tabard-style T-shirts you’ve seen on recent posts here at WoW.com, including our recent WoW 5th anniversary T-shirt giveaway. The SwagDog crew are pretty good people. They sponsor our WoW.com Guild of the Month contest, giving out a $100 SwagDog gift certificate to the winning guild every month.
When we heard SwagDog was forming an in-game guild, we smelled a marketing rat — but as it turns out, there’s no pressure to buy. Instead, The Swag Dogs have created the guild as a conduit between players and the SwagDog design team, to
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