One of the things that jumps out at me while reviewing September is that it was a fantastic month for Moviewatch. Apart from that players were occupied with the new version of Onyxia, the Argent Coliseum, still discussing some questions raised by BlizzCon, and arguing over whether Garrosh was a jerk or what.

WoW Moviewatch: Warrior's Dream: My nomination for the best Moviewatch of the year. A lovely film, well-made, beautifully scored, and it crammed a thoughtful story (and insight concerning the sometimes-uncomfortable perspective on ourselves granted by nightmares) into 5 minutes.

Faction change service now available: A feature players had been wondering about getting for years suddenly went live. Did things go crazy? Maybe a little.

A critical examination of Garrosh Hellscream: Garrosh, as we'd previously observed, is not among the more well-received NPCs these days. Rossi asks -- how did this guy go from the demoralized Orc we see in Nagrand to the arrogant jerk we find in Northrend?

Ask a Faction Leader: Garrosh Hellscream: On the subject of Garrosh, personally I found this AAFL to be among the funniest in the series. If that whole Warchief bid doesn't work out for him, Garrosh has a bright future as an interior designer.

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Cataclysm Race/Class Combinations
Another Cataclysm mini-reminder today! The expansion adds more race/classes combinations to the game and will let you play a Gnome Priest, a Dwarf Shaman, or even a Troll Druid! See the two tables below for a complete list of the combinations.

Alliance

Horde

WoW Magazine Preview
A preview of the World of Warcraft Magazine is now available on its official site. So far it doesn't look like there will be anything new announced here but it's still 144 pages of WoW related articles with a nice layout.

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Tinwhisker sent us this link to a set of entertaining PUG bingo cards on the official forums, made by Cruce of Scarlet Crusade. While I'm not sure I would actually have gotten bingo on any single run, some of the squares have certainly happened in many of my runs:

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World of WarCrafts spotlights art and creativity by WoW players, including fan art, cooking, comics, cosplay, music and fan fiction. Show us how you express yourself; contact our tips line (attention: World of WarCrafts) with your not-for-profit, WoW-inspired creations.

It may be relatively quiet around here this week, but World of WarCrafts is still managing to keep the holiday spirit rolling. Allow us to pass along several submissions from crafty readers with a Christmas-y bent ... First up, the Christmas tree ornaments (above) sent in by Faylinne from US Duskwood. Faylinne created these as a gift for Cyer of US Blade's Edge, the friend she credits as inspiring her to play World of Warcraft. Sounds like great results from both sides of that particular equation.

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Upper Deck recently announced a new item available in-game for players to claim using UDE points accrued from collecting the World of Warcraft Trading Card Game. The item, Landro's Pet Box, is a grab bag of sorts that can randomly give the character one of the following loot items: Papa Hummel's Old-Fashioned Pet Biscuit, Path of Cenarius, Sandbox Tiger, Dragon Kite, Ethereal Soul-Trader, or Bananas, the Monkey. Items previously available through UDE points were limited to a selection of epic tabards, permanent fireworks, and a Carved Ogre Idol that turns characters into ogres for 10 minutes.

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As we're heading towards the final confrontation with the Lich King and the end of this chapter of the World of Warcraft saga, we end up reminded of how much of Wrath of the Lich King was designed and never used, or used sparingly, or even resurrected later, fittingly enough. But not only do we have loads of models that either weren't used at all or were used later in places completely unrelated to where they were supposed to drop, we have entire zones that either didn't happen at all, or did but which don't seem to go anywhere.

We're all familiar with the strange case of Azjol-Nerub. Originally it was intended to be a complete underground zone that players were to level in, do quests, and so on. Then that was scrapped and we instead got two instances and an NPC who was clearly the remnant of a once far more expansive plot. It's a shame, too, because those two instances are tantalizing hints at how vast and expansive an Azjol-Nerub zone could have been. Frankly, I found (and still find) the Nerubian architecture in those instances far superior to Naxx both in design and its surprising color palette. And when you look around Ahn-Katet and realize how vast the cavern is and how little of it is actually seen in the instance, or run Trial of the Crusader and fall into yet another astonishingly vast and underused space, I don't see how you can not wonder why the Azjol-Nerub zone never manifested itself. Perhaps we'll see World of Warcraft: Underground at some point.

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There's been some interesting chatter going on around the internet lately about mysterious in-game earthquakes happening throughout Azeroth. Seemingly at random the screen will shake back and forth for a few moments. There are no visible mobs or other occurrences that would cause this. However, these earthquakes are being reported by more and more people.

We know that Deathwing is going to tear Azeroth up in a big way. Take a look at the Cataclysm trailer for how destroyed the land is going to be. Barrens ripped in half, parts of Azeroth's climate will change, and general hell will come forth unto the plentiful lands. We also know that the world event ushering in the Cataclysm is going to be big, really big. The event itself is not in the patch files yet.

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Following the success of their previous raid sets, Onyxia's Lair, Molten Core, Magtheridon's Lair, and the Black Temple, Upper Deck has released the first Wrath-themed event pack with the Naxxramas Raid Deck and Treasure Pack last December 22. Unlike their previous raid offerings, however, the Naxxramas Treasure Packs are stand-alone products which can be used separately from the raid deck.

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It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like This Raid Isn't Going to Happen is the newest release in Oxhorn's shorts series. It's obviously based off the song of the same name, from Oxhorn's Christmas for Geeks album. At the time that collection was released, I was curious whether any of the new music would make it to video form. I'm pretty glad this song was the one to make the cut.

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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.

Hopefully you all had a nice Christmas, and are as glad it's over as I am.

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Millya of <Business Time> on Moonrunner writes in with this tale: "Last night during our guild's quick Onyxia-10 run I encountered a ... rather unique situation. Being a mage, it's my job to terrorize her while she's flying around with her halitosis. Being a mage who doesn't want to be a smear on the ground, I always pop invisibility when she's landing!

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Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers' Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

Every so often I write a post purely for my own convenience, and this is one of them. I get a lot of e-mails week to week all asking the same question: How can I try to change my guild leader's mind? The topics can vary greatly, from loot systems to promotions to guild bank rules to the level of roleplaying the guild enforces.

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While thinking about the lack of tanking fist weapons, I got into a discussion with my wife about her favorite ability (or perhaps my favorite ability of hers), Misdirection. The discussion came out of the fact that I basically threw her into the deep water by having her misdirect the adds on a TotC 25 Anub kill last night (which she did spectacularly, of course) and from there we started talking about one of the seventy billion Halls of Lightning runs we did yesterday. (Seriously, Halls of Lightning? You can stop now. No, really, I'm fairly certain I've killed Loken enough times.) The rogue in this group was simply phenomenal. Solid DPS, didn't stun mobs when I tried to pull them back, didn't constantly say 'go go go', and used Tricks of the Trade whenever he was going to open up on a big trash pull. Seriously, if you could adopt gnome rogues from another realm and just keep them in your backpack to pop into the open DPS slot in your pugs I'd have done so. I salute you, sir or madam.

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Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "The avarice never ends! 'I want golf clubs. I want diamonds. I want a pony so I can ride it twice, get bored and sell it to make glue.' Look, I don't wanna make waves, but this whole Christmas season is stupid, stupid, stupid!" ~ The Grinch

Hmmm... a look back at changes for warlocks in 2009. Well there was... no, wait, that was 2008. Well what about... nah, that's planned for Cataclysm. Wow, this is harder than I thought. Nothing particularly outstanding has happened in the warlock area this year; but so much has happened and, well things have changed. It's like waking up each morning and something is subtly different. Your blue toothbrush is now red... The sofa is now against this wall, not that one... each change is pretty unremarkable in it's own right but by the end of the year you are a stuntman living in LA married to a small, blond Portuguese skier who when she's not training does abstract painting, practices yoga and brews her own beer.

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Every day until January 2, 2010 we will have new prizes to give away along with new loot codes for WoW.com's Twelve Days of Winter Veil contests. Today, we are giving away 1 Disco Inferno code courtesy of WoWTCGLoot.com. As you can see in the movie above, this in-game item summons a disco ball that comes with a lightshow and disco music. Any player that clicks on it will /dance. The perfect celebration item for your next guild meeting or surviving a PUG with your sanity intact.

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WoW.com continues celebrating Winter Veil with our Twelve Days of Winter Veil contests. Only six more days and today we are giving away a set of World of Warcraft novels written by Christie Golden to one lucky winner courtesy of Pocket Books. The set includes:

• Arthas
• Beyond The Dark Portal
• Rise of the Horde
• Warcraft Archive


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BlizzCon, BlizzCon, BlizzCon! That's pretty much what August was all about -- well, that and patch 3.2. Because this month was mostly crammed full of pure, unadulterated news about the upcoming convention and Cataclysm, there weren't quite as many one-off features this time around.

All the World's a Stage: Reflections on the passing of a roleplayer's mom: This isn't a very easy article to summarize. All I can say is -- please read it. One of David Bowers' most elegant and introspective pieces: "WoW is not an escape from life, it is a reflection of it."

WoW.com's Patch 3.2 Guide and content for the day: Patch 3.2 went live on August 4th and was (oddly enough) one of the top stories for the year. In hindsight, it probably wasn't that surprising -- it had been a while since Ulduar had gone live, and the Argent Tournament patch heralded the introduction of a slew of new pets, mounts, titles, and new druid forms. Huzzah!

Playing WoW for charity: Interview with the WoWathon team: Three college students managed to raise $5,000 for Child's Play with a marathon WoW session coupled with "dramatic readings of bad fanfiction."

Researchers study WoW to see how gangs form and fade: A UC-Irvine team has been studying guild and group formation ingame for data on "group ecology." As Schramm observed, "Listen, guys, all you have to do to break up gangs is ensure there's not enough loot to go around."

The lost art of crowd control: Both the emblems change in 3.2 and the emblems/Dungeon Finder changes in 3.3 have sent masses of people back to heroics, and we're not the only people to notice that crowd control's all but disappeared. Blizzard's answer (5 months later)? Heroic Halls of Reflection.

Felicia Day unleashes geeky pop single: So it turns out The Guild cast has both musical talent, the ability to reach #1 on the iTunes music video charts, and a sense of humor concerning their source material. We're shocked.

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