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

It's officially Winter Veil, and you know what that means! Azerothians donning their yuletide apparel and decking the halls with the blood of their enemies. Is there anything more demoralizing than getting decapitated by someone dressed like a holiday centerfold? And just think, without achievements, this activity would be naught but a holiday novelty. Technology is a wondrous thing.

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It was just on Sunday that we first heard about a Guild Christmas special, and now here it is. The Guild gang have decided that the web series thing isn't really happening with the money, so they're taking the advice of commenters and selling out with six different pieces of merchandise, one for each Guild member. They're actually pretty funny, from a Codex "answer Orb" to a talking Tinkerballa doll to a Vork unbreakable bank (unfortunately, all of the items have been recalled for various reasons). There's some cool guest stars in the mix as well -- see if you can spot Heroes' James Kyson Lee (in a Delorean!) and our buddy Alex Albrecht, along with a few other familiar faces.

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We'd already noticed last week that the Authenticators in the US store had gone free shipping, but now official updates on Blizzard's site say it's true in the EU as well. American authenticators still cost $6.50, but you no longer have to pay anything extra for shipping, and EU authenticators have had their price dropped to €6.99. That's still over $10, but they're at least cheaper than they used to be. There's a drawback, however: apparently they went with cheaper shipping, because you can no longer track shipments of authenticators, and shipping will take a little longer (up to 15 business days in the US). Which makes sense, given that you want these things as cheap as possible.

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New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. For links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's, visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide.

Plotting your path from zero to hero? "Last night, I got my alt mage to level 80 (woop) and thought I'd set about doing some heroics to get those 'phat loots' and a have a bit of fun," writes reader Hedwinkle of EU Daggerspine. "However, I was disappointed to see that I couldn't queue up for any heroics using the new tool, as my gear level wasn't high enough. I mean, it's all blue gear from the later instances, so I guess I have two questions ...

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Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we discuss some of the tips and tricks to remember when raiding Icecrown Citadel.

With patch 3.3's release last week, we saw a brand new tier of raid content released. Our mission to assassinate Arthas while he sits upon his throne has reached its conclusion. After dealing with the immediate threat of Yogg-saron's corruption and proving ourselves in the Argent Tournament, we've been selected as the agents of the Lich King's demise. We haven't come this far to fail now!

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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.

• MrVoletron is back with a brand new tune... and some tips on how to make your own remix!
• The retribution paladin priority 'rotation' is a lot more confusing than people let on. It's not feral druid, that's for sure, but it's not exactly simple.
• The latest shared topic from Blog Azeroth was especially interesting to us here at WoW.com. What do you think of the PTR and the news sites that follow it?
• If that last link didn't get you in a writing mood, maybe this one will. Last Friday's writing prompt from Too Many Annas: Letters from the Front.
• OutDPS has a few hunter tips for the early Icecrown Citadel bosses.


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The image above is a little tough to read, but you can probably get the gist: someone posts on the forums that secretly, he's been taking things from the guild bank and selling them off on the AH to make money for himself. He posts on his alt, supposedly, but whoops: he leaves his forum signature up. And the very next post is someone from the guild saying he's been caught red-handed, with a gkick imminent. Moral? Steal if you want, we guess, but never, ever tell. Or at least don't use your forum sig when posting on your alt.

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Meet Me in Azeroth probably doesn't qualify as machinima, but is still fantastic viewing for WoW Moviewatch. This video features a pair of guys rocking out to how much they prefer Azeroth to the doldrums of real life. I'm forced to agree with the sentiment, even if the musical style isn't quite my taste.

The video is clearly meant to be comedy and parody, so I totally forgive their heavy use of auto-tune. Hell, I might even have auto-tuned it a bit more thoroughly. I think the style has shown to be very effective for this kind of tongue-in-cheek humor before, and it totally had its place here.

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Welcome to Know Your Lore, where each week WoW.com brings you a tasty little morsel of lore to wrap your mind around. Sweet, sweet lore. Mmmm. Have suggestions for future KYL topics? Leave a comment below!

It's nigh-ubiquitous in Wrath of the Lich King. You can pull it out of the ground pretty much anywhere. It's crafted into armor and weapons from powerful epics to crafted items to increase our skills. It makes up the walls of Icecrown Citadel, and the bones of Malykriss, the Lich King's planned replacement for Acherus. It makes up the bulk of the Scourge's material for its mindless warriors as well as its fortifications and siege engines, and the Vrykul even presses the living into slavery in Icecrown in order to meet their master's demand for more and more of it. But this is no ordinary metal: the Tuskarr call it the "Black Blood of Yogg-Saron" and whisper in hushed tones that it may yet shake the pillars of Heaven. (Well, I assume they do. Fella named Jack Burton told me that.)

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With their constant dabbling in hellfire, shadow magic, and the summoning of demons, it's fairly clear where warlocks are going to spend their afterlife. And after witnessing this brief preview of the Pearly Gates through a graphical glitch in Howling Fjord, Tiandreyn of <Corporal Punishment> on Grizzly Hills is glad her destiny lies below. "If this is what the heavens look like, this warlock is relieved the Light is not with her," she wrote. I'm sure the priests are pretty relieved too.

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Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, everyone discovers (as I have been saying for years, but who listens to the bear tank with an ass the size of Cincinnati? No one, that's who) that PUG's are not so bad.

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That's right, we're a week into patch 3.3 (well, almost) and we're still running random PuG's on our alts. Well, I am, anyway, and if the emails we at WoW.com are seeing are accurate so are a lot of you. And as is often the case when dungeons are being run, we're seeing loot issues.

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Yesterday, Bornakk said clearly that the Battered Hilt drop that starts the Quel'delar questline was dropping at the right rate, which is much less than when the patch first hit. And then of course, in last night's fixes, they went ahead and increased the drop rate anyway. He also claimed there were no plans to make it BoP, but who knows what'll happen in the future? For now, however, you can still buy and sell the quest item for quite a bit of gold. We'll have to see where the price eventually ends up -- on the staff here, we've seen anything from 8,000g to over 23,000g, and Twitter tells us that people are paying an average of around 12k or so, going up to as high as 30k (or even shady real money offers in online classified ads). Our own Matt Low has actually seen the drop three different times, and lost every roll. It drops off of any of the mobs in the Heroic versions of the Frozen Halls 5-mans, and as Bornakk says, any class can use it to come up with a pretty solid weapon, so the competition will probably keep the price high, depending on where the drop rate ends up.

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Recent In-Game Fixes - December 2009 - 12/14
Do not forget to check the Quel'delar page!
Quote from: Bornakk (Source)Listed below are recent fixes we have applied to the game. Keep in mind that some of these changes may not be active until after the realm has been restarted.

To review previous in-game fixes, please visit: http://forums.worldofwarcraft.com/thread.html?topicId=20677858456&sid=1

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Another day, another round of in-game hotfixes. This time the most interesting one of the bunch is the increase in Battered Hilt drop rate (the Battered Hilt leads to the Quel'Delar). Of course it could mean that the hilt drop rate was increased from 0.001% to 0.01%, but hey, at least that's one whole decimal place! Please note however that we don't know what the actual drop rate was nor what it is now. All we know that it's very low.

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