Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, WoW Insider's newest weekly feature column. Have a question about the story and lore of the Warcraft universe? Click the Comments link below, ask your question, and blogger/columnist Alex Ziebart will answer you in a future installment!

Let's leap right into things, and see what Tyler wants to know, shall we?

Question: If the Ashbringer is really the Light's answer to Frostmourne, then why isn't anyone trying to use it, or destroy it? Is it because that Tirion Fordring has it? If he does, in WotLK then, he needs our help to weaken the Lich King and let him use it?

Answer: Nobody is using the Ashbringer right now because nobody has the Ashbringer in its true, Light-blessed form. Last we knew, the Ashbringer was still in Highlord Mograine's hands in a Corrupted form. The latest Know Your Lore covers the events leading up to that in a little more detail. Currently, we either need to purify The Ashbringer or forge a new one to be able to use it against the Lich King.

Tuar Annwn is holding another Date Auction on the Moon Guard server in order to get a nice RP event together on the first of May (video NSFW) -- they did this last December and from what we heard, it was a rousing success (get it? "a rousing"? I kill me). Ten of their finest members will be auctioned off for dates of the winning bidder and auctionee's choosing. And this time around, both women and men will be auctioned off, so they're now equal opportunity date sellers. Although, just like last time, there's probably no guarantee whether the character you win is actually the same sex as the player you win, but those are the perils of dating online, apparently.

So whether you want a romantic dinner in Booty Bay or just someone to help you run through Shadowfang Keep, stop by the Moon Guard server on April 25th in Silvermoon City (they didn't mention a time, but the last event went down at 9 server time). And even if you don't have gold for a date, they probably won't mind too much if you just show up to say hi at their RP event, held on May 1st.

Always love to hear about this RP stuff, especially when it's fun like this -- if you have any events going down in the future that you'd like us to report on, feel free to drop us a note on the tipline, and we'll get you some attention. Good luck to Tuar Annwn with the Date Auction this weekend -- bid high!

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.

Hopefully you were just as excited as I was yesterday to see that specifics about leveling improvements have been announced, as well as about 60 brand new midlevel quests (!) in Dustwallow Marsh. And as we heard, low level dungeons are getting tweaked, too, though not in any way I would have imagined. Blizzard, it sounds like, is going to be streamlining them, changing them from (for example with Shadowfang Keep) a 18-25 level dungeon, to an 18-21.

But waitaminute-- we've already got dungeons from 18-21. Wailing Caverns and Deadmines, specifically, and moving SFK up to 21 leaves a hole before Stockades and Blackfathom Deeps. What gives?

What gives, says Bornakk, is that Blizzard is streamlining the whole experience, which means all the instances are going to be given this same tweaking. BFD, Stockades, RFK, Gnomer (ooh, interesting) are all going to be streamlined to be finished before 30, where, Bornakk says, Scarlet Monastery, RFD, and Uldaman will await characters. In essence it sounds like the clumps of leveling 1-60 are getting evened out, and that big hole around the mid 30s (where STV is your only choice) is getting filled in.

Sounds great to me. I'm especially excited about Dustwallow Marsh-- I have three or four characters languishing in their mid 30s, so new quests there will be much appreciated. And Blizzard is always watching how we play-- if new content in the 30s is as popular as I suspect it will be, maybe they can consider adding in even more midlevel content for alts and newbies.