Last night I posted why I feel that the PvE game has been, is, and always will be the real game in WoW. One of the interesting inferences that people made was that I don't like PvP, and that I don't do it. Nothing is further from the truth. It was interesting to read the number of comments on that article, and I think it might surprise some folks that save for this introduction paragraph and a few edits I made, this article was written before I wrote my PvE piece.

So, why do I PvP? What attracts me to the PvP game, and why is it a worthwhile thing to do in WoW? There are three primary reasons that PvP is a game worth playing. First, it provides a critical and necessary change of pace from the PvE game. Secondly, it gives those with limited play time an opportunity to enjoy the game and succeed at what they do. Finally, PvP is beginning to turn into a legitimate eSport, and provides some good entertainment there in. Let's look at each of these reasons individually.

Lariana on Skywall has words of praise for "Heroic Countenance," a new NPC spell in patch 2.4 that unlocks you to the Heroic mode of MrT -- to get it cast on you, you have to complete the instance on Normal mode first by doing a quest to kill of Kael'thas once and for all. Basically, it replaces the Heroic reputation keys, which Lariana says were a much less interesting system than Heroic Countenance.

And Bornakk basically confirms that Blizzard agrees (well, all he says is that they'll talk about it on the next Blizzcast, but he adds a smiley, so odds are that Blizzard is down with the Heroic Countenance). They've been talking for a while, too, about making the reputation grind easier for alts and guilds, so maybe this type of spell is how they'll deal with that -- get it cast on one of your characters, and it will be cast on all of them.

The only question, then, is what to do with all those Heroic keys that we've picked up. The answer is probably nothing -- Blizzard doesn't really care, it seems, about updating old content, and my guess is that the instances in Outland won't be changing much from their current form. But in Wrath, it might be fun if the keys stayed, but opened up other, less consequential content. Instead of Heroic mode, what if a Revered rep key opened up the way to an additional optional boss, or an additional loot area per run? Not enough to make it necessary, but enough to reward those who went all the way with the reputation factions in the game.

Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Kara or BT, everyone can get in on the action and down them some bosses. This week, a bear talks about... bears.

Since the introduction of Zul'Aman many raiding guilds have been fascinated by the time trial; defeat all four animal bosses within 45 minutes and the last prisoner will gift you with a scary-looking bear mount, plus the adoration of your entire server. This article will take you through preparing for, and succeeding at, the Zul'Aman timed run.

Okay, so you want to get a bear.

Perhaps there are ten people in your guild who, bored with farming or wiping, want a slightly different challenge to take up an evening or two a week. The end goal of getting a bear mount (or ten) is an incredibly fun one to aim for, but it's also a lot of hard work (provided you don't just want to pay 20,000 gold).

The first stage in collecting your very own bear cavalry is to assemble a good team. While you can put together a run with whichever guildies feel like going from week to week, we recommend at least starting with a fixed group that's optimised for success. As you become experienced at running the gauntlet, it won't matter quite as much if the team isn't static.

Based on my experiences, and a slew of other folks posting over at the Blizzard Customer Service Forums, it appears many Tier 6 instances are having issues with stability tonight. Half the raid or more is constantly disconnecting at seemingly random points.

Several CMs GMs are looking into the issue – but it is wide spread. This means that it is almost assuredly an issue with the Blizzard servers. Based on testing I've done it is not an issue with addons. After a disconnect, all addons were turned off, and the disconnects still happened.

Stay tuned to HKO Insider for the latest. Hopefully they'll hotfix this one right up.

Updated 11:00 p.m. EDT: Belfaire posted "We're gathering the appropriate info now. I have no ETA on a resolution, only that it'll be [fixed] ASAP." (April Fool's text removed for readability.)

Updated 12:44 a.m. EDT: Belfaire also let us know that Q.A. is working on the problem, though no fix has been announced yet. Seems they are at work on it.

Updated 1:00 a.m. EDT: Potential solution from Belfaire: "Please have your entire raid delete or rename your Interface folder and let me know here if you encounter the issue again. [One] group said that they ran without mods, but if what I think's happening is actually happening, even if one person has [an addon], it can affect the raid."

Running 5 man instances is the bread and butter of gearing up any PvE character. There are some short instances, and some longer ones. There are some bosses that are ready for fun, and others that like to die fast. Many people consider it a universal truth that all you need to do these instances is solid crowd control. When you're faced with a pack of six or seven level 70 elite mobs, the last thing you want is one or two of them running loose.

But what can you do if you don't have any CC available? Are you just out of luck? Nope! There are a few tricks to running instances without CC, and if you pay close attention, you won't miss the lack of sheeps at all.

In fact, you might just start preferring to run without crowd control entirely.

If you were expecting to trash around in the Sunwell Plateau this weekend, think again. According to a Daelo post, Blizzard has taken the instance offline for the next couple of days.

While I can understand the Blizzard dev's taking the realm offline here or there, and taking down an instance for an extended period of time during the week, it does strike me as odd that they would choose to remove access during the weekend – a prime playing time for a lot of folks. And I know that I and many of my friends only raid weeknights, so we have ample opportunity to test out the content on the weekends.

Nonetheless, we can all look forward to reentering the Sunwell on Monday. If this changes, expect to see an update on WoW Insider.

Each week Arcane Brilliance endeavors to deliver a brief glimpse into the flame and sheep-filled (and sometimes flaming sheep-filled) world of Mages. Today we focus on the younger students of sorcery, those of us still growing into our robes and pointy-hats, because we here at Arcane Brilliance hold firmly to the motto that even the tiniest ball of flame is important, and still a freaking ball of flame.

So for some reason, be it temporary insanity, an unhealthy obsession with dresses, or just an irrepressible urge to be completely awesome, you've rolled Mage.

You've fried a few raptors, frozen a couple of furbolgs, completed a few quests, and probably died horribly at the hands of a Rogue or two, or maybe after stubbing your toe on a rock, I don't know, Mages don't get a lot of hit points. You're ready to step beyond the first zone and out into the wide world beyond. You hike up your robes so you don't trip over them and cross the bridge into The Barrens, where you discover that there are a lot of other people doing quests, and killing raptors, and asking inane questions like "where i find mankrik wife?" and "wat is stolen silver at?" and "Who would win if Chuck Norris fought Santa?"

Frankly, I think the answer to that last one is "nobody." If those two fight, we all lose.

After some low-grade emotional scarring your psyche will never truly recover from, you'll learn to tune most of it out. Once your mind learns to filter the madness that flows through that chat channel, you'll see that certain questions are not inane, and may actually be important. Most of these will be variations of the same thing: "Looking for group, Wailing Caverns."

Following some brief negotiation, you may find your new Mage in a party of five, deep within an instanced dungeon, losing loot rolls to a Warlock. You will level at high speeds, and find gear in a hue that is decidedly bluer than you may be used to.

After the jump: I'll spotlight two low level instances that are perfect for Mages, the best caster loot that drops therein, and the bosses you need to hunt down to get it.

Recently we created guides to help WoW Rookies understand how instances work and their role in them. Author Palintheist over on Livejournal has done the same with a funny, informative guide to running instances for players new to World of Warcraft. Some highlights:

"Mob: No need to ask the Godfather for forgiveness - a mob is a word for monster. Also known as creep."

"Healer: Who's keeping the tank from floor-hugging? Your powerful, puissant, never-to-be-offended healer. Seriously. Several classes can play this role and they all find it pretty much a thankless task, as people are very quick to blame healers when people die [but you won't, because you know better!]."

"Pat: Don't look around for someone androgynous - someone is warning you that a patrolling mob is coming closer and will probably [if it hasn't already] attack you. "

"Buff: Keep your clothes on. Really. "

"Inc: If there's no time to type "pat" or "adds", sometimes you'll see "inc", for "incoming". [Why is inc faster than pat? No idea.]"

Go take a look, it's not just written with its tongue in its cheek, it's actually pretty informative for new players to the game. Save time the next newbie run and just send them the URL.

Ixus sent us a question about hiring mercenaries in World of Warcraft: he's a level 20 Warlock who paid a level 57 a whopping 1g to run him through Deadmines since he couldn't find a group for it. We have mentioned this topic before, but it's usually in posts about beggars, and I don't know if we've actually considered what could be a cottage industry: actually setting rates and hiring out higher levels to complete various tasks for lowbies.

Is this an OK thing to do. I'll admit that I've run lowbies through instances before, but never for gold -- usually it's a friend of mine who just wants some extra gear from a certain instance. And I've been offered gold for an instance run, but I've never accepted it, and I'm not even sure what I would charge to actually run someone through an instance (I'd probably have pretty high terms: 5-10g and a portion of the drops, depending on what class was going through).

Have you? Do you think this is the kind of thing that's legit (and if so, should Blizzard maybe even implement a "looking for mercenaries" channel for lowbies to find their benefactors?), or should lowbies all go find their own groups like you had to and stop pestering you to run them through Wailing Caverns for their pittance?

I like Nikol's writeup of her experiences marking targets in instances. There really is an art to laying down those icons in a group, and it requires quite a bit of knowledge to do right. You need to keep group makeup in mind, know the abilities of all the classes involved, pay attention to what individual members want to do and even how they're specced, and have a basic knowledge of the instance and how it works. There's so much that goes into it that it's basically an art in itself -- do you sheep the caster and take out the minions, or focus on the big bad first and then move on to trash? Do you have the group to interrupt and pull a caster to a trap, or do you need to get the mobs out of the way before the patrol comes through?

It's complicated and fascinating stuff, and this kind of group coordination is why some players choose to play PvE rather than PvP -- because while yes, the mobs are predictable (and players aren't; as much, anyway), the fun is in the planning. And when you get a good group to go with a good planner, then things really get interesting. There is an art to laying down marks, but once you study what a good marker does, and get the hang of it, you're that much more helpful to any groups you're in.

Attunement is one of those subjects that divides WoW players. You either think people should have to work to get into high-end dungeons, or you think they should be open to anyone with the guts to try. Of course, you're more likely to fall into the first camp if you yourself had to do that work, hence the recent controversy over the attunements for the Black Temple and Mount Hyjal being removed.

Well, it turns out that if WoW lead developer Jeff "Tigole" Kaplan had his way, attunement would be much less of a pain. He dropped the following information in a thread on "Attunement and Alts" in the general forums today:

• They would like to make it so getting a Karazhan key or a heroic key gave all your other max-level alts access as well.
• They're looking into guild and raid attunements, but "no promises."
• They're interested in doing server events to open up content, like the AQ war but, Tigole says, with more fun dailies and fewer boring collection grinds.

Overall, he says the topic of attunement comes up often at Blizz HQ, and they want to do better moving forward and going into Wrath.

All right, let's put this issue to rest once and for all. Seems like every time Blizzard releases a new patch, we get someone saying "you're killing the lore!" on the forums, and complaining that Blizzard is killing off all the figures we know and love around the Warcraft universe. And apparently patch 2.4 is going to be no different.

So let's have the final word on this right now: Blizzard has tons of people to kill off, and even if they started running out of people, they've created enough heroes since WoW started (an all-Saurfang instance, anyone?) that they'd be fine on lore for at least the next decade of expansion. There. Now when it is discovered (and it hasn't been discovered as of this writing yet) that we're killing Arthas off in the next expansion, no one needs to raise a fit. Besides, I kind of like that Blizzard is starting to put out some hits on heroes we know and love. I'd rather mix it up with famous Warcraft faces than kick around some nobodies just so the almightly Lore gets protected.

But I do have to agree with Vorith's other point: it might be kind of nice to do something with these NPCs besides kill them. I think he forgets that Maiev played a nice role in the Illidan fight, and that we've already been told we're going to interact with Arthas a lot outside of the actual raid, but yeah, the raid boss killing us might make for a nice change.

Friday afternoon, Blizzard employee Bornakk posted a poll on the General boards to find our favorite 5-man dungeon of the Burning Crusade. As you can see in the above image, the Caverns of Time is rocking the charts.

I can't say I disagree with the numbers there, they're pretty close to my opinions as well. Old Hillsbrad and the Black Morass offer something that most of the other instances don't: Fast pacing, minimal trash pulls, and a story element. The instances aren't very long, either. Black Morass is what, thirty minutes? These dungeons on Heroic remain difficult and dangerous, adding some new elements to the instance, such as a necessity for speed and stealth when it comes to the patrols in Old Hillsbrad. Some of the other Heroics do this as well, but most of them coast along on 'ow this mob hurts a lot'.

Nibuca from Mystic Chicanery gets credit for coining this one, but I don't disagree: Lurting is bad-- don't do it.

Lurting, as you can see in the video above, is a made-up term for looting during battle. Sometimes, we can't help it (yes, I'm a sometime lurter, too, I'm sorry to say)-- the thrill of seeing shiny sparkles on a foe is just too much. But while it seems like it won't matter, odds are that that's when things will go wrong-- looting not only distracts you from the fighting, but also can cause exactly what happens in this video. If a loot window pops up while you're trying to keep the main tank healed. And it's a distraction that could cost the whole group.

In short, no looting during combat: no lurting allowed. That loot ain't going anywhere, and it's got your name all over it. Wait until all the sheeps are dead, and all the targets are down, and then right click away and claim your goodies.

I don't know about you, but my guild tends to run its raids and instances during "prime time" server hours, from around 8PM to midnight. But then there are a dedicated group of night owls who stay up for the "late night" instance run after any officially scheduled runs, sneaking in one last instance somewhere between 1 and 2 in the morning. (And I have to say, sometimes these casual groups, filled with players half-asleep or perhaps a bit tipsy, are sometimes the most fun to be in.) So this morning I ask you: when's your instance hour? What time of day do you always manage to get your circle of friends online and hitting up the instances you all need?