After compiling a list of what I felt were the most difficult raid bosses to heal, it got me wondering. Many of the encounters we've faced, be it in 5 mans or raids, have players feeling varying levels of emotion after they bring them down. One of my guild officers refers to it as "chasing a high". It's a feeling you experience after taking down a particularly tough boss.

I'll give you an example.

In vanilla WoW, Vael was a challenge in his own right. It took a long time for my guild to bring him down before the expansion came out. But to me, the greatest rush and "high" I experienced was after taking down Illidan for the first time. Kil'Jaeden was a close second. Sartharion with 3 drakes alive was the closest encounter in Wrath of the Lich King to even compare to the euphoric feelings I felt before during Burning Crusade.

Then there's the other kind of emotional where you've felt invested in a particular character and experience a sense of dread after realizing you're the executioner. After my guild took down Kael'thas, I felt a pang of regret. I was heavily into Warcraft III in the years before World of Warcraft. Kael was one of my favourite expansion heroes to play with. No one truly enjoys killing their favourite heroes. Of course, little did I know that Kael wasn't quite finished yet. So in a sense, even though I was overjoyed that we killed Kael after 6 or so weeks, I was disappointed that we had to kill Kael. I know I'm not the only one on the staff who feels a connection to raid bosses. For Alex, killing Vaelstrasz bought a slight tear to his eye. Just one. He's still a dragon with loot after all.

Maybe the next boss that will give me the exhilarating thrill will be when we drop Arthas himself.

Which boss made the most impact to you as a player and what about it made it so special?

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Alex Ziebart will be your host today.

That's a trailer we haven't seen in awhile, huh? It's relevant today, I promise! Besides, a little nostalgia is always fun. If I have one grievance with Wrath of the Lich King's cinematic, it's that they didn't give us an incredibly corny catchphrase to spout for nearly two years.

Discolando asked...

"Is there any substance to the rumor I've recently read that patch 3.3 will contain another yet unknown raid instance, and patch 3.4 will contain Icecrown Citadel? It does seem more logical to 'finish' the expansion with the advertised antagonist instead of a deux ex machina like patch 2.4 gave us."

Spartonian over on WoW LJ has been running some old content, and he points out something that everyone should hear: now is the absolute best time to be running the old Burning Crusade endgame. He says the contest is laughably easy with current endgame levels and gear, and yet, because we're still basically at the beginning of this expansion's endgame, there are still quite a few items that can be picked off of the end bosses in Black Temple and Sunwell (not to mention you can pick up the achievements for those places if you weren't able to down them before.

And he's right -- there are some nice trinkets still found in those old instances, and who wouldn't want to complete their Warglaive set or grab a Thori'dal from Sunwell? Sure, the stats may not be the best, but until the ammo changes go in, you can save money while soloing -- and own a legendary to boot.

Of course, when Ulduar shows up, we'll all likely be too busy with the new content (be it the raids or the Argent Tournment or whatever else you got) to go back to Burning Crusade. But now, during the downtime post-OS and Naxx, is the perfect time to go back and clean up the old content.

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, we sing a swansong to TBC raiding in all its glory.

With less than a week to go before we all start frantically levelling and leaving Outland behind for good, let's not forget the ups and downs raiding during The Burning Crusade has brought us. From Attumen to Kil'jaeden, we've run the gamut of raiding, killing anything from pit lords to corrupted naaru with nary a blink.

We've shed blood and tears over rare drops, wiped countless times until the small hours, decked our alts out in epics and moved servers to find a better guild. We've rerolled, watched ourselves and our raid instances get nerfed, hung out in Shattrath showing off our gear, and gotten to grips with major class changes in the last two weeks. So let's look back...

Every Tuesday, or possibly Thursday when the writer votes on Tuesday and spends Wednesday screaming and beating her laptop over formatting errors, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week Allison Robert steals John Patricelli's column once again, secure in the knowledge that she will never be forced to atone for her crime as long as she writes something nice about ferals and keeps a respectful distance from Dan O'Halloran's whip.

I hate Tauren cat form.

Good. I got that out of my system and can write something productive. Although, believe me, if I could get away with it, an entire Shifting Perspectives would be devoted to just how much I hate Tauren cat form. I mean, just look at it! Look at the angle on the horns! The cat can't bite anything! Christ, I just -- hi, Dan. Yes, I'm totally writing the column! Look at me go!

This week, mindful as always of American election-year politicking, I'm going to borrow a page from presidential duties and write a little something I like to call "State of the Class." Druids have undergone a number of changes in the transition to Wrath of the Lich King, and will acquire even more as they level to 80. We are one of Blizzard's primary targets for both gear and role consolidation, which raises a few questions over how comfortably we're going to scale in relation to pure classes and what we can realistically expect on the march to a new level cap.

The TL:DR version of this article -- I believe our future is generally bright, the Druid community continues to have a few concerns over certain aspects of the class, our focus in PvP seems to be changing the most, and I hate Tauren cat form. This is a three-part post, so let's get started with balance. However, if you want to jump ahead to feral, you'll find that here; and the third part, restoration, is here.

Kil'jaeden, the Sunwell Plateau end boss, has had a tough time lately. Since the Echoes of Doom patch, plenty of guilds have breezed through Sunwell and many of those have managed to kill him for the first time, signing off TBC raiding with a bang. Congratulations to them!

This is pretty symptomatic of raiding post-3.0.2 in general -- while nothing on the surface has changed drastically, everything's become a whole lot easier, as increased damage output, decreased mob health and relaxing of raid constraints all add up to great effect. Previously complex encounters become almost trivial and previously trivial encounters become hilarious, with a slight twist of nostalgia when remembering how hard they were first time round.

Here's a secret gem from BlizzCon from our sister site, Big Download: The DVD Production panel. The DVD Production team, despite the name, actually oversees most of the video produced by or at Blizzard. That means that they had a hand in the South Park episode "Make Love Not Warcraft," as well as the "What's your Game" and "Lawgiver" commercials.

They also work on the gameplay trailers from World of Warcraft, and walked us through the creative process for the patch 2.1 Black Temple trailer, revealing some interesting lore behind Akama's betrayal. Finally, they revealed that they were the force behind the Wrath Gate cinematic. It's no wonder they were able to make such an epic cut scene though: One of their team members was a member of Rufus Cubed Productions, the creations of the epic machinima Return.

There's some other nice information from the panel, including the real identity of the villain from "Make Love Not Warcraft" and a preview of the lore of Diablo 3. Be sure to go check it out at Big Download!

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Last week, I began the column by answering a reader's question regarding the two specializations of blacksmithing. The player had been considering switching, and I discussed his reasons for doing so.

I also began to compare the armorsmithing items to their non-crafted counterparts, to showcase how strong they really are. This week, I'm finishing up that analysis as well as giving weaponsmithing the same treatment.

Each item from either specialization tends to surpass its tier 5 counterpart, and strongly rival the tier 6, Black Temple pieces. Unfortunately, if the itemization is exactly right for your class, race and spec, the cost and effort spent to make any given piece is probably not worth it.

Still, for players who may never see the Black Temple, for whatever reason, can still work towards a strong epic piece to complement their PvP, dungeon and/or raiding gear.

It is also important to note the difference between blacksmithing and other gear-crafting professions, tailoring and leatherworking. Blacksmith specialists essentially create one piece, or in the case of dual wielders, two pieces, that are roughly tier 6 equivalent.

The other two professions can make more pieces, but the quality ranges from tier 4 to tier 5, although any gear choice is subject to individual circumstances and preference.

These pieces are bind on pick-up and cannot be sent to alts, so keep that in mind when you choose. There are many other blacksmithing patterns and drops that are BoE, but the specialty items, as with tailoring and leatherworking, can only be worn by the crafter.

In addition, should you make, for example, a sword and then switch to armorsmithing, you will no longer be able to wield the sword, as doing so requires that you have the correct specialization.

Dear reanimated angst-puppy hero corpses,

Love what you've done with the smell, really. The little air freshener attached to the runeblade is a nice touch. Now that I'm in the beta, I've had the opportunity group with -- conservatively -- billions of you. I've healed a lot of Death Knight tanks, and tanked for a lot of Death Knight DPS. Most of you seem like cool people, so I say this with sincere love in my little Druid heart and a touch of worry over what will happen in November:

Most of you are awful.

I don't wish to be needlessly cruel here, mind you, or to overlook that the class is still new. Blizzard endlessly tinkers with you, so it's not like your rotations haven't changed, or your talents and skills are stable. And I know you're not coming to Northrend with a bank full of awesome gear from Burning Crusade. This isn't about your wearing greens or using the wrong attack or tanking rotation; I'm not even going to bother with the theorycraft surrounding the ideal DPS rotation until Wrath actually ships. But I'm seeing an awful lot of you running around playing as if...almost as if...you haven't played a tank or a melee class before. It's uncanny. But when I switched from playing a balance to a feral druid more than a year ago and knew nothing about playing a melee DPS/tank, I made all the mistakes you're making right now. Help me help you!

As of last night's beta (and PTR) patch, players have been reporting that mob health throughout all of the Burning Crusade raid zones have been reduced by up to 30%. That struck me as really, really odd, so I decided to pop into Sunwell Plateau and Black Temple to take a look. It is, in fact, completely true. Every mob and boss that I could see in both zones (and I could see a lot- Mind Vision hopping through raids for the win) had their HP drastically reduced.

My gut instinct was, "Ugh, why are they nerfing everything so badly? That's ridiculous. Just because it's the end of the expansion doesn't mean they need to make it easy mode for us." Then I actually thought (gasp!) about it for a little bit. Looking at the changes coming in Patch 3.0.2, this was a change they needed to make to let us still raid until Wrath. A lot of encounters probably became impossible to beat as they were with those changes, Sunwell Plateau especially. Sunwell was designed with all of the insanely OP stuff players were doing to win in mind. Stacking Shadow Priests for mana regen, stacking Shaman to chain-cast Heroism/Bloodlust, half the raid going Leatherworking for Drums, yadda yadda.