How would you plate-wearing raiders like your best-in-slot (pre-Shadowmourne) weapon first thing upon stepping into the 25-man version of Icecrown Citadel? If Lady Luck is on your side, it could happen. Bryntroll the Bone Arbiter was, for a few glorious weeks, far and away the best weapon available to death knights and retribution paladins before Shadowmourne and its own Heroic counterpart. Slightly less awesome for warriors, but still pretty amazing. Can you believe it drops from Lord Marrowgar, the first (and probably the easiest) boss in ICC?

Let's talk numbers, shall we?

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WoW.com has learned through sources close to the situation that after our series of posts describing some questionable internal policies at Blizzard concerning account administration and security, as well as the likely introduction of mandatory authenticators, a few of these policies have been changed this evening.

First, the abilities of billing representatives to directly roll back characters to previous states has been more or less removed, preventing the onioning exploit we spoke about earlier. Account administrators still have the ability, of course, but it should prevent people from being able to game the system over the phone. We do not know if this ability will be returned when billing representatives obtain the proper training and tools.

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Every week, Matthew Rossi writes The Care and Feeding of Warriors. Every week, he claws at his feeble brain to come up with a header paragraph, which really is kind of unfair. Warriors shouldn't have to think. Do you have any idea how many blows to the head we take?

So yeah, turns out I should probably have shut up and not told you guys that prot was actually good at PvP. Sorry about that. I'm not going to actually freak out until I see how they plan to balance prot so we're not good at PvP anymore, since I barely even PvP and am far more concerned with prot as a PvE spec, that is to say, tanking with it. If they make a bunch of changes and my threat stays the same and my survivability stays the same and I'm not seeing any major hits to my tanking, then whatever, I'm sure there will be enraged prot warriors still but I won't be one. If, however, I see a 2k threat loss and I'm dying like a chicken trying to tank a bloody heroic, then yeah, I'm gonna be upset.

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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. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

Mourl asked...

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It seems like so long ago. But only three or four years ago, I got a very special drop from Stratholme. No, the original Stratholme, not even the Culling of Stratholme. I want to say we were doing one of the old timed runs, when you tried to kill Baron Rivendare within 45 minutes. But, we just happened to have a night when the rare-spawn gargoyle, Stonespine, appeared. I got luck and won my very own Stoneskin Gargoyle Cape. When I looked up information about the cape on Thottbot, I found myself a little treat.

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We've talked at length about the Icecrown craftables last week, but we were mostly focused on the driving, universal material required to make them. That is, we were mostly talking about the Primordial Saronite. The recipes for Icecrown craftable are given to you by the Ashen Verdict, in order to help you do battle with the legions of the Lich King.

This week, let's start looking at the items created by these recipes, and see how they perform in their respective roles. I think some of the craftable items will be pleasantly useful even over the occasional tier gear, especially if you consider that you can grab these items from the Auction House. (Primordial Saronite seems to have now dropped in price across the board, even selling for less than 2,000 on some servers.)

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In our continuing series on account security issues present within Blizzard's offices, we bring you news that lax training in Blizzard's billing department is being exploited by those attempting to game the system and illegitimately acquire more gold and high value in-game items.

The critical flaw in Blizzard's system is that billing support personnel are currently given the ability to "roll back" characters to previous versions more or less on the spot, with the customer on the phone. Because of this, there is a high degree of flexibility and personal accountability on the part of the billing representative. The flexibility extended here is vitally important to customer service, however the training that comes with the flexibility, we are told by multiple sources, is inadequate and leads to this exploit being practiced by a growing number of individuals.

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Some of the coolest contests happen in the EU, and unfortunately, sometimes completely under our radar. World of Warcraft in Europe recently announced the winners of a contest held between November 23 and December 6, 2009 (that's a period of two weeks, so even the folks in Europe might've missed out on it) which asked folks to design their own World of Warcraft trading card. We told you the coolest contests happen in the EU.

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The Scottish Sun reports that a Scottish man made the news for having to choose between his wife and his orc. 42-year old Robert Cushnie was the proud owner of a life-sized World of Warcraft Thrall statue, one of several that Vivendi commissioned from Studio Oxmox to promote Warcraft III (along with a Night Elf female statue). The telecommunications manager scored the 185cm. tall statue when a toy store in nearby Falkirk closed down six years ago.

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As previously mentioned in our lengthy review of the Razer Naga, Razer had plans to update their 17-button MMOG-centric mouse to enable key mapping. Heathcliff Hatcher from Razer responded to concerns about the mouse's configurability back then that "software driver remapping of keys is a standard function for most of Razer products and we do have suitable solutions that we intend to release in the near future for Naga that will enable this feature out of game."

Razer delivered on that promise with an update to the mouse driver, allowing users to configure all 17 buttons. This addresses the reservations many players expressed when the product launched in August last year. The driver update also supports different profiles, allowing users to configure different key functions according to their current application. Razer has also added full macro capability including timed delays between keystrokes. However, it should be noted that taking advantage of this last function might violate the World of Warcraft's terms of use, something that plagued the first versions of Steelseries' World of Warcraft mouse. Read the FAQ regarding the driver update after the break.

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In a stunning revelation from a veteran account administrator at Blizzard, WoW.com has learned that account administrators are being told by Blizzard managers not to restore people's characters and items after their account has been ransacked by gold sellers and keyloggers. Instead, account administrators are being told to give people a "care package" and get them to accept the package in lieu of total account restoration.

If the player does not accept this care package, they are then forced to go into a character restoration queue that is consistently several days to weeks long. According to sources familiar with the situation, this "care package policy" has been implemented in order to lighten the work load of those Blizzard employees who perform account restorations. Similar policies have existed at other times account compromises have been high, such as during the transition from Vanilla WoW to The Burning Crusade.

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Do you remember Shattrath City? It was the busy, bustling hub of the Outland. You could fly in and out of it, pick up some awesome badge loot, and even check out a music show? Those were the days. Of course, now, everyone's moved on to the floating city of Dalaran, and busily raiding the heck out of Arthas.

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Dodge the drama and become that player everyone wants in their group with the Drama Mamas. Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are real-life mamas and experienced WoW players -- and just as we don't want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server. We're taking your questions at DramaMamas (at) WoW (dot) com.

Yes, we're going to go on about the Dungeon Finder again this week. This time it isn't about Gearscore or DPS, but about the loot issues that have cropped up. The thing about cross-realm PuGs is that you may never see your fellow dungeon runners again. Or when you do, you may forget that you have -- unless you meticulously document all ne'er-do-wells by hand. Blizzard attempted to mitigate some of the issues they knew would arise by changing the Need Before Greed loot rules and requiring it for random dungeon rewards. But you're still going to get players working the system in order to line their pockets as well as upgrade their gear. And they aren't worried about their reputations Battlegroup-wide. At the same time, many people are expecting their fellow PuGgers to abide by loot rules designed to better a guild as a whole rather than a random crew of strangers.

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Vitrioli of <Red Thunder Clan> on Durotan snapped this shot after killing Loken in Halls of Lightning. He searched the area behind Loken's throne for hidden treasure, but was only able to discover that the throne was actually made of foil-covered chocolate instead of stone. However, you can't really consider this treasure. Even the most hardcore gamers would balk at eating chocolate that someone has been sitting on for twenty thousand years.

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One of the good things about running more PuG's than ever before is that it's forced me to learn how to communicate what I intend on a pull to a group of people I don't really know. This, in turn, has made me better at communicating with my guildies and friends when we raid, in part because now I'm finally thinking about how to express what I intend to do in a more organized way.

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digg_url = 'http://digg.com/gaming_news/External_security_device_mandatory_to_play_WoW_Likely'; WoW.com has learned through trusted sources close to the situation that Blizzard is giving serious consideration to making authenticators mandatory on all accounts. According to our sources, while this policy has not been implemented yet and the details are not finalized, it is a virtually forgone conclusion that it will happen.

This response is a direct effort to stop the massive number of compromised accounts by gold sellers and keyloggers. The seriousness of the situation with compromised accounts has reached such a level that wait times for item and character restoration are entirely unacceptable, even to Blizzard executives. Blizzard has taken other internal measures to deal with long wait times of people in account restoration queues, and we'll be covering those measures tomorrow.

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Upcoming 3.3 balance adjustments
Quote from: Ghostcrawler (Source)As many of you have suspected, we think rogue damage is too high. We will be making hotfixes to lower the maximum damage output of Assassination and Combat rogues. The Combat nerf will be slight. Both specs should still do just fine on damage meters (assuming skill, gear etc.) but shouldn't be beating out other specs to such a large degree.

Other things on our radar that you might see soon -- none of these are promises and we have no specific changes to announce yet:

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