Rotface probably has the best name in World of Warcraft. Can't you just see a pair of elementary school kids standing out in the playground, yelling at each other? "Well, you're a Rotface!" "Well, you're just a Festergut!" The comparison's pretty apt when you hear Rotface's voice, too. And then that voice gets even better when Professor Putricide yelling, "Good news, everyone! The slime is working again!"

Rotface is the mirror twin of Festergut. I usually raid Festergut first, and then go to visit Rotface. Rotface manages to be both a DPS check and a coordination check in a single fight. This is because Rotface does things to your raid. The longer you let Rotface stack up these things, the more difficult Rotface becomes. It's not necessarily that the damage increases as much as you're increasing the likelihood that something will go wrong. It's therefore best to burn him down as quickly as possible, even while trying to handle the coordination elements of the fight.

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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.

Alex Ziebart is missing. Okay, probably not missing. Probably knocked out by painkillers. Thus, I'm forced to do The Queue today.

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In honor of our hard to get trinkets and all the casters who have begged, cajoled, even threatened me to try and get me to tank Heroic PoS this week (look, I can only tank it twice or more in a day if I get it randomly. No, I'm not going to run randoms for six hours on the off chance we'll be queued for H PoS.) here's some caster loot. It's a trinket, so you don't get much of a screenshot I'm afraid, so you get the Wowhead page.

Name: Nevermelting Ice Crystal
Type: Epic Trinket
Attributes: Increases spell power by 111 on equip, on use increases your critical strike rating by [184 * 71564u] for 20 sec. Every time one of your non-periodic spells deals a critical strike, the bonus is reduced by 184 critical strike rating. (3 Min Cooldown)
So if you're like me and play melee classes almost exclusively, you may not really understand why this trinket is good. Partially the demand for the Nevermelting Ice Crystal is due to the scarcity of trinkets in general: I know casters in full ICC25/TotGC gear who want this! When you realize some mages out there are raiding up to TotC with a Sundial of the Exiled equipped, you can understand the hunger for this trinket to some degree. Now, comparing this trinket to the once-majestic Illustration of the Dragon Soul, even a melee moron like me can see that it has more than half the spell power of the IotDS fully stacked (and since you don't have to stack the Nevermelting up that seems pretty good to me) plus a sweet on use ability.

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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.

Last year, I talked about playing with preschoolers and reading-age children. Several months later, I'd like to continue the series by tackling the topic of teens. I'm now tempted to talk in tantalizing alliteration, but I really can't keep it up. Anyway...

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No, it's not just a case of the obvious being stated. In a discussion of DK design in arenas, Dr. Street comments to clarify the intended role of death knights in arena and other factors. He also makes a good point about the forums in general that bears repeating for emphasis.
"We don't intend for these forums to be the primary way the team communicates our vision for the game and upcoming changes to the community. You'll get a little of that on a few select subjects through the forums and sadly that's all you're ever going to get. It's not that we don't care. It's that forums are not a great medium for that kind of mass communication. I wish sometimes you guys could be satisfied with the fact that we used to not communicate at all and now are able to communicate a little." Moving on to the specific issue at hand in this thread, the discussion is the old shadow/frost spec that turned the death knight into a much more ranged caster, generating runic power quickly and then converting that runic power into Death Coils at range. It wasn't intended for the class. They have no problem with Death Coil itself being a popular attack, as long as the death knight has to put an effort into staying in melee with its attendant disadvantages to do so. "The DK that runs around and does nothing but Icy Touch or Howling Blast or Death Coil feels like a rogue who forgoes combo points and openers and everything just to spam Fan of Knives and nothing else." It's interesting to see players managing to find ways to bend the class out of the original design intent and how Blizzard responds to that: specs like shadow/frost or diseaseless blood DPS were adjusted quickly to put the class back to where Blizzard intended it.

Trinket Itemization and Philosophy
Quote from: Bornakk (Source)Our raid item philosophy has evolved a lot since vanilla. The tier sets were once considered a badge of honor. Someone stalking around (or mailbox afking) with their full set bonus might as well have been sporting a legendary item. These days, we virtually guarantee that any player with an interest in raiding is going to be able to complete at least the lowest level version of their set with just a minimal level of persistence. This ultimately serves as a powerful reward mechanism and is in line with our philosophy of letting more players actually see the content.

This design though also has its risks. One of the big ones is that item progression becomes very predictable and deterministic. Imagine (just as an example) a model where all bosses drop emblems and every item you want is for sale. That may sound cool for a few weeks, until you hit the point that without any kind of random element to progression that you can calculate to the day/week at which you will finish gearing up your character. The excitement of what the boss drops would be gone and we feel this would end up making the purpose of clearing new content very underwhelming.

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Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Spiritual Guidance offers holy and discipline priests advice on how to wield the holy light and groove to the disco night. Your hostess Dawn Moore will provide the music.

As promised, today I will be discussing 25-man Icecrown Citadel loot in a special edition of Spiritual Guidance. Additionally, I will be giving my assessments on tier 10 set bonuses for those of you who are still deciding how to spend your badges. Finally, I'll be offering up the counter arguments that readers left for the 'who to gear first' debate from Sunday's column.

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Any caster worth their salt can remember the frustration involved in trying to nab the elusive Illustration of the Dragon Soul trinket from Sartharion in the Obsidian Sanctum. We tried everything we could to get it, from creating our own melee-heavy raid groups, to participating only in "3D zerg" runs hoping that participants would be too over-geared to want it, to participating in Less Is More achievement runs just so there would be less competition for it.

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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.

This TDQ is about pets watching you play WoW. Why? Because I can. The above cat is my constant WoW companion Max insisting that I stop playing and give him scratches.

• Ancilorn's kitten learning to play a shaman, on top of a monitor.
• Liz Harper's puppies.
• Alex Ziebart can't have a pet in his apartment, so he got a Roomba instead.
• Michael Sacco's dog. And his pet snake and cat.
• Mybadkitty's cat is just getting out of the Pepsi box, while Doug's cat is getting ready to enjoy a stiff drink. Both essential for a hard core WoW player.
• Are you an aspiring Hunter? Petopia's How to Choose the Best Pet is a great guide for you.


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Deciding what crafted gear to sell on the Auction House can be tricky business, even with the Ashen Verdict recipes now available. Items like Titansteel are limited resources, and you need to get the most bang out of your bar. If you have a limited number of crafting reagents, you want to make product that will get you the best return per reagent.

At the same time, you need to make sure they actually sell. Like the Big Deal said in the Priceline commercial, "Is it wise to allow a perishable item to spoil?" Titansteel and most other reagents aren't perishable, of course, but they sure as heck don't make you money chilling out in your bank. You want those puppies to move.

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The Care and Feeding of Warriors is WoW.com's weekly column for warriors. This week, we jump on the bandwagon. Matthew Rossi tends to miss jumping on bandwagons, fall, and hurt himself, followed by a lot of swearing. It's actually somewhat entertaining to watch.

There is, ultimately, only one thing warriors actually do.

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I wasn't sure what to expect when I was tipped off to Happy Anniversary by Britty. I hadn't previously been exposed to her work, so she was relatively unknown to me. This is her fifth machinima, and she started off her notation about the video acknowledging that it's (yet another) Evanescence-inspired WoW video. I'll admit, I didn't have high hopes.

Within a very short time, though, I was completely blown away. Britty's skill for animation is very clear, and her characters are immediately accessible. She's definitely got some amazing chops. She mentioned in her excerpt that she didn't include any voice acting or lip synching for Happy Anniversary because she didn't feel the story required it. I absolutely agree with her. Between the power of the imagery and her perfect timing with the music, she absolutely conveyed the narrative without any additional voices or character singing.

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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.

Das Boot is the story of a U-boat crew: the adrenaline of battle and the tedium of the hunt. The film shows what IMDb calls "the claustrophobic world of a WWII German U-boat; boredom, filth and sheer terror."

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This screenshot, snapped by Vineath of <Danish Legends> on Stormrage-EU, shows fan-favorite evil troll Drakuru being slain by the Lich King (spoiler alert for anyone time traveling from December 2008!) Poor Drakuru. I only wish he could return from the dead to get his revenge. Wouldn't that be a great ending for the final fight of Icecrown Citadel? And then Fonzie can jump over a shark.

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As we've discussed before, the Culling of Stratholme did slow the spread of the plague. But it's heartbreaking to watch Arthas slaughter innocent townspeople when they are looking to him for help. Wouldn't it have been better if he had waited for them to turn into scourge before killing them? Or was there a better way?

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