Here at WoW.com we're on a Daily Quest (which we try to do every day, honest) to bring you interesting, informative and entertaining WoW-related links from around the blogosphere. Is there a story out there we ought to link or a blog we should be following? Just leave us a comment and you may see it here tomorrow!

The dungeon finder has been doing bad things to me lately. Bad, bad things. Really bad. I've been... well, I've been healing. A lot. When the dungeon queue for a healer is approximately thirty seconds long as opposed to the thirty minute long DPS queue? I'd rather help the problem, not add to it.

To celebrate (read: lament) my newly found love of what we in the business call 'the heals' we'll be taking a look at healers 'round the blogosphere.

• Whether or not healers should need to worry about their mana has been a hot topic in the community recently. Check out Restokin's take on the issue.
• Life in Group 5, a resto shaman blog, teaches you how to analyze combat logs for healers.
• The Physician's Log, who is very quickly becoming a regular here in The Daily Quest, talks about being a new healer and the potential stresses that come with it.
• Lodur discusses the death of healer niches... and I think he's saying something else, too. Seems fishy to me.

Filed under: The Daily Quest

Glorenzelg, High-Blade of the Silver Hand lives on multiple best-in-slot lists. At least, those BIS lists that don't include Shadowmourne and other Heroic content.

My favorite aspect of this epic blade is that it's blade from the Silver Hand, which is a more than significant bit of game lore. Since this weapon drops from Arthas, I think it's fairly clear that he somehow had been hoarding it (and other weapons) after having captured the weapon in combat.

For retribution paladins, this blade is especially attractive. I mean, the weapon is great for all of the two-handed DPS classes. But the weapon has a lot of strength, critical strike rating, and expertise, yet completely avoids wasting itemization points on armor penetration. This aspect makes it wonderfully suited to the class that has almost no use for ArP.

Sadly, though, Glorenzelg continues the trend of duct tape. Apparently, when the Lich King stole the weapon from the Silver Hand, he had to bind it back together. He chose to repair the weapon with skull-themed duct tape. That's okay. There's not much that the liberal application of some duct tape won't fix.

Name: Glorenzelg, High-Blade of the Silver Hand
Type: Two-Hand Sword
Damage: 895 - 1344 Damage (311.0 damage per second)
Speed: 3.60
Attributes:

• 181 Strength
• 197 Stamina
• 2 Red Sockets
• Socket Bonus: +6 Strength
• Equip: Improves critical strike rating by 115 (2.51% @ L80).
• Equip: Increases your expertise rating by 99 (12.08 @ L80).

How to get it: Get a raid together, including 24 of your best friends. As you methodically improve your skills, eventually approach and kill Arthas. He has a 30% chance or so of dropping this weapon. (At least, as of the time of this writing.)
How to get rid of it: If you're not about to pick up a Heroic version of the weapon, or perhaps Shadowmourne, don't. That being said, it breaks into an Abyss Crystal or sells for 31 gold, 57 silver, and 15 copper.

Filed under: Phat Loot Phriday

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Filed under: WoW Insider Business

One of the things I hear a lot from other tanks (especially paladin tanks) is how much they envy Charge, and especially being able to Charge in combat. "Man, I'd give up X for Charge." Usually what they want to give up is their shield throw, or their AoE taunt, which of course is not a terribly compelling idea: warriors have parallels for these abilities and charge isn't one of them. Heroic Throw is our weaker form of Avenger's Shield and Challenging Shout is our stronger but longer cooldown AoE taunt. As soon as they gave up Righteous Defense (which rocks on the Lich King fight, btw) they'd just say "Man, I'd give up X for Challenging Shout" anyway. If warriors actually managed to give up Shockwave for Consecration they'd want it back in a week.

What it ultimately comes down to is the difference between a necessary ability and one that is useful but not necessary. You also need to take iconic roles into account. I doubt many would support giving warriors Blessing of Kings, Blessing of Sanctuary, Lay on Hands, the paladin system of Auras, or what have you. The ability to die without taking equipment damage via Divine Intervention? How much, exactly, is Charge worth and if it's so pivotal to tanking why are you rolling a paladin to tank instead of a warrior? How do we keep classes compelling and interesting while giving them the tools to do the same job?

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

WARNING: This post contains spoilers for Cataclysm, the upcoming expansion to World of Warcraft. If you'd like to keep everything a surprise, don't read any further. If you'd like to know more about the upcoming content, read away!

Issue 212 of PC Gamer UK has hit the stands, and includes a fascinating six-page article with fifty reasons why lapsed subscribers should probably return to Azeroth. Forget the lapsed subscribers, there's enough information in here for current subscribers to drool over with unbridled glee. For those of you on this side of the pond, some highlights from the article. We requested comment from PC Gamer as to whether this information came directly from Blizzard, but we haven't yet received a response, so keep that in mind as we cover the highlights:

Reason number twelve: Cataclysm chooses fun over efficiency. The talent trees will be completely redone, something we've covered a little with previous posts on the new mastery system that will be made available. A quote from Tom Chilton states "I'd expect to see a further pruning of critical class buffs and debuffs, because it's still a little more restrictive than what we'd like to see. A lot of what Mastery and the talent changes are about is making sure that the choices players make about their character are interesting. Hopefully that will add character depth without making the game more complex."

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Filed under: News items, Cataclysm

The tenth annual Game Developers Conference is in full swing in San Francisco, CA -- and yesterday included a panel by Rob Pardo, Executive Vice President of Game Design at Blizzard Entertainment. Pardo spoke about design philosophy and how Blizzard approaches it, sharing not only Blizzard's success stories, but where they failed along the way, and what they did to fix it. Blizzard's design philosophy follows some key elements:

Gameplay First: Before anything else, you want to concentrate the game on the fun. All aspects of the game -- the design, the mechanics of encounters, the quests and story are focused on making the game fun to play. Not only fun to play -- but fun to play for players, not developers. The challenge is to keep players jumping through the correct hoops, while making those hoops fun. Sometimes this involves making some changes -- for example, only night elf males could be druids in Warcraft III, but for the sake of making the druid class, something that sounded like all kinds of fun, they had to be made accessible to both genders, and both sides. So the lore was adjusted so that females and tauren could both be druids -- otherwise they couldn't have introduced the class at all. And that wouldn't be any fun.

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Filed under: News items

Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we're heading back into the world of nasty, little over-budget talents bothering balance druids as we fight to save our 1 keys from total disaster.

It's been a harsh week in my little corner of the world. Between attempting to get up for work, falling back down to sleep for 5 more hours, taking medications that I can't even pronounce the names of, and several other unpleasant things that have been plaguing me for the past five days; there's been little time for actual coherent thought in my life. So forgive me if this week's article is a little short (I can already hear people cheering) and slightly confusing. I promise to try and make this post as readable as possible, but I am bound to ramble on incoherently at some point; though I'm not entirely sure how that's any different from normal.

Last week, Shifting Perspectives took at look at the various possibilities for changing Eclipse. This week, that trend will continue as we explore ways in which or other problem, if less vilified, talent can be adjusted. Yes, folks, I'm talking about Nature's Grace. This long-standing talent that has been a staple in balance builds since WoW was released. Much like Eclipse, Ghostcrawler has already stated that Nature's Grace is high on the list to be changed. Also like Eclipse, many people wonder why Nature's Grace hasn't already been changed as it is so problematic. While Ghostcrawler mentions it's a big deal, many people fail to understand how big of a deal Nature's Grace really is.

Nature's Grace is an awesome talent. It is a tad over-budget, but not nearly as much as Eclipse is, and, honestly, having an over-budget talent here or there isn't necessarily a terrible thing in of itself. The only thing that plagues Nature's Grace is how easily it allows for Wrath to be GCD capped. Again, though, this isn't so terrible of a prospect in of itself. After all, this is a mechanic that balance druids have been dealing with since haste was introduced into the game. Wrath ramming into GCD issues like the Titanic hitting an iceberg only became problematic when balance druids also failed to turn just a little to the left during patch 3.2. Prior to patch 3.2, Wrath was maybe only 10% of our overall damage done, so any scaling issues that it had was fairly trivial. When patch 3.2 came around and Wrath jumped from 10% of our damage, or less, to being 40% or more of our damage, the scaling issues became a real problem.

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Filed under: Druid, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives

Frankly, the Bladestorm nerf is a minor one, albeit an extremely annoying minor one. Granted, it means that opposing rogues, warriors and sometimes hunters (ah, hunters, the Y's of WoW) will be able to turn the major source of "And now YOU DIE" available to arms warriors in PvP into "Whee, I'm a pretty ballerina watch me spin". Arms is still pretty strong if it's geared to the absolute teeth and has significant backup, which is about the best you can expect from a warrior in PvP.

PvP for a warrior has always been "die ten million times to other classes until you finally get geared enough to get some payback and then get nerfed because they don't like it when their free kill turns around and kills them back" anyway. This is just more of the same and not even really significant more of the same, it's a very minor change that only rankles because it's piled on the back of more significant (and in some cases more ridiculous) nerfs to the class. It irritates me, sure, but let's be honest: that's not terribly hard to accomplish.

Arms in general has been getting the crap end of the stick this expansion. It's ludicrously difficult to gear for it in PvP, it got outperformed by protection for a while, and in PvE you end up as a bleed bot for feral druids while the fury warriors scale better even with all the neat tricks arms can do. Of course, part of this is ye old 'hybrid tax' which penalizes you for playing a class that has a tanking spec. There have been back and forth arguments on that... is it fair, should it exist at all, what would become to pure DPS classes without it (oh, boo hoo, we must protect the poor vulnerable little rogues and mages, let's set up a bloody nature preserve for the precious little darlings so they won't be threatened) etc etc.

This week, I'm not here to debate whether or not it should exist or how it should be applied. It's here, we have to deal with it. Instead, I'm here to argue that due to the fact that it exists, DPS specs for warriors become even more important and must be as viable for as broad an application as possible. The time has come for the warrior to no longer have dedicated trees for specific roles. With the coming of Mastery, we're looking at an opportunity for real, meaningful change to the class that I hope Blizzard embraces. It's time for arms, fury and protection (yes, protection) to be viable tanking and DPS trees.

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Filed under: Druid, Paladin, Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Death Knight

I've mentioned before that I'm a huge fan of Brian Wood's post Skill vs. gear. You should take the time to read through it if you haven't. However, in review, the basic premise of Brian's argument is that the largest DPS increases available to your raids are not directly based on gear. Instead, things like good rotations, talents, and ye-old "knowing your class" tend to have more to do with your damage than your gear.

Brian takes it to another level, however, and points out the overwhelming effect your raid buffs will have on your damage. The same can be applied to healers and tanks. (The difference between an unbuffed tank and a tank who's sporting Commanding Shout, Fortitude, Gift of the Wild, and Kings is absolutely amazing.) With all that being said, hopefully everyone's got faith in the premise that "your raid buffs really, really matter."

One of the fundamental design principles espoused by Ghostcrawler is that you should bring a player for their skill, not for their unique snowflake buffs (shaman have gotten a pass so far for Heroism, with a few different explanations). Most key buffs, debuffs, and such have duplication among multiple classes. Let's jump behind the cut and start looking at which vital buff and debuff.

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Filed under: Ready Check (Raiding)

Well, this is a welcome change -- now that Frozen Orbs are going to be the new crafting tokens, exchangeable for Frost Lotus and Eternal Fire, among other things, Wryxian announced that they will be greed only in the upcoming patch.

Wryxian

No, you won't be able to exchange Frozen Orbs for Emblems of Frost. Yeah it just takes one person to press Need after everyone's pressed Greed on the Frozen Orbs and you miss out. But the good news is that in patch 3.3.3 this won't be the case anymore -- the roll for Frozen Orbs will be an automatic Greed roll. Rejoice!

source

I wonder whether this is now some sort of flag in their database that they could use for other items. Like Books of Glyph Mastery. Nothing is more annoying than someone ninja looting jerk looting something that everyone gains equal benefit from.

Edit: Ninjas are cool. People who steal from their peers are not. Stop calling them ninjas.

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Patch 3.3.3 brings about small but noteworthy changes to the World of Warcraft. From a faster CoT, to putting those old Frozen Orbs to better use, to changes to the auction house -- there's several things all WoW players need to know. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3.3 will keep you up to date!

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Blizzard, News items