Many guilds out there have their recruitment posts up on both the realm forums and the global recruitment forums. One of the big keys to a recruitment post is to keep it up on the top of the forums so everyone sees it, and sees it before any other posts. This means that you and your guildies have to bump the post to the top of the list, and bump it quite often.
The global recruitment forums recently underwent an upgrade, where the forums were split into Alliance and Horde factions. This has helped a bit with the number of posts per day, and has thus lessened the number of required bumps a recruitment posts needs to keep it on the front page.
Yes, it's only midnight, and already the wackiness has started. These people just couldn't wait to do something a little silly on the first day of April.
Reader Tim let us know that Baron Soosdon has quit his job at Machinima.com and stopped making machinima in general. He's said goodbye with (what else?) a Linkin Park video.
This week on Scattered Shots, David provides a break in the rushing waves of Patch 2.4 news to wax philosophical about his love of being a hunter. To be perfectly honest, he hasn't had time to even try out the new patch yet, but he's really looking forward to waxing on and off about the patch at some point as well.
They say that being a hunter is WoW on easy mode, but in reality, the "easy mode" style of hunting is only the beginning of what a hunter can do. Sadly many hunters never really arise out of that stage - easy hunting can become like a rut in which one may not even realize that there is another way to do things. A player can rise out of this rut, however, either through an enterprising nature, or through acquaintance with a good hunter role-model. However one rises to it, the opportunity is there for hunters to do all kinds of things amazing things, mostly at the same time.
In fact, you could say that a fundamental mechanic of the hunter class, probably the mechanic I love most in the entire game, is that of controlling multiple characters at once: the hunter and the pet. You have the most control over your hunter character, obviously, and the pet functions as something like a yo-yo which is attached to the hunter. You can point the pet in the direction of an enemy to attack, or you can recall it to wherever you are, but you can't tell it, for instance, to kite an enemy around in circles in the same way you yourself could.
The limitations inherent in the abilities of the hunter and the pet, as well as the synergy between them, reminds me a bit of chess. Managing both the pet and the hunter to greatest effectiveness in different situations means you have to keep more than one thing in mind at all times. When you play most other classes, you can just pay attention to them and what they're doing, but being a good hunter requires you to be more aware of what's going on around you, just like chess requires you to keep track of the whole board, not just the little portion of it where the most action is happening.
Between Arenas, V'Ming spends his time as a lock laughing ominously in AV, tanking Olm with his own minions and pondering troll fashion from Zul'Aman. He's recently started to plumb the depths of SSC with his 0/21/40 build and bragging about 8k shadow bolts.
The internet is a beautiful thing. It gives everybody a voice and an easily accessible goldmine of human ingenuity and intelligence. (It is also a repository of human scum and stupidity, but we're not going there today.) As a warlock player, there are TONS of resources out there that you can use to improve your game. Unfortunately many of these resources are scattered far and wide - and it takes a certain deftness with search engines to separate the wheat from the chaff, or simply to find what fits your playstyle.
So, for the benefit of the newly initiated and the time-challenged, I'll start and maintain this list of tried and tested Warlock tips, from the frivolous to the essential. I will not claim credit for these tips, but humbly serve as the chronicler of community content in this case, and will give due credit wherever possible. If you have pet tips that you swear by as a Warlock, please feel free to share them - and I'll add it to this list after the jump.
Lots of us purchase these nifty mice from the local computer store. Be they a fancy new Logitech mouse with a dozen keys placed strategically around the unit, or a slick new beauty from Apple, the mouse is a strategic part of your game play.
At least, it should be.
All too often people don't utilize what they have in front of them. Today we're going to look at how you can increase your game play by using your mouse more effectively. In particular, the buttons.
However before we look into buttoning strategies, lets just quickly cover moving with the mouse. It's pretty simple, right? Push both buttons down, move forward. Right click and hold to turn your character. Left click and hold to look around without moving. Mike Schramm covered this in a post about a month and a half back, and it's a pretty good read for those interested more in the topic of mouse moving.
So now that that's out of the way, let's look at basic mouse buttoning techniques. I own two Logitech MX5000 cordless optical mice. They work very well and have a battery life of a couple days; but even then I recharge them both every night just so I don't have disaster strike me in the middle of a raid when the battery goes out.
Apparently Warlocks are not the only evil class in World of Warcraft.Today on the official forums, Mages aired their dirty laundry.Gompers of Archimonde began a thread that quickly filled to capacity with some of the tricks, cheats, and jokes Mages employ for amusement and profit.Some of the highlights include*:
Shlippmack of Earthen Ring, "I pyro the lvl 1 critters to boost damage."
Tiinsi of Bloodhoof, "On wipes I ice block and let everyone else who's fleeing pull the mobs further away so I have time to invis."
Amarius of Alleria, "I sheep horde who are fighting warlocks or hunters just to give them a heal and hopefully the help they need to kill said warlock or hunter."
Reoko of Sargeras, "I confess most of my deaths are caused by me hitting the windows button** when I'm trying to press alt 2 for ice block. /facepalm"
Haruka of Shadow Council, "I once carried around multiple stacks of Scrolls of Intellect rank 1 that I would use on people in the raid who complained about not getting an int buff."
Walugiee of Zul'jin, "I sometimes break my own sheeps and blame hunter multi-shots just so the raid leader yells at them."
The thread has some real gems in it. If I ever level my Mage, I may steal some of their ideas.Do you have anything you'd like to share with the group?
* Quotes are copied directly, I take no ownership of spelling and grammatical mistakes. ** This is why there are holes where the Windows keys were on my keyboard.They were pried off about my second day of playing WoW.
Every week, we round up all the great work of our weekly columnists here at WoW Insider, and put it all in one big post for your perusal. From funnies to serious strategy, and cooking recipes to disenchanting tips, here's all the weekly columns from the last week of WoW Insider.
Well Fed Buff: Maiev's Grudge Revenge, like this dessert, is best served cold (all right, it's best served lukewarm, but the saying doesn't work as well that way).
Many players have experienced faster WoW loading times with Windows Media Player (WMP) running in the background. Some players are also reporting lower latency and higher frames per second.
This tip surfaced in the Europe forums late November and was picked up by the US forums two weeks ago. Many players are reporting shortened loading times, some by more than 50%.
I did a quick test and found that by running WMP in the background, minimized and not playing anything, the login screen popped up about 20 seconds quicker than usual. The world loading time (time between clicking Enter World button and character appearing on screen) was also faster by about 15 seconds. However I did not see any significant improvements in latency or framerate. To eliminate performance boosts due to caching or preloading, I rebooted my machine between each set of timings.
Some players have also suggested adding:
SET timingMethod "1" or SET timingMethod "2"
to the config.wtf file to achieve the same effect without running WMP. For me, this shortened the time for the login screen to appear by 20 seconds as well, but only shortened world loading time by 5 seconds. Combining WMP and the config.wtf tweak resulted in the same timings with just running WMP alone.
There's been no official Blizzard response to this yet, although a likely explanation is that WMP modifies how your computer handles background applications. With WMP open, all available CPU resources apparently become allocated to WoW, leading to better performance.
Does this quirk work for you? Do you see any improvements in framerate and latency?
Guild banks are one of the banner features of patch 2.3, along with leveling improvements and of course Zul'Aman. We all know that you can store lots of things in them, although it might cost you. People are even making single-person guilds just to get to use the guild bank for storage. Come to think of it, why can't we have account banks, where we could transfer items and gold among our alts on the same server without having to use the mail? But that's not the point of this post.
No, the point of this post is a new use of the guild bank that has nothing to do with storage: checkers! Affix, from Tichondrius-A, has discovered that the bank is good for fun as well as utility. One player is using Netherweave, the other is using Arcane Dust, and they both seem to be having a good time (check the thread for more pictures). I have to say, this is the first time I've seen somebody playing a minigame inside WoW without AddOns or anything. Drysc speculates that chess would be somewhat viable, despite the fact that there is one row too few, what with the variety of item icons that exist. Tic-tac-toe should obviously work as well, though that's a fairly trivial game to not lose. Who wants to play guild bank connect four? Can you think of any other games that could be played within the default interface?
If you're a Mage, this thread from the EU forums is definitely worth a read-- it's based on a Warlock tips thread (which I looked around for but couldn't find-- if you see it, let me know and I'll link it up for the locks) that basically ran down 100 basic and advanced tips for players of that class.
If you're a super advanced Mage, you probably already know most of this stuff. The basics are here for sure-- use Blink judiciously to move in an out of range, use Sheep to interrupt casters, and downrank utility spells in PvP. But there's some other interesting things here as well-- I play a Shaman, and my first step when fighting mages (well, right after Grounding Totem) is to Purge all those buffs off. So casting Ice Barrier during my spellcast is ingenious-- either I have to interrupt to purge, or just let the barrier eat the damage.
Especially for beginner mages, this stuff is gold. If you're in the mood for tips on how to make your mage better, check it out for sure.
Update: Here's the Warlock thread. Thanks to everyone who sent it to me. Also, apparently the Warlock thread was based on a Warrior tricks thread. Anyone seen that one?
It's time for this week's installment of Ask WoW Insider, wherein we pick a question you've sent and publish it for your fellow readers to answer. This week's question comes to us from Jacob H, who asks
Where's the first aid trainer?
Just kidding! Jacob, being a sensible and pragmatic fellow, wants to know your tips and tricks for earning the dough for that flying mount:
"What are some good ways of making money for levels 60-70 in Burning Crusade? Are there people making money from jewelcrafting yet, should I pick that up? What about good mobs to grind or drops that sell well to vendors or on the AH? Thanks in advance for any advice."
Do you have any money-making tips to share with Jacob?
Don't forget to send us your questions at ask AT wowinsider DOT com -- what do you want to know? Your peers can help!
One of the things I like about WoW is finding new, unusual ways to use old skills. For instance, I recently observed a bear druid using Feral Faerie Fire on critters. When I asked him why, he responded that it keeps him in combat, preventing rage decay. It's a very clever tactic, and one I'll be using once I get my druid high enough for it (then again, I'll probably be in cat form most of the time by then). Another classic off-schedule use is Detect Magic as a marker ("attack this mob" or whatever), though that's largely been eclipsed by raid markers. And speaking of raid markers, they're quite useful even when solo, since you can see them through walls.
What are you favorite unusual uses for skills or features?
Just a follow up to David's LFG post yesterday. My suggestion for the disappointing LFG system in place after the patch was for Blizzard to leave the system in place and also reinstate the LFG channel-- players who want to use the LFG system can then do so, and players who want to LFG the old fashioned (and messier, and more annoying, and yet more effective) way can do so as well.
Blizzard, however, disagrees. Neth says clearly that the devs are standing behind the new system, and that no matter how much players ask for it, the old LFG channel ain't coming back. In fact, she even asks that players who don't want to use the LFG system use it anyway and give feedback on how to make it better.
I'm not sure that's going to happen-- it's Blizzard's responsibility to get creative about solutions, not the players'. But in the meantime, lots of players have gotten creative anyway, and if you "/join lookingforgroup" on almost any server, you'll find a close enough approximation of what the LFG channel used to be. Until Blizzard fixes their interface and actually gets something in place that finds me the group I want doing exactly what I want, you can meet me there.
I have to admit - I find this thread in the mage forums about "stupid mage tricks" to be immensely amusing. Slow fall base-jumping? Stacking portals to different places on top of one another? So, anyone reading have any amusing, entertaining, or just plain stupid tricks of their own - for mages or other classes. After all - there's only so much instancing, raiding, PvP-ing, reputation farming, and questing you can do before needing to find entertainment wherever you can.
Many guilds out there have their recruitment posts up on both the realm forums and the global recruitment forums. One of the big keys to a recruitment post is to keep it up on the top of the forums so everyone sees it, and sees it before any other posts. This means that you and your guildies have to bump the post to the top of the list, and bump it quite often.
Lots of us purchase these nifty mice from the local computer store. Be they a fancy new 
Apparently 
Every week, we round up all the great work of our weekly columnists here at WoW Insider, and put it all in one big post for your perusal. From funnies to serious strategy, and cooking recipes to disenchanting tips, here's all the weekly columns from the last week of WoW Insider.
If you're a Mage, 
Just a follow up to 
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