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Filed under: Items, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Blizzard, Economy, Humor

Good news, EU players — now you can store your ale in a WoW stein also. 3 Point Entertainment, the group responsible for making those official World of Warcraft beer steins, has announced that they are now selling the steins overseas as well, meaning that even EU players can spend $80 on a cup that won’t even fit in your cup-holder.

We kid — at $80, these things better be nice, and they probably are — each one, we’re told, is handcrafted and made of “fine grain stoneware,” whatever that is. The company says that the North American sales have been very good so far, and that a few people have even bought them for wedding or groomsmen gifts. Because nothing starts a marriage off right quite like a WoW stein, yeah?

Still, Europeans, if you’ve been waiting to get your hands on one, now’s your chance. Cheers!

Steins come to the EU originally appeared on WoW Insider on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Warrior, Analysis / Opinion, Odds and ends, Expansions, Leveling, Guides, Talents, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Wrath of the Lich King

I have spent 600 gold on respecs in the past week.

Yes, you read correctly. While leveling to 80, I’ve been respeccing constantly. The reason is simple: I love fury, I love Titan’s Grip, I have a ball running around with 2h weapons, but protection is the best leveling spec for warrior right now.

I want those of you who remember the Burning Crusade launch to read that sentence again. If you needed any proof that it’s a whole new game now, then let this be your proof: protection is the best leveling spec for warriors right now. It’s fast, fun and powerful. These are not things I ever expected to say about prot spec.

Now, I’ve been tanking for a long time now, and I’ve been prot since I hit 70 in TBC. It’s always been excellent for tanking, but unlike other tank classes, it dedicated all of its tanking power to static threat moves and had weak multi-mob tanking abilities (I detailed what I saw as the problems of the class as tanks here) but all of that is gone now. Everything I wrote about as a weakness of protection? Gone.

Multi-mob tanking? We’re strong. Damage output? Very good. Threat? Holding steady. Our health bars? You can’t kill me until I run out of tricks. I have solo’d or 2 manned (with my lovely hunter wife and her pet) group quests that call for up to five people. (To be fair, I had 200 health left on one of them.) My love for DPS spec TG is still there, but if you want to finish a quest fast, nothing beats being able to pull an entire room of undead onto yourself, pop shield block, and know that they are going to kill themselves beating on you.

Protection is the best leveling spec in the game right now, good damage, excellent survivability, and moments when you revenge and shield slam for 2k back to back and things disintegrate. Today we’ll talk about a protection DPS build at 70, 75 and 80. It’s a strong build for grinding and can tank instances, but is not a raid tanking build for reasons we’ll explain as we go.

Continue reading The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Heavy

The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Heavy originally appeared on WoW Insider on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 15:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Fan stuff, News items, AddOns

Behold the power of WoW Insider — GotGame told us about their browser and social networking service a little while ago, and we were so much more fascinated with the browser part of their app that they split it off. And here it is: Rogue is what they’re calling their ingame browser application — you can download it for free from the site, and after a quick install, you can open up a browser in any PC game.

As lots of commenters said on our last post, this isn’t really an ingame browser, it’s more of an overlay that lets you browse while playing the game. And all it really does is save you the couple of minutes it would take to tab out and check your own browser (or just run WoW in a windowed mode, and use both at the same time).

But there are a probably a few users out there who would find it really useful. Downtime is the main issue I can think of (though lots of my downtime is filled lately with the Bejeweled addon anyway). But if you’ve been waiting for a solid, standalone ingame browser to come along (complete with Flash support, which makes it easy to pull up Hulu or Pandora while playing), Rogue is it.

GotGame releases their ingame browser separately originally appeared on WoW Insider on Fri, 21 Nov 2008 14:30:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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