No husky loot this week -- with a name like "the Great Apocalypse," this sword is nothing but badass.

Name: Jin'rohk, the Great Apocalypse (Wowhead, Thottbot, Wowdigger)
Type: Epic Two-hand Sword
Damage/Speed: 380-570 / 3.70 (128.4 DPS)
Abilities:

• Equip: Improves haste rating by 45, which will help a little bit with that low speed (but look at that damage range!), will bring the speed back to 3.60, which brings it up to 131.8 DPS
  
• +49 Stamina, makes this a nice PvP two-hander
• Equip: Increases attack power by 120, which also adds to attack damage. There are better high-end two handers in the game, but anyone who likes to swing a big sword should like this one.
• Plus, look at it! And that name!

How to Get It: Drops from the troll himself, Zul'jin, in Zul'Aman. Interestingly enough, Zul'jin means "Leader of voodoo" and jin means "leader," So this sword is clearly a leader, but leader of what? Rohk, in the Zandali Troll language, actually means "end of worlds," or apocalypse. So if all the apocalypses you've ever seen in movies all got together (from Deep Impact to I Am Legend), one apocalypse would be standing above them all: Jin'rohk.

But yes, the sword drops from the last boss in Zul'Aman. Droprate is about 12%, so get to him, be someone who swings a two-hand sword and needs an upgrade, win the roll, and it's all yours. Just don't hurt yourself carrying it around.

Getting Rid of It: Sells for a whopping 17g 81s 95c, and disenchants, as you might guess, into a Void Crystal. But the terrible effect that carrying the Leader of Apocalypses has on you for all time? Priceless.

We've known for a while that we've been getting a gear reset in WoTLK, and just this morning, we've discussed and speculated on how it will affect people as they transition into the 70-80 game, especially alt-o-holics. Here's some news that should strike a lot of people as good: Bornakk confirmed in a thread yesterday that we really won't be seeing quite as large a gear gap in the jump from Burning Crusade to Wrath of the Lich King as we did in the past: No more doubling of stamina values this time, guys.

This should be good news for raiders who feel like their epics don't mean that much anymore (although to be honest, I was using a few of my BWL and AQ40 drops well into my late 60s, so I don't think the gear reset was that bad after all). If the gear jump isn't that bad, your shiny new epics should still work pretty well. Heck, same goes for badge runners. I've suspected for a while that the new Badge of Justice gear was meant to be a partial preliminary gear rest ahead of time, and I'd bet this more or less confirms it: If there's not going to be as much as a jump, these Tameless Breeches might last my druid longer than one might think.

I think it's definitely a good middle road to take. We'll get a gear reset so alt-o-holics and casuals can jump right into the Howling Fjord, but the gap won't be quite as great, meaning that raiders and badge gear savers won't need to feel like they're watching months of work go down the drain when that first level 71 green drops.

For some reason on my home server, Eldre'Thalas, when folks see a tank standing around in Shattrath without anything to do, they immediately start sending tells asking if I want to go tank such-and-such an instance for them. I don't mind it when my friends or guild mates do it, but it does get a little annoying when complete strangers do it constantly.

So I've come up with a solution: spirit and intellect armor. Whenever I'm doing anything other than fighting, I'm wearing bright yellow spirit and intellect armor that I got off the AH. I spent about a hundred gold on this dastardly set. It looks awful, it smells awful, and it's a great repellent for annoying unsolicited LFG tells.

I got the idea from looking at people's gear who are apping to my guild. Some of it was just plain nuts – spirit gear on Warriors, "of stamina" gear on Priests, things like that. Of course, they might have just been logged out in that gear the same way I'm logged out in mine right now. But when you're apping to a guild and one of the requirements is to log out in PvE gear for the next week, well, too bad so sad for them.

Since patch 2.4, hunters have been having some problems. Aside from the outrage over the fact that our traps are now announced, we seem to be having issues with mana.

On the forums, hunters are not seeing much love from the non-hunter crowd, but I suppose that is to be expected. It is important to note however, that our mana efficiency is an intended attribute of our class. We are useful, not solely, but arguably primarily, because we can provide sustainable, long-term DPS. No, we don't crit like mages. In a boss fight though, we can keep going after mages short out.

Why are hunters all of a sudden having issues with mana? There are a few theories floating around, but we have yet to be graced with a blue response. Take the jump to learn more about why this might be happening.

If you want to live through any boss fight as a tank, the one thing that you need above all else is health. Stamina, which gives ten health for every one point of stamina, is by far the most important stat that a tank needs in order to do their job well. No matter if you have reached the armor and defense cap, or if you're producing more threat than your DPS can keep up with, you won't live for a lick if you don't have enough health.

Defining minimum health is an important concept in end game raiding and groups. For most instances, a minimum of 10,000 to 11,000 unbuffed is needed. This will at least let you take a few blows from a boss before dying, hopefully enough blows that the healer will be able to get off a few heals on you. For more entry level raiding environments, it's necessary to have unbuffed health between 11,000 and 12,000. If you've got 11,500 hit points going into Kara, you'll probably be able to reach 13,000 health fully raid buffed. This will let you survive a good portion of Kara, which means you can get more gear, which begets more health in the long run.

Haven't done an offhand in a while, so while this one isn't exactly at the top of the heap, it's a nice item for your newly-70 alt to pick up, and it has a fun nod to a guy who's been working hard lately. Also, have a suggestion for a piece of phat loot to cover? Share it in the comments below or drop us a note on the tipline.

Name: Hortus' Seal of Brilliance (Wowhead, Thottbot, WoWDigger)
Type: Off-hand Accessory
Armor: N/A
Abilities:

• +18 Stamina, +20 Intellect
• Increases spell damage and healing by up to 23
• The stamina on this says Warlock, but if there aren't any warlocks around, this wouldn't be a bad pickup for any damage caster (Elemental Shaman, anyone?), especially one looking to head into PvP. For most casters, odds are that even if you grab this, it'll be replaced pretty quickly with either a better offhand or a 2h weapon.
• But on the other hand, it does look cool, and it's named after one of the most beloved CMs (if you can believe that CMs can be universally beloved) on the forums, the hypno-gnome Hortus. He's the bug guy, so many times (especially when a big PTR is being tested like this), he'll be the one to show up with answers to players asking about whether something is bugged or not.
• And he's brilliant. Hence the seal.

How to Get It: It drops from the Fel Horde's Warchief, Kargath Bladefist. We've talked about him before on PLP, so suffice it to say that he's a mean SOB with blades for hands. No idea why he's carrying around Hortus' seal, but if you are able to grab it from the guy (it drops pretty often, in both normal and heroic modes) , you might want to see about getting it back to Hortus -- he'll probably need it for all the PTR testing going on.

Getting Rid of It: Sells to vendors for 2g 20s 45c, and disenchants into a Large Prismatic Shard.

A few days ago, Eliah mentioned a tragic thing in his list of Undocumented Changes in a recent PTR push: The Stamina disappeared from the new Tier 6 pieces!

There was a pretty big outcry about this, and understandably so. The Burning Crusade has made Stamina a very important stat in all areas of gameplay from PvE to PvP. You need to be able to take blows in the arenas, and almost every raid encounter has multiple sources of random damage to the raid. Stamina is a big deal, which brings us to the good news.

The Stamina has returned to the T6! Not in the amounts it had previously(unfortunately) but still a decent amount. While not ideal, it has enough Stamina that classes can actually wear these set pieces now. Previously, with no Stamina on this armor, most classes were completely unable to wear them in a raid. I know that I, personally, already have to wear PvP gear for a number of encounters because my raiding gear simply doesn't have enough Stamina on it for Black Temple and Mount Hyjal. New tier pieces with no Stamina at all would be something I could not even consider using, no matter how good the rest of the stats may be. Being one-shotted by environmental damage makes that awesome damage and mana regen a little useless.

World of Raids has discovered something hiding in the latest patch build: All the epic gem cut recipes from current 25 mans will now be available from the Shattered Sun Offensive at various reputation levels.

While no vendor has been found for them, the most likely candidate would seem be Shaani, one of the new NPCs we mentioned yesterday. In fact, I would call this even further evidence for the likelihood of epic gem transmutes from the lab set up by Mar'nah from the Razorthorn Rise daily, also mentioned in that article. Certainly, if casuals will be able to learn epic gem cuts from a daily grind reputation, it would make sense that they'd also be able to obtain epic gems to cut from somewhere other than the AH. It really does seem like Blizzard is preparing for Wrath of the Lich King with this patch, giving more and more opportunities for the casual player to catch up so they can start the expansion on a much more equal footing with the raiding player than they did for the Burning Crusade.

In other item and trade skill news from the latest build, the new goggles will now require more ingredients to make, mostly extra primals of various types.

Finally, most of the new tier 6 gear had previously been stripped of stamina, but now has it back, though in slightly smaller amounts than before. This should be good news to all those Druid Tanks who were a bit concerned about what use the gear would be for them, at the least.

Oh, and the scaling bug continues to be hilarious.

Tomorrow morning Arena Season 3 is scheduled to start up and, among other things, this will bring a lot of new loot into the game. I'm sure many of you are like myself and have been hoarding up honor and arena points in order to buy the new gear as soon as it appears on the vendors. This season, due largely to the new rating requirements placed on some of the new items, I've decided to actually put forth effort to be competitive in the arena.

With that in mind, picking up the new PvP gear becomes a priority, and I imagine other people are going to be in a similar position. Gone are the days of dying in the arena week after week in order to finally pick up that amazing weapon. Of course, for many players, there's a much more important aspect to preparing for Season 3: making money on the auction house.

I don't know about you, but when I first started playing World of Warcraft, I couldn't have told you the difference between strength and spirit. I equipped every piece of gear I found without regard for what statistics it had. Intellect for my rogue and strength for my warlock -- why, yes, that sounds almost exactly the way I must have started my adventures in the land of Azeroth. But, yes, I did learn eventually. I read my class forums a lot, took advice from fellow players, and finally figured out what all of those funny numbers meant on my gear -- and whether they were good for my class and playstyle or not. But I imagine there are some new players in the audience who haven't gotten to that phase yet -- and this is written to help them out.

Curious to see what the five base statistics -- agility, intellect, spirit, stamina, and strength -- actually mean? (Note: there are many more statistics to consider than these base five, like attack power and critical rating, but all of the other statistics are influenced by the main five -- so we'll discuss these today and the rest later this week.) Keep reading to find out all about them!

Ratherbrute sent this to us (he saw it in a signature on the forums), and I love his description of it. It's a profile of a level one twink, and Ratherbrute calls it "an existential WoW exercise." Basically someone out there, either in this profile or in the game (this character doesn't show up on the Armory, but the only character with this name shows that characters under level 10 aren't profiled on Blizzard's database), has pimped out a level one character.

It's definitely a fascinating idea, though. What's here mostly consists of enchants-- health and stamina chants on the armor give this level one paladin 453 health. For comparison, I went and rolled a level 1 myself-- an unplayed level one blood elf paladin starts with about 38 health. There's also a bit of extra damage on the weapon (untouched paladins hit for 7-10, and the twink hits for 13-17) and a little extra armor.

The Unadorned set used here is from a vendor in the Ghostlands-- it does seem to be the highest armor set available from a drop or a vendor. There is better level one armor out there (note that the armor is level 10, but level 10 is not required to wear it) from quests, but I'd imagine that actually completing any quest that pushes you past level one would defeat the purpose. Same deal with the weapon-- there are better swords around, but they're all quest swords, so it'd be tough to find something better while still remaining level one.

Of course, while Ratherbrute says this is all just existentialism, I'll still ask the central question here: just why would you want to twink a level 1? What is this pally planning on fighting, anyway?