For those of us who like to collect stuff in WoW, one of the cooler announcements for patch 3.2 was the inclusion of a whole new set of raptor hatchling pets, dropped around the world by rare and elite raptors. Of course, it was also an announcement of dread for serious collectors who can tell horror stories of killing thousands upon thousands of slimes and dragons for rare pets before. But will it be all as bad as that? WoW fansites have been on the case.

Mania, maven of Hunter pets, has also been looking into the drop rates and drop mobs, and has compiled a handy chart on her blog. Between Mania and the news on Warcraft Pets, it seems we can mostly confirm that the rare raptors (such as, for example, Takk the Leaper) will always drop their pets, while those that drop only off elites have a very rare drop rate more similar to the aforementioned slimes or dragons.

Assuming they don't change the brews for next year, our beertastic journey will be coming to an end pretty soon. There's only one brew left that we haven't seen, which is the Draenic Pale Ale. After that, we're back to the Binary Brew unless they decide to put out a whole new batch of 12 brews, and I somehow doubt that will happen. Is anybody else hoping the Draenic Pale Ale is truly epic, considering it marks the entire year we've been drinking these crazy things?

You're a pet and mount maniac. You've hunted down every noncombat pet you can find, gotten a lucky roll on every rare mount you can possibly pick up, and after long last, you've earned both the "Lil' Game Hunter" and "Mountain o' Mounts" achievements. But still, you want more for some reason. More pets, more mounts, more achievement points.

Good news: Bornakk says that there will still be more to find. While he says they won't be upping the achievements every time they bring out a patch that has more pets and mounts to collect, they will definitely add in new achievements periodically for collecting both noncombat pets and mounts (and, though he doesn't say so, we'd assume they'll add in extra rewards besides the achievement points, including extra pets or mounts to be earned at each level).

So if you are in fact a collecting master and have already earned the 75 pets and 100 mounts (a much easier feat than it used to be) for both maximum achievements currently in the game, just be patient. There'll be new goals to go after soon.

News is flooding in that Exodus of Ysondre-US has just scored the world first 25-man Yogg-Saron with 0 Keepers, a.k.a. Heroic: Alone in the Darkness. A quick look at their site proves it to be true, complete with screenshots.

This achievement, when Ulduar was first launched, was largely considered to be mathematically impossible. One or two nerfs to Yogg-Saron more or less proved that to be true. The recent nerf to the spawnrate of the Guardians of Yogg-Saron wasn't aimed at the encounter with 4 Keepers up. It was aimed at the encounter with few (or zero) Keepers up. Without the buffs those Keepers provide, the encounter gets more and more difficult. As someone who has only killed Yogg-Saron with all 4 Keepers in the last few weeks, I fear seeing the fight with zero. Major, major props to Exodus.

They were rewarded for their efforts with Bowser's Flying Machine Mimiron's Head. I guess he didn't need it anymore. Congratulations, Exodus!

Bornakk hinted about this awhile back and we knew what the reward pets were going to be but when this years Children's Week came and went with no new content, a lot of players were a tad disappointed. Well now that the PTR is up in order to test patch 3.2, testers can find the Northrend incarnation of Children's Week in full swing and that means lots of shiny new quests.

The new quests see you taking around a Wolvar orphan named Kekek or little Roo of the Oracles to meet certain famous people or visit various landmarks in Northend like Wrymrest Temple, Vordrassil, Dalaran and the Bronze Dragonshrine.

You then have to take them to a toy shop in Dalaran and buy them each a gift. If you've ever done the classic or Outland Children's Week quests then you'll know the drill and it still looks like a lot of fun. Check out our gallery below to find out more about what the quests involve.

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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After yet another Cracked Egg with nothing but a Cobra Hatchling in it, and the bigtime raiding proto-drakes constantly getting dropped out of the game, there's really only one other option: the Red Proto-drake, a reward for the Glory of the Hero meta-achievement. It's not easy: you've got to not only beat all of the heroics in the game, but all of the hard mode achievements for each of them. Guides like our OverAchievers can help, and a really great group to go along with helps more, but some of the achievements are so tough they need extra attention.

The Oculus' achievement, however, is one that needs an even closer look. And 4 Haelz kindly provides exactly that, with an in-depth guide to toppling two achievements in one, both the Emerald and Ruby Void, by doing the boss with five Amber drakes. The Amber drakes are usually meant as DPS, which makes this fight extra tough: you can't take much damage at all, because you can't get any damage back without healers. So what it requires, instead, is communication and coordination. Basically, you use the drakes' Time Stop ability to slow the fight down, and then try to do some coordinated kiting while DPSing like mad, all the time hoping that you can bring him down before he takes one of you out.

As Bell says, once you get the idea (and have wiped a few times -- you should probably be riding the drakes naked, since not only does your gear not affect their performance, but it'll save you repair costs), the fight's not actually that hard to pull off, but it's the learning that's going to hurt.

The roller-coaster of "will they or won't they remove the Ulduar raid drake rewards" seems to have come to a definitive answer. The rusted and ironbound proto-drakes will be removed, but they will give us "about 1 month of warning" so you can make a final push if you really want it. The drakes are rewards for completing Glory of the Ulduar Raider (and the 25-man version).

Bornakk points out the parallel with the Arena mount rewards, and says that this is no accident: these are supposed to be rewards for the "top tier" of raiders, and letting people earn them with more powerful equipment from higher raids would defeat that purpose. Therefore, he says we should expect it to go this way in the future, as it was with the Naxx drakes.

As a side note, he says they may be removed when patch 3.2 comes out or some time after. This suggests to me that they think there's a decent chance patch 3.2 will come out less than a month from now. If they knew it was going to come out later, they'd just give the one month warning a month before they expected the patch to drop.

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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The Midsummer Fire Festival should now be live on almost all North American realms. If it isn't, it will be shortly! Not much has changed since last year, beyond the addition of the achievements.

Speaking of achievements, while we have our guide to the Achievements of Midsummer, you might not be able to make a significant dent in them today if you made rounds with the flames last year. None of the quests seem to have reset from last year, so getting your hands on the holiday currency to buy the items you need is going to be difficult, to say the least. By difficult, I may or may not mean borderline impossible.

I don't expect this to be a permanent issue, we'll probably see a hotfix sometime in the near future since the problem is already being checked out. Of course, that's assuming the issue is something that can be hotfixed. If not, I don't doubt we'll see a fix of another flavor down the road. I don't foresee Blizzard keeping What a Long, Strange Trip It's Been out of players' hands because of something like this. In the meantime, at least you can still take a crack at Lord Ahune.

It's that time of year again, folks. Frankly, I'm glad to be back in the realm of more reasonable and just plain fun holiday achievements, because I hated School of Hard Knocks, and wound up giving up and quitting the achievement after hours of fruitless battleground deaths. Fortunately, the Fire Festival has a lot less potential to drive you to the nuthouse, and a lot more potential to grant experience, gold, and cool items. From what I've seen, Blizzard hasn't changed the holiday since its 2008 incarnation, which is actually a good thing in a number of ways because last year's revamped and expanded Fire Festival was great.

A note on eligibility: your character will need to be at least 50 to hand in the items needed for King of the Fire Festival, and at least 65 to get the higher-level quests necessary for killing Lord Ahune in Slave Pens. With that said, we still recommend that lower-level characters participate, because you'll wind up with a ton of experience and gold even if you can't complete the meta-achievement.

Should you complete the meta, you will be awarded the "Flame Keeper" title. I've listed all of the required achievements in the order I think will be easiest/fastest for the average player to do.

UPDATE: Your character is currently unable to honor/desecrate any flame (including city flames) that you've honored/desecrated in 2008, which will make getting enough Burning Blossoms to purchase Midsummer clothing difficult, if not impossible. I'm still trying to find official confirmation that this is a bug (and I assume it has to be, as otherwise the meta-achievement isn't doable), but it also appears that fires have been added to Northrend as well. I'm heading ingame right now to assemble a list with coordinates and will update the post later.

We had a bit of a minor freakout when we heard that the Rusted and Ironbound protodrakes might be getting removed as rewards for the Ulduar meta achievements in Patch 3.2, and then even more of one when the slow trickle of information about 3.2 turned into a firehose. Bornakk mentioned the change initially with the caveat that it was their intention to remove the drakes eventually, but that he'd seek definite confirmation either way as to whether it was happening in 3.2 or not. There's been no update about it in the past few weeks.

Well, after a thorough reading of the 3.2 patch notes, I don't see a single trace of anything saying the drakes are getting removed. At the risk of counting my protochickens before they hatch, I think we might be safe, given how fast 3.2 looks like it's coming out.

This is at least a relief for my guild, who's doing pretty well on 10-man hard-mode progression but ... is there a word worse than "dismal"? ... on 25-man hard-modes. Maybe there's hope for us yet.

Should we get the soul-crushing confirmation that they'll be removed with 3.2, we'll be sure to let you know. There's still a lot of time for change on this one, though -- maybe it was an accidental omission, maybe it'll get decided on later -- but for now, you can breathe a little easier knowing you might be able to keep hacking away at those hard modes to get your undeniably awesome drakes even after the Argent Coliseum is commanding your guild's attention.

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Patch 3.2 will bring about a new 5, 10, and 25 man instance to WoW, and usher in a new 40-man battleground called the Isle of Conquest. WoW.com will have you covered every step of the way, from extensive PTR coverage through the official live release. Check out WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.2 for all the latest!

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I have to confess something. I'm a sucker for hearing stories about someone playing their Hunter in offbeat ways. What do I mean? Well, take for example that fabled Hunter Tank Gweryc.

Last week I got a great tip from Darth Solo over at WoW Alone about another offbeat Hunter idea. Seems Darth is a fan of solo play. At first I thought as you that this probably isn't completely original. We Hunters tend to just run with our pets anyways. But something kept nagging me to go check out WoW Alone and see just what Darth was doing.

Turns out he's put a lot of thought into how to get the most out of your World of Warcraft experience without having to worry about the drama associated with PUGs or even some guilds.

Of course I would be the first to admit that this kind of play style isn't for me. But if you want to find ways of enjoying your Hunter, getting loot all the while avoiding the drama associated with PUGs. Go check out his Hunter Solo Guides for gear, glyphs, and suggested specs for the Solo Hunter.

Via Guildox, we've just gotten word that Gentlemens Club of Korgath-US, Hordeside, has just become the world-first achievers of Herald of the Titans. This achievement requires that you defeat Algalon on 10-man difficult with no gear above iLevel 226. In other words, they were not wearing a single piece of Hard-mode Ulduar 25-man gear (While we haven't looked closely at their armory, the achievement would allow for normal mode 25-man gear, though even normal mode 25-man weapons would be off limits). [EDIT: iLevel 226 is actually the item level of gear from Normal mode 25-man Ulduar, not Hard mode as previously stated. It is also the item level of gear that drops from Heroic or 25-man Malygos, Kel'thuzad, and Sartharion with at least 2 drakes up. Hard mode 10-man Ulduar also drop iLevel 226 items, which indicates that the Achievement is intended mostly for 10-man progression.]

While 10-man and 25-man raids were technically meant to be seperate tiers of progression, it seems like many raiders freely mix the two, and while that's certainly to be expected, and there's nothing wrong with it, it's cool to see at least a few guilds focus on mastering that path of progression and arguably challenging themselves to at least the 10-man Algalon fight as Blizzard meant it to be fought.

In short, they've managed to proclaim themselves Kings of the 10-man game in Patch 3.1, even if other guilds technically beat them to 10-man Algalon kill itself. Congratulations to everyone involved in the raid!

There are a few accomplishments in this game that truly amaze me anymore. Leveling characters is routine now, and having an army of high level alts at your disposal isn't something super uncommon anymore. However I have been amazed by this:

Cautious, a Warrior, leveled to 80 without dying.

She had no deaths. None. Nada. Zilch.

There is no achievement for doing this, however I wouldn't blame Blizzard one bit if they went in and retroactively added one just for Cautious. Lord of the Rings Online has a no-death achievement, but only up through level 20. I got to level 18 without dying on LotRO on a recent attempt, however I perished when some "really really super awesome person" trained a bunch of mobs near me just as I executed an AoE attack. "Really really super awesome person" is what I called him too. Honest.

A few months ago in The Queue a reader asked if there would ever be (or is) such an achievement for WoW, and my response at the time was no, there is not one now and probably would not be one later. I reasoned that including such an achievement would just present undue psychological damage on the player if they died at 79 from an unforeseen circumstance. I still don't think there will be one, but it's pretty awesome someone managed to do it sans in-game achievement.

There are some interesting statistics Cautious had upon reaching level 80 without deaths. You can check out a lot of them on her armory profile, but those are inflated just a tad since she has played since reaching 80.

Some of her key stats upon reaching level 80 include:

When patch 3.1 came out, the Plagued and Black Proto-Drakes, which were rewarded for the normal and heroic tier 7 raid meta-achievements, respectively, were removed from the game. You can still do the achievement, but it doesn't give you a drake any more. The thinking behind this was that people would be able to come back with Ulduar gear and complete the achievements (relatively) easily, and Blizz wanted the accomplishments of those who had done the achievement pre-Ulduar to stand out.

It looks like the Rusted and Ironbound Proto-Drakes are going to receive the same treatment in patch 3.2: they will no longer be attainable. These are the drakes that are rewarded for the Ulduar raid meta-achievements, on normal and heroic. This is interesting because it implies that we'll get a new tier of gear in patch 3.2. Information about what the expansion of the Argent Tourney is going to bring PvE-wise is still pretty scarce; we know there will be some 5-, 10-, and 25-man content, but we're not really sure what it'll be like yet. All we've heard so far is "Think Ring of Blood or Amphitheater of Anguish, but more epic." Here's hoping for PvE arenas.

Edit: To clarify, players who have the mounts already will of course keep them. You just won't be able to get them after 3.2 if you don't have them already.

This forum thread is full of great advice and tips for the Wrecking Ball achievement, in which you've got to get 20 killing blows without dying in a battleground. The key here seems to be to find a place with lots and lots of folks to kill (a spawn point, like the graveyard in WSG, works great, or you can hide behind the big groups in AV), and then just hanging out there as far out of the way as you can get. Having a pocket healer won't hurt either, and playing fair isn't really part of this one -- you want to duck in when you're sure to win the fight, and run like crazy when things even threaten to go against you.

Some people say that doing it at a lower bracket can help, too, because unless you're uber geared, it'll be better to go after lower levels than have everybody in the BG be 80. It actually sounds like it's easier than it seems -- as long as you set yourself up in the right place and be really careful about getting stuck in a fight you can't win, you should be able to walk away with the points. Good luck!