We here at WoW Insider and others around the WoW community have talked so much about the term “bring the player, not the class” that I’m a little surprised we haven’t started shortening it to “BTPNTC.” But apparently I, at least, have not really understood what Blizzard meant by it when they said it was part of their new philosophy of balancing for raids.

Ghostcrawler basically QFTs another forum poster who said the following: “Blizzard has repeatedly stated they didn’t mean any class will be identical to all other classes in effectiveness for your last raid slot. Blizzard has provided a wow goldbunch of options you can choose from to get Replenishment, but expects you to choose one of those options. If any choice were a valid choice, there would be no incentive to think about the choice you make. Blizzard wants you to think about your group composition.”

As you may have gathered, this is in the contest of “A plea to remove Replenishment.” What Blizzard, then, apparently means by BTPNTC is that it’s now easier to get your (semi-)required buff and debuff coverage, not that you can do it with any old group. Sort of like threat for tanks, the mini-game of group composition has been made easier, but not made a non-issue. Honestly, I do think Replenishment should be removed – I don’t see how requiring my 10-man raid to bring one of five specific DPS specs, or face the consequences, makes the game more fun. But it’s good to have some insight into the developers’ mindset.

The naked night elves. The dueling fanatics. The motorcycle guy. The hunter in Black Mageweave and bunny ears. The terrifying shirtless dwarf. All of these people have at one time wiped your PUG. And now they’re raiding together.

Actually, the members of <Running With Scissors> on Dawnbringer just decided to play around a little bit while waiting for their Ulduar 25-man to fill up. Glisoarin (the male draenei on the motorcycle) snapped a candid shot of a non-catform catfight between skyclad druids Furianne and Lunarblossom. Was it for blackmail or for his private collection? The world may never know.

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@wowinsider.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, double-mounts, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran.

Warning: There’s a bit of sex bits in here, which might weird you out a bit.

M is for Muchacho was suggested to me by Art on the tip line. Uploaded by Wuza, this video is actually one hell of an interesting freshman effort. The plot is a familiar one. A small group of compatriots are relaxing by their campfire when the king’s men come to harass them. Unable to pay their taxes, the cadre must train at the feet of a combat master in order to defend themselves when the king’s men return.

What makes it so interesting to me? While the animation is basically made up of various in-game footage, “M is for Muchacho” shows a definite appreciation for story. At a run time of over 20 minutes, the story admittedly could have used a faster pace. Another option might have been to chop it up into smaller pieces. Regardless, Wuza was clearly trying to work on characterization, plot, and story-arc progression. (Also, I found the soundtrack choice for the muchachos’ training montage to be hilarious.)

I hope Wuza keeps working and developing. I like story-based machinima, and I’m always eager to see new creators enter the fold.

If you have any suggestions for WoW Moviewatch, you can mail them to us at machinima AT wowinsider DOT com.

Good Morning, and welcome to another week of 3.1 PTR shenanigans. In the past week we’ve had a couple new builds, some rather heinous nerfs to certain tanking classes, and some pretty awesome new achievements and wow goldquests. We’re expecting more of the same this week, although I can’t help but pray for a few fewer nerfs, if possible.

One thing we are also expecting this morning is some downtime, from 5 AM to 11 AM Pacific time. Since you’ll be bereft of WoW, we’ll do our usual and suggest you do some reading of WoW Insider. For example, you may want to check out back issues of The Queue or The Daily Quest and see if a question or link catches your eye. You can also read on after the break for our usual roundup of the best news and features from the past week.

• If you play a tank, or even if you just group with them, you’ll want to read this article. It explains the current problems with tanking in Wrath and why the latest round of Druid and Death Knight nerfs went in.
• Time is Money, Friend. It is also a new feature here on WoW Insider.
• Not only has Noblegarden been extended to a week, but it will be required for that Violet Proto-Drake.
• Know a good guild that takes that extra step into awesome? Why not submit them for our Guild of the Month?

Class News and Guides

• Want to know where your class fits on the target DPS scale? Ghostcrawler breaks it down.
• Check out the second latest PTR build Priest changes, as well as the latest build’s changes.
• We have analysis of the second latest PTR Shaman changes and the latest PTR Shaman Changes as well.
• We also have the latest Death Knight changes, as well as some more discussion of what this means for tanks and dual wielders in Lichborne.
• Check out the latest Warlock patch changes here.
• Encrypted text brings you a roundup of Rogue videos on the PTR.
• Even the dev team agrees: Retribution really has been nerfed too much.
• Speaking of Paladins, we also have a look at the latest Paladin PTR changes.
• Check out the latest Druid PTR changes as well.
• We also have Warrior PTR changes.
• Looking to raid, Hunters? Here’s what you should pack.

Ulduar and Raiding

• We have a first person report on the Flame Leviathan fight in Ulduar.
• We also have a report on Ignis the Furnace Master.
• The new raid token, Emblem of Conquest, now has gear to purchase.
• Ulduar now has in-game maps.
• Will we see Immortals in Ulduar?

Dungeons, Items, Professions, and More

• It’s official: Brew of the Year is gone from the Brewmaster achievement come 3.1.
• Rejoice, novice cooks! Cooking will be easier to level in 3.1.
• Fellow fishers, please feel free to join me in squealing over the new Dalaran fishing dailies.
• Horde Pet collectors will be able to get their own Sprite Darter come 3.1.
• Having trouble finding a specific quest mob? You probably won’t in 3.1.
• Check out some of the new profession items in the latest PTR build.
• The battleground twinks are restless.
• Did resilience fail in the expansion?
• Tired of all these different types of currency? There’s a method to this madness.
• Check out our list of the latest Arena hotfixes.

Odds and Ends

• Would you rather have the Sartharion 3 Drake achievement or an Oscar? This guy has both.
• The Guardian talked to some gold sellers and gold buyers recently.
• Warcraft Legends is free to read until March 17th.

Tonight on the US Patch 3.1 PTR Mimiron will be tested, and we’re bringing you the live stream of Alliance guild Symbolic Logic on Area 52. You’ll be able to watch them (hopefully) down the boss.

Mimiron is a mechanical boss with a slew of abilities for players to deal with. He has two phases: one where he’s in his Levianthan MKII tank, and one where he’s got a VX-001 Anti-personnel Assault Cannon.

While in his tank Mimiron will toss napalm out dealing AoE damage, fire a plasma blast, drop some mines, and chuck about rockets all while causing a blast wave. With his cannon he will deal fire damage to players within 80 yards of him, do some frontal cone damage, and charge up his lasers for a big ol’ blast that puts the BFG to shame.

You can read more about him at WoWWiki.

I should be a fun fight to watch!

Edit: Comments are disabled for this post.

Staring at you from the darkest corner of the dank tavern is a shadowy figure, garbed in deep purples with scarlet trim. As you step closer, you realize that before you stands the dreaded Blood Pact. Behind it, drowning in his own cliches, sits Nick Whelan.

For my second foray into non-Affliction specs, I decided it was time to go deep Destruction with 7 / 7 / 57. There aren’t a lot of people who champion this spec, or any spec that includes Chaos Bolt really. But I tried the more popular 0 / 31 / 40 earlier in the week and found it far too similar to the spec I covered last week to justify posting about it so soon. So I did some research into what deep Destruction Warlocks are doing these days, and this is what I came up with.

I was somewhat surprised that this spec decides to put wow goldpoints in Affliction rather than spend the full 13 points in Demonology required to get Demonic Aegis, but part of the experiment is that I don’t tweak the specs in any way that might affect DPS. Still, I’m tempted to switch some points into Demonic Aegis over the weekend to see if there’s any improvement — but I digress. Lets get down to business.

For my Glyphs, I picked up the soon-to-be-improved Glyph of Imp to boost my pet’s damage. I also grabbed Glyph of Conflagrate because getting more than one Conflagrate out of each Immolate seems like a good thing to me — particularly because I was always really bad about casting Conflagrate during the very last Immolate tick. I also stuck with Glyph of Immolate, because it actually turns out to be a pretty decent damage increase for Immolate, which I’m casting as Destruction anyway. I promise it has absolutely nothing to do with the glyph costing 40 gold, and me being too cheap to buy it again when I spec back to Affliction. Honestly, each of these glyphs seems so important to the spec that I really don’t know what will be the glyphs of choice once Glyph of Incinerate and Glyph of Chaos Bolt are released in patch 3.1.

The tactic of this spec shares the basic philosophy of last week’s 0 / 41 / 30. The casting sequences begins with shadow dots to proc Molten Core, then the bulk of the damage is done by keeping Immolate up and hammering the target with Incinerate. The difference with this spec is that Chaos Bolt and Conflagrate are both thrown into the mix. The latter of which is particularly essential to the success of this spec, because every time it’s cast it causes the Backdraft effect, which is like a miniature version of Bloodlust / Heroism with a 10 second cooldown instead of a 5 minute one.

I decided that instead of casting both Curse of Agony and Corruption, as I did during last week’s test, I’d cast only the former, to see what the difference was in Molten Core uptime. After doing some fiddling, I must agree that Corruption is a largely unnecessary addition to the rotation, as CoA is enough to keep Molten Core active almost constantly. And the global cooldown I saved myself every 18 seconds was put to much better use I think.

With that in mind, my rotation began with Curse of Agony, followed by Immolate. I usually got a little lag between casting Immolate and Conflagrate becoming available to me. So, I’d follow Immolate up with Chaos Bolt, then hit Conflagrate, which of course procs Backdraft. The massive haste increase allowed me to blast the target with 3 quick incinerates before losing the effect. One or two slower Incinerates was usually enough to finish up the Conflagrate cooldown. If I was quick, I could pop Conflagrate just before immolate ran out, then use the haste bonus to re-apply Immolate before continuing my Incinerate and Chaos Bolt spam. Of course, Life Tap and Curse of Agony need to be cast now and again, but if you time them to coincide with when you’d usually be casting slow Incinerates, it doesn’t break up the rotation too much.

Deep Destruction is a peculiar kind of spec to play. I commented to a friend on vent that it half like playing Affliction, and half like playing some weird sort of bizzaro-Affliction. Playing this spec you’ve got 2 dots that you want to keep up, and avoid clipping, as well as 2 cooldowns that you want to keep on top of. Personally, I found this to be more difficult and complex than the simple whack-a-mole of refreshing Affliction dots. Focus on two different kinds of count-downs rather than just one resulted in a sort of split-brain thing. It made this spec an interesting challenge to play.

After spending a bit of time on a training dummy to get a feel for the rotation, I headed to Heroic Culling of Stratholme (which was the heroic and normal daily on my server that day) to do some field tests. It didn’t go well. To be fair, my group had 2 pugs, and 3 people who were playing outside of their usual spec, but that didn’t stop my cheeks from turning red when we didn’t manage to complete the timed event. Worse yet was my personal performance in there. Rain of Fire doesn’t seem to pack the same punch that it does when you’ve got all those sexy Demonology buffs, like you do as Fel / Emberstorm; and my dps on the bosses was so abysmal I’d be ashamed to talk about it.

At first I chalked this up to the spec, and was starting to pen some disappointed, yet biting, comments in my mind. But one instance is hardly a sufficient sample, particularly one where almost every single boss has the ability to interrupt your casting in some way; and they all took advantage of that ability against me. The way Mal’Ganis was putting me to sleep, I started to wonder if my character had suddenly developed narcolepsy.

Next our group headed to Violet Hold, where my performance improved considerably. I regularly pulled 2.2k DPS on the single target trash pulls, which swelled to 2.3 or 2.4 on bosses. If I actually had the crit rating this spec is designed for, it would certainly be even higher. Once Dalaran was safe from the invading dragonflight, my group and I set off for Halls of Lightning to try and get some pants for our Mage. There, my performance continued to hover steadily around 2.2k — 2.4k — save for that one huge trash pull where I managed to break 9k before stealing aggro from the tank and getting my butt franchised.

After Halls of Lightning, the tank decided to call it a night and the rest of the group agreed. I would have liked to get some more testing done in the name of scientific rigor. But, I think three instances was enough to get a reasonable idea for how the spec plays. I was rather disappointed the group didn’t have it in them to tackle Azjol-Nerub, though. Affliction does terrible DPS against Anub’arak, and I would have loved to see how Destruction fared.

My astounding improvement between the the first and second instances can, I think, be attributed to several factors. The two most relevant being firstly my own ineptitude with the spec. Once I got the hang of things the rotation was easy enough, but it certainly took a bit more getting used to than I thought it would, and I’m glad I gave it several instances before making any final judgments. Secondly, I think it has a lot to do with a weakness of the spec. As Affliction, getting put to sleep or stunned is obviously a DPS loss, but the DoTs that were already on the boss will keep ticking away. While as Destruction, being temporarily taken out of the fight is much more damning, since you’re doing almost no damage at all during that period.

All in all, I didn’t do as much damage with this spec as I do when I’m Affliction; but there are a lot of other factors to consider here. Any respectable deep Destruction Warlock would have at least 25% crit unbuffed — 5% more than I had. And while I haven’t been on the PTR to gather any hard data on this, it looks like Affliction’s damage output will be at least slightly reduced come 3.1. On the other hand, 7 / 7 / 57 looks like it’s going to get some buffs, with Glyph of Imp having its affects raised from 10% to 20%, and replenishment being added to Improved Soul Leech. Furthermore, considering the interesting complexity of the rotation, I wouldn’t be surprised if some Affliction locks switched to deep Destro after Affliction is ’simplified’ in 3.1. On the other hand of course, Molten Core is being moved deep into the Demonology tree, so at this point, who can really say?

For now, though, 7 / 7 / 57 is overshadowed by 0 / 41 / 30. They have similar play styles and, for me, had almost equivalent damage output. But the buffs offered by the Demonology tree makes 0 / 41 / 30 much less demanding in terms of gear, and the rotation is far more bang for the buck. Still, 7 / 7 / 57 is by no means a bad spec, and I await trying it post-3.1 with great anticipation.