Rated Battlegrounds will be an alternative way to gain Arena points for those who prefer large-scale PVP. Your personal rating gain for a win will vary depending on the specific Battleground. There’ll be featured Battlegrounds each week with bonus rating gain for wins. You will not lose points or rating for a Battleground loss. Arena points can be used to purchase pets, mounts, vanity items, and perhaps best of all, the old honor system PVP titles like Grand Marshal. Tol Barad will provide bonus daily quests and instances for the faction that wins the battle for the zone, somewhat like, as Brack put it, a cross between the Isle of Quel’Danas and Lake Wintergrasp. You can check out our previous IgroMir post here, or read Blizzard’s official recap on their IgroMir site. There’s lots of lore to mine there, too: Magatha is the reigning matriarch of the clan, and not only is she buddies with the Forsaken (obviously there’s been something happening with them during Wrath), but she’s rivals with Cairne Bloodhoof as well. It would definitely be

hile it’s not a direct confirmation that warlocks will be getting a new pet in Cataclysm, I think it’s safe to read into this and maybe get a bit excited about this one. I doubt they’d mention warlocks getting “new spells” in relation to getting a new demon if such an addition to the warlock class wasn’t planned. So, new demons for warlocks? Probably. My guess is that it’ll be a pet lava monster or something related to the elemental plane. Just the perfect kind of thing to pop up into the evil hands of warlocks from the sundered land in Cataclysm. With hunters, warlocks, and unholy death knights, there are a lot of talents and glyphs that affect the scaling of stats to your pet. If you allow certain stats to scale too well, you suddenly unbalance the class. If the stat scales poorly, then the class falls in the other direction. Every talent and ability that taps into these has to be checked to make sure it doesn’t throw things out of whack. Considerations on diminishing returns on certain stats scaling would also need to be

We’re all familiar with the strange case of Azjol-Nerub. Originally it was intended to be a complete underground zone that players were to level in, do quests, and so on. Then that was scrapped and we instead got two instances and an NPC who was clearly the remnant of a once far more expansive plot. It’s a shame, too, because those two instances are tantalizing hints at how vast and expansive an Azjol-Nerub zone could have been. Frankly, I found (and still find) the Nerubian architecture in those instances far superior to Naxx both in design and its surprising color palette. And when you look around Ahn-Katet and realize how vast the cavern is and how little of it is actually seen in the instance, or run Trial of the Crusader and fall into yet another astonishingly vast and underused space, I don’t see how you can not wonder why the Azjol-Nerub zone never manifested itself. Perhaps we’ll see World of Warcraft: Underground at some point. As we’re heading towards the final confrontation with the Lich King and the end of this chapter of the World of

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. Alex Ziebart will be your host today. I want to kick off this edition of The Queue by thanking you guys for submitting your armories to the reboot of Pimp My Profile. Our first edition will be hitting this upcoming Wednesday. In an ideal world, we’ll have one for you every single Wednesday after that. On to the Q&A!Yes, everything will change around you, just like what happens when they do content patches. If you were still questing in Icecrown when they patched in the Argent Tournament, those terrain changes happened no matter what. The terrain will still change, whatever quest chains Blizzard decides to redo in Cataclysm will change. You won’t magically be level 60 or 70, no. They’re not getting rid of old Azeroth, they’re revamping and rebuilding it. From a story standpoint, if you’re a level 19 questing in The Barrens when the Cataclysm happens… well, the world explodes around your level 19 butt,

WoW’s fifth anniversary and the interviews surrounding it have ended up providing us with some previously-unknown tidbits of information — which is a good thing, especially when it comes to stuff we’ve been wanting to hear about for a long time. This particular tidbit comes from the Warcry network interview with J. Allen Brack and Samwise Didier about the game’s anniversary, and it’s about a subject near and dear to our constantly-complaining hearts: new character models. They might even be coming in Cataclysm. Says Brack: “Even though things would be better with new (character) models, we’d probably spark a lot of player outrage. So we’ve talked about giving players a choice between the classic models or the new ones, but it might not be something we want to take on at the same time as we remake Azeroth.” That’s pretty big news. We’ve been wondering about the status of these old models for a long time. His language indicates that it might not be a Cataclysm feature, but we sure hope so. Troll models are a bit

There’s been some interesting chatter going on around the internet lately about mysterious in-game earthquakes happening throughout Azeroth. Seemingly at random the screen will shake back and forth for a few moments. There are no visible mobs or other occurrences that would cause this. However, these earthquakes are being reported by more and more people. We know that Deathwing is going to tear Azeroth up in a big way. Take a look at the Cataclysm trailer for how destroyed the land is going to be. Barrens ripped in half, parts of Azeroth’s climate will change, and general hell will come forth unto the plentiful lands. We also know that the world event ushering in the Cataclysm is going to be big, really big. The event itself is not in the patch files yet. It is possible that these mobs are the hidden game mechanic causing the screen to shake. And given that they appear to have been activated with patch 3.3, it does make at least some sense that they could be tied to the beginning of the Cataclysm world event. People on the PTR briefly reported seeing these mobs as

The time has come for the new release of NinthBatter’s Nobody Like You, Episode 4. This is somewhat a plot episode for Nobody, separating him from his beloved ghoul Louis and his good friend Dot. He’s been called to serve in a dubious duty by the Lich King, and it seems like he’s got no choice but to obey. While NinthBatter intended for this to be mostly a gag release, I still think the story progression is pretty interesting. I really enjoy the Nobody Like You series, because it’s light and honest fun. The machinima style and voice-acting are both perfectly suited to the characters, and I feel like Arthas, Nobody, and Dot are getting more and more fleshed out. The introduction of Kel’Thuzad and Anub’arak also holds obvious promise. Honestly, I was surprised to realize that NinthBatter is only on the fourth real episode, because I feel like the whole series has been so very firmly established.

Ah, Winter Veil — the sights, the sounds, the jingling bells from the reindeer mounts, the curses emanating from players trying to tag the Abominable Greench mob, and the massively inflated prices for Small Eggs on the auction house. While this may not rank on the level of Great Auntie Marge’s annual fruitcake for the family party, WoW has its own set of holiday traditions — some more respected than others — and all of them were out in full force over Winter Veil. Moreover, this is only the second year that the achievement system has been active for the holiday, and lots of people are still putting time in on What A Long, Strange Trip It’s Been for both mains and alts. This year, a new achievement popped up to take advantage of the 2009 Winter Veil gift (a genuine Red Rider Air Rifle!), although players seemed unenthusiastic about the rifle’s inaccuracy and cast time. So how did the holiday go for you? Did you finish the Merrymaker meta if you still needed it? Were you suicidally foolish enough to go for BB King? Did you shoot your eye out,

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. Welcome to the 2009 healing awards where we look back on some of the craziest healing encounters introduced in Wrath of the Lich King. Which fights frustrated healers the most? Which ones involved a ridiculous amount of healing? Which boss went directly against our role as healers? The judging panel should have consisted entirely of gnomes, but Wilfred Fizzlebang was unable to make it at the last minute and I was asked to step in at the last minute to help finalize the results. Most tank heals spammed Patchwerk (Naxxramas) An early test for raiding healers, Patchwerk was a measure of pure healer throughput and mitigation. There were no gimmicks. There were no tricks. No fires to avoid, no special abilities to watch for, and no mobs to run away from. It was all pure healing. Your raid group lived and died by the ability of the healers to keep your tanks alive. And