Blood Sport: Warrior-Druid overpowered?

Every Thursday, V'Ming - who thinks that gnome warlocks are travesties of nature and need to be KOSed - shares thoughts and ideas on becoming deadlier at the Arenas. He also dabbles in the dark arts in Blood Pact.A quick look at the chart above and one thing clearly leaps out. Clue: it has to do with mortal strikes, HoTs and cyclones.Well, every third team you meet nowadays in 2v2 will probably

12 Days of Winter Veil contest winners!

It's been a few weeks since we wrapped up our 12 Days of Winter Veil contest in cooperation with our friends at Ideazon, and though we're still trying to get in touch with some of our winners, there are a lot of WoW Insider readers who deserve congratulations! Winners of FragMat gamepads include: Melenor, Ragamuffin42, Mia, Wilkie, Ellyndia, SJPadbury, Nojj, Ed, Annai, Dachande, ceckjustin, Alu,

How much money Blizzard is really making from 10 million subscribers

An article on Playfuls.com (which I found via Incgamers) tried to take the news about Blizzard's ten million subscribers from earlier this week, and suss out just how much money they're making. They do what most people would do, which is multiply their $15 subscription rate per month times ten million, which would mean that Blizzard is raking in $150 million a month, or about $1.7 billion a year

15 Minutes of Fame: Hammer time

15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – both the renowned and the relatively anonymous. Know an interesting player you'd like to see profiled? E-mail us your tips.This week's 15 Minutes of Fame subject has earned her time in the limelight – and it's actually worth more than a mere 15 minutes. Auden, creator of the wry and witty Hammer of Grammar,

The Art of War(craft): A Resilient Argument Part I

If you're interested in PvP in any way whatsoever, you've probably heard of a little statistic called Resilience. Introduced a little before The Burning Crusade was released, Resilience reduces the chance a player will be struck by critical strikes from spells or attacks. It also reduces the damage taken from critical strikes and Damage-over-Time (DoT) spells. It is a landmark change in PvP

The PvE + PvP instance

"Lowlifescum" over on the official WoW forums has had an interesting idea, to combine PvE instances and Battleground instances into a kind of "race-to-the-boss" PvP and PvE experience combined. According to his idea, players would queue up for the instance, and when both 5-man teams are ready, begin on opposite ends of a dungeon. From there, they have to fight their way through normal monsters

WoW EU Valentine's card contest is on

World of Warcraft Europe is now accepting entries for its annual Valentine's card contest. European players are invited to create a card using screenshots and/or original art showing their love of WoW. Twenty winners (five per language) will receive a Gurky key. The key can be redeemed in-game for a summonable baby pet murloc.Looking through last year's winners, I'm very impressed with the

Two Bosses Enter: Lady Vashj vs. Princess Huhuran

Two bosses may enter... but only one will get to leave in WoW Insider's fantasy deathmatch series. Every week we pit two of the World of Warcraft's raid bosses against one another in a battle that your votes get to decide. This week we have Lady Vashj from Serpentshrine Caverns in Outland matching up against Princess Huhuran from Ahn'Qiraj in old Azeroth. Though both of them are perfectly happy

Mage 5 vs 5 arena guide

This is a pretty general guide for mage arena-play. It might be a bit biased from my own experience, I haven´t tried every setup. It´s mainly for 5 vs 5 but if you are totally new you can probably learn something from this for the other brackets aswell. This guide is assuming a 2 healer 3 dps setup and it´s written because I´ve seen requests for arena-guides on the forums here. Everything about

WoW Gold Guide: gold making and leveling

This is a easy way to make about 18-54 wow gold an hour.There is a item called "Blood Elf Bandit mask," and consequently it is dropped bythe Blood Elf bandit. He spawns on the island where Dranei start - Azymist Isle(can't remember how to spell it). He spawns next to the road in 10 places behindsigns or barriers. You just follow the road in a big circle around the isle. Theonly trick is he is

The unwritten rules of raiding

I really like this post over at Mystic Chicanery. Every guild, when raiding, has its own unwritten rules of play. You just know that by the end of your raid, the MT will be drunk, the priest will have died about five times, and if you insult the healers, you might or might not get healed. It's these little quirks that make raiding so much fun-- sure, the game is a good time, and downing bosses is

WoW Guide: Easy gold for high lvl skinners

WoW Guide: Easy gold for high lvl skinnersIF you have the time required to make this profitable. Yes, it can yield you 500gold in 2 days but you will have to play 8 hours a day in order to do it! Forsome people this just isn't realistic.Angerclaw MaulersFelwood, X37, Y44.I'm taking it upon myself to let everyone know about this because I have made asickly amount of gold here latley, and a very

The evolution of the gold farming industry

It's a rare event when I wake up, walk to the computer, yawn, and think to myself what I could possibly write about only to have an article walk up to me, sit in my lap, and cuddle. Today it happened.We've all seen what I call the evolution of spam in-game. First it was just straight tell spam. Blizzard fixed that. Then it was group spam. Now it seems gold farmers have taken to just sitting in

World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade Cheats

General CommandsNote that you can cycle through commands with similar starting letters by typing, for example, /a> and then hitting the tab button to cycle through the commands that start with a./bind - Gives your current bind location./cast * - Allows you to cast spells by name./chat, /chathelp - Lists the chat commands./follow, /f - Causes your character to follow the selected player./ghelp -

How to make world of warcraft gold - part 4

With disenchantingIn part also covered in this thread at the EJ forums.Firstly, you can obviously farm instances such as BRD for Large Brilliant Shards. These sell for about 6-8g currenly on my server. Check the linked article for more info on that.This post will detail a large part of making money by disenchanting items from crafting.Lets presume you either have a friend who can make and

How to make world of warcraft gold - part 3

FarmingThe most obvious way to get what items you need is by farming for it.Farming can be tedious business, and because of this i highly recommend combining multiple farming actions into 1 session.Based on market prices, or your ability to farm a certain mob, you need to decide what to farm.Some modifiers:* You need scryer reputation* Your alt needs aldor reputation* You want to work on your

How to make world of warcraft gold - part 2

If you’re a regular raider and either losing money with 50g daily repair bills + potons + reagents, or barely cutting equal you’ll enjoy the knowledge that making wow gold is in fact quite easy. All it requires is a little effort.I’ll highlight the most commonly known ones :* Farming, this includes either farming mobs, fishing, mining, etc.* Pray for lucky drops, basically the same as farming but

How to make world of warcraft gold - Part 1

Gold, the lifeblood of the Wow economy.Many people will remember the first time they finally had “one whole gold” to call their own.Soon it became 10. 100. 1,000. 10,000But some, they never go above a certain value.Tanks and healers are mostly affected with this.But why, seriously?Why do some people have such a hard time getting money?As of patch 2.3 one of the changes that were implemented was

Alliance leaders slaughtered on Moon Guard

Good news from Moon Guard-- despite a despicable assault by the Alliance on the Horde outpost of Orgrimmar, the valiant Horde there have grabbed their sword and fought the.. Alliance, taking the battle straight to their capital cities. Ok, "factionalism" aside, what the Horde on Moon Guard did is pretty impressive. They downed Velen, Bolvar, Mekkatorque, Magni, Staghelm (yay!), Tyrande, and Jaina

Around Azeroth: Waiting...

Reader Andy sends in this unique perspective of Arathi Basin, pre-battle. And though any of you who have run AB will know this view by heart as you autorun up against the gate, ready to spring forth as soon as possible, this particular moment of tension is rarely captured in screenshot form. Just look at the blacksmith in the distance, an undefended node, ripe for the capturing, as soon as these

The happiest class

We all know which class QQs the most (I know, I know, low blow-- but it made me laugh), but which class smiles the most? Skrattin (who is actually a Warlock himself) speculates that it's 'Locks who are happiest with the game. Even though they've taken some nerfs (although they might still be OP, depending on who you listen to), they still seem to be pretty happy with their class and the game at

The Art of War(craft): A rambling year in review

In last week's column, where I went over the World PvP objectives in the Outlands, some players expressed indignation at how Blizzard supposedly "forces" PvE players into playing PvP. There are different views on this, such as Massively's Craig Withers, who wrote about a distaste for impersonal PvP in WoW and thus avoids it like the plague, and well, myself, who would actually like to see more

Blizzard and unintended consequences

Relmstein has an interesting post about Blizzard and all the "unintended consequences" they seem to run into. He talks mainly about Alterac Valley and Blizzard's recent AFKer battles, as well as the fight against smurfing and selling Arena ratings. Both times, Blizzard implemented fixes that were meant to, well, fix things, but both times, the "fixes" were either completely dodged, or simply lead

Blizzcast reveals Sunwell details

Episode 1 of Blizzard's new podcast, cunningly titled "Blizzcast," went live today. It's in two segments, one hosted by CM Karune and featuring Blizz artist extraordinaire (and, in fact, art director) Samwise Didier, and the second hosted by CM Drysc and featuring Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan. This installment is audio-only, but they promise that future episodes will include video as well. For now you

Make Unlimited Warcraft Riches - How To Farm Wow Gold With A Mage

Getting more gold has always been a goal of anyone who plays World of Warcraft. It is fortunate that guides like the Warcraft Riches guide provide legitimate tips on how to make WoW gold. The secrets divulged in this guide are totally legal and will not violate the World of Warcraft Terms of Service. This means there is no risk of an account getting banned for using them. Look below for one such

WoW Gold Secrets - Making Cash Off Vanity Items

A Vanity item is an item that has no purpose but to look good. They range from rare pets, to nice looking clothing, rare items, funny looking weapons, and character altering effects, and faction items.These items sell like crazy. You can find vanity items everywhere. When you tap into a new vanity item market you will get crazy returns.Usually you can these vanity items quickly from farming or

WoW Gold Secrets - Making Gold Off Selling Sets

Sets are another great way to pull in money. You can sell profession sets, or even drop sets (those like the Twill Set). The only way you will make money off of these though is if you complete the full set.People don't want to go through the work of farming the set out or waiting to buy and collect the full set. Listing sets on the auction house wont work either. You will have to manually trade

WoW Gold Tips - How To Make Tons Of Gold Just By Farming Cloth

Farming cloth still exists! It's possible to farm cloth at any level of cloth! Most server's have cloth inflated so much right now. Here's the prices that I'm seeing throughout my 9 servers. These prices are all per stack of 20:Linen Cloth - 50-70sWool Cloth - 60s-1gSilk Cloth - 1g-1.75gMageweave Cloth - 2g-2.5gRunecloth Cloth - 2g-3gNetherweave Cloth - 5g-9gWith the prices so high on Linen cloth

World of Warcraft : New Stories

Blizzard just released a new player story. "Having Fun" shares the real story of a mother and her son playing WoW together. A great read! With all the negative stories about how WoW can affect kids, it's great to hear a positive one!Having FunFebrower, KorialstraszBack in beta, my husband rolled a gnome mage and had a grand old time trouncing around Azeroth. He decided not to continue playing so

Tales of WoW

Lately, Blizzard hasn't merely been collecting our artwork and screenshots. They've been soliciting tales from players depicting their in-game adventures. While they have not amassed an extensive archive yet, they're well on their way.Having Fun (Febrower, Korialstraz)This is a true story about how playing World of Warcraft not only brought order to one child's life, but also accomplishment, and

WoW Armory fixed for now

For those whose characters weren't updating or showing up at all, you'll be happy to hear that the promised fix to the Armory has been implemented today. However, CM Eyonix warns that it may take "some time" for all characters to update.It's been interesting to see how this Armory downtime has affected gamers. You'd expect frustration from not being able to check on your toon's equipment,

Top 10: Role playing games

Please note: This special series of VideoGamer.com's Top 10 is a buyer's guide for Christmas 2007 and New Year 2008, and as such only includes modern titles available for the currently supported platforms. It is not a best of all time list.10. Kingdom Hearts II - PS2/PS3.One for those PS2 owners out there (and owners of PS3s with backwards compatibility!), Kingdom Hearts II, from Japanese

The 2-vs-2 arena queue and you

We usually don't realize it, but there is actually an upper limit to the number of instances that can be created in WoW at any given moment. If all the players on your server somehow decided to run Karazhan at about the same time, you'd find that after a certain number of raids had gotten started, some players would be stuck at the loading screen, waiting for the others to finish. Normally, of

New online tool shows popular arena setups

You may already be aware that SK Gaming has a listing of the top arena teams in the US, Europe, and Korea, all ranked against one another. Now SK Gaming has added another feature to this listing, which shows both the most "popular setups for high ranked teams" and the "average rating for popular setups." You can see very clearly the top five class combinations in each category of the arenas, from

WAR != WoW

Alrighty! I’ve been asked to talk more about why I am so excited about Warhammer Online. I think that I can achieve that in this post, so for now I will try and accomplish killing two birds with one big heavy stone. I’m seeing more and more comparisons between the two games. Some of them are spot on but others are way off base. I feel it’s prudent to clarify a few things for some people who may

Blood Sport: Arena nostalgia

Every Thursday, V'Ming - who thinks that gnome warlocks are travesties of nature and need to be KOSed - shares thoughts and ideas on becoming deadlier at the Arenas. He also dabbles in the dark arts in Blood Pact.Keeping in the theme of my Warlock column, let's take a look back at one of the most important additions introduced in 2007 with The Burning Crusade - Arena PvP.You can say that Arena

Tips for making profit with engineering

The Khorium Toolbox has recently posted a very thorough article on all of the ways that you can, in fact, make money from being an engineer. Although you are unlikely to make back the cost of leveling the profession any time soon, it's provides some excellent ideas as a start.Sell-worthy goodies include ammunition, non-combat pets, guns, and fun, quirky gizmos that are the characteristic

Yet more free character transfers

Yes, there are more character transfers in the not too distant future: characters will be moving from selected realms free from January 4th to January 11th. If you're currently playing on one of the realms selected to allow transfers off, and you want to make sure you get a transfer, then you may want to consider getting ready as soon as the transfers open: Drysc warns, "In the event that a realm

Politician Uses WoW to Contact the Masses

You may remember a little while ago, presidential candidate Governor Mike Huckabee enlisted the aid of Chuck Norris in a very amusing presidential campaign ad.Well it seems politicians have been trying to think of yet more ways to reach the people. Recently another presidential candidate, Ron Paul, organised a WoW in-game rally, to take place on New Year's Day. Approximately 240 people showed up

World of WarCrafts: Healthstone

Every Wednesday World of WarCrafts features a recipe or craft that teaches you how to make own real life version of in-game recipes and items. Today in World of WarCrafts I thought I would show you how to make a more "crafty" project. So this time I am going to make a Healthstone. How you may ask can a mere mortal conjure a Healthstone? Ah, young ones I am more than just a mortal. I am a mighty

January 2008 Calendar

The January 2008 Calendar is here!

Sprawl's Scrawl - Addon Spotlight: XLoot

The addon of the week this week is called XLoot. Instead of three items per page in the standard loot window, XLoot resizes the loot window to show all the items. It highlights items of value with a colored border, and will even mark BoP items appropriately. XLoot basically substitutes a new window for the loot frame whenever you loot a mob, open a chest, disenchant a item, or even open a

Two Bosses Enter: Kel'Thuzad vs. Archimonde

Two bosses will enter... but only one will leave in WoW Insider's fantasy deathmatch series. We're pitting two of Azeroth's raid bosses against one another in a battle that your votes get to decide -- until in the end we're left with a single boss as the ultimate champion. Be sure to check out our brackets for a full round-up of our ongoing fight schedule!) This week we present Kel'Thuzad, the

New Year's Eve in Azeroth

Just in case you aren't headed out to a party this evening, let this serve as your reminder that it's New Year's Eve in Azeroth this evening as well. As usual, there will be hourly fireworks in all the major cities after sunset, free drinks in public areas, and revelers aplenty (make sure to blow them a /kiss). Additionally, while it's not listed on Blizzard's official page, there are two quests