This title is what happens when you don’t title your own post and leave it to Alex to do it. You have all been warned.

Sumadin asked:

With Menethil Harbor flooded how do Alliance players get to Theramore and Howling Fjord? Has it all been moved to Stormwind?
As it turns out, docks float. Menethil Harbor is both a fully-functional quest hub and fully-functional port town. You can still get to Theramore and Valiance Keep from there.

Kavu asked:

I wonder about worgen form and combat — I remember hearing that worgen would need to be in worgen form while in combat, but if you’re in human form and, let’s say, cast Moonfire do you then have to go through the few second transformation?

Transformation only takes time when you hit the Two Forms button. When going into combat or casting a spell, the change is instantaneous.

Mau asked:

While there was no internet today, I randomly decided to see the game’s credits and the arts shown there surprised me. There was one landscape I didn’t recognize though, in vanilla WoW’s credits, a city built on a petrified nautiloid-looking thing (or is it a city on a hill that’s been sculpted like a nautiloid?), any clue on what that place is?

It’s uncertain for what the art was going to originally be used, but its untextured model is currently in-game on Designer Island. Also present on Designer Island: mining and herb nodes of every type. Weird.

ROB13 asked:

We already know that mounts will scale to the highest riding level I.E. Bronze Drakes going 310% if you have a Violet Proto Drake, but will the Sea Turtle scale to the new faster Sea Horse mounts we get in Vashj’ir?

At this point in beta, no, they don’t. They might later, but it’s unlikely — getting that water mount is a rite of passage in the zone.

Crewdie asked:

So in the expansion, you get locked into a talent tree as soon as you pick it, right? Any chance this will affect the LFG system? As in “You aren’t spec’ed to tank, you can’t tank?”

As of a few builds ago, I was able to queue as healing on my elemental shaman. I haven’t tested it recently.

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General

* NEW: Project Lore (Professions, Classes, Talents, Dungeons)

* NEW: WoW Professions

* EU Forums: Vendor Bought Recipes

* EU Forums: Moneymaking/Specialization in TBC

* EU Forums: TBC BoP Recipe Drops

* EU Forums: Faction Rewards by Profession

* EU Forums: Full List of Profession Trainers in TBC

* EU Forums: Powerleveling Guides for all Professions

* EU Forums: Lockpicking Guide

* EU Forums: List of Profession Trainers by Highlander

* EU Forums: Cost of Leveing Your Profession

* EU Forums: Ore & Herb Maps. Gem Drop %

* US Forums: Profession 1-300 Guides

* Professions

Cooking

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Cooking 1-450

* EU Forums: Cooking 300-375 by Highlander

* EU Forums: Fishing and Cooking 1-300 by Highlander

* EU Forums: List of Foods That Give Buffs by Highlander

* TenTonHammer’s Cooking Guide

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* NEW: Power Leveling Cooking

First Aid

* NEW: Exploring WoW: First Aid 1-450

* EU Forums: First Aid 300-375 by Highlander

* EU Forums: First Aid 1 to 300 Guide by Highlander

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Fishing

* EI’s Extreme Anglin’ Fishing Guide

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Fishing 1-450

* WoWWiki Guide to Dalaran Daily Quests

* EU Forums: Fishing 300-375 by Highlander

* EU Forums: Guide to the Fishing Extravaganza

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* Fishin’ Ain’t For Wimps

* Fishing and Cooking: Two Hours to “Expert” (150) Skill

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Herbalism

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Herbalism 1-450

* Lootables Guide

* Complete Herbalism Guide

* EU Forums: Herbalism 300-375 by Kharne

* EU Forums: Herbalism 1-300 Guide by Highlander

* TenTonHammer’s Herbalism Guide

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* NEW: Herbalism 1 to 450

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Inscription

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Inscription 1-450

* NEW: EI’s Inscription

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Jewelcrafting

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Jewelcrafting 1-450

* Jewelcrafting 1 to 450

* Jewelcrafting 1 to 300 by Highlander

* Jewelcrafting 1 to 300 Alternate Guide by Dominara

* Jewelcrafting 300 to 375 Guide by Highlander

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Mining

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Mining 1-450

* WoW Vault

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* EU Forums: Mining 300-375 by Highlander

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Skinning

*

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Skinning 1-450

* Lootables Guide

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* EU Forums: Skinning 1-300 Guide by Highlander

* TenTonHammer’s Skinning Guide

Alchemy

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Alchemy 1-450

* Lootables Guide

* EU Forums: Alchemy 300-375 by Highlander

* EU Forums: Alchemy Guide 1-300 by Ithilian

* TenTonHammer’s Guide to Alchemy

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Blacksmithing

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Blacksmithing 1-450

* Lootables Guide

* EU Forums: Blacksmithing 300-375 by Highlander

* US Forums: Willhelm’s Blacksmithing Guides

* TenTonHammer’s Blacksmithing Guide

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* NEW: WoW Guide Online

Enchanting

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Enchanting 1-450

* NEW: Chordian’s Enchantments

* Lootables Guide

* EU Forums: Enchanting 300-375 by Highlander

* EU Forums: Enchanting 1-300 Guide by Ithilian

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* The Enchanting Glows

* Enchanting

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Engineering

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Engineering 1-450

* Lootables Guide

* EU Forums: Engineering 300-375 by Highlander

* EU Forums: Tinker’s Guide to Engineering

* EU Forums: Velgard’s Guide to Engineering

* EU Forums: Engineering 1 to 300 Guide by Darksicarius

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* TenTonHammer’s Engineering Guide

* NEW: WoW Guide Online

Leatherworking

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Leatherworking 1-450

* Lootables Guide

* EU Forums: Leatherworking 300-375 by Highlander

* US Forums: Emli’s Leatherworking FAQ

* EU Forums: Leatherworking 1-300 Guide by Azhrarn

* TenTonHammer’s Leatherworking Guide

* NEW: WoW Guide Onlien

* NEW: Jiyambi’s Leatherworking Guide

Tailoring

* NEW: Exploring WoW: Tailoring 1-450

* Lootables Guide

* NEW: Tailoring 1 to 450

* EU Forums: Tailoring 300-375 by Highlander

* US Forums: Chezzik’s Tailoring Guide (1-375)

* US Forums: Mazorn’s Tailoring Guide

* EU Forums: Tailoring 1-300 Guide by Ithilian

* EU Forums: Fishing and Cooking 1-300 by Highlander

* EU Forums: The Best Places to Find Cloth by Highlander

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* TenTonHammer’s Tailoring Guide

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Forget Worgen Freeman, I’m rolling a stab-stab-stab rogue named Dexter Worgen. Props to Joker for putting this idea in my head.

Tim asked:

“I know there is another patch before Cataclysm. Why isn’t anyone talking about it? Are they going to do something cool and event-y like the Scourge infection before Wrath? Maybe some more heavier seismic activity or something?”

There will be another patch, likely numbered 4.0 or 4.0.2. It’s going to contain things like the aftermath Operation: Gnomeregan. The only reason you haven’t heard anything about it lately is that the patch itself isn’t out on the PTR and we haven’t really heard much about that patch in particular. Remember though, the “Cataclysm patch” as it will be called, is just a complete dump of everything that’s in the Cataclysm expansion into the current world. So all the articles you see about specs and new spells (level 80 and below), will apply to that patch as much as they apply to the new expansion.

Dannyboy asked:

“What I am still wondering about is: Why do the hunter trainers in Stormwind and Gilneas still use mana when all the other hunters in game switched to focus?”

Likely because Blizzard hasn’t coded over the hunter NPCs in game to be a physical NPC class versus a mana-using NPC class. It might never change, to be honest; I’m sure it’s very low on their list of things to get done.

Duulket asked:

“With gems changing in color come Cataclysm, will we have to replace all our currently equipped gems or will they switch automatically?”

WoW.com reader Cephas gave an excellent answer to this:

Professions are still being worked on, so this might end up changing, but as of the current beta build, BC/Wrath gems have not had their colors changed. Rigid King’s Amber is still a yellow gem and it still provides hit. A look into the game files reveals gems like Rigid Ocean Sapphire which are blue and carry hit, but it’s possible that these color changes will only apply to Cataclysm gems and existing gems will not have their colors retroactively changed.

On a related note, your ArP gems will automatically be converted to crit gems, which means that if you were matching red sockets with ArP gems, they won’t be matching anymore. This is only happening for ArP, i.e., existing AP gems will still grant AP; there just won’t be any new AP gems in Cataclysm.

How significant? For starters, armor penetration has been utterly removed from Battle Stance. Instead, it now simply grants a warrior an extra 5 percent damage dealt and 5 percent less damage taken. Defensive Stance grants 45 percent additional threat and -10 percent damage taken, with no damage dealt penalty, and Berserker Stance grants 10 percent damage dealt and no damage taken. In many ways, this is merely a way to make the stances all seem positive (much as how rested XP was changed from a penalty to XP when you didn’t rest to a bonus when you did), but it’s still nice to no longer take more damage than anyone else just because you decided to DPS as a warrior. Tanking without a damage penalty no other tank pays will just feel better.

First off, Plate Specialization is now trainable at level 60, giving arms and fury warriors more strength and prot warriors more stamina when wearing plate. To give you an idea of how mastery currently works on gear, we’ll first reprint the bonuses and then show some examples of it scaling.

Warrior

* Fury Increases the benefit of abilities that cause you to be enraged or consume an enrage effect by 80%. Enrage abilities improved further by mastery rating.
* Protection Increases your chance to block by 10% and your chance to critically block by 10%. Chances increased further by mastery rating.
* Arms Grants a 16% chance for your melee attack to instantly trigger an additional melee attack for 50% normal damage. Chance increased further by mastery rating.

To give you an idea of how this is shaking out, we’ll use Death Wish, a typical fury warrior short-cooldown DPS ability, and show how it interacts with the fury mastery (it’s an enrage effect). As you can see looking to the right, this tooltip is Death Wish with approximately 12 percent mastery — level 80 characters who have trained mastery seem to have about 8 percent without any mastery on gear, meaning that in the screenshot to the right, the warrior has 4 percent mastery from gear.

Now, to get an idea of what that mastery is doing, here’s the same warrior switching out his mastery gear for older, non-mastery gear to reduce his mastery rating to baseline. What happens to Death Wish?

You can clearly see that Death Wish without any mastery from gear loses almost 8 percent of its damage increase. Mastery for a fury warrior interacts this way with any enrage effect or effect that consumes an enrage, meaning that Enraged Regeneration will heal for more, and Enrage and Death Wish will provide more damage as your mastery rating increases. And since arms and prot each have their own mastery bonuses, you can easily imagine a situation where a mastery trinket or ring could be of use to any spec.

In addition to all this, we have some other changes. Leveling warriors who haven’t earned a talent point yet will gain a new ability: rather than starting with Heroic Strike, they gain Strike. Strike is clearly intended to replace HS and to be itself replaced once you hit level 10 and gain Mortal Strike, Bloodthirst or Shield Slam as your spec-based ability.

The protection passive ability Vitality is now Sentinel, granting 15 percent additional stamina and increasing rage generated by 50 percent when attacking someone not targeting you, most likely designed around off tanking. Rage generation has been increased by about 50 percent, but critical hits no longer generate extra rage, which ultimately seems so far to be working out (based on very limited testing by me in Deepholm) to almost the same rage generation and much less spiky overall.

Overall, you’re definitely going to want mastery gear as soon as you can get it. It makes a huge difference.

The World of Warcraft is an expansive universe. You’re playing the game, you’re fighting the bosses, you know the how, but do you know the why? Each week, Matthew Rossi and Anne Stickney make sure you Know Your Lore by covering the history of the story behind World of Warcraft.

This is introduce

If you remember Anne’s excellent Elune is a naaru post from a few months back, then you’ll know how this works. If not, then I’ll explain. Basically, what follows is a huge post full of supposition and speculation that takes established lore (including some new lore from Cataclysm) and uses it as a framework to support a contention that is not currently stated by Blizzard. It’s probably not what’s actually going on, but like that guy you know who won’t shut up about the grays, we’re going to ride the crazy rocket all the way to violent crash landing town. (I promise you the Yogg-Saron post is coming, but in writing it, I ended up going down these roads for a bit.)

Deathwing. The destroyer, Blackwing Greatfather to the gronn of Outland, Xaxas to the night elves, formerly Neltharion the Earthwarder and still referred to among some of the earth elementals. The Dark One. Neltharion the Betrayer, Blood’s Shadow, self-proclaimed Aspect of Death. The Unmaker of Worlds. Many are his titles, earned in acts of rampage and devastation from the time of the War of Ancients (when he used the Demon Soul to annihilate the Blue Dragonflight) right up to the Second War, when he helped the orcs make off with magical artifacts for Ner’zhul. Soon, the fury of Deathwing will be the focus of an entire story arc with the release of the Cataclysm expansion.

One of his titles, however, interested me. Deathwing now claims the mantle of death itself, which is interesting considering his relationship to the Old Gods, who as we know have a death god already. Furthermore, Deathwing now calls himself the Unmaker of Worlds. Now, we could just dismiss this as the typical grandiosity of a being whose pride and arrogance matches his power, but when you really start to think about it, it sounds much less like a boast and more like simple fact. Deathwing has indeed unmade a world. The preparations for this Cataclysm go back much further than we’d expected and have already borne stark fruit.

To recap Deathwing’s long history, he was once one of five magnificent dragons chosen by the Titans to shepherd their creation, the world of Azeroth, after the defeat of the Old Gods and the creation of the elemental plane. Deathwing, then known as Neltharion, was chosen to watch over the very stuff of the land, from the surface to the molten heart of the world itself. His tenure as the Earth-Warden, Aspect of Earth, passed for thousands of years. He was the solid center of the Aspects, the one they all relied upon and respected. Close friend to Malygos, cherished adviser to Alexstrasza, among dragonkind no name was more touted than that of Neltharion.

However, despite all this, Neltharion began to harbor doubts about the Titans and their creation. Why should dragons, the most magnificent of all their works, be trapped forever in the role of caretaker when they should instead be rulers? Who better than the dragons, after all, the pinnacle of form and the epitome of power? Furthermore, he looked with bland envy on his “sisters” Ysera and Alexstrasza, thinking that it was he who deserved such mates and not those who consorted with them. These doubts and lusts were fed by whispering voices as he communed with his charge, the darkest depths of the earth, and it may be that he never realized his mistake. For that matter, he probably doesn’t consider it one.

Everything that comes after flows from this one moment where Neltharion stared into the abyss below the surface of the world that was his to guard and defend and blinked. His undeniable positive attributes of strength, eloquence and intelligence were twisted by his greed to possess what he was intended to safeguard and although he would not be immediately twisted visibly by them his corruption began at the exact moment he failed to turn away from the Old Gods. His eventual state as a being constantly torn apart from within by writhing molten fury, held together by adamantite plates constantly reattached to his body, was just a reflection of this moment.

The rest we’ve covered before. Neltharion, with the help of his best friend Malygos, convinced the other Aspects to loan him a portion of their power to create an artifact capable of standing off even the Burning Legion, the Dragon Soul which would become known as the Demon Soul. The War of Ancients, his betrayal of the other Aspects and destruction of most of the blue dragons (including Sindragosa, prime consort of his friend Malygos), the centuries long hunting of the few remaining blues by Deathwing and his Black Dragonflight … down through the centuries Deathwing and his brood stood in opposition to the efforts of the other dragons.

While he was certainly a potent force for destruction and mayhem during the long period between the War of the Ancients and the War of the Shifting Sands, it’s notable that Deathwing and the black dragons didn’t play any role in supporting C’Thun and his war effort. Clearly, while Deathwing’s current power lust and madness stems from his long contact with the Old Gods, he doesn’t feel any particular loyalty to them or at least not to C’Thun.

This WoW Alchemy guide will show you the fastest way how to level your Alchemy skill up from 1 to 450 as inexpensively as possible. Updated for WoW patch 3.3

Alchemy is the best combined with Herbalism, with these two you can save a lot of gold, and you can sell the potions later. Check out my Herbalism leveling guide if you want to level your Herbalism skill. If you don’t have Herbalism profession, make sure you have enough gold to buy herbs, because you will need a lot of them.

The materials are based on a case that you will gain one skill point each craft. This won’t happen, so you will have to buy a few extra materials while you are leveling your Alchemy.

If you are low on gold, I recommend you to try this Gold Making Guide, it can help you to make loads of gold. You also need to realize this is not a leveling guide, so if you are looking for a leveling guide, the best one is this 1 – 80 Leveling Guide.

Alchemy guide sections:

Alchemy Apprentice 1 – 60

Alchemy Journeyman 60 – 140

Alchemy Expert 140 – 205

Alchemy Artisan 205 – 285

Alchemy Master 285 – 350

Alchemy Grand Master 350 – 450

Approximate Materials Required for 1-450:

* 59 x Peacebloom

* 59 x Silverleaf

* 95 x Briarthorn

* 35 x Bruiseweed

* 20 x Mageroyal

* 35 x Stranglekelp

* 30 x Liferoot

* 30 x Kingsblood

* 45 x Goldthorn

* 10 x Wild Steelbloom

* 70 x Sungrass

* 15 x Khadgar’s Whisker

* 4 x Iron Bar

* 1 Black Vitriol

* 4 x Purple Lotus

* 4 x Firebloom

* 19 x Arthas’ Tears

* 40 x Blindweed

* 75 x Golden Sansam

* 18 x Mountain Silversage

* 35 x Felweed

* 20 x Ragveil

* 35 x Dreaming Glory

* 10 x Netherbloom

* 20 Talandra’s Rose

* 5 Pygmy Suckerfish

* 85 Goldclover

* 35 Tiger Lily

* 25 Adder’s Tongue

* 20 Icethorn

* 40 Lichbloom

* 56 Saronite Bar

* 5 Dark Jade

* 5 Huge Citrine

* 5 Eternal Fire

Vials

* 74 x Empty Vial

* 65 x Leaded Vial

* 97 x Crystal Vial

* 163 x Imbued Vial