Sometimes, the simplest things in game are the best. As such, I present to you an old favorite of mine: the Romantic Picnic Basket. The Romantic Picnic Basket is neither gear nor drop. Instead, it's part of the Love is in the Air event, and is actually an integral part of the achievement Lonely. (To achieve Lonely, you have to sit under the basket with another person, fall in love, and then eat chocolate. It's a very specific order of events.)

Last year, the Romantic Picnic Basket was obtained by randomly opening a Gift of Adoration. But since they've revamped the entire Love is in the Air event this year, you can now just purchase it from a vendor the same way your purchase everything else for the event. (That is to say, at a vendor.)

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Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we're preening our feathers, practicing our dance moves, and polishing up on our slaughtering skills.

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Last month, It came from the Blog got together for another Battleground Bonanza. We split into the appropriate battleground group ranges and enjoyed some PvP with our fellow Bloglings and Lurkers. I was in the level 60 to 70 range and we worked on our AV rep by doing the quests and a couple runs.

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We've discussed the reported death of the WoW TCG before, but its publisher Upper Deck reported that everything was good in the hood, so to speak, where the TCG was concerned. Today, however, Magic: The Gathering news site Mananation reported that Upper Deck and the WoW TCG are parting ways, citing confirmation from two sources.
Mananation reports that the split was "amicable," but it seems very strange given that there are still several TCG products slated to be released in 2010, including class starter decks and the Wrathgate/Northrend sets. What this means for the future of the game is uncertain -- Blizzard might re-license the game to a different publisher or develop it internally, or pursue other means to keep the game (which was apparently doing well financially) alive. This also apparently affects the WoW Minis game, which might not have been doing as well.

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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.


Re: the title -- unlike them, I do forget. To write The Queue.

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Every so often someone looks back to 40-man raiding: this time it's Zarhym on the official forums, answering a question about raiding's future and their possible return. I have to say that every time someone decides that the 40-man raid game should come back, I cringe a little bit. So Zarhym's answer works for me.
Right now our plan is to look back on 40-player raids fondly as a format by which we were able to evolve and customize what we feel to be the best raid formats for World of Warcraft. I don't believe our developers have ever stated that they'll absolutely never do a 40-player raid again, but we're really happy with the raid variety we have now with 10- and 25-player raids featuring normal and Heroic difficulties.
I agree that there were some very epic moments in the old raid game: last night for instance I was looking at old screenshots of myself from those days and gabbing with the people who work here about our respective accomplishments and experiences in original WoW raiding. The great C'thun death beam chain ride, where we all mounted our bugs and rode in at once to see how high we could get it to go (I believe I took 6 million damage, with another 6 million resisted), the night I got my Sulfuras, the Onyxia attunement chain and what an incredible pain it was to wander around Desolace looking for Rexxar.

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This week, The Care and Feeding of Warriors continues its look at the warrior specs with Arms 101. Matthew Rossi spends some time this week talking about that peculiar form of finesse that involves smashing things with a two handed weapon.

We've talked about protection, the tanking spec, and we've talked about fury, the Tasmanian Devil spec. This week, we're talking about arms. We defined fury last week as the spec for people who want to kill things, and that's fair, but if fury is that, what's arms? Well, fury is the 'kill it kill it kill it until it's dead and then kill it some more' spec, defined by Blizzard as the 'screaming barbarians in woad'. Arms, however, is the finesse spec. Yes, that's right, I'm defining the spec that relies on using a great whacking axe, polearm, sword or mace as 'finesse'. Welcome to the warrior class, where the fanciest Dan at the party is still a hulking madman in plate. As the class Q&A put it:
However, we would like to reinforce a little more the kits of Arms and Fury. Everyone (I hope) gets the difference between Frost and Fire mages. Arms is supposed to be about weapons and martial training and feel "soldierly." Fury is supposed to be about screaming barbarians in woad. You get a sense of that, but it could be stronger.
Indeed it could, and for my money, eventually will be, but that in a nutshell is arms. Fury is about grabbing anything big enough and beating on things until they're paste. Arms is about style, about finesse, about perfect control of your weapon, and about taking advantage of openings for huge, devastating blows that get around normal conventions and defenses. If you like the idea of being really, really good at hitting people with a sword the size of a barn door, then arms is for you.

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NetEase is finally approved to release the Burning Crusade in China, which probably means that they are accepting new accounts again. This is months after being caught in the crossfire between the quarreling GAPP (General Administration of Press and Publications) and MoC (Ministry of Culture) over NetEase's rights to operate WoW at all.

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We've talked about the sublime, unknowable joy of the Moonkin in previous Moviewatch installments. There's something wonderful and subtle about these creatures. A sort of oddness that sets them apart from your average creature. That's why it seems to be a particularly beautiful inspiration to couple Moonkin with David Bowie in BeeblesTV's A Moonkin Space Oddity.

The video is straightforward and wonderful. The story is about a Moonkin who longs to return to his home. He embarks in a short, earnest quest to put together a rocket, and then shoots off into the sky. The video might feel like it runs a little long, but I promise the final bits make the journey worth your time. The filming isn't fancy or complex; instead, Beebles has focused in on his simple narrative. He lets the elements of his art do the heavy lifting.

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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.

At what point does the perfectly optimized spec, spell rotation or gear set (for the sake of the guild) take precedence over a spec, spells or gear you simply prefer (for the sake of enjoyment)? Be off with your trollish, black-and-white responses! The Drama Mamas favor neither the airy-fairy, let's-all-hold-hands-and-sing-Kumbaya crowd nor the hard-nosed, theorycrafting progression rockets. You can hypothesize about what people should do 'til the Beast Mastery pets come home -- but unless you're talking about specific people in specific guilds with specific goals, you're just another victim of the Pack mentality. We'll explain why and show you how to find the line between optimizing for performance and optimizing for fun.

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Professor Putricide (Heroic) World First Kill by Paragon
Paragon just defeated Professor Putricide in heroic mode and gets another world first kill in Icecrown Citadel. They killed all the end-wing bosses and the lich king is next on the list. Congratulations to them.

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Because today's the day the teddy bears had their picnic. Errai of <Imperfect> on Argent Dawn sent in this picture along with an explanation: "Shame his clever disguise didn't help this poor hapless soul who found himself the main course at an impromptu Valentine's teddy bear picnic in the streets of Dalaran on Argent Dawn. Errai was one of many cuddly bears drawn to the festivities that evening as eating, drinking, bad bear jokes, and general merriment ensued. The fun concluded with a rockin' druid dance party and street parade of trees, moonkins, and bears – oh my!"

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Welcome to another edition of the WoW.com Weekly Comic -- Byron the Tauren Rogue!

Here's a nice little Valetine's comic for all of you lovebirds out there. Sure, Gruuka is a good friend, even if she does pull his tail, call him names, and blame things on him. The young rogue-to-be assures us that girls are most indeed "icky," and "full of cooties."

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Rich Maloy is currently working on a distributed processing application called SimIt!@HOME which will calculate all possible enhancement shaman spell rotations for any possible situation given any gear combination. The application will also have an option to calculate all potential scenarios in which "sim it" is a half-a** answer but you should say it anyway.

If I told you the enhancement shaman basic spell rotation was: SR, FE, SW, MW5_LB, MT(0), LS(1), ES_SS, SS, FS, ES, LL, FN would you run away screaming?

What if I told you that was just for single target boss encounters and there's a different priority for boss fights that require changing targets, another priority for boss fights with heavy adds, and yet another priority for trash mobs. Scared yet?

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We here at WoW.com are constantly on the lookout for updates about all things World of Warcraft. We watch the Blizzard forums for hints at new information. We actually watch the game launcher in case it has something new listed there. And, sadly, we also watch the World of Warcraft: Cataclysm website in hopes it will actually update.

It's not at the top of our priority list, but we do check by there from time to time. According to the site itself, its last update was September 14th, 2009. That means we're getting close to five months since the last update. We've occasionally gleamed tidbits of information from the forums and developer chats about upcoming plans for WoW's next expansion, but virtually nothing from the website itself. We've even been able to glean some knowledge off of fuzzy pictures of the developers showing off the Cataclysm map. It has gotten to the point that we're starting to make a pool about when new information might crop up on there. I've got February 24th of this year jotted down as my pick.

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Sindragosa (Heroic) US First Kill by Exodus
Exodus is the first guild in the US to kill Sindragosa in Heroic Mode and now leads the Icecrown CItadel progress with Paragon, both guilds only have Professor Putricide and the Lich King left to kill.



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Once again, we've got realms coming down and undergoing emergency maintenance on Friday, February 12th from 5:00 a.m. PST / 8:00 a.m. EST until 7:00 a.m. PST / 10am EST. This maintenance is to resolve performance issues - hopefully this will address some of the lag issues players have been reporting since the extended maintenance on Tuesday.

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Every week, Raid Rx will help you quarterback your healers to victory! Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a WoW blog for all things UI, macro, and addon related.

Arguably one of the most unique encounters in the entire game, Valithria Dreamwalker is one where the success of the raid rests entirely on the shoulders of healers. After some more practice and attempts, I can pass on several aspects of the fight that I learned onto you.

If you haven't looked over the basic overview of the encounter, go check it out. This week's post is designed to purely cover the healing side of things from a defensive and "offensive" stand point.

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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.

Love is very much in the air and the complete revamp of this holiday is good news for those of us with limited playtime.

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