Ever since 2.3 went live, it's been a bit of a struggle to make the leap from the 260 cooking range to the 300 cooking range, as both my poor paladin and shaman can well attest. With recipes such as Tender Wolf Steak and Monster Omelet, once the mainstays of any aspiring chef's training, going green and gray much earlier than before (That is, gray at 275 rather than 300), It's been a bit of trouble getting the needed skill to start cooking up the buzzard and ravager meat that makes the mainstay of the early post-300 cooking grind.

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This week on Build Shop I've got another Paladin build for you all to digest -- Shockadin (aka 40/0/21)! I like this build because it's all purpose, allowing you to act as the main healer for an instance if necessary, but giving you the freedom to go grind or farm or what have you without needing to respec. It's also got the potential for some great burst damage, if used properly.

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Some older players might remember when all those empty huts and farms in The Barrens received a new infusion of life, with orc families inhabiting them and acting out stories both humorous (That poor kid being chased by a swarm of bees) and heartfelt (That poor kid waiting for his dad to come home from Warsong Gulch). A forum post by player Lalluna of the Darkspear server pointed out that, quite a few patches later, that liveliness may be spreading to other zones in Kalimdor!

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This week I'm going to continue the class guide by talking about levels 41-50. This is the level range I dislike the most when playing most of my characters (more specifically, 45-50), but I'm going to include suggestions to help you get through it as fast as possible. Since you got your mount at 40, you'll notice a distinct drop in travel time, but please be careful when mounted -- enemy mobs can still hit you, potentially knocking you off your mount to make your escape on foot. You may have chosen to respec at 40 to Protection or Holy, but I'm continuing as Retribution for leveling purposes (though Prot grinding is also quite fun). As such, certain quests / areas may be harder for some specs than others, so I've tried to offer alternative zones when possible just in case you start having trouble.

If you missed the last two installments of the leveling guide, you can find 1-20 here, and 21-40 here. Before we get started on level 41, I have a couple of recommendations: First, make sure your First Aid skill is leveled up and you have a nice stock of bandages, as sometimes you'll be low on mana and a bubble/bandage can save your life. Second, always carry around a stack or two of the best water (and maybe food) you can get, and if you've leveled cooking, try to keep yourself food buffed as much as possible. Third, take a deep breath -- some of the zones you have to quest in at this level range are notorious ganking grounds on PvP servers, and many have tough mobs that may give you trouble (especially if they have a level or two on you). You will likely find yourself running back from the graveyard a lot, and that's always frustrating. Just keep on at it, and you'll get through it.

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Last December we put out a call for new writers. Breaking news bloggers, weekend bloggers and a Mage columnist were all on our list of positions to fill. After reading the hundreds of excellent applications (and a few very strange ones), we've made our final decision.

The new WoW Insider staffers include Adam Holisky and Alex Ziebart who have both already hit the ground running to boost our weekend coverage. Daniel Whitcomb, Amanda Dean and Heath Milo will be starting this week to cover breaking news throughout the week and Allison Robert will be following soon after.

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On Saturday night I noticed a guildie acting strangely. He kept switching between characters and wouldn't respond to tells from even his closest friends in the guild. Concerned about him, we gave him a call... on the phone, to see what was up. You guessed it, he was nowhere near his computer at the time. He went to log in and found his password was changed. Unfortunately, he had also forgotten the correct response to his secret question "What is your favorite activity?"

The hacker kept running in and out of the Shadow Labyrinth. I checked the customer service forums and found that this was common behavior among hackers. Either there is an exploit in that instance, or hackers just really enjoy hanging out with Blackheart the Inciter. I'm leaning toward the latter.

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theflamecrow on LJ had an interesting little occurrence: he was in Darkshore when he saw a flash in the World Defense channel that Darkshore was being attacked. The only problem? He's Horde.

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Twice a week, our writers will tell you more about themselves, and let you get to know them and the characters they play a little better. Click here to read more About the Bloggers.

What do you do for WoW Insider?
I'm the Senior Editor on the Joystiq network, which means I do a little bit of writing and a lot of behind the scenes work on all of the Joystiq network sites, including WoW Insider. Until recently, I was the keeper of Around Azeroth and Two Bosses Enter, but these days I'm focusing my writing efforts on our Priest column, Spiritual Guidance. I've got a "Karazhan 101" idea floating around in my head right now, which will show up on the site one of these days, I'm sure.

What's your main right now?
A Holy Priest, of course! (Though I have a lingering fondness for the underdog Discipline healing build, I finally gave in and specced Holy for increased effectiveness.) What can I say -- I must just have a bit of a masochistic streak. I'd never played a healer in an MMO before, but initially rolled one in order to have something very different to play during downtime from my raiding Warlock. I quickly found that running instances from a healer's perspective was a totally different thing than running them as a DPS class. Instead of being a tedious job of staring at health bars, I found it to be a rewarding challenge and I've stuck with it ever since.

For the Horde or Glory to the Alliance?
For the Horde! When I was but a newbie, I started my career in the World of Warcraft with a Gnome Warlock. But trust me -- I've seen the error of my ways. After all, Trolls are obviously the superior race.


Favorite thing to do in Azeroth?
Instance, instance, instance! Soloing a healer isn't a lot of fun, but I do enjoy instance healing. After all, there's something very satisfying about deciding who lives or dies and holding the party's lives in the palm of your hand. (And, of course, letting that annoying rogue who can't form a sentence without the addition of many superfluous numbers and punctuation die a few times.) On the flip side, an instance with a not-so-good group (or a tank that hasn't entirely figured out the tanking thing) is absolutely agonizing, so I suppose I should clarify: my favorite thing to do is run instances with decent groups of players. In my case, "decent players" means my guildmates: even when we don't have the faintest clue as to what we're up against (and would be told to learn to play by many a game expert), we do seem to enjoy ourselves.

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Many gamers have complained that they can't max out their cooking skill in World of Warcraft if they don't start fishing. Fortunately, Blizzard has heard the cries of the gamers and has decided to fix this in patch 2.4.

On the WoW forums, Community Manager Bornakk  gave word of two new recipes called Charred Bear Kabobs and Juicy Bear Burgers, both of which require 250 cooking skill and should fill the gap for players who don't fish.

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Despite free character migrations between realms in World of Warcraft, some gamers have been dissatisfied with Blizzard's population control policies. They've even been very expressive about it.

Some gamers believe their realms are still underpopulated; some believe that underpopulated realms should just be merged; some believe that they've been neglected. Although these concerns were answered by Blizzard before, complaints kept cropping up.

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Raid Rx is designed to encapsulate and cure the shock and horror that is 25-man raid healing. Ok, so it's mostly horror... Anyways, if you're a big fan of X-TREME Whack-A-Mole (or are being forced into it against your will) this is the column for you. I prefer to remember Tom Cruise as he was in Top Gun, crooked smile and no couch jumping.

This is Part 1 of a two-part series on reaching your full casting potential. Today we're going to cover how to get around inherent casting latency and next week I'll assault you with so much info on how haste rating affects healing, you'll come back here to hide.

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Two big pieces of news today from Upper Deck about the WoW TCG-- first of all, they've announced details about their latest booster set, called Servants of the Betrayer, and available this coming April. The set will have new sub-factions, new ally types, and heretofore unreleased abilities for your deck. Additionally, the booster packs will continue the trend set in the last expansion, and contain 19 cards per pack, with those extra loot consumable cards showing up more often.

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For those of you who are looking for confirmation on the new disenchanting feature for Void Crystals in patch 2.4, then you've come to the right place. Blizzard Poster Thyvene from the World of Warcraft Europe forums has posted an excerpt of what's to come in the new update for WoW.

Asides from the new enchanting feature that everyone's been expecting, a new Daily Quest was also noted. This one ties in with the old man hanging around at Silmyr Lake outside of Shattrath City. See if you can land a big one and reap the rewards of this new quest.

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I was looking through some of the career (class) descriptions over at Warhammer Online, EA Mythic's much-anticipated MMORPG which touts a rich PvP experience as one of its selling points, and happened to go over their description of the combat system. Listening to one of their amusing podcasts, I got the impression that some careers (classes) move faster than others. This struck me as odd, if only because I've grown accustomed to something we take for granted in World of Warcraft. In WoW, all classes and races move at the same speed. With the exception of enchants, spells, or talents, all characters move at exactly the same pace. Size changes that perception somewhat, with Tauren seeming to move at a plodding step and Gnomes waltzing around like Oompa-loompas hopped up on too much caffeine.

The martial arts is all about speed, about movement where there needs to be movement. More importantly, it is about freedom of movement. Speed is essential, but it can also be arbitrary because there are so many factors that affect it. Latency, computer power... all these things contribute to one's speed or reaction time -- or more accurately, how that reaction time translates into action within the game. That's another matter altogether. What we're going to look at today is movement. How we move, how fast we move, and how we can move better. When fighting a computer-controlled mob, with the exception of scripted events or certain boss phases, there is very little urgency to move. It's easy to kill most mobs by standing still and just attacking or casting spells. PvP, on the other hand, is all about movement. Standing still is tantamount to certain death.

Freedom (of movement) is everything
In PvP, opponents will actively try to move out of your range of vision, or your cone of attack. Ranged classes will try to kite you, and melee classes will attempt to close in. Melee fighters going up against other melee fighters will try to go behind their opponents, negating their attack. This is why movement-impairing and incapacitate effects are some of the most important PvP abilities. Going through Warhammer Online's careers or classes, I found the Death Knight-like Chaos Chosen to be interesting but quickly had reservations upon finding out they were the Tank archetype, whose fighting style Senior Designer Josh Drescher described as "slow but powerful". Initially, I had thought this only referred to attacks, but later in the podcast, he mentions "slow-moving, heavily armored tanks," setting off alarm bells in my head. My gut reaction was that I don't want to move slow, and I'm willing to wager that few people do, either.

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This next machinima has a bit of everything. Spash is part battlegrounds, part raid, and part ... Shepiwot? The result is an entertaining blend of WoW gameplay.

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Reader Jehoiakim of the Steamwheedle Cartel server snapped this shot in the Tempest Keep instance, the Arcatraz. His group had just finished off Zereketh the Unbound and was working their way to Wrath-Scryer Soccothrates when he made the mistake of looking down. All the way down.

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This annual in-game holiday is scheduled to coincide with real life Chinese New Years. Asian style outfits, ceremonial fireworks, delicious dumplings and a once-a-year raid boss are all part of the celebration. Quests send you to find 50 coins and turn them in for various goodies as well. It's a fun RP event taking place across player cities throughout Azeroth, but mostly centered in the Druid village of Moonglade.

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Raids in Blizzard's World of Warcraft require different numbers of people per group. There are raids suited for just a small team, probably as small as six people.

On the other hand, there are those that require up to 25 and 40 people. At first glance, this looks good and fun but some players argue that raids are becoming hard to finish.

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It's your 20th run in Shadowlabs and just know Murmur is going to drop your Hallowed Garments so you can complete your Priest dungeon set. I mean, it's been 19 times already and you've sharded the Tidefury Kilt how many times? It's gonna drop this time, you feel it in your bones. Down he goes and the on his body you find...a Sonic Spear. You're guildies don't need to be on voice to hear your yelling.

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The end of yesterday was fairly interesting with an update of the Underdev page and an insight on AV changes in 2.4. If you feel that you missed something during the last few days you can always check :

• Under development page update and Alterac Valley improvements [Link]
  
• The full list of known changes from the patch 2.4 [Link]
  
  

[Patch 2.4] Not so many classes changes ?
It seems that after all, the patch 2.4 won't change tons of things about class balancing, at least at the beginning, we'll probably see more classes modifications during the different updates of the test version.
Quote from: Nethaera (Source)I'm going to be a bit cautious in what I say in this regard. Will there be some changes to classes? Yes, there will be some. We're not rushing into a bunch of class changes for this patch at this point. Consider the patch to be a bit more progressive in nature. As we go along, the developers are going to be keeping a close eye on the results of any changes and additions and then making changes as they feel they are necessary. How many changes occur are going to be based on testing over time. This is why it's important for players to get in and test it as much as possible.

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It's Tuesday, and you know what that means: weekly maintenance! This week most realms are getting rolling restarts instead of a full maintenance -- which means the vast majority of US players won't notice a thing. (Sorry, Australian players, as the restarts still fall dead in your prime evening hours.) For rolling restarts, Blizzard brings down all of the realm servers for a quick reboot (no longer than 15 minutes of downtime) one by one. (The restarts no doubt follow some kind of pattern which we are not privy to.) The restarts will begin at 5:00 AM PST, and though your realm may not be restarted exactly at five, the whole thing should be over by six or so. A handful of US realms will have a brief maintenance: an hour of downtime between 5:00 AM PST and 6:00 AM PST. Sounds like a good time for an powernap for players on: Area 52, Auchindoun, Azuremyst, Blade's Edge, Blood Furnace, Coilfang, Exodar, Ghostlands, Shattered Halls, Terokkar, The Scryers, The Underbog, Velen, and Zangarmarsh.

The survivability of casters, shadow priests most especially, in World of Warcraft has always been an issue, especially in PvP. It looks like patch 2.4 will bring an interesting new change, however, as shadow priests might just be able to cast an extra spell while in Shadow Form: Fear Ward.

The idea was originally posted on a thread by Omnipotence of Azgalor, who was proposing some ways in which shadow priests could have their survivability enhanced.

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