So one of the most exciting announcements from the recent flurry of news about WoTLK, at least from my point of view, is the that there will be 10-man and 25-man versions of every raid. Think about that for a moment. Yeah, that's right. That means that you and 9 other friends will be able to scale the heights of Icecrown Glacier and topple Arthas himself from his frigid throne.

This has more than a few people worried.

Back in March, Mike Schramm reported on a player who paid 20,000 gold to ensure that she would receive the Amani War Bear from the Zul'Aman raid instance. It is not entirely uncommon for players to run their guildmates' alts though low level dungeons for fun or profit or purchasing raid runs or arena points. Any of these may be considered cheating by some players, some more obviously than others. Angona of Hellscream (obviously an alt) had the opportunity to purchase Black Temple gear, though her guild is currently running Serpentshine Cavern, Tempest Keep, and Mount Hyjal.

Her guild leader disapproves of this transaction. Angona quoted him as stating "Only lazy noobs buy gear, that's not what this guild is about. If you want to buy gear, then I suggest you just /gquit right now." This attitude suggests that players should earn their gear, even if a gear upgrade would be good for the guild's raiding efforts overall.

Players who like leveling alts - or alt-o-holics - may find leveling in the first few levels of the WotLK expansion difficult.

With the accessibility of epics from badges and Arenas, the average level 70 character is now a far cry from a freshly-minted 70. The gear bar has certainly been raised among level 70s, compared to pre-BC 60s. This has led some to proclaim that "epics are the new blue."

Despite the proliferation of "welfare epics", there are still level 70 characters who are in their leveling blues and greens. They typically belong to alt-o-holics or really casual players who simply do not invest enough time to gear them up in pace with the general populace.

Some alt-o-holics even put their characters, mains or otherwise, into cold storage as soon as they ding 70 and move on to leveling a new alt. No Arenas, no heroics and certainly no raids for them. There's nothing wrong with avoiding the "endgame" really, but the gear level of their toons will be unavoidably lower than someone who chooses to focus on just one or two characters. Of course, there are alt-o-holics who do a good job of gearing up multiple 70s; if you're one of them, more power to you.

If Blizzard tunes the difficulty of the inital WotLK game to the "average" 70 with epics, will undergeared 70s and alt-o-holics be left in the dust?

Hotlunch of Thunderlord has a bit of a problem - It seems she was out on the prowl recently, and found herself an AFK Warlock. However, despite the fact that she jumped out of hiding and wailed away at the poor Warlock, the Warlock's faithful Felguard came to his aid and killed her first.

To Hotlunch's credit, she didn't immediately chalk up the blame to overpowered Warlocks but, probably rightly, to her gear. It's pretty true that poorly geared Rogues aren't much trouble to your well geared Warlock. As long as you have the hp and armor to last through their barrage of stuns to get off a fear and trinket out of Crippling Poison, then kite them around while they burn through Cloak of Shadows and Cheat Death, they're pretty easy. It's when you get the well geared rogues with tons of armor penetration and resilience that you start feeling the sting of those blades.

Of course, some people in the thread rightfully pointed out that she should start looking at Opportunist's Battlegear for a quick leg up on PvP gear - it seems like her situation is exactly what it was implemented to help out with, and might have helped out a bit with the Felguard. Good luck to Hotlunch on getting geared up. With a little more preparation, I'm sure the next AFK Warlock won't be so lucky.

But thinking about the situation, I think it's also a good counter to those people who get caught in complaining about "welfare epics" and all that.

Drysc posted yesterday to tell us a bit about what will be forthcoming when Season 4 hits the servers. It's honestly mostly stuff we knew already. Season 4 will not begin immediately upon the release of 2.4. Season 1 will go the way of the old level 70 honor gear and disappear from vendors, Season 2 will be gained via honor, and season 3 will go down in price, while still keeping the personal rating requirement to purchase the shoulders and weapon. However, the surprising little tidbit is how little they currently plan to change the requirement. Drysc quoted a requirement of 1950 for the shoulders and 1800 for the weapon. That's a total drop of only 50 points for each item. Of course, he also stressed that this information was not final, and neither the final requirement drop on season 3 nor the start date of Season 4 had been announced yet.

There is some concern from some comers that that drop is possibly a bit too low. Drysc responded to one player's voicing of those concerns with a somewhat cryptic reply that he thought they were making a few too many assumptions. I'm not quite sure what he could mean by this. I myself can't imagine a team that would climb to 1800 rating and simply satisfy themselves with season 3 weapons when they could make one last push to season 4 rating, so to me, the confusion is justified. Perhaps Drysc is hinting at a mechanics change in the way arena rating is calculated, or the fact that his numbers could easily change themselves? Perhaps he simply means that Blizzard is actively trying to shake the "welfare epics" stigma, and that people shouldn't assume they're entitled to low requirement ratings on the season 3 gear. I'd tend to lean towards that last one myself.

What do you think? Are these numbers too high? Are you expecting Blizzard to change them? Or do you applaud this as a step away from making Arena gear a welfare system for those who can't or won't raid or save badges?

My favorite part of the Public Test Realm is pre-made characters and gear vendors. Not because it's "free epics" or anything like that, not because it's particularly anything out of my reach, but because I get a fun little preview of what my characters may look like down the road.

I'm very picky when it comes to style. I adore the style of Warcraft, but other games(and even some cartoons and movies) have turned me off from them by not having an art style that grabs my attention right away. So that being said, I'll admit that even in the highest points of the Black Temple, my upgrade choices are sometimes dictated by what looks the coolest. If the ugly items are a massive upgrade for me, I'll just put them at the end of my list and hold off from looking like a freak as long as possible.

Being able to toss on full Tier 6 the last time they did pre-mades on the Public Test Realm wasn't about being super powered for a week or two for me. It was a glimpse into the future. How cool will I look a few months down the road? What if I'm going to be wearing a clown suit!? That'd be horrible! Let's log onto the PTR and find out!

Sure sure, you can always use the dressing room feature on the live servers, but nothing is quite the same as actually putting it on and running around in it. I spent a little time on the Arena Tournament PTR doing this with clones of my lower level alts, but I was disappointed to heart all of the PvE content, including mobs out in the world, have been deactivated. How am I supposed to look awesome without level 1 boars to slaughter?

Retribution Paladins and "Classic" hybrids rejoice. Even in the midst of all these recent nerfs, Blizzard is working on a few buffs. The latest news from the PTR via MMO Champion is that we can expect to see a few tweaks to Relics and Retribution Gear alike, mostly on the good side. Various pieces of Retribution Paladin focused gear, mostly from the heroic dungeon level, has had its spell damage removed and replaced with strength. Not great news for Shockadins, perhaps, but good for Retribution Paladins, whose talents and skills have been moved more to the side of shedding all spell damage for quite some time.

Druids, Shamans, and Paladins can rejoice at seeing a lot of their Idols gets a boost, with various stats and effects on them being boosted, sometimes by as much as twice their old values.

There's also a somewhat interesting, but probably ultimately minor tweak coming to arena and honor weapons, as all three levels of Feral Druid and spellcaster PvP weapons have seen their attack speed reduced by 1 to 1.60 seconds. You'll rarely see any of those classes using those weapons to melee anyone to death, so it seems a bit superfluous, but perhaps it was done for consistency with the recent Vengeful Gladiator's Waraxe change.

There will probably be a few more changes when the server comes back up, of course, and we'll be here to deliver you the news on them, so stay tuned.

With the first bit of season 4 gear showing up in data mining sessions of the 2.4 patch, there's been some speculation that the season itself might be approaching. However, many people have argued that even if they do implement the gear, season 3 hasn't been around near long enough for it to be time for season 4. Drysc would seem to beg to differ. In a thread on the general forums asking about the start of season 4, Drysc chimed in to say that seasons will tend to match PvE progression, with upgraded PvP sets to match. He said that with the Sunwell Plateau coming out, more PvP gear and a new season were an inevitability. He also mentioned that there's no set length to arena seasons, and that there's also the possibility of a new season with no new gear.

The idea of new gear for a new tier would make some sense and be in line with previous season debuts. After all, Season 2 coincided very closely with the release of the Black Temple, although there were a few extra weeks between the two, apparently mostly to give people advance warning to finish the race to Gladiator and try to assure the acquisition of a Netherdrake mount.

Of course, he didn't say officially or exactly what was going on, but the implication seems to be that with a new tier of progression in the form of the Sunwell Plateau, we should expect a new PvP season as well. It's not a given, but if you're a gambling type... you might consider saving some of those arena points for the patch.

What does it take to get epic gear? Well you can do arenas or battlegrounds and save up points for gear. It takes a few weeks of arenas to get a piece of the most recent releases. A good weekend of battlegrounds might net you a piece or two. You can do raids for epic drops. It can take weeks to learn fights and clear raids. A hard night of raiding could earn you nothing but a repair bill.

Among raiding and PvP, which shows more dedication and skill? The term "welfare epic" has popped up to describe gear that some believe is given to a player without the appropriate level of effort. In his official forum post, Kaizersosay of Spirestone asserted that there are no welfare epics- that every piece of purple loot takes effort. He said that the phrase welfare epic is elitist. The thread sparked a lively discussion of welfare epics for both PvE and PvP players.

This annual in-game holiday is scheduled to coincide with real life Chinese New Years. Asian style outfits, ceremonial fireworks, delicious dumplings and a once-a-year raid boss are all part of the celebration. Quests send you to find 50 coins and turn them in for various goodies as well. It's a fun RP event taking place across player cities throughout Azeroth, but mostly centered in the Druid village of Moonglade.

The real question this year is if this holiday is going to upgrade the event like they did for Hallow's End. Will there be fireworks in Shattrath? Elders in Arcatraz? Revelers in Zul'Aman? Shouldn't a major celebration like this have Omen dropping some welfare epics, too? Recently they promised an older holiday would get a make over. Is this the one? We'll have until February 23 to find out.

To the best of my recollection, one of the WoW developers first coined the terminology "welfare epics" at last August's Blizzcon. I've had difficulty finding the original source, but as I recall, the context of the talk had to do with the goal of the WoW designers to make all players put forth some degree of effort in obtaining quality gear. The specific gear in question was that purchased with arena points.

New arena loot was released to the clamoring masses a couple of days ago, and some of the items have arena rating requirements on them, thus setting in motion the designers' plan to avoid a proliferation of welfare epics. As per usual with changes of this magnitude, the official forums are rife with controversial topics. This time around, its the PvE players arguing with PvP players regarding the quality and accessibility of arena loot. Some of this debate spilled over into the comments on one of my own recent posts, piquing my interest in the issue even further.

The third arena season started yesterday amidst a flurry of activity on my server. Trades people were making gold by the handful. Non-raiders and alts everywhere suddenly received a huge boost from the first-season gladiator's gear which was moved to honor vendors. Last season's winners showed off their bugged titles and mounts while players across the servers began competing to win those rewards for themselves next time around.

I haven't been much of a PvPer on my main character, an Alliance rogue. In fact, I've been rather horrible at it. (I suppose I do better from range, since I always had much better luck as a hunter or warlock.) Nonetheless, I've been learning a lot in the past few weeks and have decided to aim for at least an 1850 rating this time around. For many hardcore PvPers, that goal is probably laughably easy to attain. For someone like me, who has basically died ten times each week to grab a few welfare epics, it seems rather lofty.

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.