wow gold-hisvivogame

With so many sites and stores promoting commercialism and spending, it’s always refreshing to see fansites run contests that are in the true spirit of the season — altruism (and ad traffic, of course). In this case, WoW-Achievements.com is getting into the Winter Veil spirit with their Twelve Days of Grunty contest!

From December 13th to December 25th, the site is presenting one new WoW trivia question each day. A winner is chosen randomly from those who answer correctly, and each day a Grunty the Murloc Marine pet is awarded. No registration is necessary, and the questions are easily answerable with a quick Google search. If you didn’t get to go to BlizzCon ‘09, or if you didn’t order the livestream from DirecTV, this might be your only shot at getting Grunty in your digital stocking, save asking Santa. And I don’t think Santa does the whole eBay thing.

If you know of other sites running holiday contests, please let us know so we can make sure everybody gets a chance to cash in on the season of giving!

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Kebina Trudough here, offering you the best gold making secrets they don’t want you to know about! I was like you once, poor and homely, before I discovered my patented system. Now you too can fill your pockets with the good stuff without ever breaking a sweat! Why spend all your time toiling when you could be vacationing in the Hot Springs? I’m not offering these tips for 100 gold, or 90 gold, or even 50 gold! No, not even 20 gold! My system is yours for FREE! Satisfaction guaranteed or I’ll give you a full refund (handling charges may apply). After all, Time Is Money.

The new Dungeon Finder that was added in Patch 3.3 has been garnering a lot of attention lately – and for good reason! But did you know that you could use it to make money?

Step One: Maximizing your speed.
If you spend too much time in each instance, or waiting in the queues, the amount of gold that you make per hour will decline significantly. Fortunately, there are a few things that you can do to to help ensure that your dungeon runs go as smoothly as possible.

• You can queue from anywhere, so choose a location that will allow you to do some farming on the side should you need to wait in a queue. Why not try a favorite fishing locale? Don’t wander too far away from a vendor, though, unless you have peculiarly empty bags.
• Don’t be choosy. Sign up for a random dungeon, because you are more likely to find a match more quickly.
• To avoid queues almost entirely, sign up as a healer or tank if you can. Don’t do this to trick your group mates, however. Many people are selecting tank or healer and then showing up in green sets expecting someone else to agree to switch specs. This is not only idiotic, it will take more time in the end.
• Queue prepared. This means snacks, drinks, in-game buff food and water, glyphs, enchants, scrolls, flasks, reagents, and whatever else you might spontaneously want.
• Use the teleport feature! On the way into or out of each dungeon, simply click on the little green eye around your mini-map and select teleport. This is also handy if you do have to go back to town in the middle of the dungeon.
• Sell and restock! Between groups, hit up a vendor.
• Keep a good group member! Once you meet up with a good group member, remember that you can keep them! Ask them if they would like to continue playing with you, and make sure that no one degroups between queues. Polite, competent, geared group members will not only make the experience more enjoyable, it will also speed it up significantly, and minimize dying.That last part is important because, aside from the lost time, repairs will cut into your profits.

Step Two: ???
No, I’m just kidding. Step two is the bread and butter! There are some wonderful features and changes that you might not have noticed yet, as well as some generic tips to help you earn big. To begin with, you will want to use a level 80 character if possible, and queue for Heroic Northrend dungeons.

• Right off the bat, you’ll get some goodies. The first successful run each day using the Dungeon Finder tool will net you 26 gold 46 silver and 2 Emblems of Frost. Each subsequent run in the same day will net you half of the gold (13 gold 23 silver), and 2 Emblems of Triumph.These awards are in addition to everything that you get from bosses, including the last boss.
• When something drops that can be rolled for, notice that there is an extra button next to Need and Greed when you have an enchanter in your party, called Disenchant. When you click this, if you win the roll, you will automatically get the disenchanted materials instead of the item. This is a great way to make money. Although the prices of Infinite Dust are down on many servers because the drop rate has been increased, on many servers, they are still selling for 2-2.5g a piece, and you’re likely to get 5-7. It is also a helpful way to get your own Dream Shards, Abyss Crystals, and if you get lucky, Greater Cosmic Essences. The price for the essences has risen wildly on many servers, so be smart with how you auction your new goodies!
• To gamble, or not to gamble? A weapon, whether green or blue, is going to be worth over 10 gold most likely. In fact, you can check the exact amount simply by hovering over the tooltip! As such, the vendors will pay you more for it. Of course, they also award more, or better, disenchanted materials.
• Pick up everything. From food and water to greys and up, don’t pass on or ignore any piece of loot. Keep in mind that you will need some bag space, and take heed of my advice to hit up a vendor at every chance you get. Otherwise, you’re simply throwing away several gold per mob that you were able to loot. If you can skin, mine, or herbalize, politely ask if you can harvest the nodes that you encounter.

Step Three: Profit!
This is the fun part. You can vendor plenty of items in between queues, but you can also funnel auctionables to your bank alts via the mail. If you don’t have anything pressing to purchase using your badges, remember that you can always buy heirloom for alts or even epic gems, which you can either use or resell for a profit.

So how many times per day can you exploit this? As many times as you can stand to before beginning to pull out your hair. As long as you are using the Random feature, the completion of a Heroic will not give you a lock-out. In fact, even if you are locked out for the day, if the Random feature selects that dungeon, you will still be able to go. Happy dungeoning!

If you’re new to dungeoning, why not head over and check out WoW Rookie’s Grouping With Others collection of articles and guides?

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Business Management has a really interesting graphic up (that they say came partly from Eurogamer.net, but I didn’t see it over there) that breaks down WoW “by the numbers.” It features an interesting series of stats about the game, in what I call an Oatmeal-style format, everything from number of players and items (30,000) to number of locations (1400) and the most commonly looted item every day (Frostweave). I think these stats all came from a few different places — from a talk given at Austin GDC last year, to the toplist over on the official WoW site (of course, that chart is constantly updated, so Onyxia wasn’t always the deadliest mob, and Frostweave wasn’t always the most looted.

But it is cool to see all of the numbers stacked up in a row in such a stylish way. And 3.6 million pieces of Saronite Ore turned into 3 million Saronite bars? If that’s true, why am I paying so much for it at the AH? 192 quests completed per second is pretty wild, too. That’s like three entire Oracles reputation grinds (give or take a few dailies), all completed in this second. And this one. And this one.

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We’ve gotten confirmation from our sources that patch 3.3 is set to go live tomorrow. We should be seeing the downloader get the rest of the files after the downtime begins (which hasn’t been announced yet). There are no new patch notes just yet, however those should be coming shortly.

We have been working hard today on our patch 3.3 information, and will have a lot of great content for you throughout the day tomorrow. You can check out everything you need to know, and then some, in our Guide to Patch 3.3.

Hang tight! Should be a fun day tomorrow!

Additional resources that you’re probably immediately interested in:

• Latest Patch 3.3 PTR Patch Notes
• Tier 10 armor set gallery
• Class changes
• Latest news

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Oxhorn is usually quite reliable for holiday festivities, and his video The Peace Circle instantly springs to mind when I consider Thanksgiving. “Why Mike!” you might exclaim, “What does a hippy love circle have to do with Thanksgiving?” The answer lies in Thunk’s favorite food — turkey.

As the peace circle proceeds, our Night Elf mediator encounters a painful truth. Thunk loves him some turkey. The caruncles are very tasty, after all. The good news, however, is that Thunk has thoughtfully brought enough for everyone. Even Associate Professor Evil is forced to acknowledge thankfulness for Thunk’s turkey.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone! Turkey for everyone!

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It’s been five years since this game launched, and it’s changed so much that you might have forgotten what life was like back then. But thanks to the magic of the Internet, those times are saved in clear HTML. Let’s dig up some memories of the early game.

It’s interesting to think what Blizzard was like before World of Warcraft. Today, the two are almost synonymous — while they have two other major franchises (and one secret IP hiding in the works), it’s almost impossible for anyone to think of Blizzard without thinking of WoW, and vice versa. The company has become almost solely defined by what they’ve done with this game. But of course, before the release, that wasn’t the case.

These reviews of Warcraft III (many of which are already linked to 404 pages), Blizzard’s last pre-WoW game, tell the story: Blizzard was already known as a master game studio, renowned for their polish. Critics called them a relatively conservative developer, taking old ideas, rather than crafting their own, and shining them until they sparkle. Their releases were few and far between, but always worth the wait (come to think of it, that’s not too different from nowadays). I was working at Gamestop as a manager when World of Warcraft was first announced, and I remember the reaction among gamers as puzzlement: Warcraft III had just released, and it was amazing, in terms of both sales and gameplay. Why did Blizzard want to go back into the Warcraft franchise, especially with some weird subscription-based model, when they could be working on another Diablo or Starcraft?

The beta eventually quelled those concerns, though — I remember it was tough to get into at first, and I actually ended up watching a Ustream of video from the game (a gnome leveling through Dun Morogh, I believe it was — you can see early gameplay trailers of the game over on Blizzard’s site, and that’s about what it looked like). They eventually opened up the beta, and word of mouth started spreading from there: this was a different MMO from Everquest or Dark Age of Camelot, two of the popular MMO games at the time. This was an MMO done right. Instead of waiting for five minutes after a battle, you could just eat food to regain health and mana. Instead of losing levels when you died (or sitting there dead for hours just waiting for someone to come along to rez you and save the penalty), you could just run back to your corpse and keep playing. Instead of having to all be on the same quest, you could just share quests, and so on.

Here’s a very early preview from Gamespy describing both players’ puzzlement at Blizzard’s direction right back into Warcraft, as well as how different the game would be from existing MMOs. You can see how they come at it: earlier MMOs were slow, plodding, complex, tactical affairs, while World of Warcraft came along and showed everybody how fast and fun an MMO could really be.

And another preview link from IGN, this one talking about what players experienced in the closed beta. Keep in mind how early this is in the game’s development — for a long time during the beta, hunters had no talent trees or pets, and many of the game’s current features and systems (PvP honor, battlegrounds, endgame raiding, token-based rewards) would only show up much later on. There were almost no addons or any of the convenience features that we got through the patches. The game these people played was vastly different from the one we play today: it was focused on the early levels, offered questing as a main content feature, and was largely unfinished and unexplored at endgame.

The early game launched big, but the big launch was always tagged with the qualifier: “for an MMO.” Back then, MMOs were for hardcore gamers — people who played with an Internet connection and wanted to spend $15 a month on a video game. But WoW drew a bigger audience than most MMOs, and copies of the game were even hard to find for a while. Blizzard’s supply exceeded demand on the realms, too — while the game did start up with 41 servers (most MMOs then made do with half of that), players had a tough time staying logged in. Pretty much everyone agreed that it was a good game — when you were actually logged on.

Still, the official reviews (many of which have actually been added on to that page since launch) were great. While there were certainly issues with the game, most everyone saw it as a revolution in MMO gameplay — a revamping of what these subscription-based games could be, and a chance for almost anyone to create a character and play with their friends online.

While it took a long time for World of Warcraft to build up its legendary audience, and even longer for other developers to see what Blizzard had done (take a hardcore passion and put it into a form where even casual players could find enjoyment), it all started five years ago on Blizzard’s original launch. Those early days were definitely marked with excitement. Right after the announcement in 2001, we all wondered just what Blizzard was thinking — why do Warcraft again in such a weird form? But clearly they knew that there was something to this MMO stuff, and five years later, we’re still playing.

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Two Bosses Enter … but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com’s series of fantasy death matches. This season’s combatants come from the original five-man instances of Wrath of the Lich King.

This week’s Two Bosses fantasy deathmatch throws another loser who was voted back into the competition into the pit: King Dred, who lost his last match against King Ymiron, returns to test his claws against the subtle insinuations of Herald Volazj. Volazj is riding high in this season’s tournament, easily winning his first matchup against Novos the Summoner and then shutting down Grand Magus Telestra.

This week’s ground rules:

• Assume that the opponents share similar levels, health pools and comparative overall damage output.
• This deathmatch takes place in neutral territory, which shall in no way hinder either opponent from using his usual resources.
• Don’t get caught up in gameplay mechanics and what actual players might do in each encounter.
• Don’t neglect style, story and scale.

Let the doors open, and let the contestants come forward. Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls … Dyin’ time’s here.

Herald Volazj (Ahn’Kahet: The Old Kingdom)
Ywaq maq oou; ywaq maq ssaggh. Ywaq ma shg’fhn. (They do not die; they do not live. They are outside the cycle.)

The faceless Herald Volazj belongs to the ancient race known as servants of the Old Gods (maybe even Yogg-Saron). Volazj whispers directly into opponents’ minds, slowly and relentlessly driving them insane and causing them to fight one another.

• Insanity
• Mind Flay
• Shadow Bolt Volley
• Shiver

Read more about Herald Volazj’s combat and review insights from players who’ve defeated him.

King Dred (Drak’tharon Keep)
King Dred raises his claws menacingly …

King Dred, the great Devilsaur, is found within Drak’tharon Keep. His vicious attacks are augmented by those of the smaller raptors he calls to his aid during battle.

• Bellowing Roar
• Fearsome Roar
• Grievous Bite
• Mangling Slash
• Piercing Slash
• Raptor Call
• King Dred also “raises his claws menacingly,” after which he performs all three of his bleed effects in rapid succession.

Unlike Dred’s last battle in the Two Bosses Thunderdome, we’ll allow him to call multiple raptors with his Raptor Call.

Read more about the Devilsaur’s battle tactics, and look over comments from players who’ve faced him in Drak’tharon Keep.

The Thunderdome clash

Remember: no game-mechanic nitpicking. Set aside differences in opponents’ health pools, game level and actual damage output. Vote for the spirit of the battle as set forth above, considering each opponent’s abilities — plus the style, scale and story he or she brings to the table.

After you cast your vote, we challenge you to hit the comments with a convincing scenario that will sway fellow readers to vote for your opponent of choice!

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Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly peek into the world of the death knight from WoW.com’s resident undead slave, Daniel Whitcomb.

While we’re not strictly a pet class, per se, no-one can deny that we probably have the largest menagerie outside of Hunters and Warlocks, depending on how we’re specced. It could stand to be a bit more diverse (where’s my glyph of the geist, Blizzard?), and it could stand to smell a bit nicer, but it does the job quite admirably. As a long time lover of the use of death knight pets, I’ve decided that this week is as good as any other to take a peek at those pets, both the common and the talented.

Ghoul

The Ghoul is the mainstay of our menagerie, and while only unholy death knights can have it out all the time, other specs should probably not scoff at it. It’s a very decent chunk of DPS if you can keep it alive and out of harm’s way. Here’s a few simple tips for maximizing ghoul use in PvE:

• Ghouls do gain proportionate stats from you, no matter what the spec, including things such as haste, so they’re a lot deadlier than you might think.
• They can also be buffed the same as a player, and do benefit from group buffs. With that in mind, they appear, last I knew, to benefit from Unholy Presence but not Blood Presence. Of course, the gain probably still isn’t enough to justify switching to Unholy Presence for DPS on that alone.
• Ghouls are pretty picky about hit rating. While you can probably get away with 7.99% hit rating on your own, that rounds down to 7% for them. They also get no benefit from the Draenei aura.
• You can throw a pet snack at a Ghoul to give them a buff, as undeath appears to have dulled their tastebuds. Every little bit of DPS helps, and that can be a quick and easy way to squeeze out some more, especially if you have cooking. Of course, this tip is probably only really applicable to permaghouls, since keeping yourself in snacks if you have to resummon your Ghoul all the time could obviously get expensive.

Essentially, the thing to remember with Ghouls is that you want to keep your hit rating up to the 8% special attack cap naturally to unlock their full stat potential, and you shouldn’t be afraid to pull them out of an AE or throw a Death Coil their way to keep them up. The more your Ghoul is up, the better your DPS is going to be. It’s that simple.

Army of the Dead

Army of the Dead is changing a bit next patch, as it will have a cooldown slashed in half. With that in mind, it’s probably even more important to get an idea on how it works. Currently, many DPS death knights argue that it is worth the 6 lost seconds of attacks to summon it for a DPS boost. That said, there is one major rule you must always, always keep in mind when looking to summon Army of the Dead: They taunt.

If you’re in a battle where positioning is important, especially if the mob has a cone or frontal AE attack. Even if it doesn’t, your tank may still be a bit annoyed if the monster runs away from his grasp constantly. In other words, you need to know your mobs. Know when it’s okay to have all these crazy little things running around taunting willy-nilly, because if it’s not okay, it can lead to a wipe at worst, and likely a pretty grumpy group either way.

That said, it can still be worth it. One thing to note is that they don’t taunt boss level mobs, so on straight tank and spank battles or battles with no adds, you’re probably free and clear to use them. Just be aware that any adds will probably be tauntable unless they are immune to all taunts, so you may not want to risk it on add battles where the position of the adds is important.

There is one workaround to the problem of attacking adds, but it is somewhat unreliable. If you have a permaghoul, the Army of the Dead should actually listen to its commands. So you direct them to attack a single target, such as a raid boss, and hope they leave the single adds alone. That said, they seem to be slightly unreliable in how often they listen, so exercise caution either way.

In short, there’s three things you should know about using Army of the Dead. First, you need be aware of the taunt. Second, you need to be aware of the fight mechanics so you can judge if it’s safe to use. Third, you need communicate with your group leader and/or tank to make sure they’re OK with a bunch of taunting fools running around the battlefield messing up positioning.

Gargoyle

The thing to remember about the Gargoyle is that he’s summoned with stats based on a snapshot of your stats at the time of your summoning. Since he can’t be buffed otherwise, it’s wise to make sure you’re fully buffed when you summon him. If you have a quick buff potion, drink it down. If you have a shaman in your party, wait until he casts Heroism (or Bloodlust as the case may be). If you have a usable trinket, activate it. If you want, you can even wait for any buff procs you have to go off. Gargoyles are pretty easy to manage now that they have a flat runic power cost and a flat summoned time, but you can still buff them up quite a bit. Still, sometimes it gets a little bit hard waiting for the stars to align, and if you end up waiting 2 minutes for that perfect proc and buff alignment, you’ll probably be losing on overall DPS, so be confident.

Dancing Rune Weapon

The Dancing Rune Weapon for Blood death knights is much the same. You’ll want to be as buffed as possible before you summon it for maximum DPS. In addition, it’s a good idea to have a few Death Runes ready to go. If you can immediately refresh diseases and tear out 4 Heart Strikes in quick succession, you’ll get the best bang for your buck on the DRW, since it mirrors your basic attacks. Finally, it’s worth it to note that the DRW does appear in front of the person you target when you summon it, which can be a pain when it appears in front of a cleaving boss or monster. The best way to get around this is to in fact target yourself when you summon the blade. You can see our basic macro guide from a few weeks ago for an example of how to macro this.

Know When to Hold ‘Em

Of course, with all this timing to worry about, sometimes you may despair in getting out your stuff on time. Sure, it’d be great if suddenly the stars aligned, your greatness card procced, the shaman cast Heroism, you chugged a speed potion, and sent out your Gargoyle and Army of the Dead to wreak havoc on the boss just after he hits phase 2. But sometimes it doesn’t work that way. You’re not made of gold, so you can’t constantly chug speed pots. Your shaman burned Heroism on a dumb trash pull. Your card just does not seem to want to proc. Hey, it’s fine. Sometimes it’s better to get your pets out under less than ideal conditions than to let their cooldowns sit idle. Just use your judgment and have fun, and the zen of using death knight pets will open unto you.

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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. Adam Holisky be your host today.

Another week, another Queue. There’s a few good questions today, including the first about rested XP and heirlooms.

Let’s get into it.

Shibdaddy asked…

“Is the amount of bonus xp received from BOA items effected by whether or not you are in a rested state?”

Yes. If you’d normally get 1000 XP from a normal mob, you’d get 2000 XP from a mob with rested bonus. If you have two heirlooms (giving you 20% more), you’d get 2400 XP.

Kilcin asks…

“What is the most economic way to get the tokens needed for the heirloom leveling bonus equipment solo? My guild is incapable of running any instances, my friends aren’t playing till 3.3 comes out and the only reason I’m playing is to prepare for a new character once Cataclysm comes out. Should I not waste my time since I lack the support and resources, or should I suck it up to deal with PUGs to get what I want?”

The best way is through doing the Argent Tournament dailies, although you’ll need to become a champion of every city in order to access the quartermaster. Running Wintergrasp every week is also an easy way collect Stone Keeper Shards, and they pile up quickly enough.

Once patch 3.3 hits the live servers running heroic pugs will be insanely easy. You’ll never have any shortage of badges then, and you’ll be able to buy heirlooms at your whim.

Also, Kilcin asked some other very good questions, and we’ll get to those in future editions of The Queue.

TyKell asks…

“Does anyone know if patch 3.3 is going to have a cinematic for it like the Black Temple one for BC?”

It hasn’t been released yet, but I’d put money on that it will be coming out sometime soon.

Xanedris asks…

“I’ve chosen the Oracles for my first two 80s. Why should I choose the Frenzyheart for #3?”

You shouldn’t in my opinion. Once you get the Green Proto-Drake from the Oracles you don’t really need the Orcales rep — assuming you’re not using any of their gear still (which you probably arn’t). However with the Frenzyheart rep you can get a Disgusting Jar, which has useful things like potions in it that are going to be helpful for years to come, especially if you send those potions to alts to use while leveling.

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