I am more of a straight peperoni person myself. My wife loves the hawaiian style though. /sigh I always lose that fight.

I do have a question today too.

With the announcement of the mounts being removed from the raiding achievements there has been a large uproar on the forums. Many people are in favor of it while many more are against it. Several suggestions have been made as alternatives to removing the mounts from the achievements. One of these suggestions is to put an item level restriction on the achievement. So basically no one in the raid may be wearing gear with an item level above X (i think the current item level of raid gear is 213). I like this suggestion but some people were shooting it down saying that item level is more of a point system on how stats get distributed on gear and that some items may be better despite lower item levels.

So the main question is how exactly does item level work? How is it determined and how does it effect the stats on gear?

Damn. Sorry didn't mean to attach this to this poster. You can move it to the bottom if you like. My bad.

I know it sounds weird, but I actually get better performance on windowed mode. Go figure. Been that way since back in BC.

Erogoth,

Items are built using an item budget. The total number of points, how many of each stat you can have and which ones are all affected by the item points. A large factor in this is the item level, though item quality affects it too. All epic 213 level items are roughly the same "power", but some are more useful than others because of how they are itemized. It's like talent points for equipment I guess.

If your system can handle it (mostly video card dependent in this case), I'd also highly recommend a dual-monitor setup. I've had my personal systems set up this way for a couple years now, and it's hard going back to one screen. Yeah, there's a bit of an initial investment involved, but for me it was well worth it.

When playing WoW, I have WoW on my left monitor, while I have a web browser with wowhead or wowinsider open on the right monitor. Windowed mode (maximized) lets me mouse between them without any funky transitions or whatnot. Extremely convenient.

It's also immensely helpful for writing papers (paper in one window, reference material in the other) and for artwork (full screened painting in one window with my pallete, navigator and other tools in the other window).

Here is a super easy work around that I have found to alt-tab out of the loading screen (at least on a windows PC).

Select your character and with your mouse press the 'load' (is that the term?) button and hold it down. Don't click on the button, press and hold.

Then hit the windows key on your computer and let go of the mouse. Wow will then continue to load in the background while you do other things on your computer.