There is no question that as we PUG up the Dungeon Finder system for our daily random heroic we are going to encounter a lot of bad tanks. It's not surprising really. These are people who spend all day every day getting smashed in face, typically by monstrosities many times their size. And more disturbingly, they chose to do this in the first place. So it should be no surprise that these aren't the brightest people in WoW.

However, it's often far too easy for us DPSers to blame the tank for losing aggro. After all, holding aggro is their job! What is strangely easy for us to forget is that not pulling aggro is our job. It's time for DPSers to take a long hard look at just how good a player we are before yelling at the tank.

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We took notice of this in an earlier edition of the Queue, but I thought this little bit of news merited its own article for the benefit of lore junkies, raid leaders, or anyone who just might have missed it. After being asked a question over where Angrathar was really located in the larger Icecrown raid complex, I flew out to no-man's-land of southern Icecrown/northwestern Dragonblight and tried to get a good handle on the architecture. While doing so, I noticed a new and extremely tall spire nestled in the mountain range past the Wrath Gate and flew over to investigate. At the top of a saronite spire is huge chunk of misty ice capped by a flat surface with a black design vaguely reminiscent of the one on the Lordaeron throne room (although for all I know this is entirely unintended). From above, it bears a startling resemblance to an image datamined by Boubouille some time ago that was guessed to be the location of the eventual fight with the Lich King -- and I think this exterior "set" could be quite useful for any raid attempting to work on positioning once details of the fight become known. Curiously enough, the Throne itself doesn't appear to be present in-game at the moment, but that might change soon.

We here at WoW.com are on a Daily Quest to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere.

• OutDPS has some great hunter macros for ICC.
• If you want to know everything there ever was to know about macros, Matticus made a post over at NoStockUI concerning that very subject.
• While you're over at NoStockUI, check out how to replace the old workhorse addon Cartographer in patch 3.3.
• Frost mages can increase the output of their water elemental pet by force casting the pet's waterbolt. Quite a nice trick for an extra 3% or so DPS!
• Tanking Tips looks at all the available tanking weapons for warriors, a very nice list and accompanying analysis.


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Totem Talk is the column for shamans. This week, Matthew Rossi talks about Fire Nova, his absolute favorite new ability in quite some time. Boom!

The hastily cobbled together screenshot above really only gives you a small taste of the awesome that is Fire Nova. The old Fire Nova totem was okay... you'd drop it on big AoE packs if you could do so, but for a lot of shamans, sacrificing their active fire totem to so so was a lot to ask. The genius of Fire Nova, the new ability, is of course that it works with any fire totem you have. You're a restoration shaman with a Frost Resist totem down up close to the melee on Sapphiron? Well, our first question could be "Why are you still running Sapphiron?" but we'll assume it's a weekly raid thing. Anyway, even that Frost Resistance totem can now provide some damage! I'm not saying waste your mana on DPS if it's a tight thing, mind you, I'm just saying that if you found yourself healing a fight you way overgeared you can pop a couple of FN's in there to liven things up.

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As a general rule, achievements are more oriented toward raw effort than deep pockets, and that's one of the things that's nice about them for newer players. However, some achievements are all about your ability to fling giant wads of cash around, like monkeys at a zoo flinging...things that are usually not money. If you're sitting on an overly fat wallet and ever thought to yourself, "You know, I'd really like to experience being a poverty-stricken (class) begging for gold on a mailbox somewhere," say no more. Buy your way to the following achievements, and we'll have you /dancing on that mailbox in no time.

For the purpose of our discussion today, I'm classifying anything that costs 1,000 gold or up as a reasonably expensive purchase. While there are other achievements that will probably cost you a great deal of gold to get (Working Day and Night comes to mind if you've power-leveled professions like Jewelcrafting or Inscription), how much you spend on them is usually subject to how quickly you want to do them. By contrast, the achievements below are entirely dependent on your ability to amass a huge pile of gold and then use forklifts to distribute it to NPCs in return for achievement points.

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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.

Before the Dungeon Finder Tool, leveling through instances just wasn't possible for those of us with limited playtime unless we had 4 friends with similar schedules and an appropriate selection of classes. But now, we can take advantage of the speedy XP, better gear and grouping practice.

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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.
I want to kick off this edition of The Queue by thanking you guys for submitting your armories to the reboot of Pimp My Profile. Our first edition will be hitting this upcoming Wednesday. In an ideal world, we'll have one for you every single Wednesday after that.

On to the Q&A!

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Coming up tomorrow at 5 p.m. PST / 8 p.m. EST is the next Blizzard Twitter chat with J. Allen Brack and Greg Street. Both of these guys have done plenty of panels before and are veterans in community interaction. They can easily answer and dodge any question they like; and if Ghostcrawler sees fit I'm sure he's got a few quips to hand out to the attempted troll as well.

But despite the two figureheads at the top answering questions in the Twitter chat, it's important that we look back at the last chat and make a few critical, yet fair, observations:

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New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. For links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's, visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide.

Want to level your paladin as a tank? You got it! Before the Dungeon Finder tool was launched in December, finding level-appropriate instance groups was well nigh impossible. Occasional knots of newborn death knights might putter about in a favorite Burning Crusade instance to scoop up some gear. The rest of the pre-Northrend instances remained ghost towns, populated only by speed-running level 80s who were farming or running low-level buddies through some quick levels. But the Dungeon Finder has re-invigorated the instances of Azeroth, Outland and beyond. What does that mean for leveling players? If you love to play in groups and instances or if you're looking ahead to raiding and want to lay down your skill base now, you can.

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Zharkan16's Druid Anthem is a slightly different take on Belf Rap. It's Nelf Rap. Okay, it's more like Druid Rap. Zharkan16 -- otherwise known as DJ Sn4rk -- created the Druid Anthem for the AlienWare Machinima Contest. The contest rules dictated a time limit of three minutes, which is why the creator seems to feel this film is unfinished. Still, I think the video hit its pace, and feels relatively complete to me.

I enjoyed a lot about the video. It had that sense of fun and enjoyment that I look for in World of Warcraft fan videos, and it's definitely rooted in the gameplay of a druid. I'm not sure the vocals really did the trick for me, though. They felt a little slower than the music's implied pace, and repeated the chorus a little too often. However, the lyrics and composition were strong, in my opinion.

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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.

Last week we took a look at all the ICC hunter loot that could be purchased or crafted, as well as a bit of discussion about how the ICC itemization impacts hunters and the hunter specs.

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Looking at this picture, one can only presume that flight-form druids are like ants -- they can carry many times their own weight in food. Druidess Hernia of <Mumra> on Skullcrusher-EU has captured a wild zhevra, which she will now bring to her nest, devour, and regurgitate to feed her family of little moonkins.

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The Spousal Unit came home from work the other day to find Overlord Mok'Morokk hanging out in Orgrimmar. He joined the fray for a couple minutes and then started the night's raiding schedule. Hours later, he found the ogre from Dustwallow Marsh still there. Though the battle had been kept up the entire time, the Overlord just couldn't be brought down. All of the bank alts in the AH were subjected to periodic AOE stuns and the constant sounds of battle while trying to conduct business.

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Armory Update - Model Viewer and Character Feeds!
One of the most interesting armory update is here, I announced it a couple of weeks ago and it is now live on the US armory site and will be available shortly on the EU one. Here is what you can get on any armory profile

3D Model Viewer
Every character profile now has a 3D model viewer that displays the character in his or her currently equipped gear, and accurately displays the character's physical features, hairstyle, and helm/cloak display as they appear in-game. Mousing over the character model window brings up a control panel with the following controls :

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The World of Warcraft armory page has just been updated with new features and tools!

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