WOW

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You’re playing the game, you’re fighting the bosses, you know the how — but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

It was a tiny, small, inconsequential disc. Golden in color, simple in appearance, the talisman was far more dangerous than any could comprehend. Well … almost anyone. The goblin servants of Neltharion, the Earth-Warder, created the object, and even they weren’t truly aware of just how terrible that creation truly was. For the golden disc held not only the power to tear through the Burning Legion; it held the power to control every dragon, every flight in the world — with the exception of Neltharion, of course.

For he would rule them all. The voices told him so and promised him glory above all creatures of the world, mortal or immortal, no matter how insignificant. The Burning Legion was simply an army of pests to be eliminated, as were the kaldorei; the War of the Ancients was a petty squabble marring the glorious moment of his ascension. It was only a matter More >

Sunday Morning Funnies is your weekly list of WoW-related web comics. Well, it’s another Sunday, and I hear that many of our American readers have been feasting these past few days. I hope they’ve been good ones! I’ll try not to be too jealous.

This week, several comics that have been absent as of late have been updated, including WoW, eh?, Daily Quests, Complex Actions, and Fourth Wall. [Thanks for the tip, Al!]

• WoW, eh? Watch Your Step
• Fourth Wall Season 2 Episode 1
• Complex Actions Note to Self: Prepare more than one “levitate” spell per day and It’s a Turkey-Carver!

Continue reading Sunday Morning Funnies: Feeding time

This Breakfast Topic has been brought to you by Seed, the AOL guest writer program that brings your words to WoW Insider’s pages.

Everyone took a path to get where they are in the today, both in life and in Azeroth. Whether you’re a heroic raider, an Auction House kingpin, a rabid collector, or even an ex-WoW player, at some point you stood at the crossroads and chose the path that got you where you are. Likewise, there is often a moment that crystallizes your desires and sends you decisively down the road. That moment is the turning point.

I spent a good amount of my time in WoW raiding. I eventually wound up as the GM of a raiding guild during patch 3.1. We were previously a fairly casual guild, but a few of us wanted to try our hands at hard modes. I found the prospect intriguing, so we went into Ulduar and began knocking down four-tower Flame Leviathan, Heartbreaker, and I Choose You Steelbreaker and pushed into the Keepers of Ulduar. This was fairly late in the Ulduar cycle, so we had the best gear we could get from normal mode content. We tore through the content at a rapid More >

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement, and restoration shaman. Josh Myers once only tackled the hard questions about enhancement but has recently expanded his sphere of responsibility to all shaman DPS specs. (And no, two-handed enhancement is still never coming back.)

This is it, guys: This is officially the last Totem Talk for elemental shaman I will write before patch 4.3 hits live servers. It might be this Tuesday, or it might be the sixth of December. Whichever it is, it’s pretty definite we’ll be seeing Dragon Soul within the next 10 days, barring a natural disaster, an alien invasion, or Mike Morhaime’s changing his mind, of course. Elemental is going through a few significant changes in 4.3. Our AoE will be totally revamped; we’ll be dropping Fire Nova from our AoE rotation entirely. Instead, we’ll be falling back on spamming the now cooldown-less Chain Lightning. Also, we’ll possibly drop Earthquake, but only if we can guarantee the mobs don’t move for 10 seconds. Ground-based AoEs are still very unreliable AoE damage.

Continue reading Totem Talk: Elemental shaman in patch 4.3

All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players. In World of Warcraft, that player is you! Each week, Anne Stickney brings you All the World’s a Stage with helpful hints, tips and tricks on the art of roleplay in WoW.

When you’re roleplaying a particular class, you can either choose to ignore the class aspects of what you play, or you can fully incorporate it into your roleplay. A studious magic user or priest can be just as much fun as a sneaky, devious rogue or a dark and brooding warlock — and death knights are a little bundle of joy, as we discovered last week.

But what about the warrior class? Strong, steadfast and fiercely devoted to bashing heads in, it’s a wonder to anyone what exactly goes through a warrior’s head. Some incorrectly view them automatically as less intelligent — after all, if you deliberately go out to get your head bashed in on a regular basis, what does that really say about your level of smarts? But warriors, as simplistic as they may appear to the outside observer, can be multileveled bundles of fun to roleplay, just as much as any other class out there.

This More >