The Game Developers Conference is in full swing this week. There's been a bunch of interesting news out of it, so in addition to telling you fine folks what we plan on playing this St-Patrick's day weekend, the bonus question is what we are most excited about seeing from GDC 10.

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Glorenzelg, High-Blade of the Silver Hand lives on multiple best-in-slot lists. At least, those BIS lists that don't include Shadowmourne and other Heroic content.

My favorite aspect of this epic blade is that it's blade from the Silver Hand, which is a more than significant bit of game lore. Since this weapon drops from Arthas, I think it's fairly clear that he somehow had been hoarding it (and other weapons) after having captured the weapon in combat.

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WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Cataclysm, the upcoming expansion to World of Warcraft. If you'd like to keep everything a surprise, don't read any further. If you'd like to know more about the upcoming content, read away!

Issue 212 of PC Gamer UK has hit the stands, and includes a fascinating six-page article with fifty reasons why lapsed subscribers should probably return to Azeroth. Forget the lapsed subscribers, there's enough information in here for current subscribers to drool over with unbridled glee. For those of you on this side of the pond, some highlights from the article. We requested comment from PC Gamer as to whether this information came directly from Blizzard, but we haven't yet received a response, so keep that in mind as we cover the highlights:

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One of the things I hear a lot from other tanks (especially paladin tanks) is how much they envy Charge, and especially being able to Charge in combat. "Man, I'd give up X for Charge." Usually what they want to give up is their shield throw, or their AoE taunt, which of course is not a terribly compelling idea: warriors have parallels for these abilities and charge isn't one of them. Heroic Throw is our weaker form of Avenger's Shield and Challenging Shout is our stronger but longer cooldown AoE taunt. As soon as they gave up Righteous Defense (which rocks on the Lich King fight, btw) they'd just say "Man, I'd give up X for Challenging Shout" anyway. If warriors actually managed to give up Shockwave for Consecration they'd want it back in a week.

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Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we're heading back into the world of nasty, little over-budget talents bothering balance druids as we fight to save our 1 keys from total disaster.

It's been a harsh week in my little corner of the world. Between attempting to get up for work, falling back down to sleep for 5 more hours, taking medications that I can't even pronounce the names of, and several other unpleasant things that have been plaguing me for the past five days; there's been little time for actual coherent thought in my life. So forgive me if this week's article is a little short (I can already hear people cheering) and slightly confusing. I promise to try and make this post as readable as possible, but I am bound to ramble on incoherently at some point; though I'm not entirely sure how that's any different from normal.

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The tenth annual Game Developers Conference is in full swing in San Francisco, CA -- and yesterday included a panel by Rob Pardo, Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment. Pardo spoke about design philosophy and how Blizzard approaches it, sharing not only Blizzard's success stories, but where they failed along the way, and what they did to fix it. Blizzard's design philosophy follows some key elements:

Gameplay First: Before anything else, you want to concentrate the game on the fun. All aspects of the game -- the design, the mechanics of encounters, the quests and story are focused on making the game fun to play. Not only fun to play -- but fun to play for players, not developers. The challenge is to keep players jumping through the correct hoops, while making those hoops fun. Sometimes this involves making some changes -- for example, only night elf males could be druids in Warcraft III, but for the sake of making the druid class, something that sounded like all kinds of fun, they had to be made accessible to both genders, and both sides. So the lore was adjusted so that females and tauren could both be druids -- otherwise they couldn't have introduced the class at all. And that wouldn't be any fun. Easy to Learn, Difficult to Master: The concept here is to keep game play simple in terms of mechanics and objectives, but design the game in a way that the challenges scale with the ability of play. Pardo stated that Blizzard is focusing more on designing for multiplayer games first now, rather than single player, so they design for the multiplayer aspects, giving games a lot of depth so that players won't get bored with it. He also said that WoW is a pretty hardcore game, but the key is that it's accessible to a lot more gamers -- endgame content like raiding and arenas are a lot more hardcore than leveling itself.

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I've mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of Brian Wood's post Skill vs. gear. You should take the time to read through it if you haven't. However, in review, the basic premise of Brian's argument is that the largest DPS increases available to your raids are not directly based on gear. Instead, things like good rotations, talents, and ye-old "knowing your class" tend to have more to do with your damage than your gear.

Brian takes it to another level, however, and points out the overwhelming effect your raid buffs will have on your damage. The same can be applied to healers and tanks. (The difference between an unbuffed tank and a tank who's sporting Commanding Shout, Fortitude, Gift of the Wild, and Kings is absolutely amazing.) With all that being said, hopefully everyone's got faith in the premise that "your raid buffs really, really matter."

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Frankly, the Bladestorm nerf is a minor one, albeit an extremely annoying minor one. Granted, it means that opposing rogues, warriors and sometimes hunters (ah, hunters, the Y's of WoW) will be able to turn the major source of "And now YOU DIE" available to arms warriors in PvP into "Whee, I'm a pretty ballerina watch me spin". Arms is still pretty strong if it's geared to the absolute teeth and has significant backup, which is about the best you can expect from a warrior in PvP.

PvP for a warrior has always been "die ten million times to other classes until you finally get geared enough to get some payback and then get nerfed because they don't like it when their free kill turns around and kills them back" anyway. This is just more of the same and not even really significant more of the same, it's a very minor change that only rankles because it's piled on the back of more significant (and in some cases more ridiculous) nerfs to the class. It irritates me, sure, but let's be honest: that's not terribly hard to accomplish.

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This is another entry into Alienware's Rise to Power contest. Farinar Presents: Oswald's Amazing Story of EVIL! is the story of a squirrel in Elwynn Forest who is tired of the abuse he receives from passing adventurers. After seeing a campaign poster for the king of Stormwind, the squirrel decides to take steps to defend itself in the future.

This video was hilarious to me, and is the first comedy entry we've seen in the Rise to Power contest. Farinar did some amazing stuff with this video. One moment in particular stuck out to me. When the squirrel lights the fuse on his rocket ship, you'll notice the action is entirely implied by the scene framing. You obviously don't see the squirrel holding the match, just the tip touching the fuse. This kind of clever framing is one of the ways skilled machinimators like Farinar manage to make their videos have so much action, even while working within the limitations of WoW's models.

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Well, this is a welcome change -- now that Frozen Orbs are going to be the new crafting tokens, exchangeable for Frost Lotus and Eternal Fire, among other things, Wryxian announced that they will be greed only in the upcoming patch.


Wryxian No, you won't be able to exchange Frozen Orbs for Emblems of Frost. Yeah it just takes one person to press Need after everyone's pressed Greed on the Frozen Orbs and you miss out. But the good news is that in patch 3.3.3 this won't be the case anymore -- the roll for Frozen Orbs will be an automatic Greed roll. Rejoice!

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Yes, yes, it's my second Los Lobos reference in as many days, but they're a good band and "That Train Don't Stop Here" is pretty tight. Anyway, Karli sent in this screenshot of her character using the Rituals of the New Moon to give her lupine friend some companionship. I'd be somewhat concerned that when she changes back in two minutes she'll be the other wolf's dinner, but even if it wasn't domesticated, WoW wolves of this particular fur color tend to be under level 10.

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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.

Adam, when you get back from vacation, you're going to write the Queue for a week after causing 220+ comments to be written about sea mice. You're on notice!

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Meet Sylvanas. She's about ten weeks old, and she awfully likes to gnaw on bones and my slippers. I'm aware that makes me a giant dork. I probably should have thought twice about naming my puppy after Sylvanas, but it's an awful lot of fun to point out things like "Sylvanas snores." My favorite is "Sylvanas has been sleeping with me and my wife all week." I know, I have the sophomoric sense of humor of a twelve year old.

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The Drama Mamas 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. How to handle that sticky situation? Ask the Drama Mamas at DramaMamas@wow.com.

That's it! I've had it. There's a nasty little problem gnawing its way through guilds across Azeroth, and the people who can fix the situation aren't even listening. One simple change would solve probably half of the questions the Drama Mamas receive every week. Even worse, we've covered this matter multiple times before, but certain people (ahem) don't seem to have their listening caps on.

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Cataclysm rumours/info now in PC Gamer UK VERY BIG Spoilers
In the latest issue of PC Gamer (UK) is a 6 page article named '50 reasons to play Catalysm'. The vast majority of what is covered is already known/confirmed, however, there appears to be verifcation of certain rumours first made here on MMO-champion in the days before Blizzcon but that were never confirmed nor denied.

Just a note on the source before everyone starts screaming for links for scans. I don't have any, nor would I post them if I had them. The proof however can be found in the highstreet shops of the UK in issue 212 of PC Gamer UK (April edition).

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Each day WoW.com will take you through all the blue posts and other Blizzard news from around the internet. From Ghostcrawler's latest posts to the lowdown on StarCraft II and Diablo III, we'll keep you informed.

Ghostcrawler was on the quiet side today, but the forums were still ablaze with chatter. StarCraft II fans in particular are in for a fun information dump in the near future.
Table of Contents

• Ghostcrawler
• Other
• StarCraft II / Diablo III / Blizzard News

Ghostcrawler Ghostcrawler on removing heals from the combat log Mods would be able to get around it. As long as players can see how much they healed for, they'll be able to record total healing done. Ultimately, it's just information and the problem is not in the information itself as in how players interpret that information.

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