• +153 Stamina, +153 Intellect. Yes, that much. +86 Spirit, too.
• A Blue and a Red socket, with a +7 spell power bonus if you match both up. Remember, you don't have to if you don't want to, and this is certainly a socket bonus that's probably not worth going for. If you need an extra gem for your meta, this is probably the place to put it.

We mention a ninja of the Onyxia mount in this week's Guildwatch, and while researching that, some other forum threads came up, including these two, both from General, where people say with conviction that given the chance, they'd take the Onyxia mount and never look back. They have a point -- it's one of the rarest random mounts in the game, on a raid that's definitely PuG-able. Chances are low that you'll ever see it, much less win it on a random roll, and so for a lot of people, it'd be worth the namechange and the server transfer you'd have to pay to escape your new ninja reputation.

Personally, I wouldn't do it, but that's really only because I know there are lots of rare mounts in the game that I'll never get (sigh, Red Proto-drake, I covet you), and one more isn't that big a deal. Not to mention that I like the guilds I'm in and the people I play with, and who knows what they'd think of me if I stole the mount from them or someone else. But not everyone feels the way I do, I'm sure, so let's ask: if you had the chance, in a PuG or a guild run, to steal the Onyxia mount as your own, would you take it? And if you would, is it just because it's so rare and special?

The most recent patch notes answered something I've been wondering about the "summon-from-anywhere" LFG system since I first heard about it: what happens if you get summoned into an instance and then you leave? The answer, apparently, is that you go not to the instance's entry portal, but instead you get sent right back out from whence you came. That's a bummer and a benefit -- unfortunately, you won't be able to use the feature to do any cross-world teleporting (leaving Violet Hold, for example, won't work as an extra hearthstone to Dalaran), but on the other hand, you won't have to stop what you're doing wherever you are.

In fact, porting in and out of any instances you run may change your positioning in the game completely. Nibuca doesn't see any need any more to leave a hearthstone in Dalaran -- that was previously the most central location for collecting daily dungeon quests and flying out to meeting stones, but with neither of those things necessary any more, you can park your stone anywhere you want. It'll be very interesting to see how movement patterns change after the new system goes live. I doubt Dalaran will be a ghost town (if nothing else, there will be plenty of people there sitting in LFG chat), but certainly the LFG is mixing up the reasons that a lot of people are hanging around there.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to the Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

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Because those guys at Blizzard have a wonderful sense of humor as well as an unerring knack of dangling the right carrots in front of players' proverbial horses, they've come up with the most adorable little pet to entice everyone to try out the new dungeon system to be implemented in patch 3.3. Called the Perky Pug, this elusive and adorable little fellow is rewarded to players who group with other random players using the new dungeon system. According to the patch notes, "the more random players with whom one groups, the faster the pet can be obtained."

That means the process can actually be pretty painful. It's kind of like playing Russian Roulette, except that instead of one bullet, you can possibly have four. And instead of bullets you have inept, or badly geared, or socially abrasive (or combinations of all three) players. And instead of your head, it's your... well, okay, it's still your head that can get pretty messed up.

Blizzard's new Dungeon System (with built-in cross-server LFG) coming in patch 3.3 seems to have all of its bases covered, even tiny niggling details that are not yet covered in the patch notes, as this post by Zarhym proves.

What happens with Stone Keeper's Shards when you're in a PUG that takes advantage of cross-server LFG? Well, that's easy, kiddo. The system will check to see if your home realm's Wintergrasp is captured by your faction. If it is, voila! Stone Keeper's Shards for you. If not, well, you can figure it out.

As for everyone else in the group, the same check is made, and if someone else doesn't have WG captured on their server and you do, they won't even see the Shards on the corpse, so no "Hey, what about MY shards?!" loot confusion should come up. If it does, well, you'll probably never see that person again anyway, so say what you must! Just bear in mind that parties in patch 3.3 do have that new Vote Kick option.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to the Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

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Great news for players of all classes and levels (well, levels above 15)! In the latest official patch notes update for the Patch 3.3 PTR, Blizzard added the following line:

Meeting Stones: To use any Meeting Stone, it is only required that the character's minimum level be 15. There is no maximum character level requirement for any Meeting Stone.

Now that's a change that's been a long time coming. Ever tried to get your level 80 guildie to Deadmines to help you carve a bloody swath straight to Van Cleef? It's a pain! Ever tried to get your lowbie to a high-level zone without a portal? Also a pain! This completely removes the restrictions on using or activating summoning stones so long as you're above level 15.

Now you'll be able to bring whoever you want to any dungeon summoning stone with just two people. A fantastic quality-of-life change, very likely added to ensure that interest in rerolling remains steady until Cataclysm comes out, but who cares? I'll take it! Who wants to run me through ZF?

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to the Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

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The new LFG system is certainly great, but there's one problem with random PuGs that I'm sure it won't fix, and that is of course the problem of ninjas. As long as random people are getting into groups (and with the new rewards system in place, there'll be plenty of that), some of them will always find the loot more tempting than keeping their reputation clean. So what's the solution?

Obviously, over on Guildwatch, we've been covering people shouting out names and guilds on the forums for a while, but as we've also reported a few times over there, that barely helps -- even if people do remember a ninja on their server, one name change later and they're gone. A few guildleaders over on Jubei'thos have tried putting a site together to track known ninjas on the server, but even that has issues; it's tough to avoid false positives, even if you do require screenshots.

But surely there must be a solution, so let's put our heads together: a debuff? Something like the group vote-kicking system that's coming in patch 3.3? If Blizzard wanted to really go for fair, they could just take the Need-before-Greed system and turn it into straight Need: if an item matches your class and spec, you get a roll (with items everyone can use giving everyone a roll), and the best roll always wins. You can turn it off (for a Master Looter-style raid), but for PuGs, why even bother with a Need/Greed difference? What do you think?

This week on Totem Talk we're going to continue the leveling with coverage of going from level 41 (so actually a little beyond SM, but "Razorfen Downs to Outland" or "Uldaman to Outland" didn't really have the same zing) to level 68, which is the level at which you can board the boat to Northrend. Some basic things to consider before getting to the meat of things.

• It is this writer's opinion that these are the levels that really define your spec and role. It's in the 40's that you can actually have enough talents and have trained enough skills that the real potential of each spec comes through: your elemental shaman actually feels and plays significantly differently than your dual wielding enhancement shaman, and while both can still heal, resto really starts pulling ahead here.
• Shamans were originally designed as 'offensive hybrids' to balance out the paladin's 'defensive hybrid' nature. Since shamans and paladins are no longer designed in opposition those roles have blurred somewhat, but elements of the original intent still show through. Keep in mind that two of the three shaman trees are DPS oriented, and at these levels the fact that one is a ranged DPS while the other is melee will not seem as distinctive as those roles become in raiding/instancing.
• Gear will start to drop in Outland that is more optimal for individual shaman specs. Before then, mail with spell power and/or MP5 is still somewhat rare on the ground in Azeroth outside of the various instance blues that drop. You're just going to have to work around it, annoying as it is.
• Shamans are pretty bloody flexible. I have a friend (Hi Will) who has leveled an orc shaman to 80 as resto, and is working on an alliance shaman as well. Again as resto. And he kills things just fine. It's slower, yes, but it can work, so if you have a spec you really like don't despair of leveling with it as a shaman.

Okay, now to talk about what you'll be doing for 28 levels.

One of my favorite WoW blogs, HoTs and DoTs, has a great post up about Dungeon Groups 101 -- the very basics of running instances. You may think that there's nothing more basic to the game than getting in an instance with four people and taking down a few bosses and trash, but you'd be surprised. Even in a social game like this, one of the first hurdles newbies have to deal with is joining a group to play together. They worry that they'll do things wrong and that other people will make fun of what they're wearing or playing, and that worry keeps them from enjoying my absolute favorite part of the game.

Cassandri's writeup is an excellent read for anyone who feels that way (and feel free to pass on this post to any friends or relatives you know who've been too leery to join an instance yet). She does do some basic knowledge stuff in there, just hints on the classes and what they can all do -- and our WoW Rookie posts will help out with that stuff too -- but more importantly, she says what lots of new players need to hear: that messing up in an instance isn't that big a deal, and that playing together with others (which is the reason why we're all playing an MMO rather than a single player game in the first place) is more than worth getting past any anxiety around joining a group. I've read a lot of comments like the one Cassandri quotes in her post, too, and I'm here to tell you: if you haven't run an instance yet, it's time to stop worrying about what it'll be like and give it a try.

The first thing I thought when I saw the new LFG interface coming in patch 3.3 was what I said on last week's podcast: that's cool, but where's the LFG channel? If you remember way back during patch 2.0.1, when Blizzard originally released the LFG system, there was quite a clamor raised when they took away the LFG channel then, so much so that they eventually had to resurrect it. And so, when I saw in the latest patch notes that the LFG was set to return as a citywide channel, it didn't come as a surprise at all -- even in the new era of cross-realm LFG, there's still a place for just talking about which groups you can join.

But citywide still isn't enough for a lot of players -- some are saying that they want the channel to be worldwide. Ghostcrawler himself shows up in that thread and says a worldwide LFG channel would be nuts. And he's right: way back in the day when it was worldwide, it was "mass chaos," like a Barrens from everywhere. So why are people so tied to it? Blizzard seems to be missing a major way people used the LFG channel.

Blizzard's new Dungeon System is a pretty huge overhaul of the social and gameplay experience of getting an instance group together, and we're all pretty excited about it here. On top of the hassle-free daily random dungeon selection and the great new matchmaking features, you even get teleported to the random dungeon.

But as it turns out, there's even more cool stuff hiding below the surface. If you're like me, chances are good you've spent a day or two chain-running heroics to gear up an alt or to get instant gratification on that badge item you want. The issue with chaining heroics at this point in time is that eventually you hit a wall: do instances you hate (Oculus) or stop running instances because of your 24-hour heroic lockouts.

Well, in patch 3.3, everything's a-changin'. While heroic lockouts aren't going away, they will not affect your random dungeon selections. What this means is that if you and four guildies do a timed Culling of Stratholme run, and then you join the queue for a random heroic, you may be assigned Culling of Stratholme a second -- or third, or fourth -- time, depending on your luck, as your random dungeon. And you'll get two extra Emblems of Triumph for completing the random dungeon each time, even if you've run the dungeon already that day. The only way that your lockout will affect you is that you cannot create a group with /invite for that same dungeon again that day.

Basically, as long as you're choosing the Random Dungeon option, you can run as many heroics as you want, every day.

With increased rewards for, easier access to, and the trivialization of lockouts for heroics, Patch 3.3 is the perfect time to dust off that neglected level 80 alt of yours and take him or her on a tour of Northrend's most dangerous places.

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Patch 3.3 is the last major patch of Wrath of the Lich King. With the new Icecrown Citadel 5-man dungeons and 10/25-man raid arriving soon, patch 3.3 will deal the final blow to the Arthas. WoW.com's Guide to Patch 3.3 will keep you updated with all the latest patch news.

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Welcome to Lichborne, your weekly peek into the world of the death knight. Your host, Daniel Whitcomb, is enjoying the most wonderful time of the year, when a death knight can hang around in his natural habitat all day long without seeming creepy. Or no creepier than usual, at least.

As you approach the end game of WoW, one thing you may find out quickly is that the proper use of macros is a great way to take your game to the next level. Sometimes they streamline moves, other times they allow you to perform actions that would be otherwise impossible. Death knights are definitely no exception, and though we'd be here all week if I went through all the ins and out of macro theory, or even death knight macro theory, I figure right now is still a good time to get you started.

Let's look at a few basic essential macros for the various roles and trees of the class.