On the heels of the race change being implemented, the faction change cooldown has been reduced to three days. This brings it in line with the cooldown time of the race change and server transfers (both at three days). It’s interesting to note the effect all this has: you can now more or less freely move around servers and factions without any major consequences. Three days off of raiding isn’t a big deal, however two months off if you land in a bad guild after faction transfering your main is quite an issue. There hasn’t been any blue post about this yet, but the information is present on the screens when you undertake a race change, as pictured above.

Welcome to this week’s Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that insists that tragic teleportation accident that left you with a polearm instead of an actual arm does not entitle you to a refund. Yeah, I should have known better than to start a multi-part leveling guide during a PTR cycle. Barring more huge news, we’ll come back to the leveling guide next week, but this week we need to discuss the fact that Deep Freeze is awesome. Don’t believe me? Stop reading this right now. Download the PTR client. Transfer your mage over. Spec Frost. Go find a training dummy. Use Deep Freeze on it. Giggle. Then come back here, because holy crap. Here’s how the spell works currently on the PTR: Deep Freeze: This spell now deals a large amount of damage to targets permanently immune to stuns. The base damage is 1469 to 1741. The spellpower coefficient appears to be rock solid, something in the neighborhood of 2-2.5. It doesn’t currently benefit from Ice Shards or get an increased crit chance from Shatter, but I expect both of those things to change before

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. Adam Holisky be your host today. Yesterday Alex posted a pretty picture. So I thought I’d retort with my Gimp. Now I need to go talk to Mr. Wallace… Bonc asked… “When we get cross server LFG, what will happen to VoA, for example if I dont have it on my server, can I go to another and get in there, does it go by raid leaders server?” From what we know, raids are currently not part of the cross-server LFG tool. I know there’s been some discussion about having raids be included, but so far it hasn’t materialized. Don’t expect it to either, something that you need to get multiple people back together for multiple times is exponentially more difficult than a simple 15 to 45 minute dungeon run. Dath asked… “In Cataclysm it has been announced that we can fly in Azeroth, but will be we able to fly from the Eastern Kingdoms to Kalimdor on our mounts?” Probably not. Each continent is on a

The burning question about Hallow’s Eve this year has been whether or not the Headless Horseman’s loot table would be updated for level 80. It had seemed pretty likely, since Coren Direbrew had his myriads of drops tuned for the current expansion. Boubouille answered the question, though, when he posted the newly updated items over on MMO-Champion. Of course, old Headless is still going to have three pretty key items. He’ll still drop the Magic Broom, most likely, which has always been a crowd favorite to zip around the world. You can definitely expect the Hallowed Helm and Sinister Squashling pet, since those are key to the Hallowed Be Thy Name achievement. Weighted Jack-o’-Lanterns will still be common for the same reason. Jump behind the cut to see the new stuff, though. The Ring of Ghoulish Glee is the updated attack power ring. Interestingly, it doesn’t seem to be the direct equivalent of anything in game, but is instead an item level 200 upgrade from the old Ring of Ghoulish Delight. It’s the 50 Stamina that really makes the new ring

Here’s a neat tip from Amiyuy of the WoW Ladies Livejournal group. Personally, I don’t mind the “fog” effect that sometimes pops up in game — I experienced it most recently while doing OS the other day, though it pops up on the haunted Borean Tundra coast and a few other places ingame as well. But a few people don’t get along with it too well; like the drunken blur effect, it can be somewhat overwhelming for those with a weak stomach. Fortunately, there’s a way to turn both of those off — you just have to dive into the config.wtf file in your World of Warcraft installation’s WTF folder (open it up with Notepad on Windows or TextEdit on Mac, though be careful in there, and save a copy before you do it: if you accidentally edit anything else, it could cause problems on your game), add SET ffx “0″ to the end of the file, save and close it, and then you shouldn’t see that fog effect any more. You should note that this change will also get rid of the Full Screen Glow effect, apparently, and presumably any other

Welcome to another installment of Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that dares to ask the question: how much mage is too much? Then Arcane Brilliance slaps itself in the face, because that’s a stupid question. You can never have too much mage. So, your mage is leveling nicely. You’ve wandered out of the starting area and into the wider zone beyond, done a bunch of quests, learned a rudimentary spell rotation (Frostbolt–>Fireball–>Fireball–>Fireball–>Conjure Water–>Drink) and now you’ve gone and hit level 10. This is a milestone for a number of reasons: The mage staff quest we talked about two weeks ago. You can now begin doing PvP in an actual battleground against players in your level bracket (as opposed to doing PvP against bored 12-year-olds who think it’s fun to run around the starting areas with their level 80 death knights ganking lowbies). Your first talent point! Let’s discuss the second two of these three things before we move forward. PvP as a leveling mage Patch 3.2 brought us a

The area-of-effect damage cap is something that doesn’t get talked about a whole lot. The first time I noticed it having a real effect on gameplay was in Mount Hyjal (“Hey, warlock! Wake up and throw us another Seed of Corruption!”). So what is it and what is patch 3.3 doing with it? When you hit a single mob or player with a spell, or some kind of crude inertia-based impact utensil, the game will work out how much damage that target takes. This is based on the various offensive properties of you and the spell or utensil, as well as the defensive properties of your target. The same is true for area-of-effect (or AoE) abilities, though these tend to do less damage to a single target. Add in some more targets and, while it’s still fun to do lots of damage to one of them (with the casting and the poking with sticks), you may have a chance to do damage to all of them at once. Let’s say that you can do 2500 damage to a single target with one spell or stab, but can only do 1000 damage to a single target with your AoE ability. If you have five targets that