Mages in WotLK: I'm re-speccing frostfire

As you are likely already aware, the internets exploded yesterday with what is apparently leaked details from the friends and family alpha of Wrath of the Lich King. Arguably the biggest part of this news was that we apparently have access to very early versions of the new talent trees for several of the existing classes wow. Being the responsible, conscientious Mage columnist that I am, I immediately pored over the Mage talent trees, devouring this very premature, more than likely never-to-see-the-light-of-day info like a starving man would tear into a steak.

Of course, as we all know by now, information coming out this early is almost guaranteed to differ radically from what actually makes it live. Still, it serves a purpose. Even if none of these spells and talents reach the live servers unmolested wow gold, at least we're getting a glimpse into Blizzard's development process, and possibly seeing the direction they intend to take our beautiful class in.

We like Blizzard around here, and since they made it clear that they do not want us posting the new info directly, I won't be specifically listing the new Mage talents here. You can find those on the WotLK information Wiki, so click away. When you're done, come on back and join me after the jump buy wow gold, where I'll give my take on what the expansion appears to have in store for Mages.

Mass bannings strike Glider users

We've gotten more tips on this than any other topic in recent memory: apparently many users of the popular WoW botting program Glider have been hit with the ban hammer wow gold, including some of our very own readers. You may recall Glider as the company with whom Blizzard is currently embroiled in a lawsuit (does the word "embroil" have any use other than lawsuits?). The Glider forums are abuzz with comments and complaints, to which I can only reply "QQ." Botting is clearly against the EULA, the spirit of the game, and the best interests of the other players. Yes, I would be sad if I got banned, but honestly, anyone who was botting had it coming.

There are various objections to be made to this stance. Most of the people who wrote in claim to have been botting in order to bypass the tedious leveling process cheap wow gold. I agree that it can be boring to level 1–70 multiple times, even with the new, faster 20–60 process. However, that doesn't make it OK to cheat. Others claim that with fewer bots in the system, the supply of primals will be reduced and therefore the price will go up; I'm not much of a WoW economist, so I'll leave that to others. But to this blogger, banning botters can only be interpreted as a good thing: some cheaters got what they deserved. Whether you agree or disagree buy wow gold, please feel free to sound off in the comments. And if you are a botter yourself, and haven't gotten banned yet, I'd advise you to stop -- they're clearly getting serious about this.

Mourning for China

Apparently it's natural disaster season in Asia. The massive cyclone that hit Burma () on May 3 has taken an estimated 78,000 lives with an additional 56,000 missing. Last week (May 12) an earthquake measuring 7.9 on the Richter scale shook parts of china wow gold. The death toll for that quake has reached 34,000 with the body count expected to rise. Many of the quake victims have been children, as least 6 schools collapsed while classes were in session. It will take weeks, months, or even years to sort out the amount of damage caused by these events.

The Chinese government has declared a mourning period for three days for those injured, missing, and passed world of warcraft gold. This includes the closing of movie theaters, web portals and television stations. The9, who services World of Warcraft in is participating in the blackout as is Shanda Interactive Entertainment, host of the World of Legend game.

If you are helping out, there are a number of charitable organizations taking donations to assist in providing relief to victims in Asia. Studies show that wow making donations to such organizations actually help to boost your own mood in addition to helping those who are in need.

Blood Sport: Tips and Tricks

PvP in its purest form is a beautiful thing. Amanda Dean, always obsessed with the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat brings you news you can use in the Arena. When last seen wow gold, former Blood Sport columnist V'Ming Chew had defeated a pack of angry Gnome Warlocks and had decided to take up retirement in a lovely chateau overlooking the Ring of Trials in Nagrand.

So thanks to the new point requirements for Battleground gear in Arena Season Four, many people who are not as familiar with the arena will be forced to queue up. When I first started playing arenas cheap wow gold, I didn't see it as tremendously different from battlegrounds. After several hard-learned lessons I found that I had to be much more flexible. I've also picked up a few tricks along the way.

You have to count on all of your opponents using every tool available wow. If you're not already doing these things, give some of them a shot.

Police: Gunman wounds 3 outside SoCal church

LOS ANGELES - A man with a semiautomatic rifle opened fire at a church festival Saturday, wounding his ex-wife and two bystanders before festival-goers grabbed him and held him for police, authorities and a church official said.

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Gunfire rang out on a grassy field where the festival was being set up at the St. John Baptist de la Salle Roman Catholic parish shortly before 11 a.m., said police Capt wow gold. Steven Ruiz.

"We believe this is an isolated incident, a domestic-violence dispute," he said.

Father Robert Milbauer, the parish's pastor, said a woman injured in the attack was the gunman's ex-wife. The two have a child who attends the school and had been mired in an ongoing dispute, Ruiz said.

The gunman's identity was not immediately released.

He opened fire with a .22-caliber rifle a few minutes before the church's annual weekend festival was to begin. Milbauer said about 50 people world of warcraft gold, mainly church volunteers and their children, were setting up food and game booths and carnival-style rides when the gunfire erupted.

"I was walking toward the festival area to say an opening prayer and I saw them," Milbauer said of the shooting victims.

The man's 30-year-old ex-wife was one of the festival workers. She was hospitalized in stable condition, Ruiz said.

A 45-year-old man was shot in the chest and was in critical condition and another man, 47, was in stable condition with a leg wound cheap wow gold, Ruiz said.

Their identities were not immediately released.

The man walked away after the shooting but was quickly grabbed by bystanders, one of whom was an off-duty Burbank police officer.

"They managed to overtake him and held him down," Ruiz said. "I'm told that he was in the process of possibly reloading."

The festival was shut down for the day, and Milbauer said grief counselors were meeting with witnesses, particularly the children.

The parish plans to go ahead with the festival on Sunday, Milbauer said, in part to help parishioners put the tragedy behind them.

The church and school are located in the city's Granada Hills area in the San Fernando Valley, an ordinarily peaceful, multiethnic, middle-class residential neighborhood not far from the historic San Fernando Mission buy wow gold.

The annual festival is held to raise money for the school's building fund.

WoW, Casually: Wrath of the Lich King is for casuals too

Each week or so, Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player who has 2 hours or less to play at a time.
You may have noticed that there has been quite a bit of news about Wrath of the Lich King lately. In that news, there are some very wonderful things in store for those of us with limited playtime. There is also a lot of resentment because of that from some of the players. In this column cheap wow gold, I'll be discussing what we casuals have to look forward to in the next expansion and I'll be defending what is essentially our right to participate in the WoW lore and endgame.

What I won't be discussing, like I used to, are the casual friendly events in the schedule. If you look in the right hand column of this page, you'll see a great calendar of Upcoming Events. So check there for the latest Call to Arms weekends buy wow gold, Holiday events and It came from the Blog activities.
Join us after the jump for the news and perhaps a little ranting.

The perils of questing as a healer

Stitchedlamb on WoW LJ wants to know: how do you do any questing as a healer? One reason WoW is such a popular game is that no matter your spec or role, Blizzard has done their best to make sure every class can play solo. But if you've ever played a Prot Warrior or a Holy Priest, you know for sure that some classes solo a little easier than others. Before the itemization changes hit in 2.3 and 2.4, healers had it pretty bad, and even after, it's tough to push out quests when all you've got is a bunch of +healing and no Shadowform to speak of.

I rolled my Shaman to 60 as Enhancement (Windfury while leveling is one of the great pleasures of Azeroth), but when I hit 60 way back when cheap wow gold, I switched to Resto -- I like playing in groups, and being a healer makes sure you have groups whenever you want them. But when Burning Crusade came out, I still wanted to play instances, so I leveled from 60-70 as Resto.

How'd I do it?

Addon Spotlight: Steal Your Carbon

Sean is diving, sunning himself and trying to drink all the cervezas in Cozumel this week, so don't feel bad if he doesn't respond to emails and comments. He'll be back in action next week wow, fresh and ready to re-join the Addon Army's battle for the perfect User Interface!

Welcome to this installment of Addon Spotlight! Today, we're going to take a look at another of Tekkub's addons. I've being singing his praises for weeks now, but don't worry, he's not paying me to do this. I enjoy his addons as they are simple, sleek and highly functional. Besides, eventually I will have written about all of his work world of warcraf, or perhaps not.

So, today we're talking about Steal Your Carbon, a reagent stocking addon. Here is how to get started; open the config window by using this command:

* /syc

Once you're in the window, drag an item from your inventory into the little box. Then use the arrows to tell the addon what amount of said item you would like to stock. I use the "Overstock Items" option to make sure I always have enough of whatever item I am stocking. There is also a great feature that enables the addon to upgrade water automatically. For example, if you've been restocking Moonberry Juice buy wow gold, Steal Your Carbon will automatically update and stock Morning Glory Dew when you ding 45. This is a simple matter of selecting the "Upgrade water" option.

There's a couple more features, come on in the check them out.

Insider Trader: Fishing, the final stretch

Until very recently, with patches 2.3 and 2.4, fishing was a skill mainly taken up by those players aching to relax. Casual questers who couldn't play for hours and be all business, or raiders looking to escape the pressure wow gold, took to their favorite remote and beautiful areas with a rod, some music, and a tag.

In my small and tight-knit guild, fishing often meant story time. While I was feeling Zen fishing from the Forgotten Coast, another guildmate was storming the shores along Stranglethorn Vale, and we would exchange anecdotes and gossip. We took pleasure in our secret source for cloth, leather, ore and greens, as well as fish for alchemy, and helped finance our level 40 mounts through fishing.
Still, many players, if not most players, seemed to find fishing boring, slow and annoying. Fortunately, fishing has never been necessary for any character if it does not provide pleasure. Even cooks, who stood to benefit the most from fishing cheap wow gold, could work around it, and push through any rough patches by buying small stashes of certain fish from other players.

Of course, now that fishing is more lucrative, its secrets more widely known, more people have shown an interest. As cooking became more important, so did fishing, not because you couldn't maximize cooking without it, but because some of the best buff foods are made with fish. Those who need a constant supply can't rely on the auction house.

Recently, Robin Torres wrote up some tips to leveling fishing at level 70, and this week, Insider Trader is taking an in-depth look at maximizing your fishing skill. For the inside scoop on reaching 375 as quickly as possible buy wow gold, or as profitably as possible, head on through the break.

Interest group speaks up against Blizzard on Glider case

Blizzard's lawsuit against the Glider folks (who were trying to sell a bot that was used to play the game while /afk), has a new wrinkle in it. According to PC Gamer, an interest group called Public Knowledge (they're funded by a variety of creative arts foundations) has filed a brief in the case accusing Blizzard of overstepping their rights under copyright law. In the brief, and an accompanying blog post wow gold, they say that while what Glider is doing in-game may be wrong, it isn't actually copyright infringement, because the Glider software doesn't actually infringe on any copyrights that Blizzard holds. And they're worried that if Blizzard wins this case, it could set a precedent strongly in favor of copyright holders, to the point where any misuse of the software at all, from using bots to using the wrong name, would be interpreted instead as copyright infringement.

They kind of have a point here -- Blizzard just used all the tools they had in this case to try and send a clear message to anyone out there trying to sell automation software that what they were doing would get them in trouble, and they may have thrown copyright infringement on the menu when it didn't really belong. For Blizzard's part cheap wow gold, they claim that making a copy in RAM of the game's information constitutes copyright infringement, but again, that's only because Glider is misusing those RAM files -- every user everywhere needs to copy parts of the game into RAM in order to run it.

At any rate, Public Knowledge has filed their brief and had their voices heard.wow, It's up to the judges in this case to decide what comes out of it.

The secret society of WoW players

Rufus on WoW LJ had something happen last weekend that I'd be happens to a lot of us players: He was introduced to someone who he had nothing in common with... except that they played World of Warcraft. It happens a few different ways -- sometimes, it's like what happened to Rufus, in that you share a mutual friend who knows you both play WoW. Sometimes, it's just someone (or you) overhearing something about WoW and realizing that you've found a fellow player. And sometimes it's just your guildies -- out of game, you have almost nothing at all in common, but the game has brought you together.

In my experience, it's usually just as awkward as Rufus makes it out to be -- especially when you're brought together by someone else wow gold, they have no idea that there are different factions and realms and that there are probably a good nine million, nine hundred and ninety thousand people you haven't ever met in game. There are some things that we have in common, obviously -- everyone has died to the Defias pillagers at some point, and almost everyone knows how tough it was getting past Moroes that first time. Sometimes, people can actually come together on these things -- I had a good old friend whose husband and I bonded a little for no other reason than that we both played Shamans.

But usually, especially if introductions are made by a third party cheap wow gold, it's just awkward. Have you been in this situation? Did you come away as awkwardly as Rufus did or did you make a new friend thanks to your time in Azeroth?