This is a weird one -- we've been doing Ulduar epics lately, but here's something a little different for you to hunt down.

Name: Porcelain Bell (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory)
Type: Poor Salvage Item
Damage/Speed: N/A
Attributes:

• Embellished with a figure reaching toward a swan. This is a grey piece of vendor trash, probably the worst quality item we've ever featured here.
• Wait a minute Mike, I can hear you saying, this is supposed to be Phat Loot Phriday. Why are you showing us a piece of vendor junk? Because, my friends, in the eyes of the vendors, this little bell is worth more than the Warglaives of Azzinoth combined (and you could even throw in Thori'dal, too). Yes, this little bell sells to vendors for... wait for it... 100g.


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

You know the drill! LET'S GET US SOME QUESTIONS ANSWERED.

Bearkub asked...

My main is a lvl 80 paladin (holy/prot), gold is not an issue, and I have everything I could want off the Wintergrasp PVP vendor/npc. My alt is a level 70 hunter (hilarity ensues). Is it worth it to spend 200 stonekeeper's shards to buy the +10% XP bonus shoulders? Or would those shards be better spent on something I can sell for gold (the non-bound pvp meta-gems, for example)? Is there something to spend the shards on that I'm unaware of? I imagine they're worth it on a lvl 58 DK alt, but I'm not sure what the "cost/benefit" cut-off is.

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The Argent Coliseum: Does this mean a raid and a instance will be in there?

Yes, there will be a 5-player version, then a 10/25-player version. The bosses will be different for the two versions. Think Ring of Blood or Amphitheater of Anguish, but more epic.

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Yes, that's Thoralius the Wise from the Howling Fjord starting quests. When I saw him get up and start zoning out to his smoke brazier, the look on his face just meshed too well with today's subject matter, which is the health of shamans in melee. We talked about shaman health in PvP a while back, now it's PvE's turn.

I don't play my shaman in a melee role in raids right now, because I basically don't have the gear for it. My resto set's a lot better so that's what I go as, but that only means I often notice how difficult it is to keep enhancement shamans on their feet. There are several possible culprits for the disparity, although in most cases I believe the killer to be aoe damage, so wearing mail really isn't the issue: rogues aren't nearly as hard to keep up as shamans, for instance, because rogues have cooldowns and abilities that allow them to avoid or escape damage. (If you've ever seen a rogue go sprinting through several mines on a Mimiron kill you'll know what I mean.) No, excepting those giant whirlwinding maniacs in Razorscale and Thorim, what's generally killing shamans in melee is AoE damage, and the problem here is twofold in my experience.

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The day has arrived. A little while ago, we challenged you fans to get us over 9000 Twitter followers, and somehow, some way, you delivered. So now we have to keep our promises -- tomorrow, the WoW Insider Show, which has only ever been an audio podcast, will include video with our live feed, and you'll be able to see the faces of all your favorite bloggers (for better or worse). Turpster and I will be dressed in our finest threads, we'll be toasting champagne (so bring your own if you want to toast with us, 21+ please), and we'll host a cavalcade of bloggers and friends of the show on live video. We've got some surprises planned, and hopefully Ustream will hold up under the strain -- whatever happens, it'll surely be wild.

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Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Bornakk just announced on the forums that Jewelcrafters are about to see a new nerf, and as a result, people are already beginning to weigh the benefits of switching to a different profession for min-maxing, or working out how they are going to re-itemize their gear.

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The new, rapid pace of Blizzard development continues as the Under Development page let slip that the new Battleground will be called the Isle of Conquest. We'd known for a while now that the next major content patch, Patch 3.2, would have a new Battleground, there were little details beyond that. For a while, there was some speculation that the abandoned development in Azshara would be revisited, but it looks like this is an entirely new Battleground that implements more siege weapons and vehicles.

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var digg_url = 'http://digg.com/pc_games/World_of_Warcraft_patch_3_2_details_released'; Tipster Brian pointed us at the under development page, which is now listing details for Patch 3.2. It's looking pretty interesting, all told. More Argent Tournament!

We're going to present a screenshot of the changes from the Under Development page after the jump, but just to make sure your appetites are whetted, so to speak (or type, I'm not actually talking) here's a detail: there will be a new battleground called the Isle of Conquest, a large scale siege between the Horde and the Alliance.

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Here's an interesting post from what looks like a site in Zaire wondering if Blizzard will ever bring World of Warcraft to South Africa. It's true -- we all take it for granted that here in North America and Europe, the game is available, but in many parts of the world, it's not. And apparently there's a market in a place like South Africa -- Blizzard says they have about five to seven thousand players down there already (we'd assume they're playing on EU or US servers), and that probably doesn't count any of the players on private servers, which could be as many as 20,000.

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Patch 3.2: Call of the Crusade
Quote from: Blizzard (Source)The upcoming major content patch, Call of the Crusade, will bring a host of new features for World of Warcraft: Wrath of the Lich King.

• The Argent Tournament Expands: With the help of Azeroth's heroes, the Argent Crusade will finish the Argent Coliseum just in time to call for all brave citizens to prepare for battle with the Lich King. New dailies, rewards, and more will be available at the Argent Tournament grounds to lure adventurers into the coliseum.
• Crusaders' Coliseum: In order to prepare for a siege on Icecrown Citadel, players will be called by the Argent Crusade to test their mettle in the Coliseum. 5-player, 10-player, and 25-player challenges await inside.
• New Battleground: Isle of Conquest, a new large-scale siege Battleground, will be open. The Horde and Alliance will battle head-to-head for control of strategic resources to lay siege to the keeps of their opponents.
• New Arena Season: Season 7 will officially start, paving the way for all-new items and challenges.


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Upcoming Jewelcrafting Change
Quote from: Bornakk (Source)In the next major content patch we will be removing the prismatic quality of the jewelcrafter-only Dragon’s Eye gems. Like other gems, they will have to match the socket color to receive a socket bonus. When this change occurs, players with qualifying jewelcrafting skill will be provided a yet to be determined amount of Dalaran Jewelecrafter Tokens as compensation.

Sometimes denial works for you, and I think that's why I like this forum thread so much. It's full of nostalgia for a simpler time, when PvP meant going to Southshore and murdering some Alliance, when the encounters in Molten Core were the most epic thing in the game, and speaking of epics, when seeing a player outfitted with all purples meant that they'd be raiding for weeks with 39 other people. This thread willingly looks back and sees things not as they were, but as we remember them: super fun, refreshing, and completely empty of the problems and quibbles we have to deal with today.

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You readers are awesome -- yesterday, when I posted the link to the online server alert page (which, yes, wasn't all that new, but lots of us hadn't seen it before), I suggested that it get hooked up to Twitter somehow, and sure enough, Scyntinth and blkmasta55555 wasted no time creating @WoWStatusUS and @WoWStatusEU, respectively (Ed also pointed out the EU status page). Tsaavik created an RSS feed for the alert as well, if you'd rather use that. And those aren't the only way to track Blizzard's realm status on Twitter -- looks like @wowalerts has been in action for a little while, and @pikestaff pointed out to me that @wowrealms tweets about realm downtime as well. And, hey, even your friends here at WoW.com are on Twitter keeping you up to date with the latest at @WoWInsider.

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We are always interested in storage. Since effective inventory management is essential to many aspects of making gold in WoW, we are always looking for the best options to maximize our inventory vs. slot cost ratio. From the very moment that Glacial Bags, the 22-slot bag of WotLK, were introduced we’ve been watching prices pretty closely. Over the past few weeks the going rate of these bags seems to have hit a norm.

We tested 15 auction houses (6 Horde and 9 Alliance) at random intervals during the day for the past two weeks and found that the average going rate of glacial bags was exactly 683.1749 gold. The lowest listed price we found at any given time was 575 gold. The highest equivalent was 800. It should be noted, however, that this test was hardly as standardized and regulated as our normal testing methods since testing was accomplished at different times of the day in each instance and different servers were used to attain prices as opposed to using the same server for every Horde and Alliance measurement (hence the reason for the uneven number of servers tested). However, we feel that two weeks of daily testing in this format is still sufficient to produce a realistic price, even if that price is more anecdotal than scientific.

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Reader Ted T. asked for a good place to get started with Oxhorn videos. That's a really tough call, because Oxhorn's created so many different movies. But, I guess my favorite Oxhorn piece is the Oxhorn Brand Medley. (Moo Money actually first covered it about a year ago.)

Not only does it combine everything there is to love about Oxhorn machinima, it also expands his music in some interesting ways. When my fiancee and I first saw it, we spent all weekend singing its chorus over and over and over.

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That's right, when a player suggests that maybe a zeppelin should be flying around the Tauren city of Thunderbluff, Kisirani says only, "Okay." So, a zeppelin is coming to Thunderbluff? Certainly seems that way.

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One of the things I never forgot in the run-up to patch 2.3 was seeing the photo above from MMO Champion. This was before the Cenarion War Hippogryph went live, and it was the faction's new (albeit expensive) reward for reaching exalted. Boubouille, as so often happens, datamined a bit more than what Blizzard actually permitted to go live, and the skin at the top left was what wound up being the Cenarion Expedition's flying mount. Sprinting for the CE quartermaster when the patch hit and discovering that that was the only model available (and that it couldn't walk) was a bit of a let-down, to the point where I decided to wait on buying the mount in the forlorn hopes that the other mount colors and animations would go live. Quoth the female Tauren, moo hoo hoo.

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Mimiron Hard Mode US First Kill by Premonition
Premonition killed Mimiron in Hard Mode a few hours ago. They are the first guild in the US to defeat him and reach Algalon! Congratulations to them.


Recent In-Game Fixes - 05/21/09
Quote from: Crygil (Source)5/21/09

• Furious Gladiator's Libram of Justice will now only grant additional healing to Flash of Light as originally intended.
• Amice of Inconceivable Horror and Vestments of the Blind Denizen will no longer have class restrictions
• It will now take the proper 4 seconds of drinking in arenas before a player will start gaining mana.
• Storm, Earth and Fire talent root proc will now properly affect a 10 yard radius.
• Mimiron Assault Bots no longer despawn during the transition from phase3 to phase 4. This should allow the achievement Not-So-Friendly Fire to be completable.

Bracket Rating Improvements Are Now Active
Quote from: Bornakk (Source)The update to the 3v3 and 5v5 brackets are now active.

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WoW.com readers, it's up to you to decide the fate of Turpen the Gnome Warlock with Choose My Adventure. Help test the site's new features by participating in this event, casting your vote toward the many aspects of Turpen and following his exploits on Alex Ziebart's WoW.com profile!

The polls are closed and the votes have been tallied. The audience has decided that for this little experiment, I am going to play a Gnome Warlock while I track my misadventures on my profile. As mentioned in the original post, most of the decisions regarding this character's growth will be made by you, our readers. I'll give weekly updates on my progress via the blog here, but so much more will be happening over on my profile. I've already started a photo album which will contain screenshots of my little 'lock as he goes from level 1 to level 80.

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