From time to time it occurs to me that my character, were I a better roleplayer, has actually been to a whole lot of places. He’s seen a ridiculous amount of things and would have a really hard time settling down on a farm somewhere on Azeroth or whatever it is old adventurers do when they’re tired of killing old gods, elemental monstrosities, Dragon Aspects, ancient liches, and Illidan Stormrage, to name just a few.

It really occurred to me on a visit to Darnassus, in fact, to turn in the quest “A Cautious Return” that I should be able to do more than just hand the dude a note. I mean, I killed Illidan! I’ve kicked Kil’Jaeden’s butt back down the Sunwell myself! I went back in time and fought Archimonde. (By the way, Tyrande, thanks for the slow fall item and all.) Lore wise, I’ve pretty much seen everything at this point and soon, I’ll be running off to fight Arthas. You’d think I could say “hey, take it easy” to that Sentinel for the poor guy.

When you think about all our characters have seen (even new characters leveled from 1 to 80 with this expansion have traveled to an alien world and then to a frozen wasteland stuffed with titan relics and undead like the worst pizza crust ever) these are some really experienced folks (hence that bar on your interface, I guess) and I find myself wondering what kind of stories they’d tell. So now I ask you, what stories would your character tell? What lore moments were the ones you think he or she would be more moved by, impressed by, or pleased to have been a part of? For that matter, which ones were the best for you as a player?

Ah! There it is… the holy grail of Christmas gifts! The Red Ryder 200 shot ranged model air rifle… What I want for Christmas is a Red Ryder BB Gun.

In a nod to the holiday classic A Christmas Story, this year’s WoW in-game Christmas gift is your very own Red Rider Air Rifle. You get it from the Winter Veil Gift underneath the Winter Veil Tree.

You use it to cast the spell Pelted! which expands one of the 200 charges the Red Rider Air Rifle has. You’ll want to fire off the gun to the faction leaders first to get your BB King achievement (Alliance version, Horde version). You can miss with the gun, so do the achievement before blowing the rest of the charges.

For additional information on all the Winter Veil achievements, check out our Over Achiever’s Guide to Winter Veil. This gift is active on the EU servers, and as of 8:00 a.m. EST, the gift now appears active on the US/North American servers as well.

Wow, that was a year, huh? From the dizzying highs of fury spec in Naxxramas to the somewhat less dizzying highs of Ulduar, arms’ constant evolution and protection spec’s astonishing makeover as the expansion launched, 2009 was a year that saw warriors sway from top DPS and solid tanks as if in some kind of gale force wind. Armor Penetration went from a stat we’d take if we had to and is now one of our top DPS stats, Block got a makeover that led to changes in how abilities like Shield Block and Shield Slam calculate, and in general we saw the effects of stat inflation on gear really have an effect on us and how we stack up to other classes as tanks and DPS. If you were a tanking warrior in Naxx on January 1st. 2009, for example, you may have had upwards of 35k health. (To be honest, it’s hard for me to remember, it may have gotten up to 38k if you stacked stamina.) Now, a geared TotGC tank walking into ICC can pretty easily hit 54 to 55k health fully raid buffed.

And it’s only going up from here. Icecrown Citadel promises much improved itemization as well as crazy old school procs that should have warriors, be they DPS or tanks, salivating.

Warriors have definitely had their ups and downs this year, but I think we can say we’re ending the year on a fairly high note. Fury DPS has managed to get back to a competitive place with the new weapons, arms still lags behind but has solid PvP and PvE uses, and protection is quite possibly the single strongest tanking class by virtue of sheer flexibility: other tanks may have more health, more armor, or more AoE threat, but protection’s suite of abilities includes standouts like Shockwave, Vigilance, Spell Reflection and Warbringer, making it possibly #2 in every single tanking category when no class can claim to be #1 in them all. Let’s look at some changes and how they shook out for warriors.

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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. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

For no discernable reason, the WoW.com Twitter account is asking who would win in a three-way grand melee between the Queue writers — Alex Ziebart, Adam Holisky, and me, the inimitable Mike Sacco. Whoever wins has to face Matthew Rossi in single combat, which, of course, means that they lose. So whoever wins, Rossi wins.

Before we all fall to the cruel burly forearms of Rossi, though, we can probably answer some reader questions. Or at least I can, given that it’s my day to do it.

Edge asked…

When a cross realm group wipes and has to get back to the instance from outside, which version of the “outside” are we in? What I mean is, outside the instance, are we all together on one of the servers, or does each person go back out to their own servers “outside” area, and then come back into the same instance? Or is this a whole new area just for these 5 particular people?

When you zone out of a cross-realm instance, the “outside” is your particular realm.

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If there’s one thing I hate doing in World of Warcraft, it’s missing a raid or instance I said I’d be at.

It doesn’t happen very often, because I try and be conscientious about it: while it’s true that WoW is a game, it is (for me at least) a social game and I consider my guildmates friendly acquaintances at the very least. Just as I wouldn’t bail on friends when we have an appointment to go out bowling or for pizza or when I was in a weekly D&D game, I don’t like it at all when I have to step out of a raid or bail on an appointed “help me get my Northrend Dungeon Hero achievement” or what have you.

Sometimes it’s unavoidable. Recently I had to leave a raid before it was done because I simply couldn’t stay focused on what we were doing due to feeling feverish and run down. I enjoy tanking and healing with my guild but my health and real life have to come first so I bowed out once I was sure a suitable replacement was available. I’ve been with this guild since the launch of Wrath now, and we’ve seen pretty much the whole of the xpac together.

Where do you stand on it? Do you see WoW as something easily skipped out on, or are you in a tight knit social guild where you feel obliged to show up?

They both have millions of users across the world. They both have made and broken friendships and relationships, and they both have raised millions if not billions of dollars for their respective companies. And chances are that they’re both so popular even your grandma knows about them. Gamasutra has written an interesting post comparing both World of Warcraft and Facebook of all things, and they say that the two are more alike than you might think: both enable you to create an identity, and use that identity to interact with others, and both give you a wide variety of options to do so (in WoW, you can slay dragons together, and on Facebook, you can tag pictures or post on walls). Gamasutra wants to get to the center of where exactly the interactivity lies, and in doing so, figure out what makes Warcraft a game, and Facebook a network.

One major difference is in the interface — obviously, WoW is wrapped in a fantasy world, so that in between all of the socializing, you’re also fighting the Scourge or the Burning Crusade. Facebook has games, but it doesn’t have that overarching narrative. WoW also rewards group teamwork and coordination, while Facebook leaves collaboration to its own rewards. And of course the cost is another big difference: WoW is still a subscription game, while Facebook pays in other ways. But the amount of similarities between the two are pretty fascinating. And comparing the two, as Gamasutra does, really makes you think about just what interactivity means, and how two apparently very different types of interactive media aren’t that far apart after all.

If ever there were a boss just begging to be turned into a totally Camaro-awesome tattoo, it’s Lord Marrowgar. Like an epic, multi-skulled skeleton made of bone and skulls and spikes, Marrowgar is hands down one of the coolest looking mobs in the game.
While the sophomoric “Dude, he’s a bone guy with a bone axe!” revelation has me only a little ashamed, I nonetheless get a certain thrill up my spine each time I see him.

Lord Marrowgar is not a complex fight, although there’s a few things about it that are going to be counter-intuitive. I think that slight change-up in normalized behavior is probably the biggest challenge of this fight. It’s kind of a clever design that way, but otherwise, you should expect Marrowgar to be your first, solid gear check in Icecrown Citadel.

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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. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

For no discernable reason, the WoW.com Twitter account is asking who would win in a three-way grand melee between the Queue writers — Alex Ziebart, Adam Holisky, and me, the inimitable Mike Sacco. Whoever wins has to face Matthew Rossi in single combat, which, of course, means that they lose. So whoever wins, Rossi wins.

Before we all fall to the cruel burly forearms of Rossi, though, we can probably answer some reader questions. Or at least I can, given that it’s my day to do it.

Edge asked…

When a cross realm group wipes and has to get back to the instance from outside, which version of the “outside” are we in? What I mean is, outside the instance, are we all together on one of the servers, or does each person go back out to their own servers “outside” area, and then come back into the same instance? Or is this a whole new area just for these 5 particular people?

When you zone out of a cross-realm instance, the “outside” is your particular realm.

Read more »

Sometimes you’d like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all those other shiny MMOs! Check out this roundup of the latest news from the wider MMO world.

	Is Fallen Earth our answer to a Wild West MMO? I grew up on Clint Eastwood movies. I grew up on Willie Nelson and Waylon Jennings songs about cowboy career prevention. Gunsmoke, A Fistful of Dollars and anything else by Sergio Leone are what helped mold my appreciation for what we refer to as the American Wild West.
	Age of Conan offer unlimited free trial With the Age of Conan expansion Rise of the Godslayer approaching, opportunities for new and returning players to explore the game (or revisit it) have been more frequent than usual these days. The latest offer comes via FilePlanet. If you’re a FilePlanet subscriber, you can play the first part of the game for free in an unlimited trial.
	Nearly three-fifths of users buy items in free-to-play games There’s a strong sense in most free-to-play games that the playerbase consists of two people: those who refuse to pay any money unless absolutely necessary, and those who will happily part with their income on a voluntary basis. This is largely true. What’s apparently less true is the notion which goes hand-in-hand, that there are a decided minority of players forking over cash for in-game perks.
	Runic Games talks Torchlight, the upcoming MMO, Diablo comparisons, more Can’t wait for Diablo III? Try Torchlight. The single-player action-RPG, available for just 20 bucks via digital distribution, has got PC gamers talking. But why should Massively readers care, you ask? Because eventually, in about two years or so, developer Runic Games will make it a full-fleged MMO.

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We’re going to get to kill Arthas. And as excited about that as we are as players, you have to imagine the mounting incursion against the Lich King gets a much deeper and visceral emotion for our characters. This represents a relatively unique opportunity to roleplay your characters in an otherwise static world. After all, the entire game is about to change in some pretty radical ways. This is the purest possible fodder for roleplay, and it would be remiss of us to lose this opportunity.

Join me behind the jump so that we can talk about the roleplay opportunities. The good, the bad, the ugly.

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