Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poohbah of World of Matticus and a founder of Plus Heal, a discussion community for healers of all experience levels and interests. Catch his weekly podcast on healing, raiding and leading, the Matticast.

The recent nerf to Dragon Soul with the release of patch 4.3.2 means more players are now within striking distance of Morchok on heroic modes. He's a boss that serves as an execution check for your raiding group more than anything else. If your raid group mastered the art of healing through him on normal, then it should have no problem doing it again on heroic.

Just be prepared to do it twice.

The biggest hard mode change is that Morchok clones himself. His clone has the exact same abilities as Morchok prime, except the timing will be off. Your raid will be splitting in two and pulling the two bosses away from each other. You can envision the fight as two pseudo 10-man groups fighting (or two 5-mans, if you're in a 10-man raiding group).

Come into the raid with six to seven healers, if you're a 25-man raiding group. Actually, I'd consider bringing seven if it's the very first time. For 10-man, it is not uncommon for groups to bring in up to four healers for the first time. You'll need them, due to the amount of damage being dished out to the raid. Ideally, try to insist that when your raid leader splits the raid into two groups, the players will show up in your raid frames in different groups. Having all of the players in group 1 and 2 on one side with groups 3 and 4 on the other can be beneficial. The side that is tanking Morchok is the one that could benefit from the extra healer, as it seems more damage is done on that side.

I strongly recommend bringing in tanks with their four-piece bonuses, because they will be an incredible asset.

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Filed under: Raid Rx (Raid Healing)

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome.

There was some talk on the official forums recently about the logistical issues presented by plate gear with intellect on it. The best part of the preceding sentence is that it was true last year, it's true this week, and will probably continue to be true next year.

While the gear itself was originally called spell plate due to its spellpower stat, it's now usually referred to as intellect plate. The issue isn't with intellect plate or holy paladins, because they've both been serving their purposes perfectly. The problem is how intellect plate interacts with boss loot tables, affecting everyone else in the raid.

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Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

Sunday Morning Funnies is your weekly list of WoW-related web comics.

Bloodshed! Also, Tokkar and Jekk and Kindred Spirits have both updated.

This week, the list features fishing (for suckers!), a thorny trap, a sexy shower scene, and more!

• NPC Nothing But Red and Dearest Reddest and Under Advisement
• Tokkar & Jekk Burn Out the Night and Shafted
• Kindred Spirits Implications and Fabled Reality
• Away From Reality Mama Drama
• DLC Protocol 18

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Filed under: Sunday Morning Funnies

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

Why can't I find out anything about this Superb Owl?

dinojake15 asked:

Any word yet on MoP's system requirements?

I got a little 10.5.8 MacBook that can just barely run Cataclysm. Just wondering if I should start saving money for a new computer now.

Blizzard has been incrementally increasing WoW's system requirements with each expansion, so it's safe to assume that MoP will require even more muscle than Cataclysm did. I don't think it's been announced just how much more muscle, but if you had trouble running Cataclysm, you're going to have trouble with MoP.

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Filed under: The Queue

"Life is tough as a single worgen father," writes Ghostmoon of Blood of the Titans on Eonar (US-A). "Especially when you're raising an orphaned panther cub. Finding a woman who likes cats is one thing ... finding one who likes cats, dogs, bears, treants, birds, and moonkins is another! But that doesn't keep us from going on fun family outings to Stormwind. Here is a picture of one such trip with me and the cub after a lesson in pouncing with some help from the unsuspecting locals."

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Filed under: Around Azeroth

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Gear, glyphs, and talents

First off, the easiest way to help your DPS on Ultraxion is to check your glyphs. Most elemental shaman nowadays run with Glyph of Unleashed Lightning as one of their prime glyphs. This makes sense for nearly every other fight in Dragon Soul, as they all require some amount of movement. Ultraxion, however, is a straight up stand-there-and-shoot-lightning-and-lava-until-your-fingers-fall-off-or-he-dies fight, and Glyph of Unleashed Lightning gives absolutely zero DPS if you're not moving. Switching this out for Glyph of Lightning Bolt will give you a slight boost in numbers. Your three glyph choices should be Lightning Bolt, Flame Shock, and Glyph of Fire Elemental Totem; more on the FET glyph choice in a second.

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Filed under: Shaman, Raiding, (Shaman) Totem Talk, Cataclysm

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

One of the interesting things about my current astonishing obsession with transmogrification and all things related to it has been seeing older itemization. You know, strength and agility plate. Warrior tier 6 is lousy with agility. That's a legacy of the past, of course, and as the design of the game moves ever onward, artifacts like that are left in its wake. After all, most level 70 warriors nowadays move straight to Northrend dungeons and are not likely to look at Black Temple until much later, when farming for transmog gear. The stats aren't important enough to go back and redesign the set.

What I really find interesting about this is seeing where the class has been, not just visually but also in terms of design. It's kind of like archaeology (the actual field of inquiry, not the in-game profession) or paleontology, reconstructing the class and its roots from the remainders of what it wore. Granted, I was there, so to a degree it's like excavating Pompeii with an immortal who survived the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius and keeps grumping about how people in his day didn't complain when they were buried in pyroclastic material. Which is a complete lie, by the way, we did nothing but complain about it. But I digress.

The warrior class has come a long way in seven years, and the artifacts of past design lie strewn about. New players and even old veterans can be forgiven for making a few mistakes based on the rubble. Let's go over a few.

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Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Cataclysm

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. This week, we're talking about specs, and DPS, and possibly smurfs, though I shouldn't get ahead of myself.

Patch 4.3.2 has dropped, and for mages, the only item in the patch notes is a 6% damage nerf to Fireball and Pyroblast, ostensibly to bring fire mages back in line with arcane mages for top prize in the What Spec Will My Raid Leader Expect Me to be Raiding With This Week Sweepstakes. For good or ill, every patch brings changes like this, as the spec balance carousel continues its eternal round.

That's been mage history, in a nutshell -- fire and arcane take turns pushing each other from the top of the PvE heap, and frost just shakes its head and queues for an Arena match. It's like a giant teeter-totter, with fire damage stacked on one end and arcane damage stacked on another. Blizzard goes back and forth between the ends, adding just a bit more of each type of damage or taking some away in an attempt to get the thing perfectly balanced, but try as it may, one end or the other is always sticking up in the air.

The number crunchers crunch the numbers after every damage pass and crown one spec king ... until the next pass, when the cycle repeats. And frost mages just watch and wonder when it will be their turn to go raiding.

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Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World's a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

Last week, we talked about roleplaying descriptions for characters and what should be considered a descriptor for your character. Along the way, I also mentioned that a lot of people make the common assumption that a character's history should be a part of their description as well. After all, part of what makes up a person is everything that's happened to them, right? Sure! But not when we're using roleplaying addons that have a clearly defined spot for character history.

And that clarification is important, because there are still roleplay addons out there that don't have a character history tab at all. Does this mean you should type up your character's history as part of your description? Absolutely not. Descriptions are for descriptions, and history is for history. If your roleplay addon doesn't allow for a character history tab but you're really gung-ho about writing up that history for everyone to read, I'd suggest finding a roleplay addon that has a spot for all that backstory you're dying to tell.

Except for one thing -- you don't want to tell everyone everything.

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Filed under: All the World's a Stage (Roleplaying)