While we have covered the fact that new totems are coming out for orcs and trolls in patch 3.3 so that the taurens don't have to keep sharing with everyone. We've also mentioned the fact that dwarf totems have been added into the PTR files for when Cataclysm hits. At the time, we only had the front view images from MMO-Champion. This caused a bit of an issue with the Dwarf totems as it's hard to distinguish what exactly they're supposed to look like without a side view. So, after some datamining and image editing of our own, we've put together a little gallery of the new totems for you all to enjoy.

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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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Now this is neat: brand-new totem artwork has been spotted on the patch 3.3 PTR for troll shamans by extremely excited tipster Zjin. Previously, all Horde shamans shared a totem design, and draenei got their own space-themed totems when they were added. The new troll ones look appropriately voodoo, I think.

There are now at least three designs for the four different horde races; I wouldn't be surprised if orcs turned out to have their own as well. The current Horde totems fit tauren best of all the races. Once we here at WoW.com start making our way onto the PTRs, we'll bring you any more information we can find on possible new totems for the various races. In the mean time, I'll be in my bunk, doing designs for dwarf totems in my head.

Update: yep, there are new Dwarf and Orc totems too.

Two cool in-game events we've heard about recently:

• First up, our friend Gutrot, the naked Troll Warrior, is finally hitting 80, and he's throwing another party over on EU Aerie Peak to celebrate. He had another party about two years ago at this time, and it went pretty well, so expect this one to be fun, too: he'll have some drinking and merriment (Brewfest will be going on, so that will be fun), lots of naked dueling, we're sure, and probably an Alliance capital raid as well. That all starts on EU Aerie Peak a week from Saturday, September 26, at 9:30pm UK time. If you're on the EU servers, roll a Troll and go say hi.
• If you're more of the Gnomish persuasion, there's a party for you, too: Slice and Dice is throwing a Gnomestock party this Saturday, the 19th, and it sounds like a good time, too. There'll be Gnaked Gnome Racing, two mini-games going in Ironforge, a zonewide game of hide and seek, and since Saturday is Pirates' Day and the sponsoring guild is called Bucklers of Swash, there'll probably be some piratin' going on as well. That's this Saturday, 9/19, at 7pm Eastern (which is also 6pm server) on the US realm of Mug'thol.

As usual, if you go to either event, please do take pictures and send them along -- always fun to see big player-run events like these.

Totem Talk resumes our discussion of Shamans in the upcoming expansion as Matthew Rossi puts on his wizard hat and immediately gets Earth Shocked for wearing the wrong hat. Also, I lobe the Machinima I stole the title of this post from, although that's not germane to the discussion.

We were interrupted by BlizzCon announcements last week when discussing starting a new Shaman (or resuming an old one). Frankly, the list of changes incoming in Cataclysm makes me leery of discussing the current leveling experience too much, because it's going to be radically altered. Two new shaman races! A complete reworking of gear and statistics! A new profession we'll all have access to in Archaeology, entirely reworked talent trees, a new max level progression option in Path of the Titans, and last but not least (to me) new totem skins!

Seriously, you have no idea how long I've wanted this. I expect the current 'default Horde' totems will remain the Orc totems of choice, but I'm very hopeful for Tauren and Trolls and Goblins and Dwarves to all get their own unique totem skins. Frankly, I want Tauren totems to resemble the giant beating pole Cairne Bloodhoof carries around.

Despite what I posted about my warrior, I plan on faction transferring my Draenei Shaman to Tauren fairly soon and moving him to my Horde server. I may or may not race change him to Goblin when they become available for race change (might be more fun just to level one, we'll see) but the idea of finally getting totems that match other races just fills me with glee. Trolls with weird voodoo looking sticks! Goblins with... I have no idea!

All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.

As you know, the new race and class combinations coming up in the Cataclysm will open a whole new set of doors to people who want an alternative character choice that goes against the grain of their typical racial customs, to one degree or another. With the exception of a couple combinations that feel as though they should have been there from the beginning (such as blood elf warriors, which need no discussion here), each new possibility presents roleplayers with an opportunity to play an outcast of sorts, a character who has made a significant break from the traditions his or her race usually represent.

The lore behind each combination is not yet fully clear. We know tauren paladins will probably worship the sun and call themselves "Sunwalkers" for instance, but not much more than that. Some things are clear, though, and there's a lot to get the imagination going for those roleplayers who yearn to play something a little different.

With official word that there will be new race-class combinations in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, Blizzard has posted the official matrix of what races will have what classes available to them. Big surprises so far include Worgen Druid and Goblin Shaman!

The full matrix is above, and the text list below. All of our previous speculation was correct, so this should give rerollers plenty of opportunity to experience the new, shattered realm of Azeroth!

• Human Hunter
• Orc Mage
• Night Elf Mage
• Blood Elf Warrior
• Dwarf Shaman
• Dwarf Mage
• Undead Hunter
• Tauren Paladin
• Tauren Priest
• Gnome Priest
• Troll Druid

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BlizzCon 2009 is here! WoW.com has continuing coverage, bringing you the latest in Cataclysm news, live blogs, galleries, and reports right from the convention floor. Check out WoW.com's Guide to BlizzCon for the latest!

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Good day folks and welcome to Scattered Shots. The column that takes a good look at what it takes to be a Hunter in the World of Warcraft. I am Eddie "Brigwyn" Carrington from the Hunting Lodge. This week we'll be starting our "So you want to be a Hunter" class guide series.

I have to admit something, I'm a chronic leveler. I do it over and over. Yes, I know it's not the typical play style. Yes, I also know it's highly unorthodox. By now you are probably thinking, "Who in their right mind would want to be a chronic leveler?" That someone would be me.

See when I get bored, and the game starts to become a bit of a drag I can't help myself. It only becomes a matter of time till I feel the need to scratch an itch to start over. Yes, I know it's crazy. But you can look at it this way, at least I know how the game works for the beginning Hunter just as well as the raiding one.

Having done this a few times now, I thought it would idea to put this experience to some practical purpose. It seems to be a waste and not at least write up a Hunter guide for new Hunters. So I thought I'd create a new series of posts entitled, "So you want to be a Hunter."

Before we get started, I need to make sure we're all on the same page by setting some ground rules.

1. This series is intended for the new player and/or a new Hunter.
2. Since most new player won't have a rich uncle in game, nor does everyone use Recruit-A-Friend, I'll just focus on leveling up the old fashioned way.
3. When discussing zone and levels, I'll only highlight some key quests along the way.
4. Except for when we reach the "getting ready to raid" guide, all guides will focus on using a solo-leveling/grinding build.

So there, with some ground rules set. Let's get started on making you the best Hunter possible.

Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, where each week blogger and columnist Alex Ziebart answers your questions about the lore and history of the World of Warcraft. Ask your questions in the comments section below, and we'll try to answer it in a future edition.

Hello, hello! In this week's edition of Ask a Lore Nerd, some of our questions are followups to our Fallout edition. If you find yourself confused by the premise of any of these questions, you might want to go back and read that one so you understand what caused these questions to come up.

Sweet Sweet SoulShards asked...

"Why is the undead all over Northrend glowing orange? Is there more of an answer than the lame 'It's a new plague?' "

15 Minutes of Fame is our look at World of Warcraft players of all shapes and sizes – from the renowned to the relatively anonymous, the remarkable to the player next door. Tip us off to players you'd like to hear more about.

Last week, Mike Schramm introduced Abotu (Emerald Dream-US) and his to-die-for custom Troll Rogue action figure. Abotu has been sculpting custom figures as long as he can remember. "When I was little, if there was a toy I wanted that I didn't have, I'd try to make it myself out of modeling clay or construction paper," he remembers. He's done exactly that here by creating Abotu, his own World of Warcraft figure – puts Figureprints to shame, doesn't it?

15 Minutes of Fame visited with Aboto this week, not only to find out more about the player behind the talent but also to get inside scoop on exactly what went into making his Abotu custom. Our two-part look at Abotu the sculptor, the making of Abotu the action figure, plus photo galleries of the Abotu figure and other creations from this talented player ... after the break.

We posted that fan-made Draenei Barbie last week, and a few commenters sent us a note about this figure, custom made by Abotu over on Emerald Dream. The Barbie was just something funny that a few fans did while bored, but this Troll Rogue is the real thing -- custom leather armor fitted onto what used to be a Tomb Raider figure, heavily modified with Sculpey, wood (for the daggers) and even boot laces (for the braids). It's really, really impressive, not only in the way it looks, but in what it took to make: the whole thing took about two months' worth of work (Abotu guesses it might cost over $1000 to make selling these worth it), and many parts of it are completely fabricated. The head is sculpted from scratch, and the hands and feet are from an X-men Nightcrawler figure, but even those have been shaped to look completely different from what they used to be.

Quite a piece of work. We've put all of the image in an easily browseable gallery below, to save you from the trouble of cutting and pasting Photobucket links. Our own 15 Minutes of Fame column has also scheduled an interview with Abotu, so stay tuned for more information on how this all came together (and how you too might be able to immortalize your character like this). And as always, if you've heard of some amazing fan art like this, feel free to send it along on our tipline -- we always love seeing what World of Warcraft fans are putting their crafting skill points into.

Debbie sent us a note about these plushies that she made, and as you can see, they look pretty awesome. The funny part, however, is that she doesn't know anything about World of Warcraft -- her mom's friend asked her to make a Troll Priestess, and since she makes these dolls on commission (prices start at $60 plus shipping and handling), people have asked her to do a Troll Shaman as well, and she's currently working on a Draenei Paladin. Very cool.

You'd probably have to negotiate with her if you wanted something custom made, since these are definitely not coming off of a factory line. But even if you're willing to pay the money for a doll like this, they do look cool. We don't know what it is about Shamans and their little totems that seems to make them perfect for plushie form, but there must be something there. Somehow, we're not sure a plushie Warrior would cause the same fascination. But hey -- be sure to prove us wrong. If you catch any great WoW crafts around the net that we haven't seen yet, drop us a tip.

This installment of All the World's a Stage is the thirtieth 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.

I should say at the outset of this article that I am a vegetarian, and I generally think of animals as cute and fuzzy friends of the human race. I have no moral objection against hunting animals and using their bodies for food or clothing, however. Logically, it makes sense that people have needed this to survive, but emotionally speaking, I find skinning and eating animals rather distasteful. Things would have been different for me if I had been raised on a farm or in a hunting community instead of a city thoroughly saturated with the culture of Disney movies about cute animals singing songs and having adventures, but... anyways, you are what you are. Hunting enthusiasts should feel free to write their own articles on the topic if they have different points of view.

So, anyway, as my vegetarian brain started churning around this idea of how skinning can be roleplayed in World of Warcraft, I couldn't help but admit to myself that I don't have so much real life experience of the topic. In fact, my first google search of "Skinning" turned up none other than WoWwiki's page on skinning in WoW, and I realized most people living in cities probably haven't got the first clue of what skinning animals is really like.

So I searched again for "skinning animals," and this time I found various articles about how to skin an animal for people who are interested in surviving in the wilderness, or just into hunting in general. One site even had simple hand-drawn animations of the proper way to kill and skin a rabbit, and I was struck by how very different this was from my experience of skinning in WoW. In the animation, we see the head and feet get cut off, a slice go down the middle of the animal's body, and the skin slowly peeling away to reveal all the flesh underneath... while in WoW we just right-click on a dead animal, loot its hide, and poof -- it disappears before our eyes.

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

Any class needs its role models. Rogues don't have all that many great heroes from lore, but the ones they do have stand out, especially for the prominence of women in this class.

Garona Halforcen is probably the most famous of rogue protagonists, one of the main characters of the original Warcraft I storyline that launched the whole Warcraft series. She's been strangely missing ever since the end of the First War, actually, but it seems that she is finally making her comeback to the story in the World of Warcraft Comic Book. Her full story is best left for others to tell (such as the immensely talented Elizabeth Wachowski, or the mysterious collective mind known as WoWWiki), but for now, suffice it to say that she represents a lot of what makes rogues who and what they are. Here's a few reasons why:

• She's incredibly cool.
• She doesn't talk about how incredibly cool she is.
• She has conflicted loyalties, neither all good nor all bad.
• There's so much we don't know about her, and so much we want to discover.
• She's something of a lone wolf, extremely independent and active.
• Her skill with words was just as important as her skill with weapons.
• She has a great wealth of complicated emotions and ideas that drive her deeper into the story.

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

There's something about shamans that gets us thinking and talking. Whether it's something as simple as the proper pronunciation of "shamanism," or something as profound as a shaman's humility in relation to the source of his or her power, the lore and ideology of the shaman class often resonates with players more than many others in the World of Warcraft.

One reason for this is that shamans have been such a pivotal force in the lore, possibly more than any other class in the game (depending on your point of view). Other classes, such as warriors, or paladins, come as a sort of pre-defined archetype in fantasy games that don't seem all that different from their original forms in other fantasy settings. The actual beliefs of a priest, for instance, don't seem to matter so much to many players, so long as the class can heal like we expect them to. Even the druids, with their central place in night elf society, sometimes seem more like nature-based magic users rather than true philosophers in their own right.

Shamans, however, have a major burden to bear in one of the central plot shifts of the Warcraft storyline -- namely that the orcs, who entered the Warcraft stage in the Warcraft 1: Orcs and Humans computer game as rampaging demonic evildoers bent on destruction, and actually turned out to be a peaceful race that just got tricked into being evil. Shamanism had to be much much more than just an archetype with some special powers -- it had to be a way of thinking, a system of belief that could be taken over by demonic corruption and yet at the same time act as a beacon of truth and goodness once that the demonic taint had been defeated. Shamanism has got to be complex and profound, or else the story wouldn't make sense.