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.

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the resources they need to get acclimated. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic.

There's no doubt about it: it's trickier and twitchier to level a character on a PvP (player versus player) realm than it is on a "Care Bear," PvE (player versus environment) realm. Some players thrive on the electric anticipation of the unexpected ambush; others wilt under the unrelenting stress. Being an experienced gamer and having the proverbial "friends in high places" can make the experience a lot more enjoyable – so is leveling on a PvP realm beyond the reach of a WoW rookie? Absolutely not!

But make no mistake, it's war out there ... and only the savvy will survive unscathed. Sounds ominous, eh? Let's knock off some of the mystery. First, we direct you to Zach Yonzon's insightful introduction to the PvP attitude. Zach explains exactly what is different about playing on a PvP realm, as well as the basics of concepts such as "flagging" and "honor." Soak up the basics, then join us after the break for 20 tips to help you survive your time as a WoW rookie, PvP style.

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!

Reader comments – ahh, yes, the juicy goodness following a meaty post. [1.Local] ducks past the swinging doors to see what readers have been chatting about in the back room over the past week.

The comments section is usually a cacophony of voices seeking to agree or disagree with the main post, discredit previous commentors or make some pointless point ("first" -- /facepalm). This week, readers pulled together in a more truly interactive relationship, offering up questions, tips, insights and well thought-out suggestions and ideas. Take a trip through the pickings this week on ways to make professions more interesting, more Star Trek Easter eggs, getting real about DPS, copyright issues, snappier headlines ... and even a post devoted exclusively to guild and player recruitment notices.

We were just talking about this on the podcast last night -- Turpster's tip a week or so ago was that going for the Crusader title in the Argent Tournament actually puts you at a disadvantage, because if you keep from turning in the last Valiant quest for the achievement, you don't lock off having the ability to do both Valiant and Champion quests together, thus, as you can see in the thread, earning an extra 36 gold a day, which adds up to 1000g a month. After you earn the ability to represent every city, you can't do the Valiant quests any more (instead, you have to earn city reputation through the Champion's Writ, which costs you 10g from the opposite reward). In short, right now, if you're leveling through the AT quests, stay away from the Crusader achievement until you have all of the city reputations covered, and all the gold you want.

Fortunately (or unfortunately, depending on how you look at it), Bornakk says that Blizzard probably will make a change here soon to smooth everything out. But how they'll do that isn't quite clear -- they could leave the dailies (or some form of them) open even after you get the achievement, or they could beef up the achievement reward to make up for it. Not a hard fix either way. But yes, until then, you might want to rethink racing to the Crusader achievement, as there's more reward to be had by waiting.

Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we discuss some of the tricks and strategies behind Rogues in 2v2.

An old friend approached me last week with the prospect of playing some 2v2 arena with his mage, who had recently hit level 80. Luckily his rolls are amazingly gifted, and he already had a pretty nice set of gear to play with. I equipped my Sinister Revenge and switched one of my dual specs to Mutilate, and that night we entered the arena to play as one of my favorite comps (behind Rogue+Rogue of course!).

Because of my high ratings in Season 5, we were instantly matched against 2000+ players in our very first games. While 2000 isn't quite 'Gladiator' status yet, we were definitely playing teams with some experience under their belts. I had a great time playing, as it was my first set of arena games since the end of Season 5. Mage & Rogue is a comp with some very potent synergy, and a fast-paced playstyle that brings out the best in our class.

Noblegarden - Love it or hate it, either way it's here to stay for the rest of the week. And if you want that 310% mount then you're going to have to put up with it. But hopefully I've got a tip for you all that'll make things a little easier.

There is a spot, the perfect spot if you will, where you can get upwards of 30 eggs in 15 minutes. More if you're not bothered by others attempting to rain on your egg parade.

The spot exists in Azure Watch outside of Exodar, and I've gotten a few pictures you can see after the break to make it easy for you to sit there and farm away for a bit. While this trick won't necessarily work in the early evening when everyone and their mother's uncle is on farming eggs, it works great during off hours.

Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of No Stock UI, a new UI blog for all classes. Today, Matt teams up with Arcane Mages to deliver some serious pain!

It's not very often I write posts about DPS. It becomes even more rare when I write about Mages. My only wish out of Mages is for them to learn another rank of Conjurable food and water.It's at the point now where I need to consume two of them to get a full mana bar back nearly.

Having problems getting patch 3.1.1 to download? Thinking that WoW Insider is crazy for announcing a patch without the download happening?

Well, we might be insane, but we're not crazy.

If you've converted to a battle.net account, you cannot download the patch via the traditional log-in-and-it'll-start method. To get the patch to download, enter your old non-battle.net username and password and the game will begin downloading patch 3.1.1. It's about 10-megs.

You can't log-in and play the game with that user name and password anymore, but you can get the patch with it.

Seems that Blizzard hasn't worked all the kinks out of the battle.net account system. But at least there's a way around the problems this time.

Update: Articles goes up...and 45 minutes later it's fixed!

Many thanks to our twitter followers who let us know about this!

So I've been leveling an alt lately (yes, despite the fact that it makes my skin crawl a little bit, I've been leveling a Paladin so I can tank and heal with dual specs when they show up), and my biggest problem isn't the XP, since Blizzard has nerfed the leveling time so much. It's not the quests, either -- between Questhelper and having done the 1-60 jig five or six times before, I'm all set for quests now. Nope, it's managing my inventory -- I'm questing so quickly that the biggest problem I have is just keeping bag space open.

So here's a few tips I've picked up along the way. Even if you're not leveling, maybe some of these will help. And I'm sure there are plenty of great ways to make sure your bags are clear that I haven't discovered yet (I know for a fact that there are plenty of addons out there that I haven't had an interest in yet) -- feel free to share your own tips in the comments below.

Kebina Trudough here, offering you the best gold making secrets they don't want you to know about! I was like you once, poor and homely, before I discovered my patented system. Now you too can fill your pockets with the good stuff without ever breaking a sweat! Why spend all your time toiling when you could be vacationing in the Hot Springs? I'm not offering these tips for 100 gold, or 90 gold, or even 50 gold! No, not even 20 gold! My system is yours for FREE! Satisfaction guaranteed or I'll give you a full refund (handling charges may apply).

The Auction House is something that you've probably been using since you were a wee little thing, still counting coppers. Despite this experience, there may still be a few things about the system that you might not know, and these tricks will help you buy smart and sell with confidence.

Purchasing items
i. Price per item
When asked what the focus of my public school math classes were, the first thing that comes to mind is grocery store navigation. Seriously. I'm pretty sure that we spent an ample amount of time, spread out over the years, working on making change, understanding tax, and learning that price per unit (such as $1 per pound) is sometimes convoluted in order to trick us into parting with more cash.

When looking at the basic, unmodified Auction House, you can quickly determine which stacks of cloth are selling each piece for the cheapest. This is easy to do when looking at several stacks of 20, but often, there are several partial stacks for sale as well, and sometimes you can actually get a bargain by snatching those up. Other times, they're priced at a huge mark-up!

Mouse-over the icon for the item, and the tooltip that appears will tell you the Bid Price Per Unit and the Buyout Price Per Unit. In seconds, you'll be able to tell what to bid on, what to buy out, and what to avoid.

Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. This week Matt offers some tips and insights for the healing Priests that are struggling with Sartharion and his 3 drakes up

Welcome to the toughest raid encounter that Wrath has to offer. By the end of the first night, you will wish you decided to stay home and watch the latest episode of House instead.

Ready Check is a weekly column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, ZA or Sunwell Plateau, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. This week's Ready Check was inspired by reader Evan, who wrote in to tell us of some frustrating near-brushes with immortality.

Among hardcore and casual guilds alike, the achievement 'The Immortal' has caused nothing but a headache, even though finally pulling it off puts you in a very elite group of raiders. We misguidedly hoped that there wouldn't be a similar achievement in Ulduar, but 'The Immortal, Part Two' puts paid to that hope. However, it's substantially changed in difficulty.

Currently, you have to complete Naxxramas without a single raid member dying on any boss encounter within a single lockout. This makes for incredibly tense raids when things are going well, and incredibly frustrated raids when something goes wrong and puts paid to that week's attempt. We'll take a look at some of the things that can go wrong in Naxxrams a bit later.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the twenty-ninth in a series of roleplaying guides in which we find out all the background information you need to roleplay a particular race or class (or profession!) well, without embarrassing yourself.

In this world of constant war, you must choose your weapons wisely: you may be a blood-soaked warrior with a jagged-edge axe of phenomenal power, a maniacal warlock with a lust for forbidden magical knowledge, or a ruthless rogue whose stealth lets him kill his enemies before they even know he's there.

You may also pick flowers.

Indeed, if you are either an alchemist or an inscriber, picking flowers is probably exactly what you do, no matter how blood-soaked, maniacal, or ruthless you might be. To you, however, the term "picking flowers" may be the sign of ignorance on the part of people who fail to comprehend what powers they mock when they poke fun at the exalted science of herbalism. "Let them have their giggles," you might say to yourself, sheathing your axe in order to bend down and gather some lichbloom, "I'll be the one laughing all the way down the battlefield with my Flask of Endless Rage! Muahahahaha!"

Kebina Trudough here, offering you the best gold making secrets they don't want you to know about! I was like you once, poor and homely, before I discovered my patented system. Now you too can fill your pockets with the good stuff without ever breaking a sweat! Why spend all your time toiling when you could be vacationing in the Hot Springs? I'm not offering these tips for 100 gold, or 90 gold, or even 50 gold! No, not even 20 gold! My system is yours for FREE! Satisfaction guaranteed or I'll give you a full refund (handling charges may apply).

Today we'll be discussing the benefits of disenchanting items, and weigh them against your other options, such as vendoring and auctioning.

For the purposes of this discussion, I am going to assume that you aren't using the materials to level, but rather, are interested in making the most gold possible.