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. Allison Robert will be your host today.

Alex is popping out for a RL issue, so I'm afraid, dear readers, that you're going to get stuck with the writer who will spend the entirety of a question today wandering off the Icecrown map. HC SVNT DRACONES. Frostwyrms, anyway.

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The Feast of Winter Veil ends on Saturday, but we still haven't had our It came from the Blog event. Let's remedy that tomorrow:

• When: 11:00pm EST (8pm PST, 9pm Server) December 30, 2009
• Where: In front of Silvermoon on the Zangarmarsh realm (US)
• Who: Any level Horde character (bring your highest level for the most fun)
• What: We will be harvesting eggs, baking cookies, kissing strangers under the mistletoe as well other holiday festivities.
• How: Ask any It came from the Blog Lurker or Robinator for an invite to the guild

We will have extra eggs. So if you miss the bird-bashing in Silvermoon, we'll meet you in Orgrimmar for the bribing of Greatfather Winter.

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October, as with August, was mostly a lot of news reporting. The patch 3.3 PTR dropped on October 1st and everyone went nuts for the last (we think) major content patch of Wrath of the Lich King. Next up? The content patch heralding the approach of Cataclysm, but with a lot of gated content between ourselves and that, we've got a ways to go.

Ask a Faction Leader: Cairne Bloodhoof: Among all the AAFL columns he's done so far, Sacco's personal favorite is Cairne.

Spiritual Guidance: Don't be that priest: Matt Low not-so-gently lectures his fellow priests on the failings to which the class is prone while not paying attention or entering an encounter unprepared.

Searching for the most popular server: Schramm takes a look at some data and wonders -- what's the busiest and/or most crowded server out there?

Patch 3.3 PTR: New Tauren skins found: So what are those things anyway? A new set of NPCs for Icecrown? A new barbershop option? Tribal markings for the Grimtotem?

Chill of the Throne: Dodge nerfed 20% in Icecrown Citadel: The debuff is quickly termed "Icewell Radiance" by disgruntled tanks everywhere.

Patch 3.3 PTR: Forge of Souls first impressions: Greg Reece grabs some WoW.com staffers and Tristan from The Elitists to venture deep into the scary wilds of new 5-mans on the PTR.

Holy crap, Blink has sort of been fixed: I'm just going to quote Christian Belt on this one:

• 2004: World of Warcraft is released. Mages, the single best class in the game, have a bunch of spells. One of them is Blink. It purports to teleport the caster 20 yards forward. It doesn't really work.
• 2009: Blink still doesn't really work.

Patch 3.3 PTR: The fate of Bolvar Fordragon: Troubling, but I'm afraid accurate, speculation by Daniel Whitcomb on what Blizzard's likely to do with our good buddy Bolvar.

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Today a guildy induced me to run Heroic Halls of Reflection on my tanking warrior. Sighing, I slapped on my heroic set and we went into the instance (actually, we ran all three ICC heroics) and when we finally got to the Lich King, said guildmate said "Okay, we'll do the ledge strat." I had no idea what the ledge strat entailed, and told him so. He said "go stand over there" and so, bewildered, I did as he asked.

What followed completely trivialized the event. So much so that I'm torn: on the one hand, I hate HoR in no small part due to the difficulty of picking up multiple abominations and tanking them while also trying to get aggro on the spell casting Risen Witch Doctors. The 'ledge' strategy is very simple: let Arthas walk past you and lumber his slow way up the tunnel after Jaina or Sylvanas like he always does. Meanwhile, the hordes of undead he spawns? They come running back to you, even if you're still at the door to the ledge. Since you could never stop the Lich King from getting to Jaina anyway, you don't lose anything for staying behind him, except that you no longer have to adjust in the event that the Lich King is getting closer to you with his aura of hurty.

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15 Minutes of Fame is WoW.com's look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes -- from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

Sorry, no typos in the headline. It's not the pie meme that's the topic of today's 15 Minutes of Fame. (You'll have to turn elsewhere for your just desserts.) We really do mean pi -- you know, 3.14159 ... We're not quite sure how pi and WoW go together. And frankly, neither are players on US Llane, where the mysterious Pi Guy holds court in Trade. "He's in Trade chat spamming pi and other fascinating formulas, like how 99.9 = 1," writes our tipster, "which makes sense after he shows you the steps ... which he does. He's got top-of-the-line gear, which in itself is a nice thing. But on top of that, he's a math genius. A very mysterious math genius."

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Welcome to Lichborne, where Daniel Whitcomb has decided that Boom Boom Pow is our class anthem for the new year, if only because those chickens are totally jackin' our style.

So here we are, at the end of 2009. This marks the first full year of the Death Knight class, and it's definitely been an eventful year as Blizzard's balanced and rebalanced our class to help us fit into the ranks of the more established classes. We've been called flavor of the month and overpowered. I dislike the former label on philosophical grounds but grudgingly admit that the latter label has probably been correctly applied at certain points in time. Still, overall we've definitely had the ride of our lives over the last year as the devs have worked on a patch by patch basis to get us all figured out and settled in. Lets look at each tree and look back at the highlights and lowlights.
Blood

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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.

• "When is a rockstar tank not a rockstar?" asks the Big Bear Butt.
• Merrymaker Lissiel says "These types of weapons are good for all resto druids, and everyone should either be getting a staff with haste, or a main hand + off-hand haste combo."
• Matticus proclaims loudly and proudly, "I learned 7 important healing lessons from this one quest!"
• Spicytuna turns towards Blizzard and asks, "Why can't we give thumbs down to the dungeons we don't like, just as we can in WarCraft III?"
• "This has been a crazy year," muses Pikestaff as the hunter takes a trip down memory lane.


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Erunno's Christmas Story won the WoW Model Viewer Christmas contest. It's a comedy video about one elf's brave struggle to find gifts for a Christmas story. His adventure takes him across the world of Azeroth, and features a dozen or so cameos of other, well-known machinimators.

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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.

	Preview of character creation in Final Fantasy XIV The start of the beta signups for Final Fantasy XIV was certainly good news for the many people anticipating the game next year, but it didn't exactly pierce the fog surrounding the game. Square-Enix, of course, has always played their cards close to their chest when handing out previews, but there's still so much more to learn about the game and a number of curious people.
	Hands-on with Klingons and PvP in Star Trek Online If there's one thing that's almost more synonymous with Star Trek than classic catch phrases, it's the Klingons. They are the Captain Hook to the Federation's Peter Pan and thus it's important to several potential players that Star Trek Online do them justice.
	Metaplace announces January 1st shutdown The Metaplace development team made the announcement today that no fan of a game likes to hear: "Today we have unfortunate news to share with the Metaplace community. We will be closing down our service on January 1, 2010 at 11:59pm Pacific." The bottom line to the reasoning behind the decision is that Metaplace simply is not making enough headway to be a viable (read: profitable) product.
	Vanguard paints a rocky road to come in the year ahead In a recent announcement to the Vanguard community, the team has decided to be as frank as possible and outline the road map for the game in the year ahead. Due to limited resources and a new focus on bug elimination over ambitious content releases, some of the game's anticipated updates are being shelved indefinitely. Those features include the Halls of Shattered Souls, Pankhor Zhi, Nexus, and the anticipated "alternate advancement" system.

	BioWare on developing the Dark Side of SWTOR Would you like to know more about BioWare's lengthy effort of creating the dark side classes in Star Wars: The Old Republic? Well, of course you would! We mean, who wouldn't really? Well, probably Jedi, but nobody really listens to those guys anyhow. Except maybe for angst-ridden youth who've just recently discovered their father is a dark lord of the Sith. Oh, wait, nevermind.
	What happened to Stargate Worlds? Fans have been waiting for the Stargate:Worlds MMO for what feels like forever, and a few weeks ago got a surprise in the form of a Stargate shooter instead of any more news on the MMO. We got a brief explanation on the reasoning behind this, but Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment covered things in a bit more detail yesterday. The CME team took some time to discuss Stargate:Resistance with fansite GateWorld, and also talked quite a bit about the decision to shelf Stargate:Worlds for the time being.
	EverQuest II reveals The Sundered Frontier Who likes sexy screenshots? We all do! It's lucky for us that the The Sundered Frontier, one of the two new zones in EverQuest II: Sentinel's Fate is so darn beautiful. Who doesn't like floating islands, awesome armors, and pandas? How can you turn down pandas?! Easy answer: You can't turn down pandas. You just can't.
	Mr. Freeze joins DC Universe Online cast We've been hearing more from Sony Online Entertainment this year about the upcoming MMO DC Universe Online, and while news of a beta or even an alpha would thrill us, we're more than happy with what we've been receiving this fall. The folks at Sony Online Entertainment have been treating us to a parade of new characters as the months progressed, and they're getting the fans in on the creation process with an animation contest.
	Aion's December community address looks to the future NCsoft had a big year on the Aion front: the months leading up to launch are just as crazy as the months immediately following launch, so the community team is more than ready for a little vacation. Not without one final community address, however. The Aion community team is leaving us until January fourth, taking a well-earned rest while we enjoy the Solorius festival. Good things are promised when they return in 2010, and this final address for the year gave us a hint of things to come.
	Making the most of the free trial period The whole point of a free trial is to get you to buy the game. This is a fact of the genre, and we all know it. Correspondingly, we don't usually sign up for the free trial unless we're relatively certain we'd like to try the game in the first place. But all too often, we try the game for one session, and then we miss the rest of the free trial period and never really form a cohesive opinion about the game. So the company doesn't get your money, you don't get to try the game, and your characters languish forever in the waiting room.

Karen sent in this murloc-tastic screenshot with this description: I grabbed this while doing some tribal outreach/assassination work for D. E. H. T. A.. I call it "I come in peace! Pay no attention to the felguard behind the axe." Keywords: Azeroth, felguard action shot, this costume makes me look fat." Not that fat, Karen, just big-boned.

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Welcome to another edition of the WoW.com Weekly Comic -- Byron the Tauren Rogue!

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No, I haven't actually heard of one happening. That doesn't mean I don't think one could be very cool, especially after seeing this video of all the voices Chris Metzen has done for the various Blizzard franchises over the years. The idea that one man is the voice behind Thrall, Varian, Ragnaros, and other luminaries got me to thinking that maybe a film isn't the right way to go with the franchise. Now, of course I know about as much about making movies and managing beloved franchises as I do about installing thermonuclear reactors in submarines, but I'm not going to let that stop me from speculating about how awesome a Warcraft animated movie or series could be. (I also admit I've been watching a lot of DC Animated Movies lately, and the tenuous Blizzard - Wildstorm - DC connection has me all aflutter.)

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WoW.com's Twelve Days of Winter Veil contests keeps on rolling. If you didn't win a Path of Cenarius code on Christmas, we're giving away 5 more Path of Cenarius codes today courtesy of WoWTCGLoot.com. Yes, you, too can have flowers follow in your wake. What self-respecting PuG farmer wouldn't want to have bright foliage sprouting behind them?

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Only five days left to WoW.com's 12 Days of Winter Veil contests. Today we are giving away two BlizzCon 2009 goodie bags, including all original contents. Winners will recieve, among other things, a code for Grunty The Murloc Marine in-game pet, the Noobz Raynor action figure and an official BlizCon 2009 authenticator. You can view the full contents of the goody bag in the gallery below.

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Happy Tuesday morning, everyone. Winter Veil is winding down, and as we here at the WoW.com offices fight over the last carton of eggnog, we've been taking a lot of time to look over the past year and celebrate. Of course, here in the Tuesday Morning Post, we generally look at the past 7 days or so. So yeah, there's plenty of the navel gazing stuff, but there's a good smattering of news too. Nothing too major, I suppose. Even the dev team likes to see their family over the holidays, I guess. But it's there. And in the meantime, a little bit of a navel gazing never hurt anyone. Our navels are pretty awesome anyway.

Join me for the last Tuesday morning of 2009 and catch up on your WoW reading. The usual list is after the break.

Hot News and Features

• Could the building blocks for the Cataclysm world event be right under our noses?
• As Wrath winds down, we remember the abandoned and half-finished things.
• We know why ICC's gated. You can, of course, always blame the gnome.
• The 2009 WoW.com best stories showcases our personal picks for the best articles of 2009. Check out what we've posted so far, and watch out for the last few months to go up in the next few days.
• If you logged on and got to the tree, hopefully you got your 2009 Winter Veil gifts -- And hopefully, you didn't shoot your eye out.
• The official WoW magazine has a preview out.


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