Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week, our author pretends to know more about Ulduar than she actually does, which makes a refreshing change from pretending to know more than she actually does about things that are already in the game.

Hail and well met, Druids. For the next three Shifting Perspectives columns, I'm going to take a look at Druid class roles on Ulduar fights. If patch 3.1 hits earlier than expected (I'm currently betting that it hits in late April/early May), I'll try to squeeze these in a little bit faster than once per week. But with luck (and, I hope, a parade of annoying bugs for Blizzard to hunt down and squash before they let the patch go live), we should have some information to chew on before we set foot in a live Ulduar.

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A few days ago, Bornakk responded to yet another thread regarding dual wielding for Death Knights. I read it, shrugged, moved on with life, but I found myself digging up the thread again because I started to warm up to the idea Bornakk put forth: They're considering (that's the key word here) "something like making the frost tree the dual-wield tree" and letting the strikes hit with both weapons like Mutilate and Stormstrike.

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15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

Some of the most fascinating and insightful interesting profiles here on 15 Minutes of Fame have been about players you've never heard of before: an anthropologist whose field research is inside the raiding World of Warcraft, or the couple who assembled a scale model of Booty Bay entirely out of Legos.

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This is the first in a series of daily guides intended to guide you through the Argent Tournament as quickly and painlessly as possible. We'll have guides for each daily going live in the weeks to come. Keep your eyes peeled and your lances ready!

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Kebina Trudough here, offering you the best gold making secrets they don't want you to know about! I was like you once, poor and homely, before I discovered my patented system. Now you too can fill your pockets with the good stuff without ever breaking a sweat! Why spend all your time toiling when you could be vacationing in the Hot Springs? I'm not offering these tips for 100 gold, or 90 gold, or even 50 gold! No, not even 20 gold! My system is yours for FREE! Satisfaction guaranteed or I'll give you a full refund (handling charges may apply).

The Auction House is something that you've probably been using since you were a wee little thing, still counting coppers. Despite this experience, there may still be a few things about the system that you might not know, and these tricks will help you buy smart and sell with confidence.

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A little while after BigRedKitty closed shop on his blog last week, there was another post from TJ on there asking for help with a "secret project" (that lots of you let us know about -- thanks!). And now, the secret has been revealed: a few of BRK's fans have put together a goodbye video for the knowledgeable Hunter with the big red cat, and you can watch the whole thing above.

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW Insider's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Good afternoon, everyone. I have a very important question for all of you. Recently, I purchased a Roomba. I'm not allowed to have pets where I live, so a little robot that makes chirping noises and cleans the house for me will have to do. There's only one problem: We need to name it. My girlfriend and I each picked our preferred names. Help us decide, o readers! Name that Roomba! Oh right, and we have some of our usual Q&A after that, too.
Hercules!Noms!Compromise: Nombercules!Vote
yossarian asked...

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Our buddy Ghostcrawler has appeared on the forums answering (or re-answering, as he says) a few concerns about the balance of the game. Most of his answer is about PvP: he says that Death Knights and Holy Pallies are overpowered, but that while Blizzard does believe there are more imbalances, debate is still raging about exactly where they are. And he does say that while burst damage is still a concern, he feels that Blizzard did a lot to combat that when they started Season 5, and that the bigger concern now is getting mana pools under control. Too many fights now have healers just going and going, and while they don't want fights to end super fast, they can't all drag out, either.

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We here at WoW Insider see every day just how many great artists are out there in the World of Warcraft community. We've interviewed them, we've written about them, and now we want to know if you're one of them so we can give you some sweet prizes.

We have in our hands four prizes from SteelSeries to award the best and most creative artists in our audience. All that you need to do to enter is make us a piece of fanart. Draw (or paint or whatever it is you do) a picture of how you imagine the WoW Insider crew would look in the World of Warcraft. One of us, two of us, many of us, whatever you like. You don't get pictures of us to work off of, just let your imagination do as it will. Are we heroes fighting epic battles? Are we just lowly Stormwind commoners? Are we cute little beasts going on zany adventures?

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Reader Sekhar P. sent us an interesting story of a strange roll seen in Naxx recently: Haunting Call dropped, and four people needed. The rolls came up, in order: 1, 2, 3, 4. The raid boggled at how unlikely that must be. Sekhar's tip set off a round of discussion among our WoW Insider staff: while it seems unlikely that four numbers would come up in sequence, the math on it isn't any more likely than any other four numbers (3, 69, 82, and 95, for example, or even 4, 8, 15, and 16). The odds come out to 24/100^4, about 0.00000024%, or about two chances out of 10 million. Of course, probability is tricky, so the chances that any one of those rolls would come up is still one out of 100 -- just like coin flips, previous die rolls won't affect the current die rolls (mistaking that is often called the gambler's fallacy) But the chances that any specific four numbers would come up are the astronomical chances above.

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Voodooray, the Boss of Boomkin, the Maestro of Moonfire, the OPest of Owls is back with his new feathered fury piece 28 Patches Later. The video is pretty brief, and absolutely fun to watch. The author says the video is the first part in a series, which makes this an awesome first hint.

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Our friend Medievaldragon over at BlizzPlanet is going fan-crazy about the new Arthas, Rise of the Lich King book, due out in bookstores any day now. And with good reason, too -- apparently both Alex and Dan are also nuts about the book, and it's basically a must-read if you're at all interested in the lore behind Arthas, Jaina, and the creature we all know as the Lich King. And Medievaldragon has set up an awesome opportunity for anyone interested in the novel: they're having a live public chat with author Christie Golden on Thursday evening, April 9th, at 9pm Eastern. She'll be sitting down in the CoverItLive widget there to talk with you about the lore behind the book, how she worked with Blizzard to figure out where Arthas is and where he's going, and whatever else you'd like to ask.

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More Warcraft decorating disasters? Well, actually, this particular painting is one I'd be proud to hang in my bedroom. This little number, found in an undead dwelling by Raelivh of Bleeding Hollow, is a zombie parody of Grant Wood's American Gothic. It's even got the proper clothing on the couple, and a Tarren Mill-like desecrated version of the famous church in the background. Four years of playing WoW, and I'm still amazed at the amount of detail the designers put into the little things like this. Well played, Blizzard art dude. Well played.

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If I may be allowed to indulge in a little self-aggrandizing on this fine Tuesday morning, I'd like to posit that the best article written this past week was posted on Sunday and written by me. This article is the review of Christie Golden's new Warcraft novel, Arthas. Now, before you accuse me of the sin of Pride, I should say that Alex totally agrees with me, so it's all good. Besides, I had some awesome inspiration courtesy of the book.

But my point is, you should go read the review, then go pre-order your copy. It's a pretty good book. If you're a lore or fantasy fan, there's a pretty excellent chance you will not be disappointed. That said, the release date is still a couple weeks off. This means that, in the meantime, you have no Arthas book, so you'll probably want to do the next best thing and read some WoW Insider, like during that 15 minute window while your server's down from rolling restarts this morning. Or longer if you're on one of the servers that may or may not get extra downtime. Here's a few reading suggestions:
Hot News and Features

• Watch out, the Phishers are out in force lately.
• The Arena season may end as early as April 14th, which could in turn be a harbinger of the patch.
• In another possible patch time indicator, Noblegarden was removed from the PTR calendar and later showed back up on April 26th.
• One more 3.1 feature has been delayed. This time, it's the equipment manager.
• Think WoW's getting less popular? You may want to think again.
  
• WoW Rookie helps you get down with WoW lingo.
• We checked out the new iPhone mobile authenicator.
  
• Check out our exclusive sneak peak at the new WoW-themed Hungry Man Gamer Grub! Before you check your grocer's freezer though, check the posting date on the article.
  


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It's not coming today, we know that. Rolling restarts across all realms is a good indication that Patch 3.1 won't be coming just yet. On the other hand, we know they're getting pretty close to sending it our way, and Adam asked a pretty good question yesterday about whether or not your guild is prepared for Ulduar (mine is, thank goodness). On a personal note, what is the first thing you plan on doing when the patch arrives?

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Patch 3.1 Not this week
A lot of people will ask, Patch 3.1 will not be deployed on live servers this week. Today's maintenance is a series of rolling restarts and we definitely won't see the patch this week.

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Patch 3.1 Mounts

Quite a few mounts are being added in patch 3.1!  This should make the Mountain o' Mounts ( / ) achievement a bit easier to complete.  However, remember that two of these mounts are being introduced to replace the Plagued Proto-Drake and Black Proto-Drake mounts with the new Ulduar achievements, since they're being removed from Glory of the Raider.

Sea Turtle is reportedly going to be 133% in water, but currently it's listed as 60% in the data files.  There has also been a Venomhide Ravasaur mount added, but no source has been discovered, so it's probably not implemented yet.

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