It’s time to face the facts. The vampires are out there.

They lurk in the shadows of Silvermoon with their bare, glittering chests entrancing casual bystanders. Theirs is the skin of monsters. Their cunning angst and perfectly tousled hair threatens a new generation of Azerothian teenagers. They are vile and unrepentant. It doesn’t matter if you claim that you can’t be a vampire; the Blood Prince Council beckons like a tempting cupcake. “Eat me,” they say with voices like chocolate frosting. “Forbidden fruit!”

But how can we possibly fight these vile fiends? What can we do to stave off our pale, cold future?

Ladies and gentlemen of the readership jury, I present to you: Stakethrower.

Stakethrower is crafted from the very finest engineering know-how. Its barrel packs enough Light-blessed silver to burn scars on thousands of vampires. The bayonette is crafted from metal retrieved from the Cathedral in Stormwind. The trigger is more sensitive than a teenager worried about their pants.

Capable of hurling stakes and bullets, the Stakethrower is the very finest sidearm available to modern-day vampire hunters. Pick yours up today in your local Icecrown Citadel!

The vital statistics for your last line of defense are just below.

Name: Stakethrower
Type: Ranged Gun (that throws stakes)
Damage: 500 – 836 Damage, 222.7 damage per second (with stakes that are thrown)
Speed: 3.00 (takes a little while to get a new stake in the barrel)
Attritbutes:

• 45 Agility
• 32 Stamina
• Improves haste rating by 28 (0.85% @ L80)
• Increases attack power by 70.
• Increases your armor penetration rating by 31 (2.21% @ L80)
• Decreases the number of vampires in your area

How to get it: You only need 9 friends to kill Blood Queen Lana’thel. Nine, for what it’s worth, is the number of vampires in the Cullen family, if you count Bella. Coincidence? Unlikely. I suspect there’s secretly a Twi-heart on the Blizzard staff.

How to get rid of it: It sells for 17 gold, or can become an Abyss Crystal. However, if you lose this protection, you could also lose your life, and become one of the gruesome vampires. Is that really worth 17 gold?

Filed under: Phat Loot Phriday

Phat Loot Phriday: Stakethrower originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 19:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Go to Source

Last week, we talked about the core buffs just about every raid needs to get by. I included the 3% damage buff provided by some folks like retribution paladins. While ample raids get by without that buff, it’s so straightforward that I felt it merited inclusion. It affects physical DPS characters, tanks, and magical DPS characters all alike, so is fairly universal.

Of course, I didn’t mention a lot of other obvious buffs like Arcane Intellect. While I’ll certainly admit I can’t recall having been on a raid in while without that buff, I’m pretty sure at least a few 10-man groups have gone without a mage. But that’s why, this week, we’re picking up the remainder of the raid buffs that provide so much synergy for raids.

As Brian Wood pointed out, raid buffs are some of the most drastic increases available in raid performance. Every class’s power soars while under the effects of raid buffs (and while their targets are getting debuffed), and it’s this synergy that makes raids successful. That’s by design: Blizzard wants us to be exponentially more powerful while grouping with other players. The power of two players in a group is greater than the sum of their parts.

With all that in mind, let’s jump behind the cut and start going down the other important raid buffs.

Continue reading Ready Check: Raid buffs for great justice

Filed under: Ready Check (Raiding)

Ready Check: Raid buffs for great justice originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 18:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Go to Source

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

Around this time last year I was off helping my area deal with a 500 year flood. This year it’s struck again (although only 2 feet less, /cheer?). Pictured above is a shot from the live flood web-cams the local paper has set up, and it’s kind of interesting to watch (for those wondering the water should be about 20 feet lower than it is now). Every once in a while you get to see a cop or some workers do something, and boy, is that exciting…

About as exciting as AoE pally tanking. /rimshot

Fornozo asked…

“How come the GearScore addon became so popular?”

Continue reading The Queue: Fargo (the flood, not the movie)

Filed under: The Queue

The Queue: Fargo (the flood, not the movie) originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Go to Source

Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. After a week of being under the weather, we’re back with to explore the depths of Murmurs’ mailbox and to find out just how much junk he really has in his trunk.

It’s another week. Another week and I still don’t have my ‘OP’ version of Starfall to play around with. Do you have any idea how upset this makes me? I mean, honestly, all I really want to do right now is slap on my PvE gear and run screaming through the Horde turtle in AV and watch as Starfall obliterates everything in my path. Is that asking too much? Since I don’t have legions of dead Horde bodies to entertain me at the moment, I thought it would be a fantastic time to go in and check my e-mail for a change. That was a mistake.

Apparently, it is not a good idea to rely solely on filters for people that you know in order to view your mail. I mean, sure, I get all the important stuff, but after my week of doing nothing but laying in bed all day long, I came back to see that I had officially broken g-mails load limit. Okay, not really, but I did have well over 2,000 unread messages. That’s a lot, like, a lot a lot. Unfortunately, that’s far too many for me to ever catch up on if I plan on ever eating, sleeping, working, or bathing again – and, let me tell you, I love to do those things. In an effort to not quit my day job – or get fired from it due to not being awake and smelling like I crawled out of a sewer – instead of attempting to reply to each e-mail individually, I’ll address many of the most comment topics in one stroke of the key. Alright, so, there will probably be many key strokes involved in this plan, but there will be a lot less than if I did it the other way around.

Continue reading Shifting Perspectives: Moonkin mailbag

Filed under: Druid, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives

Shifting Perspectives: Moonkin mailbag originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Go to Source

This video is just the beginning of a larger project here at WoW.com. We’re working to bring more video content to the site in all areas, raids and otherwise. We have big plans for Cataclysm in particular. With this in mind, we’ve made it a point to make our video content easier to find and navigate. Any videos made by the WoW.com staff will be posted to our new YouTube channel rather than scattered across the staff’s personal channels willy-nilly as they have been in the past. Check it out, and if you’re feeling especially kind, go ahead and subscribe, too.

Continue reading Lich King strategy and tutorial video

Filed under: WoW Insider Business, Raiding, Wrath of the Lich King

Lich King strategy and tutorial video originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 15:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Go to Source

Nethaera hit the forums this morning, asking for feedback from tanks around the globe. Ghostcrawler has been having a lively discussion with tanks (most specifically protection warriors) recently, and now they seem to be formalizing the discussion for the wider audience.

Nethaera

Nethaera goes on to remind people that this thread isn’t the place for balance discussions necessarily, and certainly not a place to debate who’s overpowered. This feedback also won’t dictate exactly what the developers will do, it will simply help them make the right decisions. Do you have an opinion? Then head on over to the forums and make it known! Politely, of course.

Filed under: Blizzard, Cataclysm

Cataclysm tanking cooldown feedback wanted originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 14:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Go to Source

The Care and Feeding of Warriors is about warriors, those lovable, squeezable, strokeable bundles of pure joy who seethe with a burning inner fire, a rage that can only be quenched in blood. Matthew Rossi tries quenching it in delicious caffeinated beverages. You’d be surprised how often that works.

Honestly, believe it or not, I’d actually like to talk about DPS today. My current raiding guild has between three and four regular tanks who show up for most every 25 man raid. As you might expect, you don’t need three to four tanks for ICC. At this point in the raid’s life cycle, if you have two tanks you can get through most everything except Putricide and maybe Blood Princes. (We have used two tanks and a DPS for this fight, but we usually use our feral tank for it, so three tanks.) Marrowgar at this point can be done by two geared tanks and a plate DPS standing up there mashing away, although to play it safe we usually just use three.

So last night, after tanking Sindragosa, I got to DPS on Arthas, which is fun for a warrior. (Ah, Glyph of Cleaving, you make up for the mechanical deficiencies of my class.) Then I went and did some stupid fun heroics with a warrior tank, arms warrior, another fury warrior and a resto druid who kept healing in bear form. (I know they can’t cast healing spells in bear form. He’d occasionally pop out and throw a HoT on folks. It was pretty much all we needed.) So it wall all sorts of DPS warrior fun last night.

And then I went and read this endlessly exploding threat on tanking and now I have to talk about it. Why? Well, first off, Ghostcrawler mentions Monte Cook. That hits all of my nerd buttons. (If only you’d thrown in a plug for Kingmaker, Greg.) Secondly, we both hated the old Shield Block mechanic and we both hate the current Heroic Strike one.

Ghostcrawler – Re: Just get rid of dodge and parry altogether

Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: But hitting buttons is fun!

Filed under: Warrior, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: But hitting buttons is fun! originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Go to Source

Malamenz created the majority of the movie in Fraps, which is a tradtional and time-tested method for machinimators who are just getting started in their craft. The voice over was clean and easy to understand, even if the production was all narrated from a first person point of view. The story is pretty straightforward and most of the audience shouldn’t have much trouble picking it up quickly.

Congratulations to Malamenz on winning the Rise to Power contest. Here’s hoping we see you to continue to explore creating machinima.

Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an e-mail at machinima AT wow DOT com.

Filed under: WoW Moviewatch

WoW Moviewatch: I am Vengeance originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Go to Source

Dodge the drama and become that player everyone wants in their group with the Drama Mamas. Lisa Poisso and Robin Torres are real-life mamas and experienced WoW players — and just as we don’t want our precious babies to be the ones kicking and wailing on the floor of checkout lane next to the candy, neither do we want you to become known as That Guy on your server. We’re taking your questions at DramaMamas (at) WoW (dot) com.

Warning: This week’s topic is very much on the serious side and has nothing to do with WoW except that it occurs in-game a lot. Because it brings up some sensitive subjects and is very close to home for me (as you will see), I may be very heavy-handed with the moderating. I would appreciate it if you kept all of the comments constructive and non-trollish so I don’t have to. Making fun of me, Robin, is ok though. I’m already laughing at me, so you can only laugh with me.

Drama Mamas, I recently went to ToC5 with my RL friend, and in the party there was a mage. A very chatty mage. I humored him and chatted away. Today the guy whispered me and talked about wanting to do some instances etc.. Nothing out of the ordinary, I guess. I think he said something about not having any friends as well. But later the same day, he started talking to me about how he hates his life because he has no friends, and his girlfriend just broke up with him.. He actually started talking about wanting to kill himself.

Continue reading Drama Mamas: Suicide threats

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Drama Mamas

Drama Mamas: Suicide threats originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 11:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Go to Source

As we’ve all learned from Garfield, cats are prone to laziness. Also, they enjoy tormenting their sexless, despondent owners, although real cats will prefer to eat your iPod ear buds before any lasagnas. Our anonymous submitter has taken being lazy to a new level. She’s decided that walking is too tiring, and has commissioned a more energetic cat to carry her from place to place.

Do you have any unusual, beautiful or interesting World of Warcraft images that are just collecting dust in your screenshots folder? We’d love to see them on Around Azeroth! Sharing your screenshot is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wow.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. Please include the word “Azeroth” in your post so it does not get swept into the spam bin. We strongly prefer full screen shots without the UI showing — use alt-Z to remove it. Please, no more battleground scoreboards, Val’kyr on mounts, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran. Older screenshots can be found here.

Filed under: Around Azeroth

Around Azeroth: The joy of sloth originally appeared on WoW.com on Fri, 19 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

Permalink | Email this | Comments

Go to Source