Is it just me, or are the realms kinda dead today? Well, that's probably because everyone in the known universe (with the possible exception of on-call firefighters and paramedics or surgeons who are not currently engaged in removing brain tumors) is off playing Diablo III. That's fine. I don't judge.

But sometimes you need something to do whenever other people aren't around to provide mental stimulation. Here are a few quick suggestions that will make your in-game life slightly more interesting until everyone gets back (and a lot more interesting afterwards):

1. Submit a GM ticket asking if WoW's orientation around gear upgrades constitutes a dismissive critique of the nudist lifestyle. (Editor's Note: Don't do this.)
2. If you have guild bank privileges, feng shui the contents.
3. If you don't have bank privileges, spam the officers with letters accusing them of betraying the proletariat.
4. Macro /y BOING to your space bar.
5. Edit guild ranks to more accurately describe members. "Officer" is a less descriptive term than "Untrustworthy Gurthalak-Stealing Suck-Up."
6. Run through Stormwind/Orgrimmar shouting that the Rapture has occurred.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Humor

Like Mat, I read through Reddit's /r/wow community a few days ago and really enjoyed an interesting thread about an Alterac Valley match versus a multiboxer. In case you haven't heard of this, it's a great story. The multiboxer in question was a Horde player with 30+ characters (!) camped in Drek's room and, predictably enough, he was annihilating anyone who peeked in. The Alliance had all but given up when someone hit on the bright idea of summoning Ivus the Forest Lord and letting the now-86 elite loose on the multiboxed raid. It worked, and not only did Ivus handily curb-stomp the multiboxer, but the Alliance also won the match.

After reading this thread, it occurred to me that I've never seen a single Alterac Valley match where anyone summoned Ivus or his Horde counterpart, Lokholar the Ice Lord. I started playing at the beginning of The Burning Crusade, and I get the impression that the days-long AV matches where these summons and special events were common largely ended in classic. But you know what? Now I really want to see what kind of havoc one of these bad boys could wreak on a gloriously unsuspecting enemy, and it's vaulted to the top of my WoW To-Do list.

So what's on your WoW bucket list? What haven't you done in the game yet that's on your list of goals?

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, things are about to get a little easier.

Between Ghostcrawler's blog post and Zarhym's additional notes on the forums yesterday, we now know a lot more about how account-wide achievements are going to work. No preamble this week, folks -- let's get right to it. A lot of questions were answered, but there are still a few unknowns.

Question: Will all of my achievement titles be accessible from every toon?

Answer: Probably, but there may be restrictions on their use.

I've been looking to farm some nice titles out to alts that have done absolutely nothing to deserve them (who isn't?), and what we do know is that Blizzard's looking for a way to do this. From how GC's written about it, I'm wondering if this might actualy go live after Mists of Pandaria has already shipped, because Blizzard's talked about the technical limitations previously, and it's apparently still at work on it.

We also don't know when these titles will become universally accessible. For example, your level 1 monk may not get access to Kingslayer until level 80 or Defender of a Shattered World until level 85, which is sensible insofar as my level 1 monk was not in much of a position to save anyone with Jab as the full extent of her repertoire.

For now, put this firmly in the category of "Probably going to happen, but don't expect a firm date."

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Filed under: Achievements, The Overachiever

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday was supposed to be an "off" week for the column, but screw that.

You know what? I think I finally nailed why the druid experience on the Mists of Pandaria beta has felt so bizarre at times. We've seen the re-emergence of stuff we used to take for granted (shifting out of roots and the return of permatree among them), and you know what it all reminds me of? Someone once described the boot camp experience as one in which "all of your God-given rights are stripped, only to be doled back later, one by one, as privileges." Yep. That's what this is like.

Anyway, Ghostcrawler hit the forums last night to give us some news on a revamped set of level 90 druid talents that have completely altered the ratio of win to suck in the bracket.

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Filed under: Druid, Analysis / Opinion, News items, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives

I don't know what class you play. I don't know if you're any good at it. If you're looking for gold, I can tell you I don't have any. But what I do have is a very particular skill -- a skill I have acquired at level 87 after a long career of pleading with Blizzard for relevance. This skill makes me a nightmare for people like you. If you let the contents of your action bar go now, that'll be the end of it. I will not look for you. I will not pursue you. But if you don't, I will look for you, I will find you, and I will take everything you hold dear.

Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Symbiosis -- or as we like to call it around these parts, the reason you need to be nice to druids in Mists of Pandaria.

Or as we also like to call it, the endless, numb suckhole where raid balance goes to die.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Mists of Pandaria

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, you might as well come back next week.

So here's the deal: This article's kinda stupid. I really wanted to write about pet battling this week, because if the idea of running around the world raining destruction on everything with a small animal of indeterminate origin doesn't appeal to you, then you are probably a communist. But pet battling has been functionally disabled on the Mists of Pandaria beta (you can only access it at level 90, and the current level restriction is 88), so all I can really do is nose around and dream of what's to come. If you want to skip this week's outing and return at a time when we're doing something a little more relevant or useful, I don't blame you. Go with blessings.

And yet I still really wanna write about pet battling.

My first pet in the game was a prairie dog sold by Halpa in Thunder Bluff. My next was a Black Tabby, which I camped Ambermill for the better part of two days to get off a now-vanished mob known as the Dalaran Spellscribe. While I have amassed in excess of 150 pets since then, the original two have accompanied me across the world into the darkest depths of the ocean and to the top of the highest mountain peaks. They were there when my guild sent Kil'Jaeden packing. They were there when I was alone in the darkness. They were there when the Lich King fell. They were there when I got my ass handed to me by a slightly less cooperative version of the Lich King.

And by God, they're going to start pulling their fricking weight around here.

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Filed under: Achievements, The Overachiever

Opinions were pretty mixed when druids lost permanent Tree Form going into Cataclysm, but two distinct camps emerged. Lots of people who'd been playing since classic WoW resented having to be in a low-poly model all the time just to be competitive with other healers. Others really liked playing a tree, missed the form, and have sulked their way through Cataclysm with only temporary access to the (admittedly awesome) Captain Disco Soul Patch Groovy Tree.

When Glyph of the Treant was introduced on the Mists of Pandaria beta, I was among those who hurried to glyph it in order to enjoy the form again and subsequently found myself running around Azshara like an idiot, one-shotting the mobs as a tree again. I have difficulty defending this. It literally adds nothing whatsoever to the class. It takes up a valuable glyph slot, gives no combat advantage, and exists only to be enjoyed.

And then I realized -- a lot of the stuff I've liked about Mists has absolutely nothing to do with the druid's combat effectiveness. Something that contributes to tanking, healing, or DPS always has to be balanced with other classes, and a degree of homogenization results because you can't have wildly different mechanics without usually getting wildly different results. Something that doesn't contribute to combat can just exist to be fun and doesn't have to be balanced with similar abilities elsewhere.

What skills, spells, or abilities does your class have that are only for fun? And on a more thoughtful note, would the game benefit from more "dumb stuff"?

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, our friends keep mounting us and -- for whatever reason -- we encourage it.

I'm currently prepping a column on the bear experience on the beta, but seeing as to how so much of the recent experience consists of disconnecting, lagging my way to parts unknown, launch problems, and finding colorful new language with which to greet these events, let's put that on the back burner for now.

One of the things that was instantly obvious about the new set of Mists of Pandaria druid glyphs is that a lot of them are, for lack of a better term, really, really fun. One lets us confuse people endlessly about our actual spec. Another lets us be mounted by friends and groupmates for totally platonic purposes. I hope.

Now, these are by no means all of the new glyphs available on the beta right now, but with so many class abilities being retuned and changed, it's tough to evaluate how most of the major glyphs stack up. However, even a few of the major glyphs are things that'll pretty obviously have a positive impact on how you experience a spec, so I've included the ones that really pop out here.

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Filed under: Druid, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives

I ran into an old friend from the Burning Crusade days recently, and we found ourselves reminiscing about the things we missed from that expansion. While we both agreed that the quality of the play experience is way better these days, there was one thing that we both missed: Shattrath.

As any BC-era player could tell you, Shattrath was a busy place, with players getting their tailoring and blacksmithing done in Lower City, loitering around the Scryer and Aldor bank ledges, playing chicken with the elevators, and riffing on Cro Threadstrong's threats to the nearby fruit vendor. Because the Alliance and Horde were both headquartered in the city and there were no faction restrictions on which of the two banks and inns you used, it was pretty common to encounter both friends and enemies as you went about your business (or, just as commonly, sat somewhere and gossiped in guild chat). While we were chatting about this, my friend said something that stuck with me: "It felt like you cared more about players from the opposite faction because you saw them all the time."

The more I thought about it, the more I felt he was right. I knew if my counterparts in Alliance raiding guilds had upgraded their gear, /waved at them a lot, and /pointed and /cheered to the telltale flames in the central part of the city to congratulate them on their Kael kill. In Cataclysm, we find ourselves largely on opposite sides of the world and encounter each other but rarely outside of the entrances to raids or while farming in higher-level zones.

Now obviously, there are technical issues with sticking players of both factions into the same city (Dalaran was famously laggy for most of Wrath of the Lich King), and given the Mists of Pandaria storyline, it doesn't make much sense to encourage interfaction closeness. But still I wonder, would the sense of server community (otherwise hurt by the success of the Dungeon Finder and Raid Finder) benefit from the reintroduction of a popular neutral city?

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

1. DPSers are enormously indifferent to aggro in early dungeons. You're not healing one tank -- you're healing four. Five, if nobody bothers to stomp the mob making a beeline for you.

2. Early dungeons aren't necessarily good training for everyone involved. I wouldn't go so far as to say they're a terrible experience, per se -- they're quick, easy, and a good way to build confidence for new players -- but the usual mechanism by which players are encouraged to behave themselves (ugly death) is a remote possibility at best.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion