Last Sunday, It came from the Blog celebrated Mother's Day by taking a bunch of female Orcs to the Barrens and telling "Your Mom" jokes. I had a lot of fun and discovered that my ICFTB guildies were very creative. Daniel Whitcomb also joined us with Okasama, his Orc-Mom.

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Much like the rogue class itself, Elizabeth Wachowski's Encrypted Text usually pops up just when you're not expecting it, is prone to disappearing without notice for large periods of time, and steals your lewtz.

Hey, fellow rogues! It's been a while! Well, more like nearly two months. Sorry. But we're back with some fresh ideas, one of which is this: how can you roleplay as a rogue without seeming like a cliche?

Admittedly, I'm new to RP, and my RP character is a draenei priest -- about as far from my beloved troll rogue as one can get. So this article is geared to people who, like me, are new to RP. The more experienced RPers can correct all my horrifying, glaring errors in the comments.

So, let's start out with:

Picking a race

Each race has different rogue traditions, heroes, and senses of morality. Here's a quick overview:

• Humans control several rogue organizations: the Ravenholdt guild, their archrival Syndicate organization, and SI:7, the official intelligence agency of Stormwind. If you're interested in "joining" any of these organizations (or the vaguely rogue-ish Defias Brotherhood), human would be a good choice.
• Night elf rogues would seem to have some difficulty fitting in with their peaceful, nature-loving society. However, night elves have skills at stealth, and every society needs its enforcers. The night elf police force, known as the Wardens, always has room for a good rogue -- and the archdruid Fandral Staghelm might not be above employing some sneaky folk to advance his political goals.


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Scattered Shots is for hunters. 'Nuff said on that topic. The Freezing Trap David was stuck in last week also wore off a little bit, thanks to Daniel, permitting him to write once more without his fingers snapping off from the cold.

In the wake of the recent confusion regarding Scare Beast, once again some hunters have gotten to complaining a lot about the state of their class. While on one hand, there are certainly problematic issues hunters are having, it's really not fair to say that the class is broken. It isn't -- being a hunter is more fun than its ever been, and it looks like this class will only get better in the future.

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I only slightly mentioned this back on the podcast, I think, but there was a fairly interesting change that snuck in the patch notes on 2.4.2: lots of formerly main hand weapons have become one-hand weapons. There are a couple of theories poking around about why this could be -- dual wield is first and foremost, of course, as this change allows classes who dual wield, including Rogues and Enhancement Shammies, to have a little more choice as to what weapons they can use. Death Knights will also be able to dual wield in the expansion, and this will open things up for them a bit as well. And Blacksmithing weapons were apparently changed as well (in addition to losing their "unique" status), so Blacksmithers have a little more leeway, too.

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Blizzplanet has a new Wrath of the Lich King related video from G4TV. It has interviews with Jeffrey "Tigole" Kaplan and J. Allen "No nickname I'm aware of" Brack and very short previews of the new zones, the Death Knight hero class, quests and raids. It also has a very annoying soundtrack underneath the interview snippets which made me want to rip the speakers off of my computer when I watched it the first time, so be warned. A few notes of interest during the interview:

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I'm getting back to WoW Insider after a month's real-life-related absence and have been spending some time playing catch-up on the site. One of the articles that caught my attention was Matt Rossi's popular "One reason tanks won't PuG," in no small part because I play a tank and my own PuG runs have been few and far between of late. My main, a Tauren Druid, respecced from balance to feral at level 69 because there were so few tanks on my server, and I literally spent months and months tanking PuG's to get experience and gear.

During that period I saw everything from rogues rolling on +healing maces to warlocks needing on tanking cloaks, and I learned that you never can tell what you're going to get from a PuG. Yes, you'll get hunters who can't trap, mages who never resheep, rogues who mistakenly believe they leveled a warrior, and priests who Power Word: Shield you straight off the pull -- but you'll also find people who know their class well, or are in the process of learning just like you are, and who are fun to be around. I have now killed Illidan with a contingent of people who showed up to my PuG's back when I was a wee lolbaretank in quest greens and Heavy Clefthoof, so as a matter of personal experience I think PuG's are a somewhat underrated way to meet people who will later turn out to play crucial roles in how you experience the game.

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Gamedaily has the report that Xfire, the online service for gamers (that we have coordinated a few events with in the past), has broken a whopping ten million users. That, you'll probably realize, is just as many as World of Warcraft, and in fact, while Xfire apparently has support for over 1,200 games, World of Warcraft always seems to rank pretty high on the list.

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Those of you who have been around for a little while will no doubt know about one of the most useful resources in this World of Warcraft: WoWWiki. If you're new to the party, let me tell you about it. WoWWiki is, as the name suggests, a wiki about all things Warcraft. From boss strategies to patch history to insanely detailed lore, if it's about the Warcraft series, it's probably on there somewhere. And if not, it's a wiki, so you can write it yourself!

The occasion for this particular post is that they have just completed some major upgrades to their software and infrastructure. Here are the highlights:

• WoWWiki is now hosted in a distributed fashion across the Wikia network, which should mean more stability and less chance of catastrophic failure.
• A new default skin, which looks nice and classy.
• The OpenSearch plugin is now working again, so you can add WoWWiki as a search engine in Firefox or IE (though I still prefer Firefox's search keywords). Click on the menu by your search field while browsing WoWWiki to check it out.
• A proper sidebar menu, with links to important parts of the site. This fixes my single biggest complaint about the site, which is that it was hard to navigate.
• The sidebar is also now customizable; users can pick which widgets they want to see over there, and in what order. This is very cool.
• A new version of MediaWiki, which brings many feature improvements and bug fixes.


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The Australian branch of CNET (CNET, by the way, just sold to CBS for $1.8 billion) is little late to release their notes from the Wrath of the Lich King preview party, but I forgive them, because they contain a few new nuggets of information that I don't remember seeing elsewhere.

• As I speculated last time, it seems a Death Knight will have to "go to a specific locale" in order to pick a new configuration of their six runes. I would still guess that it would be an inn, or stable master, or some other building/NPC found in every town.
• They saw an escort quest wherein the escorted NPC mounts the same horse as the player; the player was then able to use some attacks on enemies. Sounds like a sort of ground-based bombing run -- not quite mounted combat, but a step in that direction, anyway.
  
• The Oracle/Wolvar faction choice is meant to be less permanent than the current Aldor/Scryer divide; CNET reports "it appears that you'll be able to juggle favour between the two groups." This sounds good to me, since I'm currently regretting my choice on one of my characters (missing access to some recipes). On the other hand, it will contribute to further homogenization, and what's the point of splitting faction allegiance if it's easy enough to go back?


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Hello again! This week's strip has been done in memory of Children's Week. That wonderful and joyous celebration that gets you a cute little tag along to play with, all in exchange for running everywhere in the entire world.

I have somehow managed to miss out on Children's Week every year, but knowing my luck, it's for the better! It would likely lead to a catastrophe not unlike what is featured in this comic.

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If you're a machinimist or just someone who likes to poke around the game files trying to see what The Ultimate Druid would look like (yeah, I'm guilty), good news; Wow Model Viewer has been updated for patch 2.4.2. I haven't used it since the patch hit, but according to the mod's site a few twitchy issues popped up that have since been fixed.

The developer warns that this version will not work with any version of Wow pre-2.4.2, so if you haven't downloaded and installed the patch yet, don't install this update until you do.

• WoW Model Viewer's main site
• Download page for the updated version


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Totem Talk, the column for shamans, takes another look at offense this week. Matthew Rossi covers how to burn, freeze, or... whatever earth shock is supposed to be, a big rock in the face? He couldn't tell you. But whatever it is, it really annoys spellcasters. Boom, clod of earth in the face, no spells for you!

Last week, on Totem Talk, we escaped a burning warehouse only to discover that Diego really isn't the father...

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If you've visited the main page of the official forums lately, you'll notice that things are a little different -- they've replaced the simple links to class, realm, and battlegroup forums with a dynamic interface. All the forums that were there are still there, but the navigation to them is a little faster and less cluttered. It's not Flash or anything fancy, so it should work just fine across any number of widely used browsers.

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If you've been reading up on our World of Warcraft posts, you may have noticed an update stating that the acquisition of the bear mount from Zul'Aman would be disabled once Wrath of the Lich King comes into play.

A recent update, however, adds a bit of a silver lining to this sad news, as it seems another bear mount will be made available when Wrath goes live.

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With M'uru now apparently substantially nerfed, and several guilds having been past him for a few weeks anyway, the top guilds are now biding their time until they can face off against Kil'jaeden himself. Before they can do that, one last Sunwell Plateau gate needs to be opened; my guess on when that will happen is May 27, two weeks from yesterday, but no-one knows for sure.

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Insomniaddict Productions is back with a trailer for his new series, Narien Asks. The series will be about a Blood Elf with lots of questions, and his quest for the answers. I can't say much about the machinima, as it would give away the surprise! We previously featured Insomniaddict's BeoCraft comparison earlier in the month.

What's interesting about Narien Arrives is that he used Second Life to build and chromakey objects for certain scenes, as many machinimators do with WoW Model and Map Viewers. The virtual world is highly customizable, which allowed him to create a branded truck for his show.

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Ding, dong, the orc is dead! This seems like it would be one of those traps at Gringotts, but it's actually just an unfortunate accident at the Netherwing Mines. From the look of things, this particular miner got buried in his work. *rimshot* *waits for applause* *realizes joke was terrible*

Anyway, Crowblood of Garona swears this miner was like this when he found him, so he tried to help by removing the quest item crushing weight. But the miner had already perished, so Crowblood did the sensible thing and ate him. Hey, you can't let a good meal go to waste.

Do you have any unusual World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We'd love to see it on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

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Every Thursday, Shelbi Roach of The Bronze Kettle guides you in creating WoW-inspired crafts using real world mats with World of WarCrafts.

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This is certainly an early announcement, but at least it gives us time to prepare. We're letting the readers know that preparations are now underway for the London Games Festival 2008. This year's celebration of everything that is pixelated goodness is scheduled to begin on October 25.

No exact details have been announced yet, although if it's going to be anything like the previous fest, expect it to be crowded. Last year's LGF garnered a total of 100,000 attendees, and carried over 50 events catering to both casual and hardcore gamers.

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Once upon a time, before Burning Crusade was released, my Alliance druid was hanging out in Felwood and a Krol Blade dropped. I was able to sell it on the AH on the first try for 700 gold, which in those days was a lot of in-game cash.

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There might be a second update today if we are not too lazy.

Update: New DPS chest for casters on M'uru - Fel Conquerer Raiments

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WotLK will be released in second half of 2008
Vivendi's released a press release with their earnings for the first quarter of 2008. Even if that's probably not interesting for the average WoW player, there is a very, very instructive comment related to WoW.


According to this press release, Wrath of the Lich King will be released before the end of 2008. You've probably been reading it for the last few days, but if you didn't check it yet you can read the WotLK preview released during the weekend.

• Wrath of the Lich King Preview - Part 1
  
• Wrath of the Lich King Preview - Part 2
  
• Wrath of the Lich King Preview - Part 3
  
• Wrath of the Lich King Preview - 134 Screenshots
  
• Wrath of the Lich King - HD Trailer
  
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