I've always wanted to write a transmogrification article in the same vein as Dawn Moore and Anne Stickney, but I never could find the right theme that I wanted to tackle. As I kept trying to find a theme, it suddenly hit me -- no theme is needed! I'll just show you my two awesome transmog sets for my orc warrior, Braggosh.

Who doesn't love Braggosh, the fiercest, most lovable orc warrior ever? No one, that's who! Both transmog outfits that I'm going to show you how to put together today are for plate wearers, and some of the set pieces, while warrior-specific, have alternate color versions available if you'd like to wear one of my cool sets.

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Filed under: Transmogrification

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mathew McCurley (@gomatgo) will be your host today.

Still the best Mr. Voletron song. Link Thorim all you want -- you know I'm right.

MattressWX asked:

Do you think Blizzard will ever get rid of the requirement of being in a raid group in order to enter a raid instance? It would be nice to solo old content without having to ask someone to group with you just to get in the door.

No only do I hope that Blizzard gets rid of the requirement for raid groups, especially for old raids that we can solo, but I hope that Blizzard gets rid of some of the heroic lockouts for doing Burning Crusade and Wrath content more than once a day. Farming for certain transmog weapons and specific pieces is a pain in the butt when you've got one shot at the boss a day.

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Filed under: The Queue

Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, and esoteroic topics that slip through the cracks.

Diablo III is a popular video game for the PC and Mac that sold a lot of copies and made a lot of people happy. Also, there was a lot of money. With great success comes great responsibility and cost, since the amount of success becomes proportional to the amount of crap to deal with to make the operation run smoothly. Being successful in the video game industry is not always what it's cracked up to be.

This past week has shed some light on two very interesting Diablo-related news pieces, putting Blizzard and its blockbuster dungeon crawler at the heart of scandals, government raids, clever vendors, banned games, and more international intrigue. You'd think that this was all a James Bond plot, but for the presence of guys with fanny packs and an overabundance of Utilikilts.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, The Lawbringer

If the Mogu on the Mists of Pandaria login screen don't high-five at the 20-minute mark, I will be severely disappointed.

Pyro asked:

Is there any time frame when Battle Tags will be open to all games on battle net? I really want to get into cross-realm raiding, but refuse to do RealID.

While there is no official time frame on when BattleTags will get rolled out to other games and services, I hope that it happens sooner rather than later. The promise of having people find me via BattleTag is much, much better for me than giving out my email. It sits better with me, doesn't reek of privacy issues, and lets me have more friends and more options within my games as to what content is accessible to me.

I'd like to hope that BattleTag integration happens before Mists of Pandaria launches and anticipate that it will be a part of the pre-patch patch that usually happens before the real patch hits retail -- you know, 4.3.455(RELEASE)(TEST)(NYI), etc. Maybe some systems changes, as well.

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Filed under: The Queue

Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same.

The Addon Spotlight Alternatives series continues with a look at cooldowns, timers, bars, and anything falling into the category of timing. Timing is a crucial factor in many of World of Warcraft's angles. You've got DPS rotations that can be made or broken based on the time between skill use. You've got tanks making split-second decisions on ability usage and timing -- what if you're only a few seconds away from a Shield Wall, but heroic Nefarian is about to use his thunder electro-whatever? Yeah, you have better been timing those cooldowns better, buddy.

Cooldown and skill timing management are some of the game systems baked into the game to separate the better from the best, the true test for the most hardcore WoW players out there. People are still tackling Dragon Soul heroic content and succeeding because of good timing -- ask anyone about the gruesome slog that the Madness of Deathwing fight is on heroic. I did. I asked Rossi. He growled at me.

We've established that timing is important, right? Good. Addons can greatly help you with the timing and cooldown tracking of your abilities because the game does a pretty poor job of it. That's not Blizzard's fault, either -- tracking your cooldowns in such an elaborate and specific way is not exactly what the game is designed to showcase to every player. This is all information we are willingly taking on in excess from what Blizzard is providing.

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Filed under: Add-Ons, AddOn Spotlight

Each week, WoW Insider and Mathew McCurley bring you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which spotlights the latest user interface addons. Have a screenshot of your own UI that you'd like to submit? Send your screenshots along with info on what mods you're using to readerui@wowinsider.com, and follow Mathew on Twitter.

This is exciting. The very first Reader UI of the Week from the Mists of Pandaria beta, and it gets to be my own. In fact, the UI that I've created in the beta is a bit of a dream team, fantasy UI that has been bouncing around in my head ever since World of Warcraft went live on the first day. You see, it's taken more than seven years for this feature to be developed and implemented in the game, and things will never be the same once the newest expansion launches.

I've been waiting for the ability to move my player and unit frames for a long, long time. The upper-left location of the screen was never my favorite area to slap a health and mana bar. I've put up with it over the years and have changed the feature wherever and whenever possible, but betas are not usually addon-enabled until the later days. Until then, I must make do.

These days, however, Mists of Pandaria looks to bring us some beautiful new changes to the user interface and my own sanity, giving me the ability to change some of the fundamental aspects of the player and target frames. With just two small movements and two quick options, the World of Warcraft default user interface moved leaps and bounds forward in the race to compete with my custom setup. And this fact makes me wonder if the UI will one day be seen as analogous to transmogrification, where Blizzard thinks that people can't handle one thing but actually crave the other.

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Filed under: Add-Ons, Reader UI of the Week

If you know me a tiny bit or follow my Twitter, you know that I'm sort of a nerd when it comes to shaving. Not content with the Mach 3 quad-blade whatever and desperate to save cash, I decided to search for something better. Like most young men of the internet age, I found mantic59 by way of a forum post or somesuch that lauded the benefits of traditional wet shaving and fragrant lathering, and my life changed forever. If you're interested, start here, and watch them all.

Anyway, I've never considered myself a true shaving fan because the visceral reaction to my fandom was never profound. It was fun for me, sure, but the outward expression of the thing was just not there yet and it was my personal experience. However, when I saw Truefitt and Hill showing off their Jubilee Commemorative Shaving Mug for the Queen of England's Diamond Jubilee in 2012, I wanted it. I want it bad, and I'll do anything to get it. Then it hit me; I'm sure excited about a shaving mug. Could be a whole lot worse.

So, men, I implore you. If you shave, shave like a man. I can give you no better, no more sagely, and no more important advice. You'll be better for it.

Questions?

ancientn00b asked:

What happens if we enter a cross realm zone and someone is there with the same name? Will it be like in dungeons where their realm name is after their name? Also will we be able to join with them in a party to quest together?

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Filed under: The Queue

Pop law abounds in The Lawbringer, your weekly dose of WoW, the law, video games and the MMO genre. Mathew McCurley takes you through the world running parallel to the games we love and enjoy, full of rules, regulations, and esoteroic topics that slip through the cracks.

Blizzard has been off to a pretty good start with Diablo III, selling who-cares-at-this-point millions of copies of the game people have been waiting over a decade to get their hands on. The craziest part about the whole thing is that it lived up to the hype -- a new Diablo game that felt like a Diablo game. Good for you, Blizzard! That's not what today's Lawbringer is about, no sir or ma'am. I've got a few topics I'd like to ramble on about today.

You know those days in high school when the teacher was inbetween lesson plans and they just sort of rambled to you for that one day that they had set aside in case Federico didn't understand the "green light" symbolism in The Great Gatsby? That story happened, but I changed the names to make it more funny to the people who get the joke. Great way to start off this edition, right? Make the most inside-baseball column on WoW Insider get a little more in-jokey. Mat, you sure know how to hook 'em.

No, wait, stay. I've got lots to say about Diablo III, the potential issues with the real money auction house, and my own thoughts on the cross-realm compromise and dodging the dreaded "merge." I think you'll have plenty to say in the comments after today's topics -- they are some of my favorites.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, The Lawbringer

Blizzard headquarters in Irvine has been lording its orc statue over the other Blizzard foreign offices, smirking and laughing, reigning as king of the statues outside of game companies' buildings. A challenger has finally emerged at the Blizzard offices in Versailles, France -- an amazing sculpture of Sarah Kerrigan, the Queen of Blades, from the StarCraft series.

The statue looks awesome and there's plenty of pictures up on Blizzard's Facebook page. Check out the pictures and tell us what you think. Will the next statue be Diablo-related and feature the best angel ever, Tyrael? We can only hope.

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Filed under: Blizzard, News items

Each week, WoW Insider's Mathew McCurley brings you a fresh look at reader-submitted UIs as well as Addon Spotlight, which focuses on the backbone of the WoW gameplay experience: the user interface. Everything from bags to bars, buttons to DPS meters and beyond -- your addons folder will never be the same.

Now is the perfect time to work on that alt you've been keeping locked away, sad and lonely for so long in his little alt box. You've got time now, right? Deathwing is long dead, and things are pretty chill. I even heard there's a new island out there to explore one of these days, most hopefully in July or August, which would be pretty cool.

Ironically, when I'm leveling most of my alts from an early level, I don't enable most of my addons. What's the point? Group and raid content that requires any addons is far off in the future, the number of abilities I have at the time doesn't reflect the button matrices that I've built for level 85, and there is practically no similarity to playstyle. So I turn off my addons, save some very crucial ones.

If you're looking to go addon-light for your next alt, I've got some addons that you're going to want to keep around because they make your life a thousand times easier. WoW's UI has gotten a lot better in recent years, but it still isn't perfect. These addons bring it a little closer to that perfection.

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Filed under: Add-Ons, AddOn Spotlight