Ready Check is a twice-a-week column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Vault of Archavon or Ulduar, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. Today, we step back a little and look at endgame in the context of sports.

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World-first Heroic: Alone in the Darkness? "Didn't Exodus already get that?" you may ask. Well, they did get the achievement, but they used an exploit, and were slapped on the wrist to the tune of a 72 hour suspension. Which means: the stage was open for a legitimate world-first!

In a break from the tradition of European guilds getting major world-first accomplishments, Chinese guild Stars (playing on the Taiwanese servers) has apparently completed the achievement legitimately. They got that nifty Mimiron's Head mount, too.

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Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com'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.

Since today's first question in Maelstrom-themed, we've decided today's edition of The Queue was a good time to link the supposed leaked trailer of the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion, to be announced at BlizzCon '09. We haven't embedded the video to try and dodge waking up to a DMCA tomorrow, so just check it out on YouTube. We'll let Google deal with the mess, eh?

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WoWPals.net is a brand new social networking site targeted at you WoW players that just got a nice bit of coverage over on VentureBeat's GamesBeat site. Social networking is taking off just as much as World of Warcraft lately, and so there's a whole slew of companies trying to step up and become the de facto social service for gamers, from GamerDNA and Rupture to wowtwitter and even our own little enterprise. WoWPals isn't too different -- it's run by a few gamers based in Israel, and is currently in alpha, and hoping for a beta by the end of the year. You register to the site with your first character, and after a short wait for an activation email, you can jump in and find friends by guild or server, or punch in your location and search around that way. Once you're friends, there's not much more to do but chat and message each other, but what more do you need, really?

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We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• Big Hit Box covers the Best In Slot Emblem Gear in Patch 3.2 for the Enhancement Shaman.
• Twisted Nether Blogcast episode 51 is up and ready for listening.
• Lorecrafted has a good bit of speculation on the possibility of WoW: Cataclysm.
• Why did Sarah Palin resign? To work on her WoW blog.
• BlizzPlanet is getting in on the Cataclysm speculation, too. A new playable race?


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Note that I say "could be tamed," not "can": apparently Blizzard has hotfixed the NPC so that he can no longer be tamed, stating that they never intended players to have a humanoid pet. Players who have already tamed Garwal will find that they have no talents or abilities for him, nor can they feed or buff him rendering him effectively useless except as a vanity pet. I would expect him to be removed even as a vanity pet soon.

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Update #4 - A video of the last seconds of the fight against Yogg-Saron is now available.
Update #3 - Added achievements.
Update #2 - Added all the professions changes, fixed a few errors in the class changes.
Update - Post has been updated with a new PTR build!!

Yogg +0 World First Kill by Stars
After the drama of the bugged first kill, it looks like we have a real World First Kill for Yogg-Saron and this one is from ... China! Stars (TW-Crystalspine Stinger) defeated Yogg-Saron without any guardian helping and got the Heroic: Alone in the Darkness achievement according to their Armory Profiles

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BlizzCon approaches! Preparing for BlizzCon is your regular source for tips on how best to prepare for Blizzard's gaming extravaganza.

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World of Warcraft has been around for a while now, and the game has changed significantly. Back in the day, way back in the day, things were so different you probably wouldn't recognize it. A couple times a week WoW.com will look back at old patches, lamenting on what once was.

Welcome to the first post in our Patches of Yesteryear series. We're going to take a look at old patch notes (listed after the break) and point out some of the ridiculous, and not so ridiculous changes that have gone through the game the past five years.

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Welcome to Lichborne, the Death Knight class column, with your host, Daniel Whitcomb, who's still wearing mourning black for AE Unholy Blight. And also because black looks awesome.

I admit to being a bit underwhelmed by the Death Knight Q&A. To be fair, this is primarily because most of the things covered were already in the 3.2 patch notes, and the rest was pretty common sense stuff. However, one little comment by Ghostcrawler did catch my attention: His praise of Death Runes.

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Patch 3.2 is out on the PTR, and every day seems to bring new surprises. From raid lockouts to tier gear and heirloom pieces.

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I'm not a keyboard turner -- my steady diet of FPS games growing up made sure of that. And while I do occasionally point-and-click abilities, for the most part, I do use hotkeys. But, just like Tank Like a Girl, there is one control-scheme sin that I'm definitely guilty of: I am definitely a Tab-targeter. I guess the issue is that sometimes you do have to use Tab to choose your different targets -- sometimes, you can't quite click on the thing you need to target, so instead you hit Tab to flip through all the available targets until you get to the one you need. But that's a no-no. Flipping through the targets takes more time than you should (if you happen to miss your target, you need to flip through all of them yet again), and, as I know from personal experience, Tab targeting often ends you up on the wrong target. Not that CC is so much of an issue anymore, but let me tell you: the first time you happen to pull that one dragon your group has cast sleep on, it'll be embarassing.

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"Cower in fear, puny mortals! Maintenance time is upon you!"

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TaintedLore is back with a new video titled Take My Quest. This video was created by ViKarious Productions. (That's not a typo -- the "K" is capital in their name.) Of course, the singing itself is by Sharm. I think I may need to brush up on my pop music, because I couldn't be sure whether the song is a parody, or a completely original work.

At any rate, the video work in this piece is pretty good. It's got a good variety of action and models, all which come together in proper harmony with the song. I've not seen anything by ViKarious before, so this was a pretty good break onto the scene for them.

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The Westfall Brigade might need more constructive ways to occupy their time. When Jaeren of <I Shoulda Been Horde> on Rexxar pulled Vengeful Bambina over to their camp, the Brigade went to town on the poor deer, who just stood there while the guards hacked away in a futile effort to kill the immortal fawn. See, the Horde doesn't have these kinds of problems. At least, not since the Royal Apothecary Society deployed their Chronic Wasting Disease catapults.

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Sometimes you'd like to know that there are other MMOs out there, right? Our sister site Massively can provide you with everything you need to know about all those other shiny MMOs! Check out this roundup of the latest news from the wider MMO world.

	Being a WoW fan doesn't mean you're an MMO fan Syncaine posted an interesting article on his blog discussing why he thinks there hasn't been much uptake in the majority of MMOs released since World of Warcraft. Basically, he believes that just because you enjoy playing WoW, it doesn't mean you'll enjoy other MMOs.
	EverQuest's 51/50 server "Mayong" is live Earlier in the week, EverQuest's new 51/50 server "Mayong" went live. Pretty much anyone that played EQ around launch will recognize the name as that of the infamous vampire Mayong Mistmoore, a character that was sometimes played by GMs and devs for live events way back in the day. For those not familiar with the special rules of this server type, it's fairly simple: 51 is your starting level, and 50 is the number of AAs you automatically receive upon making a character.
	Redefining MMOs: Terminology As we look back at the past several years of the MMO scene, we see a genre that has gone through significant evolutionary leaps. With those pioneering days of text MUDs and blocky graphics behind us, today we enjoy professionally developed games with impressive development teams and massive budgets behind them. The genre's depths have been thoroughly explored and we've even categorised the features we've come to love and expect from our favourite online retreats. Every part of the genre, from the types of gameplay available to the terminology we use, has been routinely evolving and redefining itself over time.
	Massively's DDO Unlimited developer tour Love can sometimes be a fickle thing, but I'm pretty sure that I love what Turbine has done with the DDO Store in Dungeons and Dragons Online Unlimited. I'll admit that initially I was a little concerned with the concept of an in-game store, but after playing with it at bit and asking some questions my fears have pretty much melted away.

	Twitter added to Champions Online, social butterflies rejoice The first July 2009 State of the Game for Champions Online is out and it sure came with an interesting surprise. Namely, the addition of Twitter to the in-game feature set. Now we're sure some of you will scoff at this idea, but sit there for a moment while we paint you a mental picture.
	First Guild Wars trilogy novel titled and given unofficial release date You may remember back during our coverage of PAX 08 last year when we reported on ArenaNet's announcement of a Guild Wars book trilogy, set up to explain the lore between Guild Wars 1 and Guild Wars 2. Recently, Ravious at Kill Ten Rats wrote a great post compiling the information we have now, combined with some brand new info on what looks to be the first novel in that trilogy.
	How to get yourself unbanned from Second Life What should be helpful advice, and something we strongly urge you to consider is that you shouldn't do things that will get you banned to start with. However, the regrettable fact is that you're quite probably reading this because you didn't take that advice in the first place. Your options are now very limited, but let's go through what you have to do to get unbanned.
	Champions Online devs reveal Mystic power sets: Sorcery and Supernatural Over the past few weeks, the developers at Cryptic Studios have been walking readers through the various powers that will be available to Champions Online players, from Energy Projectors to Martial Arts, as well as Power Replacers. Now they're giving us a look at the game's Mystic power sets -- Sorcery and Supernatural -- for those players who want to dabble in the dark arts.
	What audiences should Mythic have targeted with Warhammer Online? Many people claim WAR is a total fail-whale of an MMO. I can see sides of their argument, but I don't believe it's completely true. The "fail" perception mostly comes down to the expectations that were set by Mythic and EA and then never fully delivered upon. It's no secret they were aiming for 500k+ subs and then missed the mark (by about 200k), but it got me wondering... Who is/was WAR's target audience? Was their potential audience actually big enough to support their aspirations?
	Massively hands-on with Cities XL As the Cities XL closed beta continues to run strong, we got word that the beta's NDA has lifted [Edit: for press] and we can spill the beans on our first impressions of the game so far. Now, two very important points to be made here include the fact that this is not a review (MMO reviews are bad, mmkay), and this is still in early closed beta stage.

It's time once again for weekly maintenance, and not only do we have the standard 5 AM - 11 AM Pacific downtime for most US servers, there's also a handful that are down from midnight to noon today. With all that extra time on your hands, you'll have time once again to read up on WoW news.

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AddOns are great. We all use them and they enhance game play. Indeed as we've seen from sites like Curse there's a thriving trade. The thing is a lot of newer MMOs, most notably Aion, have everything that AddOns provide and a bit more built in. While Blizzard is starting to cotton on with the introduction of their own threat meter and quest tracker, there's still a long way to go. Perhaps the most notable change in this direction is the promise of a somewhat basic quest helper in 3.2. Now I've been using the actual QuestHelper for quite a long time (indeed it's one of my essential AddOns) and from what I've seen of Blizzard's version, they have a long way to go.

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Hunters - Tame a Worgen Pet!
All the cool kids have a worgen pet and you know you want one too! I took the time to make a short video to explain how to tame this pet but before going into the explanation I would like to point out that this is going to be hotfixed very soon and you might not keep the pet after the fix. It's still worth trying I guess.
Quote from: Zarhym (Source) As you put it Zennie, we are currently discussing this issue.

It is not intended that Garwal can be tamed while in worgen form and will be addressed via a hotfix in the near future. When we have determined how to handle situations where hunters have already tamed Garwal we will let you know.Now that you're aware that you can eventually lose this pet, here is how you get it:

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The recent passing of legendary pitchmen Billy Mays and Ed McMahon got us thinking about the pitchmen of WoW. “WTS [item]” is the /trade chat standard but so much more can be done with this message depending on what your selling goals are.

Name Your Price

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I've always considered the Caverns of Time to be like the theme park of Azeroth -- as we've discussed before, there aren't really any reasons to go to some of those instances in the first place, and the whole thing seems just so ludicrous. If we wipe, or we don't go in there, and Thrall isn't able to escape Durnholde or Arthas isn't able to murder Stratholme or any of the other premises they have set up, then wouldn't the world as we know it change? It seems like fan service -- Blizzard wants us to visit these great parts of lore, and it just seems to me like they've cooked up a weak story around getting us there.

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