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Each week, The Care and Feeding of Warriors looks at the warrior class, the dizzying highs, the devastating lows, and the agony and ecstasy of plate wearing, rage using toons everywhere in Azeroth, Outland and Northrend. Matthew Rossi is our slightly demented, hirsute guide to all things warrior. We’re not kidding, the guy’s really hairy. Like a sasquatch, really.

Okay, first off, a confession: I’m cheating on my fury spec.

I have been since the option to have dual talent specialization came out, actually. See, I tanked all through original WoW and The Burning Crusade (to be fair, I tanked as an arms or fury warrior because I could in MC and BWL) and so I figured, what the heck, I’ll go prot for my offspec and tank some heroics. After an initial hiccough where I actually specced arms for some fights and fury for others, I settled back into a standard prot build for tanking heroics for friends. Then summer hit, and we all know what happens in summer: people suddenly want to go outside and froilic in the sunshine and you’re sitting there waiting to raid with 22 people and no tanks. So what do you do?

Well, you strap on all that offspec tanking gear you collected ‘just in case’ and you tank Ulduar, that’s what you do. Over the past couple of weeks I’ve tanked more than I’ve been DPS That’s not the problem, however. It’s not that I’ve been tanking that has me bothered… it’s that I liked it. A lot.

I switched to DPS last December when I moved guilds and started WotLK progression. I was tired, and maybe even burned out on tanking. For some reason, when I tank I’m much more of a perfectionist than when I DPS, I work like a fiend to get and hold aggro (I was trying to multi-mob tank in ZA on Dragonhawk way before the change to TC and addition of Shockwave, which is one reason why I have this very impressive cyst on my right wrist) and in general I find the greatest satisfaction as a tank in doing as good a job as is possible. However, by the time BC ended, I had started to hate tanking, hate the guild I was in for being the people I tanked for, and hate Blizzard for how they designed tanking. You’ve either taken a look at that cyst picture or you haven’t, but either way the ridiculous amount of spamming Devastate, Heroic Strike, and Shield Block (also TC every time it was up, also Demo Shout every time it was about to fall off, also Shield Slam every time it was up… warrior tanking meant never allowing a cooldown to lie fallow, you were slamming on keys like a pianist on crank) had left my right hand in a state of pure agony.

I had to ice my wrist down after we killed Kael’Thas the first time. I’m not even kidding here.

So when I found myself tanking again this week and found myself enjoying it again, it came to me as a bit of a shock. Not that I didn’t know that they’d overhauled prot immensely in patch 3.0, I leveled from 70 to 80 as prot intending to tank for my then-guild before the lure of Titan’s Grip became too strong to resist. But the reduction in the spam factor was pretty substantial. Aside from metaphorically slamming my foot down on the Heroic Strike accelerator, and beating on my Devastate key like it owed me money, and yes, hitting TC every single time it was up… well, okay, I’m not exactly making my case here but trust me, it really is a lot better now. Honestly, while it’s hard for me to determine which tanking class is outright superior to the others (DK’s generally get chosen for hard modes due to their ridiculous level of tanking cooldowns, I am aware, but while that’s an important part of the game it’s hardly all there is to tanking) I would have no difficulty in saying that there’s nothing a warrior can’t tank. It’s probably true that a paladin would have an eaiser time with large AoE packs and can generate more threat up front, it’s certainly true that a druid has higher armor and health and most likely a great deal more dodge (which is true avoidance and not a mixed stat like block) and we’ve already mention death knights and their cooldowns that a warrior has to double glyph just to approach. But when I as a warrior tank can solo tank Yogg-Saron’s Phase 1 and 3 and get a successful kill, I have a hard time believing that warrior tanks are broken as such.

That being said, the recent changes to the class on the last PTR build seem like very welcome ones to me. Are they massive, ground breaking redesigns of the class? No, they’re not. Do warriors need more to remain viable tanks? I think this is a deceptive issue. Warriors are viable tanks now. Blizzard keeps saying that warriors are very well represented in Ulduar, and while for myself I have to say I haven’t seen that (I’m the only warrior currently doing much tanking for my guild) I don’t see much point in disbelieving them on it, not only do they have access to numbers I don’t but if they were lying then the whole point of the discussion would be gone.

I think the biggest issue facing warriors as tanks is that they are, in many ways, the legacy tanks of old content. Warriors are the tanks who were designed to tank MC, BWL, AQ, and original Naxx. They’re based around the idea of steady damage coming in, converted to rage, and going back out as threat. This worked fine when warrior tanks had 4 to 6k health and took hits for 3 to 4k at the absolute most (not counting things like crushing blows or big predictable Broodlord Lashlayer MS hits that could crit for 8k) but now that damage comes in huge spikes of up to 25k and tank health fully buffed is creeping towards 45k or more, you end up in a situation where warrior threat is ridiculously spiky. The initial period of aggro generation is hampered by having, at the most, the rage from Bloodrage and a charge to work with, making AoE tanking still an issue for warrior tanks despite our greatly increased toolbox we gained in patch 3.0. Meanwhile, on a boss, a warrior will often go from having effectively no rage to suddenly seeing the rage bar fill up from a huge spike or two of damage, leading to what I said before about threat generation being extremely spiky.

Combine this with one of our tanking stats being fairly lackluster at the moment, (the change to Shield Specialization will help with this to some small degree, at least in terms of rage generation, but it doesn’t fix the ‘meh’ factor of blocking a 25k hit and in so doing reducing it by 2k damage, and that only if you’re lucky enough for the 25k hit to be physical and not magic damage) and it’s quite understandable that warrior tanks would feel that patch 3.2 is a disappointing one for them. It’s fair to say that, despite the drastic and welcome redesign of the warrior protection tree in patch 3.0, warriors are still a tanking class designed and built originally around the idea of spamming certain ability to gain and hold threat.

Such a class, and one based so much around mechanics like block that are simply less impressive in the WotLK tanking world of big spike damage that requires cooldowns to mitigate, ends up feeling a lot more fussy to tank with. There’s less of a feeling of a rotation and more of a feeling of battering your keyboard into submission in any given attempt to tank a boss, and AoE tanking still requires a warrior to hope no one is stupid in the first ten seconds of a pull because it takes about that long to get thunderclap, shockwave and tab devastating to the point where mobs will hold themselves on you via damage shield, and in that window it’s fairly easy for anyone to pull mobs off of you while you wait for an AoE cooldown.

While I believe it is possible for a warrior to tank any content in the game, and for some fights our vast array of situational abilities (Vigilance, Intervene, Spell Reflection to name a few) can be quite handy, warriors are tanking with a design philosophy from the original release of the game at their core, and despite all the changes and abilities bolted on to that framework in BC and WotLK, the legacy of that oldest set of tanking mechanics persists and needs to be addressed. I don’t think it will break the game if it’s not addressed in patch 3.2, no.

But I also don’t think the band-aid changes to block value on gear are going to do much, and as long as warrior damage output is the lowest of all the tanks, our rage generation is inexorably tied primarily to how much damage we take, and our threat output is linked to spamming abilities (you should have seen my wrist after I got done solo tanking Yogg) there are going to be issues with warriors as tanks. I’ve learned in the past couple of weeks that yes, I enjoy tanking still, but that going back to it full time might well destroy my hand. Is it as bad as it was in BC? No, but not as bad doesn’t mean good enough. The small changes we’re seeing in 3.2 are a step in the right direction, now lets see some more steps.

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Ghostcrawler has finally said on the forums what I’ve been saying for a while here on WoW.com and elsewhere: using blue text on the forums as a way of disseminating information is “a strange way to communicate.” He’s been appending the words “[Not tracked]” to some of his posts so they don’t end up on the official “bluetracker,” because a lot of what he posts is just silly and fun and not to be pored over and examined (especially without the context of the other posts around it). But all of those posts are still picked up by the unofficial bluetrackers that many players follow, and he laments that it’s annoying to have people jump in on threads without reading all the context: “you end up looking like a real jerk half the time.”

I would never call GC a jerk, but it’s clear to see what he means — sending out information via official posts on the forum is something Blizzard has done for a long time, and it’s really a bad way to go about it. To their credit, they’ve been trying lots of new things lately, from official interviews to class Q&As and just plain releasing official information on the site. But I’ve always thought (and still think) that the company could use an official blog — back when I was playing Dark Age of Camelot, I really enjoyed all of their work on the Camelot Herald, and I think Blizzard would benefit from something more like that. They do have a section for official news on the front page, but that’s mostly licensed items and marketing information, not actual updates to the game.

In the meantime, we’ll keep getting hints and scraps from the forum. It’s probably a bit much for GC to ask that some of his posts not be talked about at all — if he was on Twitter, every tweet would be pored over, too (”GC had pancakes for breakfast, nerf pancakes!”). But I do think that if there was more information coming from official channels about class balance and changes, the forum posts wouldn’t be such a big deal.

Update: The folks over at Woraid tell us their bluetracker doesn’t track posts with “[Not tracked]” added to them. But doesn’t it show just how silly the whole forums thing is that we have to have webpages that track forum posts by the blues, and then they have to have flags in those posts that keep us from tracking them?

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Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new UI and addons blog for WoW. Having some difficulty with Mimiron? Let me help!

Where do I start? There are several intriguing changes impacting wow goldthe Priest class (specifically those of us that heal). On the one hand I’m partially disappointed by some of the changes. On the other hand I’m relieved because the changes could have been worse.

Let us get to it then, shall we?

First up is the Prayer of Healing change.

Prayer of Healing: The percentage of spell power this spell gains in healing (per target) has been reduced from 80.7% to 52.6%.

This change was probably needed. I don’t like it but I can understand the need for it. When your Prayer of Healing starts critically healing in excess of over 8000 points, that might be construed as a bit much in our current stage of end game.

But 30%? Really? What about something more in between? I think the 65% range is a good number. Who knows? Maybe they might decide that it’s too severe and decide to raise it back up again. I can’t fault the design team for wanting to reduce the healing coefficient. With Priests breaching the 3000 spell power barrier right now, Prayer of Healing was doing an enormous amount on its own. Factor in the two piece set from tier 8 and it was a change we saw coming.

Those of you that disagree, stop and think ahead for a moment. The Coliseum raid instance that’s coming out is a full tier better than Ulduar. Assuming Icecrown is after that which is either tier 10 (or 11 depending on what else is in between), then we’d be seeing 10000 point Prayer of Healing crits. Couple that with the Glyph of Prayer of Healing? You can see those numbers go up even more.

For Discipline Priests, Penance takes a slight hit.

Penance: Cooldown increased to 12 seconds, up from 10 seconds.

We may as well just say that we our Major Glyph slots drop from 3 to 2. Personally, I believe this makes the Penance glyph that much more important. Does it really change anything though? In the grand scheme of things, it’s two seconds. My Priest is rocking around ~400 haste. Those are some lightning quick spells as it is. So what do we do with the extra 2 second cooldown? There’s a lot of spells we can use in between. Another Flash Heal, another Power Word: Shield, or another spell are just a few of the things I can think of. Heh, for the more offensive minded Discipline Priest, you could sneak in a Shadow Word: Death or a Shadow Word: Pain. (I’m kidding!)

Over the past several weeks, I did manage to get involved in a few arenas playing on my Priest. Running Vault of Archavon over the past several months resulted in a decently capable PvP set (800 resilience is the amount I started with). Penance played a big part in the ability to keep myself and my partner alive.

What about the change to Inspiration?

Inspiration: The buff from this ability now reduces the physical damage taken by the target by 3/7/10% instead of increasing the target’s armor.

Switching from the armor increase to physical damage taken isn’t a completely bad nerf. A first, a lot of Priests I spoke to thought it was a great buff until they realized the damage was physical. The majority of the raid damage in Ulduar is magical. I’m leaning towards it being a slight nerf.

That’s it for the Priest specific changes. We’re not done yet. There are a few other things listed in the notes that affect Priests. Did you spot these?

There’s a slight modification to the Glyph of Power: Word Shield.

The heal from Glyph of Power Word: Shield can now cause Divine Aegis.

So what type of numbers are we looking at exactly? A typical Discipline specced Power: Word Shield will land for 6000. The glyph heals for 20% of the amount absorbed. We can ballpark that at 1200 healed. Not only that, but Divine Aegis only activates if the heal portion crits (which goes up even more). The Aegis will protect 30% of the overall crit heal.

The PTR isn’t up yet so I haven’t been able to give it a shot. I don’t foresee it making a huge impact, but it’s a slight improvement at least even though it won’t make up for the Prayer of Healing changes.

And then there is Replenishment.

Replenishment: This buff now grants 1% of the target’s maximum mana over 5 seconds instead of 0.25% per second. This applies to all 5 sources of Replenishment (Vampiric Touch, Judgements of the Wise, Hunting Party, Enduring Winter Frostbolts and Soul Leech).

That’s a straight nerf. It’s an overall 20% reduction in Replenishment’s effectiveness. You can read more about that change in Eliah’s Replenishment post. Pay close attention to your manipulation of mana.

What about the buffs to MP5?

Lots of questions about this. MP5 based items have their numbers increased by 25%. With the previous Spirit nerf, one would wonder if we’re being shifted back into MP5 mode. The jury is still out on this one. Discipline Priests don’t care that much about Spirit regardless so this change is an overall buff. But for Holy Priests, the ultimate question is between gear with Spirit and gear with MP5 and which to choose. Spirit does affect the spell power stat for Holy.

So here’s the million gold question.

Is the increased regeneration from MP5 better than the spell power modifiers and regeneration from Spirit?

I’m going to leave that question for the theorycrafting gurus to answer and patiently wait and see what the conclusion is. I believe the answer is more towards MP5.

Like all patch notes, all of this is pre-emptive and subject to change at any time.

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We’ve picked up some more details about professions in Patch 3.2. Some of the changes were covered a few days ago by Eliah. The notes made today elaborate more on engineering, alchemy, fishing and cooking changes.

Alchemy

• Stackable potions now stack to 20.
• Five new epic gem transmute recipes are available from the Northrend trainer. The recipe for transmuting a Cardinal Ruby can be learned from a quest, given by Linzy Blackbolt in Dalaran.
• Rage potions can now be used by druids.

I have an entire guild bank tab filled with nothing but Mana Injectors. I was both saddened and delighted when I heard that potions now stack to 20. Big plus to Potion of Speed and Potion of Wild Magic since those will be stackable now. But are they going to be completely useless? Nope! Wait until you see the Engineering changes. It means I don’t have to make any more injectors! New epic gem transmutes are on the way too!

More profession changes after the jump.

Cooking

• Blackened Dragonfin Recipe: Now only requires 1 Dragonfin Angelfish.
• Chef’s Hat is now superior-quality and allows the chef to cook faster.
• Drop rate for recipes from the Outland Daily Cooking quests increased.
• A chance for a bonus Dalaran Cooking Token from the Spice Bag has increased.
• Captain Rumsey’s Lager recipe can now be randomly found in the quest reward Crate, Barrel, or Spice Bag from the cooking dailies.

My first thought looking at the cooking changes is that I’m going to have to go and pick up a Chef’s Hat now. Faster Fish Feasts? Yes please!

Engineering

• Added a schematic for a Goblin Welding Beam that can heal friendly mechanical units.
• Alarm-o-Bot functionality changed. Materials required reduced.
• Box of Bombs no longer requires an anvil.
• Doubled the duration on Nitro Boosts.
• Increased benefits from Hyperspeed Accelerators, Hand-Mounted Pyro Rocket and Reticulated Armor Webbing glove modifications.
• Increased the passive bonus provided by Springy Arachnoweave, Flexweave Underlay and Nitro Boosts.
• Increased siege damage caused by Saronite Bombs and the Global Thermal Sapper Charge.
• The Ultrasafe Bullet Machine and Saronite Arrow Maker schematics have been simplified to create a full stack of the appropriate ammunition. No longer requires an anvil. Reduced the materials required to make this ammunition.
• Mote Extractor now has innate tracking for gas clouds while it is in your inventory. Tracking of gas clouds has been removed from goggles.
• Potion Injectors now increase the amount gained by 25% when used by engineers. Quantity produced by recipes for Runic Healing and Mana Injectors has been increased.
• Significantly reduced the cooldown on MOLL-E.
• Spynocular belt enchantment changed to a Brassbolt Rebreather, allowing engineers to breathe underwater.
• Transporter devices are no longer classified as trinkets and can be used directly from your inventory.
• Reduced the materials needed to create all engineering Dragonlings, and reduced their cooldowns, although they still cannot be used in Arenas.

Here we go! The most hotly debated profession gets several changes to it. I mentioned earlier about the changes to potion injectors. It seems like engineers who use injectors now get a bonus out of it. As a healer, I can’t help but wonder if that alone is worth a profession switch. Then I remembered what a grind leveling engineering was and thought better of it. But at least injectors aren’t going to be completely useless anymore.

Fishing

• Players with 300 or higher cooking have a chance to find a Waterlogged Recipe in the Bag of Fishing Treasures awarded by the Northrend fishing dailies. This item can be traded to other players and rewards several Dalaran Cooking Rewards when turned in.

Inscription

• Added a new Glyph of Claw for young feral druids who haven’t yet obtained Mangle. Inscribers can learn this glyph from the trainer.
• Master’s Inscriptions increased.

Leatherworking

• Added recipe for Heavy Knothide Leather to Leatherworking trainers (rather than a vendor recipe). Changed several recipes to use Heavy Knothide Leather instead of regular Leather.

While we know the other professions are going to undergo additional buffs, we don’t exactly know what. Like Eliah, I’m also curious about how the Tailoring changes will evolve.

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Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart answers your questions about the lore and history of the World of Warcraft. Ask your questions in the comments section below, and we’ll try to answer it in a future edition.

I’m going to get this out of the way right off the bat since I know I’ll get a dozen people asking again this week: Yes, Know Your Lore will be coming back, it is not gone forever. I promise. I will pinkie swear on it, even. Come on, who wants to pinkie swear? Anybody? Anybody?

Aler asked…

“On the topic of the Nerubians and the Qiraji, is there any relation in the lore between the two? Or are two insect civilizations coincidental?”

There’s absolutely a relation between the two. They hold a common ancestry. Both the Qiraji and the Nerubians are offshoots of an even more ancient race, the Aqir. Way back when Azeroth was still very primal, and Trolls were the top dogs. There were three major players in the world: The Amani Trolls, the Gurubashi Trolls, and the Aqir. They warred for thousands of years. Thousands. It was a war of attrition on the grandest scale possible, and all involved more or less broke under the weight of their losses.

The Aqir Empire was split in two, between the North and the South. The Aqir in the north founded Azjol-Nerub. The south founded Ahn’Qiraj. After thousands and thousands of years, they just evolved differently, likely to adapt to their two very different environments. The Aqir basically ceased to be, and in its place were the Qiraji and the Nerubians.

alpha5099 asked…

“Is it my imagination, or are the Dwarves the only playable race that doesn’t seem to be terribly screwed up by something in the recent past? The Orcs are atoning for decades of evil, the Humans, Undead, and Night Elves have deep psychic scars from the Third War, and the Gnomes, Tauren, Trolls and Draenei have all been forced to flee from their home lands due to invasion (those are simplifications, obviously). But what do the Dwarves have? They probably saw heavy losses in the third war, but no where near as bad as the Humans did. They have the Dark Iron Dwarves to contend with, but that doesn’t seem to be too bad. Unless I’m missing something major, the Dwarves seem to be surprisingly stable.”

The Dwarves have many words that describe them. Stable is not one of them. The Ironforge Dwarves have had just as much trouble as every other race on Azeroth, the only difference is that right now, they’re in a relatively calm period compared to the others. Relatively calm does not mean calm, mind.

The War of the Three Hammers isn’t terribly recent, but it set the stage for the current state of the Dwarves, for the most part. This War was a civil war among the Dwarves, sparked by the death of the former king of Ironforge, Modimus Anvilmar. The Bronzebeard Dwarves, the Wildhammer Dwarves, and the Dark Iron Dwarves were all once under the same roof, and the same banner. Modimus Anvilmar kept them all in line, more or less. Ironforge is currently one third the kingdom it used to be, with the loss of the Dark Irons and the Wildhammer. You can read up on that whole thing in our Know Your Lore article on Grim Batol.

More recently, the Dwarves lost a significant amount of territory in Khaz Modan to the Dragonmaw Orcs during the Second War. The Dragonmaw still have a pretty strong presence, as you see in the Wetlands.

Ironforge currently does not have an heir. Wait, let me correct myself: Ironforge’s current heir is a pawn of the Dark Iron Dwarves, and has by now given birth to a halfblood that can technically claim the throne one day, unless Magni utterly disowns his own daughter and Ironforge decides not to recognize her hereditary right to rule. If they do that, then there really is no heir to the throne. When Magni passes, the crown is up for grabs, and it won’t be pretty.

The other Bronzebeard brothers were completely missing until very recently, and the Explorers’ League keeps sticking its nose where it doesn’t belong, unearthing horrors never meant to be seen by mortal men.

The Dwarves aren’t in a good spot. Not nearly as good as people make them out to be, anyway. All it would take is Magni choking to death on his ale to throw the place into chaos… unless the Dwarven senate can keep things under control, and I think we know the fantasy genre by now. The senate can never keep things under control.

Oni Stardust asked…

“There’s something that’s always bothered me about the Horde. Why is it that when the Trolls joined the Horde they were expected to give up cannibalism (and voodoo), but the Undead eat the bodies of intelligent creatures all the time and as far as I know Thrall hasn’t said a word about it.”

The greater Horde body turns a blind eye to a lot of things that the Forsaken do, really. The Forsaken probably get away with a lot of what they do simply by keeping themselves a safe distance apart from their allies. Thrall is either completely unaware of what the Forsaken do, or he’s a hypocritical bastard for letting them do it. It’s either ignorance or incompetence, it can’t really go any other way there.

Sumanai asked…

“What’s the story around Path of the Titans, the ruined road that goes from Ulduar to the shore of Dragonblight? What bugged me is that it doesn’t end on the shore of Dragonblight, it continues further and we see some ruins deep into the sea. On top of that, in Strand of the Ancients, which is supposed to be located in some island south of Dragonblight, you can see the road pass through the island and continue further south.”

I can’t remember where I read it/heard it, so please take this with a grain of salt: From what I understand, the Path of the Titans was a pathway that went from the top of the world (Storm Peaks/Ulduar), all the way to the bottom. It cut straight down the middle of Azeroth. It was built when the world was all one continent, before the Sundering. After the Sundering, the continents were broken apart and the Path of the Titans broke with it. Northrend is the only place we’ve visited where you would still see parts of it preserved. When we visit the Maelstrom, we may see some remnants of it there, too.

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You know you’ve been waiting too long for new content when you start organizing events like this one. “It’s been a long-standing tradition of my guild to run level 1 naked gnome/dwarf races, or as we call them, “nakkid” races,” writes Baddad of <Survivors of the Storm> on Madoran. “The goal is to run from Dun Morogh into Ironforge, through the Deeprun Tram (players can take the tram and it’s often VERY funny to watch someone just barely miss the tram and fall into the pit) and then through the gates of Stormwind.” That’s Baddad refereeing in the middle with his impartial Felguard advisor. He adds that in this particular race, first place went to Nenet, with Tiberiusll as runner-up and Sycosimp taking the bronze.

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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 — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, gold seller ads, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran.

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A friend of mine recently got hit by a pretty devious phishing scam targeting wealthy (in-game) players looking to make legitimate purchases. My friend, we’ll call him Cobra, was in a major city when an offer in the Trade Channel caught his eye. A player, we’ll call him Bubbles, was offering a Spectral Tiger Mount for 5000 gold. Since this mount is only available as a code on a rare loot card, Cobra contacted Bubbles to inquire. Purchasing codes for in-game items with in-game cash is perfectly legitimate, according to Blizzard, so Cobra did not worry about going against the TOS with this transaction.

Bubbles, a level 78 Blood Elf Mage, seemed legitimate. For one thing, he was not a throwaway low level character. Also, he didn’t want to take the cash then, but just see it in a trade window to make sure Cobra was in possession of it. So Cobra gave Bubbles his email address only and waited for the email that included the code and a link to where to input the information.

Cobra was in-game on one computer and clicked on the link on a separate computer. The link went to a page that looked exactly like the non-Battle.Net account page. He logged in and it took him to a page that looked exactly like the official Blizzard code entry page that he had used when he entered his Polar Bear mount code from last year’s BlizzCon. After three tries of trying to register the code he had received, he noticed that his other computer had disconnected from WoW.

When he tried to login again, he was told that his account was now associated with a Battle.Net account and that his username and password were no longer valid. It just so happens that all of this was done during a break at work, and Cobra works with his guild leader, who we will call TSU. Cobra walked over to TSU’s desk and asked him to logon and see if he was logged in. Sure enough, he was. So TSU immediately demoted Cobra’s character.

Unfortunately, TSU did not get a screenshot, but here is what happened next.

Hacker: What did you do that for?!?
TSU: You’re a hacker.
Hacker: How do you know?
TSU: Because the real player is looking over my shoulder.
Hacker: O HAI!

Cobra was able to get in touch with Blizzard support and get his account back within 20 to 30 minutes after it was compromised. About 10K gold from various characters and all of his gems were gone. Also, some of his other items were on the Auction House. His gear was still intact and he was able to raid that same evening, so the damage was far less than others who have been hacked.

But wait! There’s more! As I write this, Cobra’s account got hacked again. Not only did the phishing site take his old account info, it downloaded a keylogger to steal the new account info. They logged into his character and started the scam all over again by spamming Trade Channel with the same Spectral Tiger Mount offer.

Using a server-known, high-level character (hacked from a previous transaction) for the initial communication and asking to only see the cash is an excellent way to both look legitimate and only get targets who have enough money to be worth further effort. Trusting a link in an email rather than going to the site directly was Cobra’s biggest mistake and ultimately how his account was compromised. Having an Authenticator would have helped in this situation, but this kind of scam circumvents most other basic account security measures.

In general, if you want to conduct account related business (for any account, not just WoW), get to the website yourself and use trusted links only. And, please, don’t buy gold. If these hackers didn’t have a market to sell their ill-gotten goods, then they wouldn’t waste their time devising these scams in the first place.

Be careful out there!

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It’s Wednesday once more in Europe and Blizzard has been busy. After the implementation of multilingual battle groups last week, they seemed to like it so much that they’re merging some more, this time on a bigger scale. Hopefully all this should be happening between 3:00am and 11:00am CEST, but judging by some of the problems experienced by Americans yesterday, this could easily changed. Just keep calm and carry on.

So during the maintenance tomorrow, we will not only be getting patch 3.1.3, various battle groups will be shoved together and renamed.

• Bloodlust (hey that’s me) and Cataclysme will become Cataclysm/Cataclysme
• Cyclone and Todbringer will become Cyclone/Wirbeisturm
• Conviction and Raserei will become Frenzy/Raserei
• Rampage and Ferocite will become Rampage/Saccage
• Reckoning and Verderbnis will become Reckoning/Abrechnung
• Ruin and Glutsturm will become Emberstorm/Glutsturm
• Vengeance and Schattenbrand will become Vengeance/Rache, and finally
• Sturmangroff and Represailles will become Sturmangriff/Charge

So while you’re waiting for all this to happen, there’s plenty to do. We’ve got patch notes for 3.1.3, there are the new Tauren kitty forms to drool over and you could even download the Battle.net authenticator app from EU iTunes stores. As usual one of my American colleagues - this week Alex Z. - has compiled a fun post to read that rounds up all the interesting tidbits which have been happening for your amusement to tide you over until the servers pop back up.

UpdatE: Maintenance has now been extended to 1pm CEST.

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Although most of us, I suspect, prefer guild runs, most of us also have to PuG it up every once in a while. LFG can be a bit of a crap shoot; you can get an Ulduar-geared player doing 3,000 DPS in your heroic, or a fresh 80 who has a thing or two to learn doing 1,000.

Fortunately, we have the Armory to help us separate the good from the bad, or at least the geared from the ungeared. Sites like Be Imba and WoW Heroes have been around for a while to help us more easily check a character’s gear level.

Now a new site, PUG Checker, can show you at a glance what bosses a character has killed, and how many times - or rather, what bosses they’ve been present for a kill of. Above right you can see what it shows for raids on my priest (I don’t like Malygos very much). If you click “show bosses,” you can see specific raid bosses in raids; otherwise, it just counts kills of the end boss. It uses Armory data, of course, which is pretty accurate, but not always perfect. Like the site says, “don’t shoot the messenger” if the numbers aren’t quite right.

Like Be Imba and WoW Heroes, this isn’t an infallible guide to whether a player is good or not. It does probably correlate to some degree, though. In fact, if PUG Checker just added the average ilvl of the equipped gear of the person I’m checking, it would be my go-to site for checking puggies. It does load data much quicker than either of those equipment sites, which alone is enough that I will probably use it. I also really dig the clean design and the number-circles that look like subway indicators.

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider’s daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky will be your host today.

There’s a few good questions today of various voluptuous varieties: raiding, legal ToS (TNG > ToS, by the way), and new gaming hardware. Yummy.

Start me off, Delks…

Edit: Please be sure to listen to Fly Me To The Moon by Ol’ Blue Eyes during today’s Queue, or you can listen to the title’s name sake song.

Delks asked…

“What’s the point of running old world raids and instances?”

Several, besides the obvious one of achievements. First, they offer compelling story lines that really help tie up many of the arcs that run through the stories present in the 1 through 60 game. Secondly, the dungeons are quite visually impressive if you haven’t been through them a few hundred times already. It’s just fun from a gameplay stance. Finally, running the old world content can still give some unique rewards that people covet, like bug mounts in AQ40 (although they’re only usable in AQ40), or the tiger and raptor mounts from ZG.

George asked…

“Here’s a question about the terms of use agreement that we must accept every time the game gets patched. I certainly don’t bother reading it and I’m fairly certain that most others don’t either, so couldn’t Blizzard pull a fast one and make us agree to something we wouldn’t normally agree to by hiding something in the legal fine print?”

They could sneak something crazy in, but that would be supremely evil and cause a significant backlash against their company. They won’t do such a thing for that reason alone. If there was anything way out line, like the example of signing over your first born that Erik pointed out, you’d have quite a powerful argument.

In the end remember that the agreements between you and Blizzard really amount to nothing more than a fair set of rules normal and fair minded people would agree to abide by: no botting, no harassment, no hacking, etc…

Of course, I Am Not A Lawyer (iAnal), and there is fine print for a reason… See? Now I’m not culpable for anything I said. Horray! Drinks are on me. Oh wait…

Okkienookie asked…

“Any dates when the new Logitech keyboard is coming out?”

The Logitech G19 is showing up as released on the Logitech site, and you can order it for $200. It’s not showing up as released on Amazon yet, and Best Buy doesn’t have it in their inventory either. So it likely was just released in the past few days. I’ve heard rumblings that Dell had an exclusive deal with Logitech, but wasn’t able to find anything on it while briefly searching.

I’ll be ordering mine after I find out how many BlizzCon tickets I’m buying this weekend for people.

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