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Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, time is of the essence. Where have we heard that before?

I recently talked to a player who managed to solo most, though not all, of the Glory of the Hero achievements from Wrath. He mentioned ones like Share the Love that been impossible to complete without putting a group together, and as you can imagine, getting four more players for heroic Wrath achievements isn't the easiest thing in the world at 85. People who want the achievement for their alts are rarely interested in doing a meta piecemeal, and this is probably going to get worse, rather than better, once account-wide achievements go active. Once someone's got a red proto-drake on one character, they almost certainly won't repeat the process on one of their alts.

The vast majority of achievements get easier as you level up, but the canny achievement hunter will pay attention to the ones that don't. As the game changes, players' priorities and interests change, and older content has a tendency to fall by the wayside. It's best to strike while the iron is hot.

This isn't the first time I've written a column like this, and we'll revisit the topic once we have a firm handle on any achievements going bye-bye in Mists of Pandaria. In the meantime, let's tackle the Cataclysm achievements you want to get done before the next expansion hits.

General

General achievements aren't that bad. You won't lose anything other than a little convenience if you decide to put these off until later.

Cataclysmically Delicious and Drown Your Sorrows You can actually afford to ignore these until later, but they're both marginally easier to do right now when so many of the ingredients or even the finished dishes themselves are on the Auction House.
To All the Squirrels Who Cared for Me As above. You might as well knock this one off while you have a reason to be in the Cataclysm zones in which they're located.
Quests

Two words: Molten Front. Expect this to empty out quickly when Mists arrives, and that will make several of the related achievements more difficult to get done.

The First Rule of Ring of Blood is You Don't Talk About Ring of Blood Blizzard is very likely to reduce the amount of experience needed to level from 80 to 85, as it's done with previous expansions. This had the effect of turning later zones from The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King into ghost towns, because players outlevel the expansion's content before they need to do zones like Shadowmoon Valley or Icecrown. The Twilight Highlands are likely to suffer the same fate. However, if you play a class that can solo the Crucible of Carnage, disregard.
Round Three, Fight! Same deal as the above.
Have ... Have We Met? It'll be tough to find a lot of people doing the Molten Front dailies after Mists hits, and some of the NPCs needed for this (Thassarian is the major sore point) are already rare catches. Even if it means hanging around Sethria's Roost for a bit, I would really try to get this done now.
Gang War This will still be relatively easy if you can convince a friend or guildie to come with you in order to lose a duel, just more inconvenient.
Master of the Molten Flow You need another person in the party with you in order to complete the Flamewaker Sentinel requirement. Unless you want to make a special trip back with a guildie or friend who's already phased in that particular leg of the Molten Front dailies, do it now.
Exploration

No real problems here. However, if you're one of the few people who doesn't have this yet, go knock off Stood In the Fire. Reportedly you can still get this on the Spine of Deathwing encounter (I haven't personally observed this, but commenters have written in about it before), so try to get it done while Dragon Soul PuGs are still common and you haven't outleveled the Raid Finder version.

Player vs. player

Oh, this one's easy. As any Wrath player could tell you, Wintergrasp achievements got a lot tougher when Cataclysm made the zone less compelling to max-level players. The same thing's likely to happen to Tol Barad. The problem's less acute than it was for Wintergrasp, which had more achievements that were reliant on having a zone with lots of players around, but you'll still want to get Master of Tol Barad (which encompasses most of the stuff you need to worry about) done before players set sail for Pandaria.

By contrast, the daily quests and reputation associated with the zone shouldn't be a problem.

Dungeons and raids

This is the big one, and it's actually what prompted this article after that conversation I had with the Glory of the Hero soloer. It got me to thinking about a few scattered Cataclysm dungeon achievements that I never got around to doing, and I started to wonder how many of them I could realistically put off if I weren't getting them out of the way now.

Azeroth is a world made of memories. Whether you're talking about mind-blowing scenery, incredible in-game experiences, or just good times with friends, you'll experience plenty of WoW moments that you'll remember for the rest of your life. Just like in real life, it's helpful to snap a quick picture to supplement your walks down memory lane. Taking screenshots in WoW is fairly simple. Just press the Print Screen button on a PC or Command+Shift+3 on a Mac, and the photo gets dropped in your game files. While that's all there is to actually taking a screenshot, there's a difference between getting a picture and getting an awesome picture. Let's take a few tips and tricks from seasoned photography pros and make our screenshots truly spectacular. Technical tricks While I'm mostly going to focus on methods and framing here, let's get the must-know technical tricks out of the way first. Hit Alt+Z to make your interface disappear. Unless you're purposefully taking pictures of your UI, a gleaming row of hotbars doesn't help your picture look awesome. Hold down the right mouse button to scroll the camera view without moving your character. This is how you get pictures of the front of your character. Experiment with your zoom buttons; the mouse scroll wheel zooms by default. Don't ignore your graphic settings. You can turn them all the way up for an amazingly detailed picture or even turn them down for a clear, instructional screenshot. Spray and pray While the spray and pray method of photography is muchly maligned by veteran photographers, it's still a valuable aid to anyone working a digital camera. Spray and pray is equally worthwhile to a WoW enthusiast. Each screenshot takes up a miniscule portion of your hard drive's memory -- why not shoot rapid-fire photos and hope for a bit of luck? The spray and pray method says that if you take thousands of pictures, chances are, a few of them have to be good. Of course, sorting through those thousands takes a lot of time, and your eye for composition is still the key component in decided which screenshots are the best. But still, you don't lose much by taking a bajillion screenshots and hoping for the best. Rule of thirds Without getting deep into photography philosophy, the rule of thirds basically says you want the key element of your picture off-center. It should be about one-third into the photo. (This is a general rule, mileage varies, etc., etc.) When you're taking profile pictures of your characters, avoid the temptation to frame your character dead center. At best, it'll look like a yearbook picture. Take the time to experiment moving your character off center and putting some fun elements in the rest of the picture. Dynamic action Taking action photos can be tough. This is why you've practiced the spray and pray method. As soon as something exciting starts happening in-game, mash that screenshot button like your life depends on it. Don't wait for something to happen; you'll have to anticipate it. Start taking screenshots as soon as you pull the mob and don't stop until one of you is dead. You'll have to go back into the logs and figure out which pictures really worked, but hopefully you'll have a few. Anticipate those special moments One of the most important parts of taking in-game screenshots is being prepared. Have a list in your head of special moments you want to capture in pictures. Your first mount, hitting the final levels, or maybe killing the big bosses. While knowing you want a screenshot won't magically make your pictures better, per se, it will definitely keep you from looking back and thinking, "Gosh, I wish I'd taken a screenshot."

AbabakarOctopuce asked:

I have two level 80 toons with vanilla gear (they got to 80 through free RaF levels). I use them mostly for professions, but if I were to ever level them up, where would I find the appropriate gear to send them into Cata zones?

As readers mentioned in the comments, professions or the Auction House would be the way to go. All you need is a basic set of gear that will keep them alive long enough to complete some level 80 quests. The level 80 quests will bring you up to speed just find as long as you can live through them.

mingusunt asked:

The launch of Diablo 3 has been very... un-Blizzard-like. Several server crashes, two significant downtimes for over an hour each. Lots of criticism for releasing a game Blizzard has said themselves is unfinished. Should this give us reason for concern with MoP?

Personally, I think Diablo III's launch has been very Blizzard-like. The first day or two after a game launch is almost always unstable. Blizzard's not very good at launching a brand new title. It underestimated the demand for World of Warcraft, so vanilla WoW was unstable for weeks after launching. The Burning Crusade was Blizzard's first MMO expansion, and that launch was highly unstable. Wrath of the Lich King was much better because the company'd had experience. Cataclysm finally had a smooth launch because it was expansion #3. StarCraft II's launch wasn't super stable at times, either.

Mists of Pandaria will probably be fine due to being WoW expansion #4, but unstable game launches is kind of Blizzard's modus operandi at this point. I love them despite it.

busscyc497 asked:

On the Mists beta, for the spec specific rewards, could you look at it in one spec, switch to another, and see the other reward? Like switching from dps to healing to get healing gear.

Yeah, you can do that.

@xifenririx asked:

are the inclusion of account wide achievements and mounts, does that mean heirlooms are next?

I don't know if one necessarily leads to the other, but I do believe Blizzard wants to make heirlooms account-wide. Rather than allowing heirlooms to be mailed to different servers, it would be easier to go with an unlocking system -- acquiring an heirloom on one character grants other characters access to those same heirlooms at no additional charge. So if your main purchased an heirloom axe, your alt on another server would be able to go buy another axe at a vendor for free.

There's no ETA on the system and there's no guarantee that's the form the system would take, but that's the latest idea I've heard.

@taufmonster asked:

what would you like for the WoW team to learn from Diablo III?

That smashing lots of stuff is more fun than smashing a single stuff. They could have also learned this lesson from the Dynasty Warriors series!

And before I close this out, I'd like to point you guys toward the AMA I did on reddit's /r/wow yesterday. I'm not really taking questions over there anymore today, but it may be an interesting read for those of you curious about how we operate behind the scenes. There's a screenshot of our publication calendar hidden in there!

So yeah, I'm tanking again. There are a few reasons for this. Reason #1 is my experiences testing prot in the Mists of Pandaria beta. Quite frankly, I think it's going to be much easier to level to 90 as a tanking warrior, what with the spec working quite well on the beta at the moment. Since I expect us to be doing so by August at the latest, I wanted to get a jump on things.

Another reason is simple necessity. We needed a tank; I happen to be capable of doing the job and doing it well. Even back when threat was harder than it is now, I always knew I was a respectable tank. I pay attention to my positioning, I know how to use my cooldowns, and I've got a lot of experience with the role. When my guild found itself short a tank, it seemed like the right thing to do. It's just plain easier to recruit a DPSer and have someone established doing the tanking.

I've asked before if it's time to kill tanking. Almost a year down the road from that question, here I am tanking again. I think what I'm learning is that, at present, it's fairly easy to tank decently and not very hard to tank well, but tanking itself is now split into two halves, and one of them is actually more difficult than it has ever been. It's easier to learn but not easier to master.

Threat and the tank

See, threat is not a tremendous issue. The threat changes we've been living with for almost a year have made it much, much easier to hold threat even against very high DPS. Now, ludicrously high DPS can still pull threat, especially very early in a pull or on a mob that is annoying in its positioning (the charging adds on heroic Warmaster who can stay out of range of your threat moves for an annoyingly long time, for instance) or with constantly spawning adds that don't give you much time to build threat on them. It's not a major deal over the life of a fight, depending on the situation, but it can be irritating.

What I'm noticing in doing tune up 5-mans and Raid Finder groups is that, for whatever reason, people still do all the things that make tanking harder. They pull when you're not ready or not even close to them. They unload all their DPS right as you make contact with the mob or mobs. They play the go-go-go game. And while, thanks to the rather high amount of threat even a semi-competent tank can put out, they don't usually end up dying for any of it, it does make me wonder.

And since I've also played as a DPSer quite recently, I see the opposite side of the equation, all the bad tanking habits you need to make sure you don't pick up. Pulling so fast the healer is out of mana, being a condescending jerk, forgetting that there actually is a method to AoE tanking beyond spamming X AoE threat move. I even had to force myself not to pull a pack out of the group's AoE a few times, an old habit I developed from days tanking in Shadow Labyrinth back in The Burning Crusade when warrior AoE threat was pitiful.

The difference between tanking on the side from time to time to moving your focus from one role to the other on a semi-permanent basis is that it forces you to change your thinking. I always feel a sort of dislocation when I start DPSing after a time spent tanking and vice versa. To a degree, it forces me to relearn the class -- what the talents do, how to use specific abilities and not to use them, how to spec given different roles (Will I be add tanking? Will I be tanking a load of bloods? Will we be taunt-swapping a boss?) and what my experience with the fights as a DPSer allows me to be more or less aware of.

Frankly, DPSing causes me to develop a touch of tunnel vision, and tanking forces me to broaden out. I need to know if I'm in the right place, if I'm ranging the healers or not, what abilities are about to go off, if a debuff is stacking, and so on. It creates an entirely different experience.

Divided but not dissected

I said before that I believed tanking has become two separate halves. Frankly, it's not really new. It's just significantly more pronounced now. Threat is trivial to the point that I stepped back into tanking at the heroic level of Dragon Soul and didn't have a threat issue. I can tank a 5-man in my full tank set and never have to worry about things like taking off my pants to take more damage and thus generate more rage.

But while the threat responsibility of tanking basically just requires you to try and make an effort, the complexity of fights ranges from mildly difficult to quite hectic. Anyone who's tanked heroic Spine knows what I mean. As the fight goes on, you perform a kind of complex dance with an ever-increasing swarm of mobs that would like nothing better than to kill you. Over time, it goes from a slow waltz to a tarantella to a mosh pit, and while it's going on, you need to do more than get and hold threat. You need to stay alive, kite, use cooldowns to benefit the whole raid, and otherwise perform like a traffic director who is directing a school of sharks that want to eat him.

This isn't to say that tanking is super hard now, any more than DPS is, and certainly I believe healing to be significantly more unforgiving in terms of player error. Tanking has simply taken the emphasis away from holding threat and put it onto managing the fight. It's why I'm starting to believe that the active mitigation model for warriors could actually work in Mists, because it is philosophically what every tank is ultimately doing right now anyway. It just means we'll have more tools to do it.

My sojourn in the ranks of the DPS has allowed me to really experience the last week's return to tanking with fresh eyes. And in so doing, I've come to the conclusion that tanking's shift away from threat generation, although personally difficult for me to grasp instinctively (I was a threat tank, I was always working hard as I could for maximum threat), is a welcome development. Yes, people can still pull threat if they play badly, but now, you have a lot more of a chance to control that.

What you really have to work hard to perfect isn't how hard you can spam anything -- it's how well you can conduct the fight, how well you can stay alive, how well you can make the healers jobs easier, how deftly you manage the conditions of the encounter. You're not fighting your own group anymore in most cases, and it's a welcome change.

Well, we got it. I never thought I'd see the day, but we finally got the Trial of the Crusader Lightwell that shoots heals at allied players instead of requiring them to click. Holy priests will gain access to the new Lightwell, called Lightspring, using a glyph of the same name. Before you get too excited, however, I should mention that there is a catch. Apparently, automatic Lightwells don't heal for nearly as much as a manual ones do, so depending on the fight and your raid members' ability to use the Lightwell in the first place, you may choose to skip the Glyph of Lightspring now and again.

Good ol' Derevka has already written up a thorough first look at Lightspring in which he points out many of the spell's limitations. In the post, he points out that Lightspring only heals targets at less than 50% of their health, and it has a 5-second cooldown between heals to prevent it from being used as a raid cooldown. To read the rest of Derevka's write-up and see his comparisons on the numerical output of the two spells, head over to Tales of a Priest.

Holy priests in need of more love

Discipline has shaped up into a rather complex spec at this point, between the addition of Spirit Shell and the recovery of all their old talents as baseline abilities. I think there's a lot of potential for different disc playstyles to surface in the next expansion that are both fun to play and viable to use in dungeons and raids.

Holy, on the other hand, feels like it's missing something. Ever since Atonement got snatched away from it, I've been wondering what a holy priest has to look forward to in MoP. There is no new ability, no Spirit Shell equivalent, and since the spec was always pretty streamlined to begin with, there aren't even that many passive baseline abilities in the holy spellbook.

I think Glyph of Lightspring is a good start, but I'm really crossing my fingers for a new ability altogether. I'd love to see something like Spirit Shell for holy that alters the behavior of Circle of Healing or Prayer of Healing. Or maybe a revamp of Chakra so the level 90 talents are roped in and altered, but not just numerically. Maybe we could get a whole new Chakra stance altogether? At the very least, I hope we'll see Divine Insight work off more than just Greater Heal soon. The super spastic Prayer of Mending is awesome, but Greater Heal doesn't have as much application as Penance does.

The Rapture debacle

Two weeks ago, I discussed Derevka's post on retiring Rapture. Since then, Ghostcrawler (lead systems designer Greg Street) responded to Derevka's post on the forums with a few insights. I think it's worth a read for those invested in the topic.

While on the topic of Rapture, the ability has been tweaked slightly since my last post. The change is actually big news, in my opinion. Rapture now removes the cooldown on Power Word: Shield (just like Soul Warding used to) so that discipline priests will once again be able to spam shields if they choose to.

The ever-evolving Spirit Shell

A little over a week ago, Blizzard released another beta build with a major update to the functionality of Spirit Shell. Previously, the ability was just a new shield for disc priests, much like Power Word: Shield, except this one had a cast time and was balanced alongside Heal (and later Greater Heal). Now, Spirit Shell is a cooldown ability that upon use will turn a selection of your cast heals (Heal, Greater Heal, Flash Heal, and Prayer of Healing) into shields instead. The ability lasts for 15 seconds and has a 1-minute cooldown, and the shields are affected by mastery.

In its current incarnation, Spirit Shell is noticeably complex in behavior. Each of the four different spells that are affected by Spirt Shell creates its own shield when cast. Cast Greater Heal on a player, and he'll receive a shield called Greater Heal. Follow it up with a Prayer of Healing, and he'll receive another shield called Prayer of Healing. So unlike Divine Aegis, where addition absorption is stacked onto one master shield, Spirit Shell lets you create four separate shields on a player at one time.

Two Bosses Enter's season finale was a big win for dungeon boss design, with End Time's Murozond beating out the rest of the Hour of Twilight 5-man instance bosses and even some of the Dragon Soul raid bosses, thanks to the Raid Finder. The WoW Insider community connected with an all-around fun fight that wasn't as punishing as some of the other fights in the 5-man heroic tier but made for epic moments and an important climactic battle. Murozond and his unique mechanic will have a lot to say going forward with encounter design, I would imagine, as this whole set of 5-mans has been remarkably successful, for the most part. Sorry, Arcurion.

Now that we've got season 3 tucked away, it's time to ponder the future, looking forward toward a brighter and more peaceful tomorrow. Sadly, that tomorrow isn't looking so bright or peaceful, with the Horde and the Alliance preparing to descend upon the lost continent of Pandaria, bitter rivalries and hatreds newly reignited. With war comes heroes from every faction, giving us plenty of cannon fodder for Two Bosses Enter.

Rather than do a beta season of Two Bosses Enter, we're going to announce Two Bosses Enter Season 4 once Mists of Pandaria launches, let people have some time with the new content, and then start a new season. Until then, much like the experimentation of the exhibition season last year, we're going to try something new.

One of the best metrics we've found for the most involvement with Two Bosses is how much people understand and know about the characters that are facing off against one another. In the exhibition season, there were characters that never had crossed people's minds before, now in their sight -- opening up new facets of WoW that they might not have seen yet. We're going to do something similar with the potential contestants in the next season.

So until Mists of Pandaria launches, here's what's going to happen: Over the next few months, we'll be profiling bosses, looking at the coolest encounters, and putting the time into getting to know these bosses, factions, and new personalities. When the next season starts, things will be bigger and better. With a grasp on the heroes and champions on a brand new continent, everything improves.

Until then, I'd urge you all to go back into our archives for the last two seasons of Two Bosses Enter and read over some of the awesome stories that you've potentially missed. There are some very talented and awesome writers in our columns with fantastic renditions of their stories, battle reports, and more. I love writing this column because of the creativity I get to see each and every week.

tl;dr: Season 4 of Two Bosses Enter will begin shortly after the Mists of Pandaria launch. Until then, I'll be delivering more content from the beta highlighting the new Two Bosses lineup for season 4, so we'll all have some information and something to go by when deciding the next champion. But we already know that Chen is going to win ...

So there you have it. Season 3 was a ton of fun, and season 4 looks to be even better. See you guys at launch -- and until then, never let the absurdity of a fight deter you from writing something awesome about it.

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.

Warcraft lore is a continually fluctuating beast of a thing that can change at a moment's notice. This is particularly true for stories and plot developments that we hear over the course of beta testing, prior to an expansion's actual release. Nothing announced for Mists of Pandaria in the way of plot development is really set in stone and slapped into lore until the day you can purchase the game for yourselves and play it to your heart's content.

Even then, things might not be what they appear to be. Early this week, we had a fairly eye-opening announcement from Community Manager Zarhym in which he stated that perhaps Thrall wasn't slated to make a return to warchief once Garrosh had been removed, unlike all previous assumptions had suggested. Given the fact that Thrall's just saved the world, not to mention the fact that he's about to be a father, it's hard to picture him gladly taking his place as warchief again. There are more reasons than just those, of course.

But then that leaves the major question: Who the heck is going to be warchief? We don't have answers, but we've got five interesting possibilities for you to consider.

Why Thrall isn't the logical choice

We need to look at why Thrall left in the first place. He didn't think he was fit to be warchief and lead the orcs in the way they apparently wanted to be led. That hasn't changed with Cataclysm; if anything, that rift between Thrall and traditional orc thinking has gotten even wider. Thrall's journey in Cataclysm was a journey of self-discovery and a strong lesson about his place in the world and the place of all mortals in the world.

Thrall has always held the opinion, much like Jaina Proudmoore, that there are far larger dangers in the world out there to be concerned with, dangers that vastly outweigh any petty squabbling between Alliance and Horde. If anything, his participation in the events that led to Deathwing's downfall only reinforced his opinion. A rampaging dragon bent on the destruction of the world is a much larger issue than fighting in Ashenvale. We're talking about the needs of the world vs. the needs of a faction -- and Thrall is siding with the world on this one.

Speaking of the world, it's still in shambles. Deathwing's emergence tore the landscape of Azeroth asunder and sent the elements of the world into a tizzy. Just because Deathwing is dead, it doesn't mean that everything is going to be magically better again. In fact, things might have gotten a little more chaotic, especially given the fact that Ragnaros and Al'Akir are now dead, and Neptulon is nowhere to be found. The world's been saved, but the elements still need a guiding hand and reassurance that everything is all right again -- something that Thrall could help with, along with the Earthen Ring.

Thrall's had his eyes opened by the Aspects and the events of Cataclysm. Given the amount he's seen, it's just unlikely that he'd quietly step back into the role of warchief, particularly when tensions between the Alliance and Horde are heating up to a boiling point. And that leaves us wondering exactly who's going to step up to the plate.

Vol'jin

Vol'jin isn't just the leader of the Darkspear; he is also arguably the most vocal opposition to Garrosh's placement in the first place. If anyone understands Thrall, it's Vol'jin. The Darkspear were the first addition to the Horde on the way to Kalimdor. And just before making that trip, while his father died at the hands of the Sea Witch, Vol'jin was off on a vision quest with his friend Zalazane. In that vision quest, Vol'jin saw bits and pieces of his future, including the Darkspear's departure from Orgrimmar.

"I brought de Darkspears here to protect our bodies," he said. "We live to fight another day. But that just our bodies. One thing the Darkspears can't lose, loa, we can't ever lose, is our soul. The Darkspears have a soul, and if we stay with this orc, do his bidding, we lose our soul. And there be no comin' back from that."

Vol'jin has held this knowledge somewhere deep within for years, knowledge gleaned in the months before the orcs arrived on the tiny jungle island, saved the Darkspear from the Sea Witch, and offered their hand in alliance. He may not have remembered all of it, but as the events of Cataclysm played out, there had to be a part of him deep inside that remembered the visions, remembered Garrosh's face. It's likely a good chunk of the reason Vol'jin argued so vehemently against Garrosh, because deep in the corners of his mind, there was an inkling of memory.

Vol'jin isn't a leader like Thrall. He understands that fighting comes with a price, yes, but he also understands that sometimes you simply have to fight. He understands that struggle is a constant, but struggle is also a key to freedom. He also, in his way, understands the importance of keeping those tentative Alliance threads intact. Without the help of the Alliance, who knows what would have happened in Zul'Gurub and Zul'Aman?

For all of these reasons, he'd make an excellent leader. The only thing standing between him and that leadership are the orcs. And those orcs may or may not trust Vol'jin, largely because of his abrupt departure from Orgrimmar and his lack of support for Garrosh. On top of this, Vol'jin isn't an orc himself -- and the backbone of the Horde has always been the orcish race. Would the orcs gladly look to a troll as a leader? It's an excellent question.

I admit, destruction in Mists of Pandaria looks very cool. I've been leveling with it, and although a handful of buttons can get boring, I like the back-and-forth rhythm of Incinerates and Conflagrates. To top it off, Chaos Bolt looks totally badass, even if it still casts like slow fire.

But as I hit the level cap once more, I decided it was time to return to my roots: affliction. I've always loved the flow of affliction -- health is mana is health is mana is health.

To scare an affliction warlock, a master of fears, you can do something sneaky like spell reflect or spell stealing. Or you can just drain me of all my self-healing and expect me to continue tapping as normal -- that horrifies me just the same. I find myself fervently hoping that dried-up self-healing streams as affliction are just bugged.

Mana regeneration as a warlock

I've always held that good warlocks Life Tap responsibly. Life tapping to full mana and ending with little health left is best done out of combat only and, in Cataclysm, directly followed by Soul Harvest. Even if the healers still don't get it that the purple candy cane lines mean I'm healing myself, it's only polite to not waste their mana.

Destruction and demonology warlocks both take a demonology talent called Mana Feed that grants us mana when our demon performs its basic attack. But Life Tap is still necessary sometimes, and the same talent lets the tap help out our pets, too. Face it: Life Tap is our main mana regeneration method. Ask us not to tap, and you might as well ask the shadow priest not to Disperse or use his Shadowfiend.

Affliction is a bit weird compared to other casters when it comes to mana regeneration. We don't have a clearcasting mechanic or mana-reducing talents. We have to buff our destruction-based filler with talent points in the destruction tree, so we can't reach Mana Feed for our own rolling mana regeneration. While we regen our mana in chunks, the chunks are shorter and appropriately proportioned in both cost and reward smaller than the traditional Evocation or Innervate. The only talent that buffs our mana regeneration buffs Life Tap itself.

For affliction, sacrificing our health is our only mana regeneration method. Affliction warlocks must self-heal to manage their mana in a fight without causing additional stress on healers. So, naturally, we are and have been the caster kings of self-sustainability in the health department.

Alternating resources and regeneration

Historically, our spell mana costs have been higher per damage than other casters because of the periodic nature of Life Tap. It's almost as if we DoT ourselves, manually activating the ticks at staggered intervals. In Mists of Pandaria, the ebb and flow of mana is taking a different direction for warlocks.

Each warlock spec gets a unique secondary resource. For demonology and destruction, it's easy: Mana alternates with the secondary resource. There aren't any spells that use both resources at once, and often, abilities are spending one resource while building up or allowing the other to regenerate.

For destruction, mana will be drained by Incinerates, with Backdraft slowing down the eventuality of going OOM. While the 4-second cast of Chaos Bolt to spend a full ember sure does suck, you can't deny the full mana bar you find yourself with at the end of the green dragon's head splash. Life Tap is actually replaced with Ember Tap, reversing the resource-health trade-off.

For demonology, the goal is to get into Metamorphosis and then stay there as long as possible. While the current beta build as of writing has issues staying in demonic form (the fury cost of abilities is ridiculous), the opposite swinging of the mana and demonic fury bars from full to empty and back again is still working. It's largely the Demonic Fury cost issue that is the current problem, since a warlock often comes out of Meta before her mana has regenerated enough to cast spells to fill the demonic fury bar again.

But affliction's secondary resource isn't complementary to its mana bar. Soul shards in Cataclysm have been independent of the mana bar; that is, shards don't spend more mana, nor do they allow mana to regenerate while depleting themselves. Soul shards still remain largely independent in Mists with the pure utility Soulburns, and they are almost simultaneous with mana with the new twist on Haunt. There is no significant mana regeneration period; a warlock casts the 1.5-second Haunt and then gets right back to burning more mana on spells. The only time we pause to regen a chunk of mana is to Life Tap.

Unfortunately, affliction's self-healing has been severely nerfed, and it's hurting us when we have to choose between being OOM with no other in-combat mana regen and imminent death.

Healthstones still have a 2-minute cooldown, though thankfully they have charges now instead of having to re-conjure one mid-fight.

Haunt's health return is gone in Mists. That's a chunk gone.

According to reports by MMO-Champion, the Black Market Auction House is now live on beta realms. Attempts to confirm this by chatting with Madam Goya just kicked back a UI error at me, but there seem to be plenty of people stopping by to check her out. Madam Goya makes her home at the Tavern of the Mists in the Veiled Stair, north of the Valley of the Four Winds. She's not alone, as Wrathion is still quietly hanging out in the tavern as well.

So what's available at the Black Market? A little bit of everything, including rare mounts like the Ashes of Al'ar, pictured above. Also included are pets that require a grind to obtain such as the Sen'jin Fetish, previously available only from grinding out Argent Tournament reputation, and high-level crafting recipes, although we don't have a lot of information on what those recipes are exactly.

However, perhaps the most interesting note to glean from this is that the Black Market Auction House appears to be carrying the original tier 3 sets that were removed from the game when Naxxramas was moved to Northrend and changed from a 40-man raid to a 10- and 25-man raid in Wrath of the Lich King. Obviously, this means that those looking to transmogrify into these rare tier sets can now pay to do so -- provided they've got the gold to fling around.
I'm hoping this leads to other items that were removed from game showing up as well. How about rare blacksmithing specialization plans that were taken out of the game? Or the recipe for Dirge's Kickin Chimaerok Chops, which disappeared with Cataclysm? Or mounts we can no longer obtain, like the tiger and raptor from the original iteration of ZG, or the black and plagued proto-drakes that were removed when Ulduar was released? The possibilities are endless here -- as long as you have the gold to spend.

What I am hoping, however, is that transmogrification items like the old tier 3 will also be made available in replica versions like we've seen over at the Darkmoon Faire. I really like the idea of replica armor and weapons. I'd hate to see that method of obtaining old sets removed in favor of a gold sink. And that would leave a few alternatives to obtaining the gear, just in case people would rather farm tickets than farm a lot of gold. Still, it's nice to see a good old-fashioned gold sink for players who have entirely too much gold and entirely too little to spend it all on.

I still remember the unmitigated joy I felt, sitting in my crummy seat far off to the left of the main stage at BlizzCon 2011, as Blizzard began to go into the new talent system for Mists of Pandaria and a screenshot of the paladin tree was shown. Sitting at the top of the new tree was a tier of familiar names: Speed of Light, Long Arm of the Law, Pursuit of Justice -- all the names of the various speed enhancements that the class currently had. Sweet fancy Moses, it was a tier of "gap closers"!

I slap some scare quotes on the phrase gap closer because, despite that being my holy grail for the past two years, let's be honest -- the new talents aren't technically gap closers. They don't have the immediacy of a Charge or a Death Grip. But they're as close as we're going to get without some homogenized Divine Charge, and to a point, they will help us close a gap. They're acceptable substitutions, each with its own positives and negatives.

Why is a gap closer important?

The one huge quality of life difference between paladins and the other tanking classes was, for years, mobility. If there was a boss that required a tank to zip quickly from point A to point B, be it toward some critical add that just joined the fight or out of some obstacle that threatens to kill him, the paladin was always at the disadvantage. Warriors could quickly jump into action (or out of it) with their vast array of mobility toys. Bears can similarly charge an enemy. Death knights could bring adds to them, though obviously this was worthless on bosses.

Meanwhile, paladins had to slow trot over to the far-off target at run speed or a little above it. Probably while panting in frustration as the warrior gallops laps around him.

Consider a boss encounter like Al'Akir that requires tanks to be in range at all times, lest they be shocked with a channeled lightning attack. Then a wave of tornadoes comes rolling by, with the gap (of course) all the way in the back. You'd dash out, get zapped like a idiot jamming a fork in an electrical socket, and hope to get back in before the healers lost you.

And then there's the warrior who quickly leaps out to the gap in the tornadoes, then charges right back to Al'Akir, taking much less damage than the paladin.

Or consider a fight like Shannox, where you are taking a constant beating from the boss as his damage stacks higher and higher. As a paladin, your only hope is to slowly kite the boss while juggling cooldowns and sweating bullets any time Shannox is supposed to drop his stacks. Meanwhile, the warrior is doing pirouettes around the area, leaping away from his target at the last moment to buy some crucial extra space and guarantee that stack will come off.

The pattern here (other than that warriors are jerk-face show-offs) is that mobility can equal survivability in certain circumstances. I've said it before -- as tanks, it's our job to hedge against any corner case, and having a tool that would prevent (or at least aid against) getting squished in a mobility-dependent corner case is a huge plus.

The three choices

The first choice, and the one that I feel is the best overall, is Speed of Light. It's a controllable sprint button that increases your movement speed by 70% for 8 seconds, on a 1-minute cooldown. The obvious downside is that the minute cooldown means that it will be the most of scarce of the three gap closer options you have -- the trade-off, obviously, being that it's just so much faster than the other two.

Nonetheless, the biggest upside to this talent is its controllability. You can determine when you get the speed boost and thus not have to worry about wasting it (or at the very least, having it at an inopportune time). Combine that with the 70% run speed boost, and you have a natural winner.

That's not to say the other two talents are completely without merit. Indeed, there are times when they will be the better choice.

Long Arm of the Law will have a nice synergy with the Sanctified Wrath talent, theoretically giving you 20 consistent seconds of a 45% run speed boost. Otherwise, it seems better suited for PvP or leveling, for the purpose of giving chase to ranged targets. The rotation generally won't be flexible enough to recommend banking Judgment until you can use the speed boost -- not to mention, you'll be hurting your holy power generation by not judging as often.

Lastly, Pursuit of Justice (our old friend) takes on a very staccato form in Mists. Gone is the passive 15% run speed boost from the old version (and I'm mourning that pretty deeply). Instead, now we have a constant passive 10% boost, followed by an additional 10% per charge of holy power, up to 3. There are two ways for this to play out. One is that you're incentivized to bank holy power and keep at close to the 40% boost level as much as possible, or the other is to completely ignore any conscious decision-making related to the talent and play as normal, subsequently having to put up with sometimes going fast and sometimes running at a slight boost.

For the former, I can't see the value in that playstyle, as it'll essentially require trading mitigation (via Shield of the Righteous) for going faster. Doesn't seem like a fair trade to me. With regards to the latter option, you'll have to put up with what will feel like lag spikes. Sometimes you'll be trotting along at 40%; other times, it'll feel like you're plodding at only 10%. I don't know about you, but constantly suffering through highs and lows of run speed would drive me insane.

Ultimately, as I said, I feel like Speed of Light will generally be the best choice, especially for tanking boss fights. You don't need to move that often, so having a really powerful sprint at your beck and call seems like an awesome addition to the toolbox. It won't make us nearly as mobile as our fluttery warrior friends, but it'll go a long way toward closing the gap between the mobility of our two playstyles.