Mages come in two general flavors: the kind who love to blow things up willy-nilly, and the kind who love to blow things up based on a precise mathematical model delineating optimal throughput and efficiency. Lhivera of US Aggramar-A is the second kind. His love of theorycrafting landed him in hot water with Blizzard recently, after he posted speculative analyses of Mage performance based on leaked Wrath of the Lich King alpha information. Blizzard didn't like the discussion appearing on their forums, and Lhivera ended up perma-banned from posting there again.

But Lhivera is alive and well and still crunching numbers, both in game and over at the Elitist Jerks forums, where he's made a new home among fellow theorycrafters. 15 Minutes of Fame spent a few days in e-mails with Lhivera to bring you a closer look at the numbers behind magecrafting. This week, we talk with Lhivera about Blizzard's ban-hammer and the appeal of theorycrafting; be sure to tune in for Part II of our interview, next week.

The single most informative resource out there for Shadow Priests, shadowpriest.com, has recently undergone a makeover! They've launched a custom theme tailored to their logo's color scheme, and a few new features have come with it. In addition to the awesome new look, they've added a couple of (unobtrusive) RSS feeds to the sidebar. LightNatured (their sister site for healers) is one of them, and WoW Insider is another! That's always a good thing, eh?

I'm sure I've said it a few times since I've joined the WoW Insider team, but if you're a Shadow Priest and don't stop in at ShadowPriest.com once in awhile, you're doing yourself a disservice. Even the bleedingest of bleeding edge players have room for improvement and can learn new things once in awhile. ShadowPriest.com goes well alongside Elitist Jerks for all of your gear, strategy and theorycrafting needs. Especially with all of the discussion that will inevitably crop up when the Wrath Beta rolls around, you definitely owe it to yourself to take a look.

[ Thanks, Matt! ]

Is WoW really player friendly? Tobold doesn't seem to think so. Says he, there's a lot of things that it doesn't tell you or you can miss the first time around, such as spending talent points, and that at the end game, he constantly has to check outside sites to figure out what he needs to grind to get certain drops and recipes. WoW does things better than most other MMORPGs, he says, but it is far from perfect.

But, me, I'm not sure he has it quite right.

Scattered Shots is for hunters. 'Nuff said.

Once you reach level 62 and learn Steady Shot, it's time to start getting a firm grip on this thing hunters must learn called "shot rotation." If you don't - just casting your shots willy-nilly, as soon as they come off of cooldown -- you'll end up wasting a lot more mana and doing a lot less damage than a hunter who has his or her shot rotations timed right.

The video embedded above is a handy example of two basic shot rotations which we'll look at in more depth here, and it can give you a basic sense for how the timing of all this is supposed to work. But if it still looks a bit confusing, fear not: today's Scattered Shots will help you to make your shots less scattered and more organized, with helpful charts and fundamental knowledge about how to do this rotation thing. It really ain't that hard -- just a bit of info can get you pointed in the right direction, determining the rotation which is best for you.

Last week we discussed the fact that raw DPS is not a good indicator of the strength of a hybrid. The quality of a hybrid, or a person that plays a hybrid, will not easily be seen by looking at traditional damage and/or healing meters the same way you would for 'pure' classes.

Before I go on, I'd like to reiterate my disclaimer on this topic: Just because your class or spec is not expected to top damage meters, that does not mean you should become complacent about your DPS or Healing effectivenessity(use it, love it) in a raid. You should always strive to be a better player and find ways to improve yourself. If you think you've hit the ceiling of what you can accomplish, work harder to break through it.

In the past here on Hybrid Theory, we've discussed what Hybrids are capable of doing in a raid, as far as beneficial talents and utilities. We talked about the fact that a few well-placed hybrids in your raid can take your DPS from 'good' to 'horrifyingly good.' All of this comes to the front again in a boss that many high-end raid groups are clashing against right now: Brutallus.

If you haven't read anything on this boss yet, it's the single largest gear check in WoW yet. It's Burning Crusade's Patchwerk, mostly. To beat Brutallus, you need roughly 29,000 sustained DPS across your entire raid. If you don't pull that off, you hit his enrage timer and he destroys all of you. Simple as that! If you're lucky you can burn off a final two or three percent of his health after the enrage, but that's about as far as you go. That three percent is about 300,000 health, so don't get too confident.

If you're as excited about 2.3 as we are, you'll love this spiffy new staff from Zul'Aman.

Name: Amani Divining Staff
Type: Epic Two-hand Staff
Damage / Speed: 144-304 / 3.20 (69.9 DPS)
Abilities:

• +58 Stamina, +47 Intellect. That's hot.
• Red, Yellow, and Blue sockets-- socket bonus of +5 spell damage
• Equip: Improves spell crit rating by 31.
• Equip: +217 spell damage and healing. Very nice.
  
• And plus, it's all troll-looking. Personally, I love the look of the Zul'Aman stuff. I know everyone doesn't share my tribal tastes, but I think it's a great move by Blizzard to lighten up the look of the Outland gear a bit.

How to Get It: Ah, yes-- the tough part. First, you have to get in to Zul'Aman, and then you probably want to make sure you can clear it first. This staff actually drops from the timed event in that instance. Just like the Baron Run in Stratholme, when you first zone in, you'll have 20 minutes to kill the first boss. If you kill that boss in time, an NPC will come out with a chest, open up the chest for you, and give you your loot. The loot table for that chest includes this staff, so you have to be lucky enough to see it.

From there, things are still a little fuzzy. We know it's 20 minutes to the first boss, but after that, I haven't seen exact timer numbers (this EJ thread has a lot of good tactics for all the bosses, however). It might be twenty minutes for each boss, or it might not. Some guilds on the PTR have completed the timed quests, but there's not a lot of documentation around on the instance. Yet, that is-- pay attention to the WoW Wiki page, and I'm sure details will show up soon after Tuesday. I do know that Blizzard has it out for you-- the next boss' timer starts when you down the last boss, not when you get the loot. So the timer runs while you wait for the NPC to come out and open the chest. Awkward much?

I should mention, also, that it's not entirely clear whether this staff is part of one big loot table for the timed event chests, or whether it only drops on a certain boss' chest. At any rate, it does appear in those chests at some point, so just complete the entire timed event quest (which Blizzard claims is very, very hard), and you'll be fine!

Getting Rid of It: Disenchants to a Void Crystal, and sells to vendors for 16g 85s 85c. Which I usually say would never happen, but then again, remember that Zul'Aman, and especially those finishing the timed quests, is going to be full of bored Mount Hyjal guilds looking for new content. So there may be a few of these things disenchanted and sold off. Bummer.

With Patch 2.3 coming next week, a number of players are going to turn back to some of the old alts they've always wanted to play, and level them up now faster than ever before. If a group of friends had decided to start over from scratch, then all is well and good, but for many players who already have character spread out at different level ranges, friends used to spending a lot of time together may suddenly find themselves with a large level gap in the alts they're most interested in.

Especially considering the new and improved dungeon loot, many players will wish their friends could join them. Of course, their friends could just bring over their level 70s and rush them through, but for a certain kind of player, this is less interesting because it takes away all the real challenge and teamwork of the instance. They may be able to find PUGs at that level, but it likely won't be the same.

Douglas at the Elitist Jerks forums has been having this problem for a long time now. He and his friends very much want to play together, but have never been able to make their schedules work out. Before long, their characters inevitably level at different speeds and can no longer level up together. He says he longs for a "mentoring system" like City of Heroes has, where players of different levels can become one another's "sidekicks" and go to dungeons together as if they were at the same level. At first glance it seems like WoW could implement such a system too, to make something like a temporary downgrade or upgrade in ability power and gear quality so that friends could fight together across the level gap. But further discussion reveals some serious problems.