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

It’s time again for Arcane Brilliance , the weekly mage column that today brings you the above fan-submitted picture of an apparent gnome explosion. Incidentally, Gnome Explosion

I should probably asked “What would your ultimate raid be” instead but let’s just run with it.

I am endeavoring to take more screen shots of all the funny things that happen – Would you belive I STILL can’t find my Screen shot folder on my 64 Bit Windows so I have to SS and then paste into Gimp. I even installed Piccaso to try and see if it was hiding in some odd directory

I already covered the disciplines of war and now its time to cover the remaining announced disciplines. We’ve got two more “combat” disciplines comprised of the spell-caster types and we’ve got some profession based disciplines.

New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW’s newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft . F or links to all our tips, tricks and how-to’s, visit WoW.com’s WoW Rookie Guide .

On Wednesdays, Fox Van Allen takes control of Spiritual Guidance and spams all sorts of shadowy goodness.

We dont’ have an official date yet but Blizzard posted about the the Cataclysm prologue event and according to the website link, it will happen after the release of Patch 3.9 on live servers. I’ve got the official page updates and information as well as some image galleries after the break so check it out now for more details. High Tinker Gelbin Mekkatorque: The Liberation of Gnomeregan Gelbin Mekkatorque is known as much for his technical brilliance as he is for his just leadership of the gnomes

An Assault on Two Fronts – Patch 3.9 Blizzard posted about the the Cataclysm prologue event. According to the website link, it will happen after the release of Patch 3.9 on live servers.

Thanks for all the comments on the Twinking post. I’ve decided to level my Hunter, and I’ve started working on a gear list for him. It’s almost like end game gear planning, which I enjoy, only with much less guidance

In FFXIV you don’t exactly have classes you choose at character creation. From what I gather you have certain disciplines that act exactly in the same way that the class system does in most other MMORPGs we’re familiar with.

Every Sunday (and the occasional weekday) Dawn Moore reinvents what “smitelol” means to her shadowy cohort, Fox Van Allen , by busting down a door with penance lasers and raising holy hell to a Tarantino soundtrack . In the column Spiritual Guidance she offers advice to holy and discipline priests on how to wield the holy light, with style

Axes, maces, lightning, fire, frost, and wolves, and best of all, Windfury. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy lives it and loves it

T he lush, green, rolling hills of the Arathi Highlands did little to ease Decedereful’s racing heart as she stalked around Refuge Pointe.? What was she doing here?? With her brother and his wife off helping the assault in Icecrown, she had planned to continue her own smaller skirmishes around Northrend as the occasion warranted.? It seemed that the Citadel was getting all the attention, however, and so her and Abigora sat, tending house for the last several weeks.

Lately I am supremely enthused about my shaman. Fist weapons! Zapping things! Windfury! Turning that guy into a frog! That guy is totally a frog! Now he’s on fire! The best thing about the enhancement shaman playstyle I’m working with (designed for five mans and the occasional 10 raid) is working out for myself how to glyph and spec for it. It’s admittedly not the most efficient spec, relying on a lot of 3 second Fire Nova blasts in big trash pulls, but it’s undeniably fun

Patch 3.3.3 – PTR Build 11655 A new build has been deployed on test realms! So far it looks like the only changes are the ones from the official notes, but I’m digging.

We were just talking about it on today’s podcast (thrill to the sound of three people barely awake trying to coherently discuss World of Warcraft ) and hey, look, Ghostcrawler reads my mind from across the interwebs. Well, okay, no, he responded to a forum thread, but it’s still interesting

Two Bosses Enter …

Every Wednesday (you know, ideally Wednesday, when he’s not slacking off), Fox Van Allen grabs hold of Spiritual Guidance from her holiness Dawn Moore and makes everything just a little darker than usual. Don’t worry, he usually remembers to unlock the closet and let her out when he’s done.

Mastery System Preview Quote from: Eyonix ( Source ) Last week, we gave you an early look at the changes we?re making to the stat system in World of Warcraft: Cataclysm, and explained how these changes will ultimately provide players with more interesting gear choices and make stats easier to understand. Today we?d like to go into more detail about a brand-new feature that?s an integral part of this overhaul: the Mastery system, a set of new game mechanics designed to allow players to become better at what makes their chosen talent tree cool or unique. With this system, we want to accomplish three things: give players more freedom in how they allocate talent points, simplify some of the ?kitchen sinky? talents that try to do too much at once, and add a new stat to high-level gear that makes you better at your chosen role