2009 has been a year of almost continuous changes for shamans. It seems that not a patch has gone by without some changes to the class, some major, some not so severe. The class has seen mysterious DPS shortfalls, a minor controversy about health in PvP that then carried over into PvE content with the high levels of AoE damage in Ulduar with patch 3.1. Flametongue Weapon saw changes to prevent enhancement shamans from using caster weapons. Resto got a fairly substantial review and some significant tweaks. Elemental also saw some talents redesigned.

While all of this was going on, shamans also saw some controversy about itemization, gear scaling and having to share caster mail between two specs that value different stats, as well as the constant battle with holy paladins to keep their grubby, grasping mitts off of our mail. Yeah, we know you don’t want that MP5 plate, but since you’re the only ones who can possibly get anything out of it, go away and leave our precious alone. (Cue the pages of discussion on why it’s perfectly acceptable for holy paladins to take caster mail and explanations in detail of why I’m an inhuman monster who drowns fish. Yes, fish, That’s how evil I am.)

Now that we’ve got the pleasantries out of the way (remind me to tell you the story of the year my mom beat Santa Claus up in front of the extended family) we move on to shamans in 2009.

Class Interactions/Changes to Buff Stacking

From the discussion of how Totem of Wrath compares to the Warlock version to the murmurs about the ‘mystery DPS leak‘ being related to our DoT’s not working properly or being affected by another class being nerfed, shamans and the complexity of their various totem buffs were possibly the single class most affected by the change to how buffs work in Wrath of the Lich King. As a shaman, you now have to pay more attention to the make up of your party or raid than ever before to make sure you’re not dropping a totem that duplicates a buff already present (and after a while, you can end up simply running out of totems you can drop without duplicating someone’s efforts) – as an example, you’re probably going to drop Totem of Wrath in your raid (as an elemental shaman) even if you have a Ret Paladin providing the same debuff to the boss with Heart of the Crusader, or a demo lock surpassing the spellpower benefit of the totem with his pet, depending on the situation. (You may well drop a Magma Totem and spam glyphed Improved Fire Nova on a big trash pull, of course. You can hit that bad boy six times before the totem despawns, not that I’ve been doing this and making tanks cry or anything.)

I’d definitely put the changes to how buffs stack down as a big change to shamans in this expansion so far, and frankly, all too often the shaman version of a buff or debuff loses out to some other class’s. I get that our totems stand in one place and provide their buffs as an aura, meaning that if the other class’ buff wasn’t superior our totems would just overwrite them and we’d have to rebuff people who were going to leave the totem’s area, but there has to be a way around this that favors the shaman once in a while.

Dual Talent Specialization

Seriously this should be in just about any class’ list of “Big Things of 2009″. I’ve seen Elemental/Resto, Enhancement/Elemental, Elemental/Elemental (PvP/PvE), Resto/Resto (both PvE specs, just focused differently)… Dual Talent Specialization gives players the chance to customize and channel their characters to succeed at an aspect of the game without immediately locking themselves out of other aspects. Healers want to grind? Boom, here’s your DPS grinding spec. DPS want to help out the raid when a bit of extra healing is needed? You can have a healing spec ready to go. Want to PvP as elemental but still enjoy raiding as enhance? We have you covered.

Totem Bar Interface

Honestly, this was an idea that took so long to come to fruition (how many of us had various totem addons to try and automate the process out a little before patch 3.2) and was such a nice change it really deserves to be celebrated. The Call of the Elements, Call of the Ancestors and Call of the Spirits spells allowing shamans to pre-select four totems and drop them as a group is simple and made a process that was irritating (run after the group, drop totems one at a time wasting globals) and could even be deleterious (a resto shaman trying to get the totems down in between casting healing spells, for instance) into something easy to use. You can even change the call spells on the fly via a very easy to use tab system, so you don’t have to keep dropping Strength of Earth in your Call of the Ancestors set if you have a DK in the group without having to use an entirely different Call if you don’t want to. (I like Call of the Spirits to be my PvP set of totems.)

Patch 3.1 and 3.2 both redesign shamans

Shamans saw a lot of design changes in both patch 3.1 and 3.2. Bloodlust/Heroism saw a shorter cooldown with a longer debuff (adjusted so that raids that wiped could use B/H on their next attempt), Flametongue Weapon was changed to benefit a slower weapon, both elemental totems were buffed, Earth Shock lost its spell interrupt and gained an attack speed slowing effect, Wind Shock was renamed Wind Shear and was taken off of the shock cooldowns, Fire Nova Totem was replaced with the Fire Nova talent, Restoration got a significant overhaul. (Resto’s overhaul was one of the minor success stories of 3.2 in my opinion, as healing on my shaman got significantly more fun for me after that.)

Frozen Power was introduced to help enhancement out in PvP, our poison and disease cleansing spells and totems were rolled into one, Spirit Weapons, Improved Stormstrike, Chain Heal, Shamanistic Rage, Elemental Mastery, Lightning Overload… the list of talents and abilities that saw redesign in one of these two patches is pretty significant. Booming Echoes was introduced for elemental (Shamanism, an even more significant talent for elemental scaling, was actually added in 3.0.8). Even things like base health were adjusted this year. It’s really safe to say that shamans have been one of, if not the, most highly adjusted and redesigned classes of this expansion. (Patch 3.3 continued this trend with the introduction of Fire Nova, or as I like to call it, “Lookit me, I’m Arthur Brown! I’m sorry, Mister Tank.”)

It’s been a really astonishing year of changes and re-changes for shamans. Between itemization and scaling issues, buff controversies, and nigh-continuous redesigns, it’s a wonder we can still recognize the class, but shamans keep on dropping totems. (Even if those totems look really different now.) Here’s to another year of dropping sticks in the ground and setting everything on fire, or healing everything. Whichever you prefer.

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.

Titan’s Grip

Yes, even a year and a month later, Titan’s Grip has changed how warrior’s DPS forever. It’s not just fury that it changed, either: the rather radical design elements included in the arms tree are testament to the difficulty inherent in trying to balance a tree that DPS’ with one 2h weapon against a tree that sees that one 2h and raises it another one.

Titan’s Grip didn’t just cause design problems for arms, however: the talent itself required a lot of adjustment until it reached its current state. It’s no secret that I disliked the hit penalty when it was originally introduced, chortled in glee when it was removed, and then wept bitter black tears when the talent instead gained a flat 10% damage penalty to offset the benefit of having all the stats of two two-handers. I’m still not thrilled about that penalty, or the idea that in order to match any other hybrid DPS who uses a two hander I have to spend DKP on another one and then eat that penalty on top of it, but I can’t deny the evidence of my senses: as gear improves even penalized Titan’s Grip just gets better and better and better. (Hey, when a tanking warrior can go DPS for one fight, throw on his DPS gear and switch to his old DPS raiding spec and hit 9.5k DPS, even the most bitter curmudgeon in existence has to admit he was wrong.)

Titan’s Grip is a problematic talent, to be sure. I expect it will require further adjustment as we go into Cataclysm and see five more levels, with the redesigned talent trees and even more powerful gear. But it does what it was intended to do and moves fury DPS away into a unique and iconic level.

Dual Talent Specialization

Was anything as directly and immediately class changing for every single class in the game as Dual Talent Specialization? Perhaps it wasn’t as big a deal for the so called ‘pure’ classes, but for classes who can perform two or more roles, this was an absolute revelation. As long as you can keep your gear, glyphs and specs current, you now have the ability to (as just one example) tank and have a DPS spec, or PvP and PvE. The customization and flexibility this offers is simply astonishing, and it’s a feature I’m so glad they decided to put into the game.

Armor Penetration

Until patch 3.1 dropped, no one was really thinking all that much about Armor Pen. It had its moment back in BC with enchants like Executioner and weapons like Cataclysm’s Edge, but people were generally of the opinion that ArP was a confusing and really awkward stat. But 3.1 made ArP indispensable to the DPS warrior. So much so that there was wonkiness with the stat and has been ever since: we quickly saw it capped so it couldn’t reduce armor to below zero, there was much discussion of how the stat was calculated at all (to the point where devs actually explained it, something they rarely do) and the amount of ArP rating you needed to actually reduce armor was increased in patch 3.2.2 to address it’s runaway popularity among physical DPSers.

Since warriors are pretty close to being a purely physical DPS class (we have a few bleeds and bleed effects) ArP is one of those stats that, of all plate wearers, benefits us the most. While it’s gone back and forth ever since it came roaring back with Ulduar, you simply cannot ignore ArP if you want to DPS as a warrior.

Block

It’s been a roller coaster of a year for us block tanks. We talked about block back in May, and while the basic idea of block hasn’t changed (you have two stats, block rating, which determines how often you block, and block value, which determines how much damage you block when you do) block itself has had its ups and downs this year. The changes to Block in 3.2 didn’t magically fix all of its issues. Even Blizzard itself said in the Q&A series that block will eventually move to a pure percentage system where the amount you block will not be a static number but rather a certain percentage of a blocked hit. This will make the stat less godly on big trash pulls (in some instances a high block tank can simply ignore trash because their individual hits will never get over his block value, especially with talents like Critical Block) while making it more effective against a boss who hits for 30k or more. (Depending on the percentages blocked, of course… too low and it’s just a nerf across the board, too high and block becomes the only stat anyone cares about.)

Part of the issue for warriors and block and the reason we saw so much tuning when block value from items was increased (and also the reason the amount of block value we get from strength wasn’t) is that we use block as a threat stat as well as a damage reduction stat. Right now you can go play arenas and see, possibly for the first time, prot warriors in high strength or strength/BV sets running around Shield Slamming as an offensive strategy. This is subject to diminishing returns (this was put in place in patch 3.2) -

Shield Slam: The benefit from additional block value this ability gains is now subject to diminishing returns. Diminishing returns occur once block value exceeds 30 times the player’s level and caps the maximum damage benefit from shield block value at 34.5 times the player’s level.

What this means is that when you hit Shield Block, the amount of block value you get from the talent doesn’t just scale directly to Shield Slam damage, which while a clunky solution is certainly more elegant than the ‘Shield Block just adds threat to your Shield Slam, no damage’ solution that was the original goal. While the doubling of block value on gear and the diminishing returns on block value for Shield Slam damage is not ideal, it’s definitely better than rolling back to pre-WOTLK days.

Gear Scaling, Rage Generation and Rumblings of the Future

Warriors have forever been the class that scales the most… interestingly… with gear. We’ve seen rage normalization attempt to fix this back when BC came out (and fail spectacularly, too, I might have added at the time oh look I did) and it’s been an issue ever since. The mantra is as it has always been: a warrior leveling has the most downtime, has to stop and eat while out grinding and soloing, and is weaker in relatively equal gear than almost any other class. Then, as the warrior gets better and better gear, his or her relative strength increases out of kilter with how other classes scale because as the gear improves, rage starvation goes from a real liability to a complete nonissue, giving the warrior effectively a red mana bar that starts low and then shoots up, never going empty.

Meanwhile, the tanking warrior finds herself or himself walking an entirely different tightrope. The gear he or she uses to tank absolute cutting edge fights, the best of the best for survival against massive spike damage from huge, powerful bosses, is a liability tanking anywhere else. Your best gear? Don’t wear it to heroics. Oh, I know the DPS will be wearing all of their best gear, the same level and quality of gear as your best stuff, earned in the same dungeons and raids. But you can’t do that. Strap on that older gear with worse stats, or gear to stack a threat stat or two over health even if it means wearing stuff you abandoned two tiers of content ago. It’s not crippling, but it is irritating: I know I dislike losing 3k health to tank a heroic.

These aspects of the class… the wonky nature of rage generation and how the class scales… have had profound impact on how the class has been designed, and how it will be designed. The Warrior Q&A we saw this year showed us that an awareness of this issue is still foremost in Blizzard’s look to future design. And the Cataclysm preview we saw at BlizzCon 2009 showed us that the changes will most likely be baked right into our talents and the Mastery ability, meaning that we are coming to the end of the time where a warrior uses stats like defense to determine the tanking viability of an item.

Make no mistake: warriors are still absolutely the class that scales best with gear. Bad gear is almost crippling to a warrior, and the better suited gear is to a role the more powerful the warrior is. Tanking is still heavily dependent on rage from damage taken, not dealt, and that is most likely going to change, and we first heard about it at BlizzCon.

Also, that class Q&A said Arms Warriors maybe will get to tank with 2h weapons, which is pretty sweet and I wanted to mention it again.

Arms goes round and round and round

It’s hard, looking back now, to remember that there was a time where fury warriors wore tons of leather and mail and used 2 1h weapons like discount rogues, and arms warriors were the undisputed kings of two handed weapon fighting among the clanky rage class. All through Burning Crusade, Arms was feared for its Mace Specialization Stuns (especially when combined with a Stormherald) and of course Mortal Strike. Arms was regarded as a PvE DPS debuff spec, able to put out respectable numbers while also granting Blood Frenzy to the raid.

Frankly, when Wrath was in beta, I wasn’t terribly impressed with arms. The new ability Bladestorm felt weak, arms felt kitable, and MS just didn’t seem all that impressive anymore. Fury was over there dual wielding 2h and I was trying out arms and feeling like a tool. Frankly, I really missed paying attention to arms’ new abilities like Taste for Blood, Wrecking Crew and Sudden Death. Obscured by my own obsession with Titan’s Grip I missed as the developers moved arms as a spec into the ;disciplined and solider-like’ spec they had in mind for it.

This past year has seen a lot of up and down for arms. There was the creation of Juggernaut, followed hard upon by the nerf to Juggernaut (but not to macros yelling catchphrases from last year’s internet memes) which did help give arms much needed comabt mobility in both PvP and in movement heavy fights like Ulduar. In the hands of a skilled player, arms is capable of solid DPS and is a threat again on the PvP battlefield (the sheer volume of people complaining about Bladestorm proves that arms is no longer seen as the free kill it was at the beginning of the year). Part of this is also the change to Battle Stance adding ArP and the buffing of Sword Spec to where it’s actually a useful ability and you won’t reject a sword out of hand for the spec. Arms is solid now. Although even at this late date we can find issues to fix, apparently.

There’s a lot more to discuss, of course (holy crap the Dungeon Finder alone), there always is. But here’s to 2009, and looking forward to 2010.

It’s time again for Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that loves nothing more than to gaze down upon the whole of Northrend from one of the floating chunks of stone around Dalaran and realize that at some point, a mage has probably killed every living thing down there. At least the targetable ones, anyway. And the ones you can’t target? I’m sure more than one mage has certainly tried.

So I’m officially nominating patch 3.3 for “best patch ever” status. Here’s a short list of the highlights of this patch:

• Three highly challenging, fun, lore-filled 5-man instances, full of sweet loot
• A massive new raid, with four gated sections, 12 bosses, and the promise of eventually being able to shove a Fireball up the Lich King’s tailpipe
• The incredible, game-changing Dungeon Finder Tool, which is responsible for peace in the Middle East, has brought an end to the recession, and has cured cancer
• A few choice mage buffs, including a PvE viable Frost spec
• Quest Tracking without the need for an addon
• Quel’delar and Shadowmourne
• A swiftly approaching new Arena Season
• Weekly raid quests
• The Kalu’ak Fishing Derby
• Perky the Pug
• A host of little changes for low level characters
• Rocket bare

Not shabby, right? And best of all, Blizzard has managed to deploy the majority of this new content without also deploying a host of bugs, glitches, and instability, or otherwise making the game unplayable for awhile as we’ve come to expect from patches this large. There were some log-in issues and bugginess on day one, but by day two, everything was running relatively smoothly by day two. I’m being relatively conservative when I say that Blizzard, in my personal opinion, has hit this one out of the park.

As we discussed last week, perhaps no single change in the history of the game has altered WoW’s landscape so fundamentally as the Dungeon Finder Tool. Bridging the gap between a fresh level 80 character and a completely raid-worthy character has never been easier, or more fun, to accomplish. The options are myriad. Even those of you who have been raiding consistently with your mages prior to 3.3 will likely find a host of new ways to plug holes in your gear set through this new tool.

So let’s look at our new options:

Gearing from scratch

Once upon a time (and not very long ago at all), hitting 80 was a milestone that ushered in a new weeks-long period of desperately trying to span the gulf between your mismatched greens and blues and the epicness you saw all around you. It required expensive profession mats, reputation grinding, and hours of waiting for instance groups to form. It took, as I mentioned earlier, weeks.

Now you can make more progress in an afternoon.

As I see it, there are two excellent options for a fresh level 80 mage, depending upon the resources available to you. If you have a group of friends or guildies to play with who are willing to carry you a bit at first, your single most efficient path is to head directly for normal Trial of the Champion and then farm it. Item-level 200 epics drop from every boss there, and you’ll find you can fill up a great many slots with quality gear in very little time without ever leaving that instance. It isn’t terribly difficult for even moderately geared characters on normal mode, and after a few runs, if the drops go your way, you’ll find you aren’t a liability anymore.

The other option, for those without access to that kind of in-game support structure, or those who simply wish not to be carried even for a short while, is to immediately begin queuing for random Lich King dungeons in the Dungeon Finder. Not the heroics…you aren’t ready for that. Just hit the normal versions of the level 80 Lich King dungeons, and start upgrading your gear to blue-quality and picking up Emblems of Triumph. Now, the problem with this is that you will likely get thrown into some random Trial of the Champion groups, or even more likely, some random Icecrown Citadel 5-man groups. The Icecrown 5-mans, especially, are a bit beyond your abilities at this point. Blizzard has implemented a hidden minimum gear-score requirement for entry into these instances, but in my experience, it doesn’t always work.

If you get one of these instances, you have two choices: leave and wait out the 15 minute debuff, or stick around and risk being kicked. I’m not telling you what to choose here. If you leave, there’s still a very good chance you’ll get thrown into another of these four tough instances the next time you queue anyway. If you’re confident in your skills, and you feel you can make up for your low DPS by not dragging down your group in other ways, then by all means give these instances a shot. If your group is forgiving, they may not care about your subpar DPS. If the group is struggling, you may need to discretely excuse yourself to provide them the opportunity to find a more seasoned DPS. One place I’d absolutely avoid until you get better gear is the final Icecrown 5-man instance, Halls of Reflection. The wave-style opening encounter can be harsh for even strong groups, and the final flight from the Lich King is such a massive DPS race that you risk crippling your group and causing a wipe if you’re not putting out solid damage.

Of course, you can solve all of these problems by queuing only for specific instances, but by doing so, you eliminate the ability to start collecting Emblems of Triumph. The bottom line here is to start hitting instances right away, learning your role within the group, and collecting gear upgrades as swiftly as possible. When you feel ready (and it really shouldn’t take very long at all), you can again choose from one of two paths.

1. Random Heroics

You should find it even faster to find groups for these, as everybody and their grandma is farming heroics for Emblems right now, and I don’t see that popularity tapering off anytime soon. It’s important that you be relatively well-geared before hitting the heroics, so that you aren’t the proverbial turd in your group’s punchbowl while running these potentially challenging instances. Once you’re ready, though, there may be no single more efficient way to gear yourself up than by farming random heroics.

Your gear upgrade options here are legion. There are the drops themselves, which will all be item-level 200 rare or epic-quality and can swiftly provide upgrades for the gear you got in the normal versions of these instances. In addition, you will be gaining two Emblems of Frost a day, and more Emblems of Triumph than you can keep track of. In a matter of hours, you can have enough to begin purchasing pieces of your tier 9 set from the emblem vendors at the Argent Tournament. I want you to take a brief look at one of these pieces to give you some idea of how massive these upgrades will be:

Sunstrider’s Shoulderpads of Conquest

Yup. And it’ll cost you 30 Emblems of Triumph to purchase that. That’ll take you an hour or two, if you get in some decent groups. In fact, with some efficient heroic-running, you could easily have the entire set in a matter of days. Then you can start farming up Emblems for some of the other choice items available at the vendors in Dalaran, like this trinket:

Talisman of Resurgence

Now again, though the gear-score requirements should keep you out of them early on in your heroic-running, you may find yourself thrown into a random Heroic ToC or one of the Icecrown 5-mans, any of which may very well be a bit beyond your capabilities at this point. If you can stick around and not kill your group or get yourself kicked from it, then by all means do so. The gear you get there is potentially very nice. But as with the normal versions, if you’re going to be a liability, leaving is always an option. Only you can make this decision.

Which leads to the second option:

2. Trial of the Champion/Icecrown 5-mans

Once you’re ready, you may instead choose to gear up by running these instances exclusively, farming all the gear from them that you want, then moving on to the heroic versions. This is an especially efficient options if you have an already established group to run them with.

The normal version of ToC nets you item-level 200 epics (the trinket is especially nice), and the heroic item-level 219 epics. If you want a more detailed run-down, see my ToC gear guide here. The normal versions of the three Icecrown instances provide you with item level 219 epics on par with those from heroic ToC, and the heroics throw item-level 232 epics at you. These can easily fill open slots in even an experience raider’s gear sets.

Here’s the full list of mage gear from these three instances:

Normal Forge of Souls

• Cold Sweat Grips – Hands
• Coil of Missing Gems – Neck
• Essence of Anger – Waist
• Mantle of Tattered Feathers – Shoulder
• Blood Boil Lancet – Staff
• Coffin Nail – Wand

Normal Pit of Saron

• Ice-Steeped Sandals – Feet
• Palebone Robes – Chest
• Rimewoven Silks – Legs
• Wristguards of Subterranean Moss – Wrist
• Unspeakable Secret – Staff

Normal Halls of Reflection

• Frayed Abomination Stitching Shoulders – Shoulder
• Marwyn’s Macabre Fingertips – Hands
• Tattered Glacial-Woven Hood – Head
• Chilled Heart of the Glacier – Dagger
• Splintered Icecrown Parapet – Sword

Heroic Forge of Souls

• Very Fashionable Shoulders – Shoulder
• Arcane Loops of Anger – Neck
• Mord’rethar Robes – Chest
• Seethe – Sword

Heroic Pit of Saron

• Ancient Polar Bear Hide – Chest
• Braid of Salt and Fire – Waist
• Prelate’s Snowshoes – Feet
• Engraved Gargoyle Femur – Staff
• Nevermelting Ice Crystal – Trinket

Heroic Halls of Reflection

• Sightless Crown of Ulmaas – Head
• Bracer of Worn Molars – Wrist
• Suspiciously Soft Gloves – Hands
• Strip of Remorse – Waist
• Shriveled Heart – Off-hand Frill
• Soulsplinter – Wand

There are a few other possible upgrades in there, but they all have mana-per-5 on them, which means that they go to the healer unless the healer passes. If they’re upgrades for you, and the healer doesn’t need them, by all means take them.

Bottom line here? You can very easily gear your mage up in full epics in a very short amount of time. No more grind. Most of the old stop-gaps (expensive profession epics, BoE world drop epics, faction rewards, PvP gear for PvE) have fallen into the realm of obsolescence. It’s too easy, too fast, and too much fun not to gear up through the new instances and the Dungeon Finder these days.

One final tip, before you embark upon your great random 5-man adventure: As soon as you can, buy up all of the various faction tabards. You can purchase them from the various faction quartermasters at Friendly, and by equipping them while running these random dungeons, you’ll find you hit exalted with the various factions with amazing speed. I’m not even kidding, it’s ridiculous. And though the gear these factions offer is no longer worthwhile, the head enchants totally are. Start with the Kirin Tor, since they’ve got the one for mages. You’re already running the dungeons, right? Might as well get the rep while you’re there.

And make friends with a Jewelcrafter and an Enchanter. You’re gonna need lots of both. Oh, and a disclaimer: You’re a DPS, which means finding groups might take a bit longer than you’re used to if you’ve tried to find groups as a tank or healer before. As with all things that annoy me, I blame this particular problem on warlocks. They’re all over the place. Like cockroaches. Stealing our DPS spots. And generally just smelling up the place. When I’m mayor of Dalaran, I’ll fix this, I promise. I have a whole new Warlock-Population-Counter-Measure program ready to go before congress. It involves trading in warlocks for a used car. I call it Trash for Clunkers.

Belt in 2010! Yes we can!

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?

Following up on their neat entry for Ulduar, Blizzard has released their newest Bosstiary, this time for The Frozen Halls, the collection of new Icecrown 5-man dungeons coming with Patch 3.3. The site serves as an encyclopedia of information on the many and varied bosses of the Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, and Halls of Reflection.

The Bosstiaries often have information that the dungeons never really give you; for example, who knew that Auriaya was the Titans’ librarian? Nobody, that’s who. We just wondered why the heck she was wandering around Ulduar with a bunch of cats and a bad attitude. But now you can go into the Frozen Halls and know exactly who you’re fighting and why, replete with marks on the map indicating the position of the bosses and the instance entrance.

The Forge of Souls sees us freeing the souls of innocents from Arthas’ Soul Grinder machines, run by Bronjahm, Godfather of Souls. Guarding the machines and preventing souls from escaping is the Devourer of Souls.

The Pit of Saron is Arthas’ saronite mining operation; Krick, a leper gnome, oversees the operation from atop his abomination, Ick. Forgemaster Garfrost shapes the saronite into weapons of destruction under Arthas’ command, and Scourgelord Tyrannus lords over the pit with his fearsome Scourge powers.
The Halls of Reflection are Arthas’ private quarters, guarded by his lieutenants in life, Falric and Marwyn. Inside, Arthas himself keeps Frostmourne locked away from those who would try to use it against him.

It seems like every Wrath patch brings with it more items than the last by an order of magnitude. It was eight hundred of ‘em for 3.1, between the Argent Tournament and Ulduar, and now Ghostcrawler says that 1400 more PvE items will be packed in every box of Patch 3.3, including our big orange buddy up there.

Given the recent interview with Cory Stockton and our man GC, it seems like there’s a lot of attention going into itemization for all of the Icecrown gear, and thus it’s actually a little surprising that there’s so darn much of it. And there’s a ton of new kinds of procs, set bonuses, et cetera, building on the “Epic. Cool things. Proc’y stuff.” mentality that GC says Icecrown items are all based on.

Then again, with what’s going down with items in Cataclysm, fourteen hundred new items seem downright mundane in comparison. It must seem that way to Ghostcrawler, too, given that this whole comment off-handedly came out in a post where someone was loudly complaining about an itemization bug on a piece of Icecrown gear. That’s casual conversation for ol’ Greg. “Yeah, put the finishing touches on 1400 new items today. Figure later I’ll get the number of that waitress at Applebee’s. Tomorrow I personally reitemize all of the old-world quests for Cataclysm. I’ll get up around noon, probably leave work at 3:30 or so.”

Ah, Kirin Tor rings. We’ve come to rely on these old standbys as gear that’ll always be there for us. Especially if “we” are elemental shamans. But what’s going on with them in Patch 3.3?

Surprising no one, Bornakk confirmed recently that there’s a new set of Kirin Tor rings on the way for those with lots of disposable income in Patch 3.3. With an item level of 251, they’re a significant upgrade to the 226 ring you upgraded back when Ulduar came out. You should expect the upgrade process to cost about as much as the last one — that is, 1000 gold pre-faction discount.

Good to see that they’re seeing this ring thing through to the end of the expansion. The initial investment is a bit steep, but hey, free Dalaran portal, and the upgrade price is pretty reasonable as you go.

Ancilorn over at the European forums has confirmed that the armored Frost Wrym mounts mined from early builds of the Patch 3.3 PTR will be rewards for achievements in the Icecrown Citadel raid. Much like past raid dungeons have awarded mounts for completing meta-achievements, such as the Ironbound Proto-Drake for Ulduar, the Frost Wyrms will be “up for grabs,” for dedicated raiders.

MMO-Champion previously unearthed this armored Frost Wyrm model along with spells named Frostbrood Vanquisher and Frostbrood Vanquisher Flight, which could give some insight into some Icecrown Citadel encounters. Despite the confirmation of new reward mounts (expected to grant 310% flying speed, as well), there is currently no word on the removal of the Ulduar reward mounts, which Blizzard has said to stay for “the foreseeable future”.

The latest build on the PTR has uncovered the stats of the World of Warcraft’s newest legendary weapon, the two-handed axe Shadowmourne. Apparently bandied around by random GMs on the PTR, players were able to see the highly impressive stats of this weapon, which requires an epic quest to complete. MMO-Champion also has it in its database, the entry of which can be viewed here.

Notable among its features, aside from the ridiculous +223 Strength and 344.1 DPS, are three red sockets and an interesting proc. The sockets can combine for a total of 68 Strength when socketed with Bold Cardinal Rubies and obtaining the +8 Strength bonus. If we understand it correctly, the proc also stacks Strength for a total of 360 before firing off a damaging effect, presumably resetting the Strength bonus to 0. Needless to say, even without the proc, this Item Level 284 weapon is the best two-handed melee weapon in the game and should serve players well into the next expansion.

Wowhead has been a go-to site to track what’s going on on the PTR for quite some time, and now there’s even more reason to go there. Their improved new items in patch 3.3 page features the following improvements:

• Categorization by item level, with breakdowns for the five levels of items that are coming at us (219, 232, 251, 264, and 277).
• You can now filter the new items and search within them.
• Items are also sortable.

And this isn’t a new feature, but it bears mentioning, at least if you’re a major news geek like me: you can get an RSS feed of the new items added to the Wowhead database. If you wanted to you could probably hook this up to Twitter, or put it on your blog, or whatever.

Anyway, if you want to know what items are coming at us along with Icecrown Citadel, I think there’s no better place to be. What items are you most excited about?