Posts with tag featured

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.

I find myself wondering about protection warriors as tanks. Clearly, we're neither the most nor least popular tanks, holding steady in the middle of the pack - both blood DK's and protection paladins absolutely own tank representation. Blood is at 4.2% and prot pallies at 4.1% of total class/spec representation in Throne of Thunder, with prot warriors at 2.7% and guardian druids in about the same spot as brewmaster monks, 2% for guardians and 1.8% for brewmasters.

It's fairly clear that fury warriors, despite being a relatively smaller fraction of total class representation, are by far the most popular warriors in current raiding. Protection is not only second, but a distant second, and arms (despite being a solid 3% of the total player base overall) is vanishingly under-represented in raiding. We'll worry about arms in raids later. For now let's ask why protection warriors aren't being seen in raids. It's not based on class popularity by itself - based on looking over Realmpop for a couple of hours I'd argue that warriors are holding pretty steady at about 9.6% of the total population. (It's a slight drop from the 10.14% we saw last December) World of Wargraphs puts the number at about 9.5%, so either way, there are a lot of warriors. But looking at the Wargraphs data, two things come to mind.

Submitter Taedran of Guilty as Charged on Silvermoon (US-A) recently sent me ... quite a few screenshots. As in literally several hundred. I think that's considered justification for homicide in Texas. Anyway, several of Taedran's pictures featured zoomed-out high-definition pictures of certain zones in the game. This one features the isolated (and unvisitable, except for newbie goblins) Lost Isles. It seems like a paradise. Why did we ever leave?

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Want to see your own screenshot here? Send it to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com. We strongly prefer full-sized pictures with no UI or names showing. Include "Azeroth" in the subject line to ensure your submission dodges email spam filters; if you'd like to be credited, also include your name, guild and realm.

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Wandering around outside of Azeroth, in the so-called real world, you'll see a lot of World of Warcraft players. Some you'll spot with class t-shirts, others drive cars with alliance or horde window stickers (or even custom license plates), some may wear WoW-themed jewelry, and some even have WoW tattoos. But not everyone feels the need to show off their WoW fandom in an obvious way -- or even at all.

So what about you, readers? Do you have a WoW-themed t-shirt collection so you always have the right shirt for the occasion? Or is there some subtler way you like to show off your WoW love?

RomireVids is hitting the street with a brand new video: Hockers. A Pawn Stars parody, this video turns Azeroth into a bizarre, huge pawn shop. It's got some shout-outs to bizarre lore moments of the past, a few slightly purple jokes, and more than a few punchlines.

This video is a huge step up for Romire. The graphics are solid for the subject matter and the voice acting is excellent. Most importantly, the script flows convincingly and sticks to a single train of thought. It's a nice video from Romire. My hat's off to you, sir!

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.

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The ghostly creature hovered in the air, quietly chewing on a chocolate chip cookie. Her iridescent wings flapped in slow, lazy arcs.

"And you don't know where you got her?" Lolegolas asked. "No clue at all?"

"None," Throgg confirmed. "I just opened up my pet bag and poof. There she was. She's pretty cute, though. In an adorable way, I mean."

Lolegolas nodded. "So, she's a mystery. Why is she unborn?"

"It turns out her people don't consider you really born until you kill a worthy target," Throgg said.

"That's kind of harsh," Lolegolas said. "Does she fight well?"

"Incredibly well," Throgg said. "That's why I gave her a cookie. She totally decimated my opponent a few moments ago. She likes cookies."

Item Note: The Unborn Val'kyr is shrouded in mystery; we're not quite sure where you can get it yet. While Northrend is an obvious component, the details are still vague. Stay tuned for more details!

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Phat Loot Phriday brings you the scoop on some of the most ... interesting ... loot in the World of Warcraft, often viewed through the eyes of the stalwart Throgg and indelible Lolegolas. Suggest items you think we should feature by emailing mikeg@wowinsider.com.

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Last time we talked about getting rid of funsuckers, but what about the many players who enhance our gametime? Should they be rewarded? How would you go about it?

Perhaps we could have a dropdown box where you could report a player for being extra helpful or otherwise going above and beyond to make your day better. Perhaps someone answered your question politely in tradechat. Or a player asked if you were going for the mining node you were fighting on top of rather than just ninjaing it during your battle. Or maybe someone helped you fight a battle out in the wild that got out of control with adds.

Once someone gathered enough reports of being helpful, what would the rewards be? I would think it would have to be something that doesn't affect gameplay. If it did, guilds may insist on guildies reporting each other has helpful just to skew the system in their favor. Perhaps it would just reward a series of titles. Unfortunately, guilds may still require guildies to report each other in order to get those titles just to collect.

I am dead, but I live? What sorcery is this? Submitter Aryon of AnyThingButSerious on Ghostlands (EU-A) caught Fleshcrafter Hoku literally contemplating his own mortality on the Isle of Thunder. Respawn timers take a lot of the sting out of the old "what happens to us when we die" question, don't they? Oh, when we die we come back a few minutes later, only to be killed again. It's like the dollar store form of reincarnation.

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Want to see your own screenshot here? Send it to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com. We strongly prefer full-sized pictures with no UI or names showing. Include "Azeroth" in the subject line to ensure your submission dodges email spam filters; if you'd like to be credited, also include your name, guild and realm.

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I was smirking my way past the Gordon Ramsay-esque commentary on Twitter recently (go to the tweet to view it in all its unblurred, NSFW glory) when it struck me: Blizzard has created so many incentives to play a healer. Obviously, they've worked -- but are the healers enjoying it?

As a long-time healer, I find myself broken-hearted at the idea that players are going through the motions of healing simply because for the sake of faster random queue times or to fill a hole in a roster lineup. Healing by people who aren't passionate about healing? Healing by people who aren't glued to the action? Healing by people who might be watching "other things" on another screen, or eating pizza, or, or ...? Dear readers, we're talking about saving lives here. I weep. Seriously, I weep.

Still, there seem to be quite a lot of healers going about their business in today's game. If you're a healer, do you enjoy the role? Did you choose to be a healer of your own volition, or were you influenced by queue times, role benefits, or the needs of your raid or guild? If you were nudged into healing by outside forces, has it been worth it? Are you a happy healer or a reluctant healer?

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It's a little-known secret that Batman Beyond remains one of the best Bat-reimaginations we've seen. Clinging to continuity with a tenuous but resilient grasp, Batman Beyond captures some of the best bat-themes and bat-ideas.

You can imagine my thrill when I saw Fifth Element's bat-video, Batman Beyond Twin Consorts. With the same sense of excitement and flair they bring to all their videos, the raiding team of machinima gives Terry a whole new spin.

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.

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I didn't start playing World of Warcraft right at launch, but it's safe to say that I've been playing for a long while. For me, WoW is the video game equivalent of an old, worn t-shirt: it's comfortable and familiar. It's a game I often launch when I'm not looking for something fun and distracting, but not anything that's going to challenge me too much. I still find WoW to be a lot of fun -- I wouldn't keep playing if I didn't! -- but it's still usually something I play with the television on in the background.

But sometimes, still, even after all these years, WoW does things that manage to surprise me. Of course WoW has new content -- lately, it's come more quickly than ever -- but even, sometimes, when I'm not looking for it, I'll run into something new. Now and then I bump into quest text I hadn't read carefully before, a Cataclysm change that I'd never noticed, or an Easter egg the developers snuck in.

And you, reader? Do you keep finding that WoW surprises you?

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Last week we discussed how to get rid of the funsuckers making our WoW time less enjoyable. There was quite a bit of discussion in the comments and we had one blogger address the issue as well.

Account-wide ignore
I and others suggested one step in the right direction would be to make ignore account-wide. As long as the other characters on the ignored account were added to the ignore list invisibly, it couldn't be used for griefing.

Peer review
I had also mentioned the Tribunal system that League of Legends uses to police its player base. Commenter Yoojine linked to a video that described the science behind LoL's techniques. If you have the time to look at it, I highly recommend it for those who are interested in studying human behavior. It's fascinating and also heartening that a game company is going through so much effort to make the gameplay experience less toxic for everyone. Basically, they use peer review, direct feedback and the concept of priming to lower the toxicity of the in-game experience. I think that WoW could benefit from Blizzard conducting similar experiments on us.

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

There's no end to the number of people who will tell you how to play this game. None. Even here, despite having a large audience of varying playstyles, we can let things slip through about the only way to do things.

You must raid to experience WoW, you must PvP, you must level your pets from 1-25 to be any sort of serious pet battler.

But you know what?

We're all full of a bunch of hot air. At the end of the day all we're able to do is give you what we think is the most fun way to enjoy WoW based on our experiences. The same goes for Ghostcrawler, Zarhym, Neth, Bashiok, etc... All they can do is tell you how they enjoy it, how they experience it. At the end of the day WoW is a highly personal experience, one that humanity hasn't had before. It's an entire virtual world, whose population would be the 91st largest country in the world (down from 74). Let that put the subscriber drop in perspective for you.

There are 151 real life nations that are smaller than WoW. And none of that matters, because it's your World of Warcraft. As in the rest of your life, make of it what you will.

Paul asked:

The latest scuttlebutt reported on the idea of a WoW film was that the project is in danger of being scrapped (yellow/red lighted) in the wake of the latest game news. It'll probably depend on what the future news is, but even the devs indicated they expect the population to continue declining over the next year; we'll probably never see a WoW film come to light.

Submitter Sporkwind of That Takes Effort on Terenas (US-A) was tired of his travel form not being able to keep up with his friends' mounts. So with the help of a local engineer, he retrofitted a rocket to fit his stag form's hooves. Sadly, his plan hit a snag when he tried to fuel up his rocket with grass and herbs, and discovered that a high-tech mount takes more effort to maintain than the organic kind. I can't tell who has the nastiest sneer on their face -- the rocket or the deer.

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Want to see your own screenshot here? Send it to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com. We strongly prefer full-sized pictures with no UI or names showing. Include "Azeroth" in the subject line to ensure your submission dodges email spam filters; if you'd like to be credited, also include your name, guild and realm.

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