April rolled around, and so did patch 3.1 and Ulduar -- a huge, all-encompassing raid experience that pitted you against Titanic creations and Yogg-Saron, distant cousin of C'thun. Later in the month, a revamped Noblegarden went live to howls of protest from players who found all of their egg spawns camped, and we got some unsettling news that someone was one-shotting Ulduar bosses.

Seriously?

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Usually, I am the 'perfectionist tank' in a run. I want things to go perfectly: I want to never lose aggro, I want the DPS to all attack the proper target, I want the healer to, well, okay, I mostly just want the healer to heal us, I'm not looking for anything fancy there. As long as a healer seems to be casting healing spells I'm willing to cut her or him a lot of slack, especially in dungeons like Halls of Reflection where people often die through not moving out of giant, inky pools of blackness on the floor that they stand in as if they were instead duck ponds full of adorable baby ducklings. There are no ducklings in the fetid wells of corruption, guys.

Last night, however, I had a sort of small revelation. First and foremost, I was stressing myself way the heck out over a pick up group with four folks I was likely never to see again. Secondly, the faster you go in a PuG, the less likely perfection is to be attainable, and if four people want speed and one guy wants flawless, you'll get very fast flaws. So that meant I've come up with an entirely new tanking philosophy for the new five mans, and an entirely new way to gear for them. I'd talk about both.

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When we're talking about Raiding in 2009, the story actually starts in 2008. Okay, sure, you could talk about raids going all the way back to the opening of the game, and how things have changed, and grown out of each other, and it could go on forever and a day and never actually end and it'd be like a run-on story just like this sentence.

But if we're going to keep the conversation manageable, we'll start in 2008. It was a cold and frigid night in November 2008 when Blizzard released the newest expansion to World of Warcraft. With much hullabaloo, the Wrath of the Lich King hit the shelves with a brand new paradigm.

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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. Adam Holisky be your host today.

Let's be honest. The holidays are fun and everything. Getting together with the extended family, having some good food, sharing in each other's joys -- good times all around. But there gets a certain point where you just want to say "Enough is enough already, let me go do something I want." Is it a bad thing if that's already happened to me?

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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.

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Ghostcrawler, when not directly occupied with the pack of idiots harassing him on the Damage Dealing forums, stopped by the Healing forums this past month to share some information on how healing is likely to change in Cataclysm. Of particular interest is Blizzard's changing design philosophy with respect to what makes healing challenging. Right now tank avoidance is so high that, as GC's previously observed, bosses have to hit like a freight train in order to pose any threat to tank survivability at all. Between that and what's universally acknowledged as the "never running OOM" ethos of Wrath, the unfortunate effect has been healers spamming their largest heals on anyone within range.

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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. In this special edition, we cover the top 10 changes of 2009.

We've been through a lot in 2009. It seems like every time we get settled on a spec or playstyle, Blizzard flipped it around with the next content patch. With each raid dungeon released, the top DPS build seemed to bounce to a different tree every time. I would say that rogues are probably in the top 3 classes for 'most change received' in 2009, especially when talking about changes that redefine the class completely. While death knights will complain that all they saw was the nerf bat this year, rogues have matured as a class and are far more versatile than where we were in January.

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Just in time for the holidays, NinthBatter has busted out the Nobody Like You Chris-- er Hanukkah Special. NinthBatter says that he created this video because there isn't much Hanukkah machinima out there. That makes his song selection perfect, considering the nominal reason for Adam Sandler's Chanukah Song is the same.

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Be warned: This post, as well as the video above, includes minor spoilers for Patch 3.3's Shadowmourne quest chain. If you don't want to be spoiled, do not read/watch.

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It's the most wonderful time of the year again! The time of year where we try to plot how to escape from various horrid family gatherings and sneak out to get drunk and/or play video games. But feel sympathy for we humble public servants who have to work all week. This picture, taken in Dalaran by Gerda of Lightbringer, is about as close as I'll get to a Christmas tree this year, unless one falls on a person.

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We're finally good and ready to announce the winner of last month's Guild of the Month contest, and as you probably saw in the headline above, Sleeper Cartel of the Perenolde server is walking away with the prize: A $100 gift code from SwagDog. This is a guild that almost needs no introduction, considering they've made previous appearances here on WoW.com. I'll let Sleeper Cartel do the talking behind the cut below.

Before that, I want to remind everyone that December's Guild of the Month contest is still ongoing, and you still have time to enter. Make sure you check out the original posting, as well as the official rules. If you've entered previously and weren't chosen, don't get discouraged. Competition is fierce and ever changing.

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A man walks into a bar... or in this case, a Panera Bread café, lugging his whole iMac. He orders a cup of coffee and proceeds to play World of Warcraft using the coffee shop's free Wi-Fi. It almost sounds like a joke, except that it isn't. Gizmodo reported that the Panera Bread iMac Man has made a habit of going to his favorite haunt with his entire desktop computer and playing WoW using the complimentary Internet connection.

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Friends, gamers, Earthicans -- lend me your ears.

One of the things that has increasingly struck me while reading peoples' accounts of the new LFG system is the frequency with which people cite getting kicked from groups due to a low gear scores, or scathing comments from other players on the extent to which they are being "carried" after damage meters are posted. Now, while I don't believe that this is an overwhelmingly common practice (most players have had positive experiences with the dungeon finder, and I'm one of them), it's still a problem. People have complained since the beginning of WoW about damage meters and the jerks who spam them, and we've all seen our fair share of the unhappiness wrought by the misuse of GearScore, but this is different. At no point in WoW's history have so many players who don't know each other from Adam been tossed into relatively intimate 5-man situations with the total freedom to be angels or asshats to each other (and, speaking of the Adam we do know, even he's given up and started to expect some bad play in his PuGs).

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Yesterday, we kicked off our Twelve Days of Winter Veil contests. Every day until January 2, 2010 will have new prizes to give away along with new loot codes. Today, we are giving away 1 Sandbox Tiger code courtesy of WoWTCGLoot.com. As you can see in the movie above, this in-game item can take you back to your childhood with a click. I don't know about you, but I'd love to see a Tauren on one. Or possibly Arthas.

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WoW.com continues celebrating Winter Veil with our Twelve Days of Winter Veil contests. Today is day eleven of our countdown and we are giving away a Feast of Winterveil TCG Collector's Set to three lucky winners courtesy of Upper Deck. Each Collector's Set comes with all the following goodies:

• 10 exclusive Feast of Winter Veil cards that can't be found anywhere else and feature new content that are all usable in your favorite WoW TCG deck!
• Two exclusive Pet mini-cards that allow players to customize their experience even more!
• An exclusive holiday deck box featuring Feast of Winter Veil artwork
• One Heroes of Azeroth booster pack
• One Through the Dark Portal booster pack
• One Fires of Outland booster pack


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During the holidays I will take the time to highlight most of the features added to the game with the upcoming expansion. Most of the information was released during the Blizzcon and I don't think anyone had the time to process everything during the event, the blue poster activity will calm down for a week or two and it should leave you with plenty of time to discuss each feature.

I might add a Cataclysm menu when I'm done with that. (Yes, I do realize that I'm starting to have a lot of menus here. I'm sure I'll eventually figure something out)

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