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!

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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.

Any machinima that uses The Beastie Boys wins a few extra points in my book right off the bat, but it certainly helps that this video in particular is well choreographed. The video fit the music very well, and I think my only real complaint is that it started to drag on a little. To be truthful, I can’t tell if that’s the fault of the machinima or the fault of my fascinating inability to sit still for more than a few minutes if there are no explosions in my direct vicinity.

I do like the fact that there was a story being played out using the lyrics of the song, rather than just a bunch of unrelated scenes cobbled together as we see so often. It’s nice when someone sticks to a theme rather than flashing back and forth between random characters and scenes, only focusing on words that stick out in a song rather than the entire song. The jarring scene switches have their place, but this isn’t it. It’s good to see the author recognize that.

The creator, CSid, mentioned that this was a test project and they’ll be working on their own WoW web series. I haven’t seen enough from CSid to make a prediction on its quality, but I can say that I plan on giving it a shot. The animation quality is there, and the ability to tell a story through WoW models is there. We’ll see about the writing, I suppose. If you can’t see Youtube at home for some reason, here’s an alternate Vimeo link.

Every Monday Scott Andrews contributes Officers’ Quarters, a column about the ins and outs of guild leadership.

Who knows what’s best for a guild, its leader or its members? It’s an interesting question. The guild leader certainly has the best perspective on all guild issues (or she should, anyway). But it is her job to keep the members happy. So if the members are against something, should you allow them to overrule you? What if you as an officer think the members are wrong? This week’s e-mail comes from a reader who did what his members wow goldwanted him to do, but thinks he might have made a mistake.

Hey Scott.

I’m the GM of a reasonably successful guild who have gotten to Sarth 2d and working on 3d in 25 man raids, so there’s not a lot left to do.

Back in mid January we were successfully [running three Heroic raids] a week. However some classes were very tight and for the 25 man we had maybe 27 signups and not all of the ‘right’ class balance, but ‘good enough’ for Naxx etc. We had the opportunity to take in approximately 10 good raiders [. . .] with whom some of us (including myself) had played in the past and [whose] attitude matched very closely to our own. With those 10 raiders there were approximately 10 other people who did not want to raid with RL commitments but still enjoyed playing WoW etc. The Officers were largely in favor of taking them on, our class leaders had some concerns, but generally thought it was a good idea. So we took the idea to the guild as a whole who were largely against the merger.

There’s a lesson here for all guild leaders faced with a difficult decision. Anon, you certainly did the right thing by asking your members what they would prefer. That’s an important step in the process of making the decision. However, it’s just one step. There are a few more you could have taken. The next step would be to find out exactly why people were against the merger.

Guild leaders have to consider the long-term growth and success of their guild. Guild members aren’t largely concerned with that issue in the day-to-day. Members are more about the here and now. They don’t want the boat rocked. If they are able to do the things they want to do without much drama, then most of them will be happy.

At the time you proposed this merger, you were able to raid and just about everyone who wanted to attend a raid was able to do so. So your members were happy with the situation and they saw no need to add 20 new players.

But the fact was, you were walking a razor’s edge with 27 players for 25 slots. Your officers saw the future need. Your members saw the risk to their current happiness. Would they lose their raid slot if someone better joined the guild? Would they get along with all these new people? Given these easily imagined concerns, it doesn’t surprise me that your members voted down the idea.

If these were in fact their concerns, but you still felt that inviting those 20 players was the right call, you could have taken the next step: Use this information to address your members’ uncertainty head-on. Before inviting these new players, you could have put together a joint run to see how it went. If everyone got along well, your members might have had less doubt about drama. In addition, if the raid had gone smoother due to a better balance of classes, they might have seen the advantage of that aspect as well.

If the run did not go very well, then you may have had to admit that you were wrong about bringing them on board. Either way, at least at this point you’d know more about what could have been.

If your members had other concerns, I’m sure you could have done something to address them going forward. Members always have concerns. Sometimes it is the guild leader’s job to tackle those concerns and keep everyone happy. But sometimes it’s our job to help members see the long-term benefits that can outweigh a short-term risk.

I think the members in your guild who still want to raid right now are seeing what those benefits could have been. Given the chance to voice their opinion again, some might make a different decision.

From a certain point of view, by giving your members what they wanted, you let them down. It’s a dilemma every leader must face. And it’s why sometimes the best leaders aren’t always the most popular.

The PTR Patch Notes for Patch 3.1.2 are out today, and we have them for you in their full glory. Everyone loves themselves some notes!

We found out yesterday that there was a PTR up and running now, along with a bunch of premade characters for everyone to play on. Earlier in the week we also learned that the mounts of the Argent Tournament were getting a revamp.

Some of the highlights from the patch notes today:

• Vehicle health and damage output in Strand of the Ancients and Lake Wintergrasp now scale with the item level of the operator’s gear. Power scaling is now 1% damage and 1% health per average item level.
• Mirror Images: The images summoned by this spell will now target the creature that most hates the Mage, and should no longer cast Fire Blast or Frostbolt on targets that are affected by crowd control debuffs that break immediately on damage unless they are already casting these spells when crowd control is applied. (Which Alex talked about earlier today.)
• Equipment Manager

The full patch notes after the break!