Ready Check is a twice-a-week column focusing on successful raiding for the serious raider. Hardcore or casual, Vault of Archavon or Ulduar, everyone can get in on the action and down some bosses. Today, we step back a little and look at endgame in the context of sports. Ah, summer. Pimm’s in the sunshine, the thwack of tennis balls against grass, iced Frappucinos and hayfever. Delights like these, and others, all conspire to turn perfectly normal raiders into monsters of poor attendance. Yet guilds soldier on despite a mixture of player attrition and general unreliability — this column looks at some of the ways they manage. The problem at hand is that many raiding guilds, at all levels of raiding, rely on a fairly tight-knit group of players. The smaller the raiding core, the more reliant you become on everyone showing up, but the better the guild is (in theory) since your players are well accustomed to working together. Additionally, loot is better used since it generally goes to those who raid rather than those who sit out. With the advent of dual specs, it’s become even more possible to run a very tight ship in terms of player numbers. Once you solve the loot problem — giving offspec loot on the

Addon Spotlight takes a look at the little bits of Lua and XML that make our interfaces special. From bar mods to unit frames and beyond, if it goes in your Addons folder, we’ll cover it here. Today I’m going to focus on an addon that is almost purely cosmetic. XLoot is one of those addons that people will see on screenshots and ask “ooh, what is that?” Essentially, it makes your loot frames much prettier, and somewhat more informative. You can see the default configuration in the screenshot. It’s extremely configurable, though; anything from background and border colors to whether the loot frame snaps to your cursor can be set with a simple “/xloot options.” Personally, I like my XLoot to not snap to my cursor, since I use auto-loot and the movement is distracting. I also like to lighten it up a bit; glossy black isn’t a great fit for my UI. But everyone should be able to find a look that fits. I also like the option to color the loot frame based on loot quality; it’s nice to see a blue frame when out questing. Finally, the “link all” button is quite handy for a raid leader, and there’s a thoughtful option to only show that button when you’re in a

Did you really believe that the Ember Clutch was created by a bunch of fire-breathing proto-dragons? Pshaw. That’s just what they want you to think. In reality, Akrasia of Steamwheedle Cartel-EU got a little too careless with her Arcane Missiles, and what was once a thriving forest is now a bunch of very large matchsticks. Remember, kids, as the Rabid Brown Bear says, only you can prevent forest fires. At least that’s what I think he says. It’s hard to understand him through all the foaming at the mouth and chewing on my leg. 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@gmail.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, gold seller ads, or

Reader UI of the Week is back! Each week WoW.com will bring you a fresh look at reader submitted UIs. Have a screenshot of your UI you want to submit? Send your screenshots, along with info on what mods you’re using, to readerui@gmail.com. This interface, by Metzerott, is one of the more unusual I’ve seen. With 90% of the submissions I get featuring rectangular unit frames towards the bottom, a large bottom panel studded with action buttons, and a customized mini-map moved to the middle of the bottom, it’s nice to see something a little different. Well, it still hits the last point, but two out of three ain’t bad. More importantly to me, it’s very minimal. It covers less of the screen than any interface I’ve seen recently, including the default UI. I’m going to guess that the left unit frame is the player, the right is the target, and the small user frame to the upper-left of the target frame is target-of-target. Up at the top-right you can see some ElkBuffBars, and there’s a soulstone timer at the right under the zone map. The minimap has been Sexy-fied a little bit, and below that you can see the zone name, the framerate, the current coordinates, and a percentage that

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. Long long time ago… I can still remember How that music make me smile, Alex. And I knew if I had my chance That I could make those people dance And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while, Alex. Tim asked… “When discussing new content coming out, why does Blizzard always play so close to the chest? For example, the mount changes are due to be “in the next major content patch” which everyone knows is going to be patch 3.2, why don’t they just say it?” It’s all about forward looking statements, and in general companies don’t like to make them. If they make them and then things happen differently, it’s possible for them to get sued. That’s why if you look at the BlizzCon announcement page, for example, or any press release, there’s gigantic legalese attached that basically says “Blizzard is not responsible if these statements don’t come true.” Now does saying something like “Mount changes come in patch 3.2” and then it gets delivered in patch 3.1.4

Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we talk about a few of the general raiding tips every Rogue should know. As a break in the boss-by-boss breakdown of Ulduar fights, I wanted to go over a few general raiding tips for Rogues. Some of them may be very old ideas that you’ve been using since level 60, while a few others are new tricks that we’ve learned in WotLK. Hopefully you’ll be able to glean a few good bits of information to take with you the next time you zone into any raid. There’s nothing more important than properly preparing for a new fight, but knowing the general tactics for any encounter will make understanding new fights much easier. First, however, I would like to comment on the new Overkill. Its new form is a significant buff when looking at total energy generated, and also for PvE Mutilate Rogues. However, it is a nerf to our 6-second burst window during a Cheap Shot -> Kidney Shot combo. I feel this will end up being a net buff for Rogues, as relying solely on the first 6 seconds of a fight in PvP has become far to gimmicky for us to rely