Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player with limited playtime. Of course, you people with lots of playtime can read this too, but you may get annoyed by the fact that we are unashamed, even proud, of the fact that beating WoW isn't our highest priority. Take solace in the fact that your gear is better than ours, but if that doesn't work, remember that we outnumber you. Not that that's a threat, after all, we don't have time to do anything about it. But if WoW were a democracy, we'd win.

The problem with writing these year end posts for WoW is the tendency for Blizzard to make huge changes at the end of the year, altering everything. Whether it's a new expansion like Wrath of the Lich King or Patch 3.3, it's hard to remember what the game was like the previous 3/4 of the year. It's not that we didn't have a good time before the big year end events, but the game becomes so different, what we did before is irrelevant.

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Want to crush your enemies, see them driven before you, and hear the lamentation of their women? Blood Sport investigates the entirety of all-things arena for gladiators and challengers alike. C. Christian Moore, multiple rank 1 gladiator, examines the latest arena strategy, trends, compositions and more in WoW.com's arena column.

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Sam Raimi will no longer be directing Spider-Man 4, and neither will anyone else for that matter. Sony Pictures announced today that they are canning the current Spider-Man franchise and will be rebooting it in the summer of 2012 with an entirely new director, cast, and crew.

Raimi's decision to withdraw from the project supposedly stems from the summer 2011 release date, and how it would compromise the creative integrity of the film. This all comes after news that complications in the Spider-Man 4 script threatened to delay the film.

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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. Today's edition is brought to you by Dan O'Halloran, your resident WoW.com managing editor and founder of the WoW class news aggregation site, The Daily Druid.

Feral cat guides on the internet seem harder to find than other spec guides, so I've collected a few here for those of you looking to claw faces with greater efficiency.

• WoW Wiki's Feral DPS Guide: A very comprehensive guide for cat druids covering specs and glyphs, dps rotation, gear stat explanations, Rawr video walkthrough, enchants, gems, consumables and more.
• Melee hit table FAQ for feral druids: The Fluid Druid blog breaks down why cat druids need to hit the hit cap.
• Cat Druid best in slot gear list updated for Icecrown: Kalon has actually rated a long list of top items available to cat druids for each slot, but don't we all just look at the best in slot and skip the rest?
• Best 3.3 non-tier cat gear: Kalon is at it again, this time listing the best gear you can get if you don't raid.
• Cat dps guide for Icecrown Citadel: Lower Spire: Jacemora gives a down and dirty bullet point listing of strats for each one of the ICC bosses.


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Kebina Trudough here, offering you the best gold making secrets they don't want you to know about! I was like you once, poor and homely, before I discovered my patented system. Now you too can fill your pockets with the good stuff without ever breaking a sweat! Why spend all your time toiling when you could be vacationing in the Hot Springs? I'm not offering these tips for 100 gold, or 90 gold, or even 50 gold! No, not even 20 gold! My system is yours for FREE! Satisfaction guaranteed or I'll give you a full refund (handling charges may apply). After all, Time Is Money.

If you're like me, you have a lot of excess emblems sitting around. Maybe you never got around to spending them before the next tier came out, or maybe the badge gear just never quite compared to your raid drops. Whatever the case, there is no sense letting them go to waste when you could put them to work and earn some gold!

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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.

New from the Department of Old News (wait ... wut?): We're still nuts about papercrafting. While we've spotlighted papercraft before on the site, we haven't featured it specifically on World of WarCrafts. Never let it be said that World of WarCrafts left a creative stone unturned!

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Blood Pact is your weekly warlock digest brought to you by Dominic Hobbs. "Closer! Come closer... and burn!" ~ Keli'dan the Breaker

Once again Blood Pact turns its gaze towards those up-and-coming warlocks; those who are learning the craft, battling foes to hone their skills and sharpen their minds. I've said before that leveling a warlock is great fun and part of this is due to the diverse ways in which you can go about it. By the time you start getting a decent pile of talent points to spend you can shape your lock in many and varied forms. There's the unstoppable train of death that is the affliction lock, cursing and corrupting all around it as it passes smoothly through the world. The demonologist, pouring their power into their minion and pushing them into the fore while sitting back and calmly picking off their foes. And of course, the destruction warlock, blazing a trail of raw power in an explosive display of mental prowess over physical frailty.

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Really, WoW.com? A guide to the Oculus of all things? Over a year after the launch of Wrath of the Lich King, you're doing an Oculus walkthrough? Is that necessary? Boy, I wish it weren't. We're all sick of hearing about this place by now, but of all the instances and raids in the game, this is the one where nobody seems to be sure what to do or where to go. I haven't seen players this confused since Sunwell.

All strategy and ability discussion in this guide discuss the heroic version of the Oculus. Beyond the cut below you will find simple strategies for each of the bosses in the Oculus, as well as maps to help you find your way through the environment.
Band of Variance Drakos the Interrogator is the first boss in the Oculus, coming just after the bridge of many whelps. Despite what the visuals of his encounter suggest, the fight doesn't require a very heavy amount of movement or coordination.

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

The community of WoW is not best known for its courtesy. The bar for what constitutes civil behavior has been set pretty low. We as officers don't expect much from random people, but we'd like to think our members and counterparts are better than the average player. That's why it's always so disappointing when we discover we are wrong.

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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.

Today has to have some special significance. If you take the month and the year and add them together and subtract 2000 you get the day. The day. It's like, the world is going to end or something, and it isn't even 2012!

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If you read WoW.com with any regularity, you probably saw and read our pieces on Friday discussing some rather curious policies Blizzard has recently instituted. There are two in particular that I'd like to discuss further: The care package for hacked accounts and the possibility of mandatory authenticators.

First, how many of you have had your accounts stolen, or know someone that had theirs stolen? Chances are good every single person that reads this post will raise their hand to that question. The problem is not a small one. I'm in a rather large guild, and every few weeks someone has their account stolen and the little bits of our guild bank they have access to go with them. My large guild is also just one guild in a larger guild alliance which suffers the same problems. Every two weeks or so, someone I see online on a regular basis gets their account stolen.

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Sabaska created his first machinima video using the song Octopus by Jonathan Coulton. JoCo's music has been a fairly consistent presence for machinima, so Sabaska made a wise choice in accessing this song for his first WoW video. The video works fairly well for the song, so I think overall, it's a good job.

What's really interesting about this video, however, is the annotations. The video's good, but Sabaska went above-and-beyond with his YouTube annotations. Using this feature, Sabaska outlined many notes, topics, and techniques he used in creating Octopus. This is especially helpful because it gives the audience a better look at the effort and work performed by machinima makers, and gives us a look behind the curtain. For many people just getting started with machinima, I'd wager it also gives them a little inspiration and useful tips. Octopus wasn't meant to be a tutorial, of course, but it's still awesome that Sabaska shared this level of information with us.

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We had a great time on the WoW Insider Show podcast this week, where my co-host Matt Rossi and I were visited by guest hosts and former WoW Idol winners Daryl Brewer and Fatty. We answered your emails live (Rossi predictably talked forever about choice of tanks for one reader, while Fatty and Daryl weighed in on what they don't want to see in Cataclysm), shouted out to the chat channel, and (of course) talked about WoW.com's top stories of the week. Eventually.

A special thanks to Daryl and Fatty for being on the show this week -- you can check out Daryl's music on his Last.fm page, and for fans of Fatty, you can grab her "Daily Heroic" EP on iTunes and CDBaby for under five bucks, or check out the rest of her work at thesixtyone.com/fatty.

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Disappointed with the content in Wrath of the Lich King, Cygnus of <Tetractys of the Decad> on Drenden has decided to be first in line to greet Deathwing at Grim Batol. He sent in the following poem/rant/Unabomber-esque screed about tanking in WotLK:

• Cygnus is waiting. Cygnus is a protection warrior that, like many heroes, was promised glory in the frozen north. Cygnus arrived in the freezing wastes to find no glory, but only that all the crowd control is now solely his job. Cygnus looked up to a sky with no sun, only to see a drake he had to ride, depriving him from his sword. Cygnus loved to learn new abilities during his training, and felt miserable when he was ordered to ride and charge with a lance. Cygnus hates being cold. Cygnus has had it with the Lich King. Cygnus is in Wetlands until the voices in his head stop calling for a "taunt". Cygnus is now at the doors of Grim Batol, where the sun shines, and a new promise of glory will be made. Cygnus is waiting.


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Every so often, an email comes along the tip line that really gets the writers talking, and we received one such email last night from our reader Zikko, who was curious what people did while they were waiting for the Dungeon Finder to assign them a group ("Guess this only applies to DPS," as he/she observed). While Zikko usually does dailies, watches TV, or farms mats for cooking and fishing, he/she wondered whether anyone had hit upon a better way to pass the time while the Dungeon Finder went on the search. I include the writers' individual comments below, not just because it's a nice "slice of life," but I also think it's a good peek at how different peoples' experiences can be depending on the roles they play:

Matt Rossi: I have time to inhale a couple of times during the LFD queue.

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Addon Spotlight - Elitist Group
Today's addon is a good way to build raid PUGs (raid weekly quests, I love you so much) without wasting too much time inspecting everyone to make sure that they're not terrible. Once again the original description is just fine and I'll steal it!

• Download Elitist Group

Elitist Group's goal is to shift focus away from single scores that don't tell you anything about the users choice of gear. Instead of a single score you'll see a variety of information from experience in different tiers of dungeons and raids, to if their choice of equipment, enchants or gems matches their spec.

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