Each week, Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player who has 2 hours or less to play at a time. Well, it used to be weekly and it will be again, starting today.

When last I wrote, which was ages ago, I promised to answer some reader mail about getting groups quickly. And then I vanished for a bit. I'm sorry about the interruption in this column and I will get to the reader mail, but not this week. With the new patch getting closer to release, I think I need to talk about some of the changes that will affect those of us with limited playtime.

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15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – both the renowned and the relatively anonymous.

If you want to hear a sad song about a lack of bag space, just talk to a hybrid or tank-capable class. Those guys are lugging around three or more sets of gear, plus variations – it's enough to bust a Foror's Crate of Endless Resist Gear Storage wide open. (Yeah, we know you wish you had one of those; we do, too.) We talked with a player who definitely has storage issues, but from a little different perspective: Rattleshirt of Uldaman, who displays her finery not in raid instances or battlegrounds but on the catwalk.

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Hi folks, it's me again. Somehow, Liz's computer got unplugged from the Light at the last minute and wiped her draft for this week clean. The task has fallen upon me once to swing the Light and wreak havoc upon these pages with blood and fury. Or something like that. In the wake of the admittedly lackluster (what, no giant GMs or gnome-transfigurations or demons run amuck?) second take on the TTR stress test, I've decided to write up the experience about making your own Paladin on the Tournament Test Realm, aka the TTRadin. If you haven't logged on to the TTR, now's a good time to download the PTR client and get yourself started.

Paladin without the pain
If you've never played a Paladin before, the TTR is an excellent way to experience some Paladin goodness without having to go through the entire leveling experience -- some parts of which even self-confessed altaholic and column co-writer Chris Jahosky admits to having a dislike for. Of course, leveling is part of the education process, so don't expect to know all the abilities and talents a Paladin -- or any class you make, for that matter -- right off the bat if you don't have a max-level character of that class on the live servers. That said, making a character on the TTR is well worth the effort and is definitely something any player can use to explore their options. Getting a taste of a max-level character, in our case a Paladin (this is a Paladin column, after all), is something players can learn from.

So where do we start? We have the usual racial choices: Human, Dwarf, or Draenei for the Alliance; and Blood Elf for the Horde. Because it isn't a PvP server by definition, you can make an Alliance and a Horde character. The tournament server also isn't like the live realms in that there are no quests or NPCs aside from the trainers, vendors, and arena representatives. I haven't explored the tournament realm completely, but it's safe to assume that it's a barren world. The NPCs are all Goblins, by the way, which is a bit unsettling and bizarre. There are few things stranger than seeing little green men and women in full Tier 2.

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A number of players have reported being able to inspect characters they aren't fighting against on the World of Warcraft Tournament Test Realms. Some have asked if this feature will be applied to the actual game servers.

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Blizzard has recently opened a new thread on the World of Warcraft forums which will keep track of all the graphical bugs found by players on builds of the 2.4.0 Public Test Realm built on or after March 12 or build number 8058.

The new thread was opened by Blizzard Poster Tigerclaw, who explained that any inconsistencies found with the game's graphics should be posted there. Since the thread is dedicated exclusively to the reporting of graphical bugs, any out of topic posts will be summarily deleted by the moderator.

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Totem Talk is written by Matthew Rossi for shamans, and the people who love them. You'd better be one of those people that love them or are them... is them? Wait, how did this paragraph get away from me so fast? Crap, don't die, don't die, don't....whew, the heal landed! I'd better burn an NS and drop a Healing Wave on it, just to be sure. Man, the paragraph's health just started bombing!

So you've decided to heal.

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In a thread started by quitting player whose final rants include issues such as class balance and the limited number of Battlegrounds, Drysc responds with a rare, long explanation. He mentions that Blizzard understands that not all classes and specs are as viable in PvP, particularly in the extremely competitive Arena environment, and concedes that they are trying to make at least all classes contributive in some way. Protection Warriors, for example, should be able to jump into Battlegrounds or Arenas and "be able to do something with some small amount of success." The 'small amount' comes from the fact that he also unequivocally states that it is Blizzard's philosophy that they have to be ok with all specs not being as viable as others.

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Hardcore Casual has a post up about how easy he says World of Warcraft really is -- just by learning your class, getting the right gear, and theorycrafting a bit, you can roll right through, and get to the point where even yellow or sometimes even red monsters don't give you trouble.

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Our favorite little web video series, The Guild, has been nominated for a 2007 YouTube award in the series category, and voting is going on right now over on YouTube's awards page. There are a lot of different categories to choose from, but if you click on "Series," you can see all the nominated web series, and The Guild is in the list down at the bottom. This isn't the first award they've been up for, but on the blog they claim it's one of the biggest.

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Or

"There's no such thing! Is there?"

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In the wake of Alex Ziebart's recent post for Hybrid Theory, we received a number of comments from paladins on their ability to main-tank a 25-man raid. Behind the scenes, the subject was equally controversial; many of us here play tanks and we all feel passionate about our classes. An email discussion started about hybrid tanks in general, and it got to be so interesting that we were threatened with being fired if we didn't post it we were asked to share it with our readers.

Warriors? Druids? Paladins? And the people who love them? This one's for you. Now, I've previously fielded complaints that my posts are too long, so far warning; if you're not in the mood for a pretty thorough look at the current state of hybrid tanking, you'll probably want to keep moving. If you play any tank at all, just want to know more about them and the people who choose to play tanks, or are considering rolling a tank class, I hope you find the following to be of interest.

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Man, you European players just can't seem to balance server load, can you? /cast Evasion. Once again, here's a round of free character migrations for European servers, open from yesterday to next Tuesday, March 18 (my birthday!).

• From: Burning Legion, Crushridge, Kazzak, Magtheridon, Shadowmoon
  
• To: Auchindoun, Jaedenar


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Every Thursday, Well Fed Buff will be serving up the tastiest dishes to boost your HP and stats, just in time for your weekend gaming.

In honor of the impending Spring season, and the traveling Darkmoon Faire, this week's Well Fed Buff will feature an improved version of [Fizzy Faire Drink "Classic"]. Don't worry, we won't be going anywhere near 'New Fizzy Faire Drinks'.

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So we've been having a back and forth about various tanking classes, and our overlords have commanded us to share this with you, the readers. So I enter into the fray, girded for battle (you have to gird, you'll pull something) and ready to provide unto you my opinions once again. For I am an opinionated cuss. Also, I just dropped something like 100g to respec fury for the night in SSC because we had a surplus of prot warriors, prot paladins and feral druids for once. So I got to see how the DPS half of the warrior class lives in raids, and it got me to thinking about how, of all three tanking classes, it was the warrior who got asked to respec.

My responses here are unabashedly pro warrior and from my own experiences. Some of them will be extreme cases. Some of them will be stressing a worst case scenario. I'll admit my bias now. I love warriors. I don't love druids or paladins. I try and leave this bias out of the people... I have a lot of druid or pally friends in the tanking corps, because, well, I'm a tank first and foremost and not a DPS player anymore. So fury warriors and I have only our class in common most of the time (except for, say, last night in SSC), while those off spec tanks and I are tanks together. I try very hard never to call for a nerf to another class. And I don't think paladins or druids should be nerfed as tanks now.

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Earlier today, The Dragonblight has been added to the Wrath of the Lich King official website. For those of you unaware, The Dragonblight is essentially a Dragon graveyard, though there are obviously other aspects of the zone as well.

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We love covering cool fanmade crafts here on WoW Insider, but now there's a blog that covers the dark side of "Warcrafts." World of Warcrafting is a new blog that... well, at first, I thought it was a joke, but now I can't tell. Something like this Green Dragon looks like a pretty good attempt at crafting (an attempt, anyway), but the stapleserpent seems just too funny to be real.

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Blizzard has once again extended an offer for free character migration on World of Warcraft. According to Community Manager Thundgot's announcement, the developers of the game are doing this to balance out the population differences between the highest and lowest populated PvP realms.

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It looks like Oxhorn's WeGame gig is paying off for fans. After nine months, he has released the sequel to Orcs in SPACE! Since Stage6 is gone and Oxhorn is exclusive with WeGame, the best extra we can link to is the script.

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Last week David covered Arenas for the hunter, while I laid low and did a little more leveling. I'm to the point now where crowd control becomes not only an option, but at times a requirement. Hunters are known for our ranged damage output. It's practically the thing hunters are made to do: stand back and shoot. We are also quite good at crowd control using our traps, though. You'll see it in the Looking for Group channel fairly regularly: "LF1M DPS/CC."

That's us. Damage per Second and Crowd Control. They might be thinking Rogue or Warlock, but you should see those five letters and think "that's me." Not only is crowd control something hunters are good at, it's something which not all hunters do reliably or well. Being able to trap, and trap competently, will go a long way towards making you friends in both instances and the open road.

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Citizens of World of Warcraft, more or less, are concerned about the facts and figures surrounding the Death Knight. As a matter of fact, Frostypants from the Twisting Nether realms aired out his opinion on this matter.

He said that unlocking a certain feature, like the DK hero class, in an MMORPG was pointless. He added that they didn't have to unlock the Draenei and Blood Elf when Burning Crusade came. He asked why can't they just pick this class in the beginning.

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Player Ohayou of Roflcers of the Lawl on the Shattered Halls realm was having some fun with his buddies in Booty Bay when he was attacked. Was it the opposing faction in a coordinated attack? Elementals spawned by a world event intent on overruning the goblin outpost? The newest raid boss of Sunwell Plateau?? Well, it turned out to be a well framed shot of a fish hanging from the mast. Don't give me that look. It's still kinda scary.

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Wrath of the Lich King is still some time away, it's true. Many gaming stores and websites seem to be anticipating an October or November release, but Blizzard's keeping mum on the exact date so far.

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Patch 2.4 on background downloader

It seems we were right yesterday, parts (251 mb) of the patch 2.4 can now be downloaded via the background downloader. It means that a good part of 2.4 data is finalized; the patch could be released between 2 weeks and 1 month, but that's an estimation based on previous patches.

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Having trouble trying to update your World of Warcraft MMORPG? If you are, you may not be the only one. According to Hortus over at the WoW forums, there's an ongoing issue that's causing Blizzard's updater to stop working on machines running on Microsoft's 64bit Windows Vista OS.

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Patch 2.4 available from the background downloader
The first part of the patch 2.4 is now available from the background downloader on live servers. This could be a sign of imminent release, or just the same thing as everytime with Blizzard trying to make the upcoming patch day as pleasant as possible. Keep in mind that everytime Blizzard did this, we had to wait a few more weeks before the effective deployment of the patch on live servers.



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Courageous and adventurous denizens of World of Warcraft test out what they're really made of in the TTR. Evennia from the Feathermoon realm, who hasn't been to the TTR, noticed that a Blizzard employee had an advantage with their equipment.

The screenshot on the right shows Blizzard QA Timbal wearing season 3 gear. Evennia assumed that the Blizzard gives a slight PVP advantage due to the equipment that they had.

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It's time to get those background downloaders up and running again. Blizzard has released a portion of the World of Warcraft 2.4 patch, which means people can pre-emptively pick up part of the patch now and avoid downloading everything once 2.4 comes around.

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