There has been a lot of good discussion lately concerning various aspects of the DPS status quo. Some classes are putting out too much compared to their cloth counterparts, and others have suddenly found themselves too powerful in certain areas of the game. Blizzard recognizes this, and this evening the Lead System Designer, Ghostcrawler, came out and enumerated a few things Blizzard believes are true.

Ghostcrawler has left the door open to these class and item balance issues being fixed (if Blizzard decides to pursue such fixes) in either a hotfix or through an upcoming patch. Chief among these changes are an increase in warlock DPS, a decrease in rogue DPS, a change in protection warriors to limit their utility in PvP, and refinements to Icecrown Citadel weapon procs.

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Several people have told us via our feedback page that they have received theirWorld of Warcraft Official Magazine in the mail. Last month, we got to see the preview and now many subscribers already have them in hand.

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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. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

Somewhere along the line, I've picked up this habit of discussing games I've been playing (besides WoW) as my introduction to The Queue. It doesn't make a lot of sense, but it's fun. Unfortunately, I'm currently playing Bayonetta and I'm not sure I can really talk about that one here. Just look it up on Youtube, you'll know what I'm talking about. Now before I shame myself any more, let's get to the Q&A.

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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.

• Righteous Defense tells you what not to do during Rotface.
• As a paladin tank, I totally agree that Tanks and Healers Should Get The Biggest Rewards.
• Vodka has a very good video of the Rotface and Festergut fights.
• Euripides of OutDPS has a great set of tips for the hunter facing Lady Deathwhisper.
• Stoppable Force has a great breakdown of physical vs magical damage for death knights in relation to the Lady Deathwhisper encounter (or any encounter for that matter).


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On Tuesday night, my guild hit the new Icecrown Citadel bosses in the Plagueworks wing -- Festergut, Rotface, and Professor Putricide. While Festergut and Rotface are both pretty straightforward encounters, Putricide is a different matter. Due to Icecrown's gating system, you will have only 10 attempts on Putricide this week (on both 10- and 25-man, so 20 total if you see both versions of the fight), and mistakes are costly. Moreover, our raid found some pretty good strategies for both Festergut and Rotface, but there's a lot of conflicting information about Putricide.

Our hunter's guess was that the encounter on the PTR might have been buggy, and that's why the different strategies we read seemed at odds with each other, so our raid leader looked it over and took what turned out to be a pretty good shot at what we needed to do. After wiping on Putricide-25 3 times and walking away from it convinced that the encounter was still bugged, we split the raid into multiple 10-man teams and took a crack at it there. The footage you'll see above is our 10-man's 4th attempt and a clean kill (i.e. no deaths), with my annotations on the fight. Past the cut are a few more notes (and one correction) that I hope will be helpful.

• As noted in the video, Putricide was not bugged; Blizzard's intent is that the raid is only able to have one abomination up at a time.
• To correct a mistake made at two points in the video, Putricide's phase changes occur at 80% and 35%, not 85% and 30% as I initially thought.
• We're still somewhat unsure about the specifics concerning some of Putricide's abilities, so I apologize in advance if any of the other information contained in the video turns out to be inaccurate. This strategy worked really well for us, but I wish I had more specifics on why it worked really well for us.
• The DPS requirement here is quite high, particularly once Putricide enters phase 3. You lose the abomination in phase 3 and thus the ability to gobble up all the ooze making the floor dangerous, so Putricide has to die before you run out of places to stand (if you've done Firefighter or Lady Vashj, it's pretty much the same deal here).
• Our second 10-man made the kill with only two healers, so you should be able to use or 2 or 3 here as you prefer. Healing requirements, as with DPS, are very high. The abom has an AoE damage pulse and players take a great deal of damage while targeted by green or orange oozes.
• We used an off-tank in phase 3 because we weren't certain whether some of Putricide's abilities would require a tank switch or additional cooldowns (he is tauntable), but it turns out you probably don't need one.
• The MMO-Champion page on Putricide referenced in the video can be found here. You'll note that the abom only has 3 abilities to worry about, but your "driver" will need some time to get used to them.


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First off, yes, I'm leaving Totem Talk. It's been a good ride, and no, I'm not quitting the shaman class nor WoW.com. You'll still see me around on Know Your Lore and The Care and Feeding of Warriors for the foreseeable future, and I'll be writing Totem Talks until we have a replacement. The reason I'm leaving Totem Talk is simple: I don't think I'm giving enough coverage to all the different specs and playstyles anymore, and frankly I don't want to have to try and respec every few days to catch up on spec mechanics for roles I don't want to play. For some classes I play, this isn't an issue, but I'm straight up never ever going to like elemental as a spec or a playstyle. I'm not a ranged DPS player, I never was, I never will be. There's a big difference between personal preference and a spec not being good, mind you. I don't dislike elemental, I simply don't like standing in the back and casting as my DPS role.

So I'm out, and we'll have new people come in and cover the class. I'll still be playing my shaman, healing and stormstriking my way through content. I still love the class, and I'm always going to play one as long as I'm playing WoW.

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Two Bosses Enter ... but only One Boss Leaves, in WoW.com's series of fantasy death matches. Welcome to the quarter-finals of the Original Five-Man Wrath of the Lich King season. Grab a seat, and let's get ready to rumble!

Last week's battle was all about size. In the end, being tougher trumped being larger, as Anub'Arak Pounded King Dred with 64% of the spectator vote. We'll get a view of the beat-down after the break -- plus we'll set up the vote for this week's battle between Ley-Guardian Eregos and Skadi the Ruthless.

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Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, Allison Robert has been at the cough syrup again, without the editors realizing in enough time to shut down her access to the blogging software. No good can come of this.

Lines composed more than 3,000 miles from Tintern Abbey, by someone who hated Wordsworth and thought he was a self-obsessed little prick, but managed to conceal this from her professor long enough to book it from the class with an A, and this is a run-on sentence just like the title of the original poem, which is what we call Irony.

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It's a new year and that means another opportunity to play oracle and figure out what Blizzard's plans are for 2010. BlizzPlanet has gone ahead and tossed out some of their ideas on what will happen for BlizzCon this year, laying out their predictions and even speculating on the event date. As you might know, there was a bit of confusion stemming from supposed leaked information that pointed to BlizzCon 2010 happening in Las Vegas in July. That didn't go down so well with Blizzard, and the Las Vegas convention center later retracted its statements.

BlizzPlanet points out, quite logically, that Blizzard probably wasn't too thrilled with that. Even if they had planned to do it in Las Vegas, that kind of public relations misstep is a deal breaker. Besides, Eldorian from BlizzPlanet applies simple, sound logic to his sleuthing work and explains that examining the Anaheim Convention Center's Calendar of Events reveals an odd, blank date on the weekend of August 20-21, yet almost all the weekends of the venue are already booked. With Blizzard being the secretive bunch that they are, he figures those blank dates actually correspond with this year's BlizzCon event. It's a pretty cool theory. Read the rest of their predictions as well as a few of our own guesses after the jump.

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Let's be honest; the best lore-related achievement is without question Loremaster, which requires you to do the vast majority of the game's quests. But that's pretty self-evident -- "To get the best lore experience in-game, do the quests, which contain virtually all of the actual lore!" -- and thus kind of a cop-out from my perspective. So what I'm going to do with this edition of OverAchiever is pointedly ignore the fact that Loremaster is the most important thing you should do as a dedicated lore junkie, and turn to some other options that tend to be overlooked.

As with our article on Twenty-Five Tabards, this is not an exhaustive guide on how to do each achievement, but simply a starting point if you're either interested in Azeroth's history, or interested in your character becoming more deeply involved in the developing story. As an early warning, 1 of the following 5 achievements is no longer doable, but I've decided to include it as I think the inability to do it at this point in time could be considered part of Azerothian history.

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Today's video is Spacebar Clown by TheGreyFoo. You might remember the creator from The Pally DPS Song. Spacebar Clown has a kind of a bonus video, in that it comes across as two videos in one. You have the first opening clip as a homage to the old 8-bit style video games, and then you have the full parody song afterward.

I absolutely loved the 8-bit opening. Not only was rendering Arthas in this fashion absolute genius, it was a nice little call out to the early roots of MMORPGs. It might sometimes seem tough to remember the old turn-based attack selection menus, but it still has a fun, historical feel to it.

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Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class.

Okay, maybe it's not all hunter loot -- certainly there are some useless plate pieces and decorative maces in there -- but our ICC loot shopping list is delightful and vast, and even impacts the balance of hunter specs. This is the end game loot folks. The last major raid instance with the coolest and shiniest and bestest toys we're gonna get (and some bows).

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Between yesterday's submission and today's, it seems like it's pretty easy to have Trial of the Crusader bug out on you. Gnolie of <Eye Candy> on Executus got to the gunship battle before the massive area lag brought the server to the edge of disaster. All the NPCs on the ship disappeared, and the constant spam of Death and Decay and Consecrate caused the ship to look like it had become the victim of a surprise volcanic eruption.

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The healer is the most important member of a five man group in World of Warcraft, hands down. The healer is the backbone of the group. The healer is the motive force that allows things to proceed. If the tank is mediocre, the DPS good, and the healer good, you might progress or might not. If the tank is good, the DPS is good, and the healer is mediocre, you'll have a much harder time adjusting to any sudden surprises, If the tank and healer are both good, as long as the DPS can put out ANY DPS and there's no enrage timer, things will die.

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Paragon kills Professor Putricide (25)
I do not usually posts about normal mode kills but so far it looks like Professor Putricide won't be an easy fight, even in normal mode. Paragon (EU-Lightning's Blade) was the first guild to defeat him, congratulations to them!



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