WoW Rookie is brought to our readers to help our newest players get acclimated to the game. Make sure you send a note to WoW Insider if you have suggestions for what new players need to know.

Having the right weapon can make a world of difference in a players leveling experience. Last time on WoW Rookie, we looked at the types of weapons that each class can use and where to train the skill for them. Now just because you can use a weapon, doesn't mean you should. This week we'll examine what to look for in a weapon.

It's pretty important to keep your hands full. You have a four weapon slots at the bottom of your character sheet: Main Hand, Off Hand, Ranged, and Ammunition. Two handed weapons take up both the main hand and off hand slots. The off hand may hold a weapon if your class can dual weild, a shield, or an off hand item that either adds to your attributes or looks cool (such as Bouquet of Red Roses or a Dark Iron Tankard.) I recommend something useful when adventuring, though it's fun to see what folks come up with when roaming the city.

Susana of Hyjal speculates about something I've thought about a few times before -- just what exactly are Blizzard's internal development tools like? Most games that have mapmakers can churn out new maps pretty rapidly, but we've had the same BG maps for years now, and only one or two per year since then. And even the created maps aren't fixed easily, apparently -- a few map tweaks on WSG would probably fix the turtling problem, but Blizzard instead is tweaking the rules to fix things. Just what is Blizzard using to make their game that they take so long with development?

To be fair, the rules here are a little more complicated than most first-person shooters (since you can do a lot more than just shoot at each other), so obviously the maps would presumably be a little more complicated as well. But in the age when players have access to the Neverwinter Nights toolset and even the Forge on Halo 3, surely it's a little crazy that Blizzard takes months to release one map, when other great games can pump out whole packs of them in the same time.

Now, this is WoW Insider, so it's ok if you're a Blizzard apologist. It's fine for you to say "Blizzard has the biggest game in the world not despite the fact that they're so slow, but because of it," and it's fine for you to be a fanboy/girl and say you'd rather wait three years for a Blizzard-quality Arathi Basin than play a whole "Hidden Fronts" pack. And the truth is that when Blizzard does release content, they don't disappoint. But we're still left wondering just why, after doing this for so long and having so much practice at it, it still takes them so long to do it.

Using my Quel I raided happily until Burning Crusade came out. Being such a stickler, I used it for tanking all the way to 70, and only replaced it with Grom'tor's Charge. To this day its still sitting in my bank. I've recently taken it out and gave it some use in the early trash in The Eye. I found that its actually not that bad of a weapon still. Granted it doesn't proc as often as it used to, and its stats are not that great compared to Mallet of the Tides. Happily however, it still kept the threat up against all those over zealous DPS'ers.

Having all that fun with my Quel again got me thinking... is there any chance for an upgrade? There have been rumors that there will be an upgrade quest, but nothing substantive yet from the mouth of Blizzard. Until someone in Blue posts on the official forums and makes all of us warriors happy, for the time being we'll have to just get along with dreaming for an upgrade quest. And maybe, just maybe, someone from Blizzard will see this and decide that Wrath of the Lich King needs another feature.

Do you have other cherished items that you dream about Blizzard updating?

There's yet more Patch 2.3 news, this time for people who have been having problems with sound ever since the sound upgrades in 2.2. As Cicero noted from his experience on the test realms, "all my sound problems were gone. I can hear myself cast again, no more clipped sounds..."

Those of you who have been suffering unduly may wish to go to the test realms and try it out. I haven't been able to do so myself due to some computer limitations, but I wonder if our readers who have visited the test realms can comment on any differences they can hear.

Are things really as good as Cicero says?

A query on the forums for what the longest questline in the game might be brings up this amazing page over on WoW Wiki-- a great collection of "long, exceptional, or hidden questlines" in the World of Warcraft. We've covered pretty much all of these quests before (including this cool compendium of quests you've got to do if you haven't done yet at 70), but this is a great and well-written guide to (mostly) higher level quests that have to be done to be believed.

As for the actual longest questline, it appears to be the "Fallen Hero of the Horde" line (that Alliance can do as well)-- it starts around level 50, and rolls all the way around the world and up to level 60. But I actually agree with some of the other posters in that thread-- while Fallen Hero is actually a great quest, the longest, most annoying questline in the game is probably the Dungeon Set 2 quests (also known as the Tier 0.5) armor. Back in the days of 60, Blizzard wanted to give players a way to obtain Epic armor without raiding, so they invented a long, grueling questline (with multiple branching paths) that would let you upgrade your first set (Tier 0) armor, piece by piece, into an Epic, eight piece set. I never made it any farther than the bracers, although I know for a fact that lots of folks got the whole thing done (and this was after completing the eight piece Tier 0 set in the first place). As long as the Fallen Hero questline is, I believe the Tier 0.5 questline wins, if only because it seems so much longer.

Leveling up my draenei hunter, I used to keep looking for the next upgraded item I'd be able to use. My most exciting upgrading moment so far came when I reached level 40 and got to put on a full mail set I had bought and put away in the bank just for that moment.

Somehow, though, I wasn't able to find many upgrades in my forties, and now starting on my fifties, some of that armor I had saved in the bank is still the best I can find, on the auction or in quests. The surprising thing is that leveling still isn't that hard! Of course maybe it's just because I'm a hunter, and hunters can even level naked if they want to.

Still, it makes me wonder just how often we need to try and upgrade our armor leveling up. Is it totally different for the various classes? For example, can a hunter get by with sub-par gear for a long time, while a priest or warrior never could? If you're trying to level a very gear dependent class and just can't seem to find good upgrades, how do you manage?

Rejoice! Now we North American types can also upgrade and download the Burning Crusade! I was heading over to www.worldofwarcraft.com just now and was hit with the following message:

• You can now buy account upgrade keys and download the game client for World of Warcraft: The Burning Crusade directly through the account management section of www.worldofwarcraft.com. With this new direct online upgrade method, you don't even need to leave your desk if you decide to upgrade to The Burning Crusade and join more than two million players who are already adventuring beyond the Dark Portal.

Pretty sweet, eh? Head over to the account management page to get your upgrade on.

I was chatting with Elizabeth Harper about why they might choose to offer direct download now, and not at launch. Here's what I came up with:

• Offering direct download at launch might irritate retailers.
• Offering it now might get a few people to buy who weren't motivated enough to go out to the store.
• It probably costs them relatively little to do this.

What do you guys think? Was it a sensible business move to wait until now for this? And how many of you are going to buy, now that you can do it without moving more than five or six muscles?

[thanks also to Doug for tipping us off]

Back in October, Mike Schramm let us know what the Burning Crusade system requirements were going to be. Now that we're in the holiday season and the expansion is a matter of weeks away, do you plan on making any upgrades in order to get the most out of the Outlands?

I've been playing WoW on a number of systems since beta. I started on a 12" PowerBook G4, then swapped to a 1GHz Duron desktop, then to a 15" PowerBook G4, then a 20" iMac G5, and now I play on both the iMac and a recently-purchased Core 2 Duo system with an ATI x1900. Through all of those systems, the two most important factors I've found in playing WoW are system memory and the video card.

For memory it seems that 2 gigabytes seems to be the sweet spot for playing WoW on OS X, Windows XP, and Windows Vista. With only a single gigabyte, all of my systems have seemed to chug a little, relying on caching to keep everything going. If you play with Teamspeak or Ventrilo, or have iTunes running in the background, you're definitely going to want 2 gigs of ram.

With the video card situation, it's all about where you can move the sliders in your Video Options. On my iMac, I play with the default settings except that I've turned the viewing distance down to minimum, and that's with the 128mb ATI 9600 pro that comes in the system. With the PC, everything is cranked to maximum on the 256mb ATI AIW x1900. I've played around on different systems, from the AMD Athlons through the Core 2 Duo chips, and it seems like WoW's not really a system resource hog in terms of processing power.

So, what system did you start playing WoW on, way back in 2004? What do you see yourself playing WoW on in 2007? Is the expansion inspiring you to upgrade or change your system at all, or will you stick with what you've had all along?

Do you play on one of the following realms? Azjol-Nerub, Bloodscalp, Bonechewer, Boulderfist, Bronzebeard, Crushridge, Daggerspine, Darkspear, Draenor, Dragonblight, Dragonmaw, Dunemaul, Eldre'Thalas, Feathermoon, Firetree, Frostmane, Gurubashi, Nathrezim, Perenolde, Scarlet Crusade, Shadow Council, Shadowsong, Silvermoon, Skywall, Smolderthorn, Spirestone, Stonemaul, Stormscale, Suramar, Terenas, Uldum, or Windrunner. Well, if so, I feel sorry for you, because your so-called Tuesday maintenance will be stretched out until 12:01 AM PDT Wednesday morning. They're down for hardware upgrades to -- hopefully -- improve server stability, but such extended downtime isn't exactly fun for those looking forward to logging on and playing Tuesday afternoon. As an additional downer, friend and ignore lists will be lost for those on effected realms, and paid character transfers will be offline for the duration of the maintenance period.

After much waiting, the time has finally arrived. Patch 1.12 will be deployed on US realms during Tuesday's maintenance (and presumably on EU realms during Wednesday's maintenance). The maintenance has been extended by two hours to give time to apply the patch, so it should start at 3:00 AM PDT and end at the usual 11:00 AM PDT. However, in addition to the extended maintenance required for patch 1.12, a number of realms will be coming down tonight at 11:00 PM PDT for hardware upgrades - to come back online with the rest of the servers when maintenance ends on Tuesday. Servers coming down early for upgrades include the following: Aggramar, Argent Dawn, Arthas, Azgalor, Bleeding Hollow, Bloodhoof, Burning Blade, Burning Legion, Durotan, Earthen Ring, Elune, Eonar, Eredar, Gilneas, Gorefiend, Kargath, Laughing Skull, Lightning's Blade, Llane, Lothar, Magtheridon, Malygos, Mannoroth, Medivh, Shadow Moon, Shattered Hand, Skullcrusher, Stormrage, Thunderhorn, Thunderlord, Warsong, and Zul'jin.

Update: Further proof that this is, in fact, a roll out of patch 1.12 is the fact that the public test realms have been closed.

CM Thundgot has announced plans to retrofit all existing realms with new hardware over the next month - in preparation for the expansion's release. These upgrades should result in an immediate performance improvement - however, the realms involved can expect additional downtime periods in which to perform these upgrades. The realms needing upgrades have been divided into three groups, and will be receiving upgrades group at a time (with specific dates and times to be announced).

You know the hardware upgrades mentioned on Thursday? Well, some of them are already becoming reality. Three US realms will be brought down at 4:00 AM PDT for a scant two hours in order to install short-term hardware upgrades. There's no detail on what exactly is being upgraded, or what precisely the upgrades are expected to accomplish - though all must hope for overall performance improvements.

The lucky (or unlucky?) realms in question are Arthas, Bloodhoof, and Stormrage. The response to this upgrade seems mixed - many with the opinion that it's too little too late, and many more complaining that their servers need upgrades more urgently. However, what performance improvements even these servers will gain is still left to see.