Ready Check: Tonight we’re gonna raid like it’s 2009

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

The best of WoW.com: January 2009

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

The Queue: Isthmus-time is here

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

More dungeon finder tips

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

Breakfast Topic: Are you using the Looking For Group channel?

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

Let loose The Swag Dogs of war

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

[1.Local]: What’s all that morrowgrain for, anyway?

Reader comments — ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week. You know, Archdruid Fandouche Toolhelm Fandral Staghelm sure does ask for a lot of Morrowgrain … So what’s up with that? Shade: He constructed a World Tree without the blessing of the dragon flights, causing a tree that is warped and corrupted enough that it’s being invaded by harpies, grell and grelkin, and corrupting the furbolgs that are supposed to be living happily on it. A tree that invites the invasion of satyr — and the satyr are referenced in the War of the Ancients trilogy as being products of Sargeras, warping some dude with a god complex. Silithus? He defended Silithus once, yes — and watched his son ripped apart before his eyes in the process. That broke him. He shattered the Sceptre of the Shifting Sands, the key to opening the Gates of Ahn’Qiraj, when the dragon flights asked him to keep guard over it in the event that the Qiraj returned. He

WoW 5th Anniversary Giveaway: 3 Tiny mount loot codes

It’s day three of our World of Warcraft 5th Anniversary giveaway extravaganza and we’re celebrating it by giving away 3 codes to Scourgewar TCG deck loot card, Tiny. This summons a mini mount that doesn’t increase your run speed, but, well, it looks damn funny. Draenei on a pony? Tauren on a raptor? 50 charges of fun in every code! To enter for a chance to win, leave a comment in this post by Thursday, November 26th, 12pm ET (noon). That’s it. Limit one entry per person and make sure you’re registered with a valid email address. We’ll be choosing three winners randomly from the entrants and contact them via email after the close of the contest. Note that we won’t be emailing the code to the winners until mid-December when it is made available to us by the fine people at Upper Deck. Pics of the mounts in action after the jump! EDIT: Contest closed. Thanks so much for participating!

IgroMir 2009: Goblin gameplay footage

More Cataclysm footage is trickling onto the internet from IgroMir 2009, Russia’s huge gaming convention, and there was a beautifully clear (well, compared to what we usually see) video of early Goblin gameplay that merited some attention here. I have to confess; I wasn’t initially enthusiastic about Blizzard’s choice for a new Horde race, even if Goblins do make sense from a lore perspective. But after trawling through so many videos of their early questing experience in the Lost Isles, I’m sold. Female Goblins still aren’t playable yet, but their male counterparts have some awesome casting animations and an incredibly endearing sort of waddly run. They just look so interesting and dynamic doing anything that now I’m torn over which class to roll, although I can’t really take their 2H special attack seriously, so it’ll probably be a caster-class of some sort. I enjoyed Necrolord_Bob’s answer to our poll on which Goblin class to roll: “Priest! Priest of the Holy Temple of BOOM!” We didn’t think that Blizzard would

Patch 3.3 PTR: Armored Frost Wyrm mounts are rewards from Icecrown

Ancilorn over at the European forums has confirmed that the armored Frost Wrym mounts mined from early builds of the Patch 3.3 PTR will be rewards for achievements in the Icecrown Citadel raid. Much like past raid dungeons have awarded mounts for completing meta-achievements, such as the Ironbound Proto-Drake for Ulduar, the Frost Wyrms will be “up for grabs,” for dedicated raiders. MMO-Champion previously unearthed this armored Frost Wyrm model along with spells named Frostbrood Vanquisher and Frostbrood Vanquisher Flight, which could give some insight into some Icecrown Citadel encounters. Despite the confirmation of new reward mounts (expected to grant 310% flying speed, as well), there is currently no word on the removal of the Ulduar reward mounts, which Blizzard has said to stay for “the foreseeable future”.