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Totem Talk is our weekly look at all things shaman. Matthew Rossi would like to remind any readers with screenshots of their Horde shamans to email them to matthew.rossi@wow.com and not put them in the comments, where he is likely to forget they exist. In addition to being extremely hairy, he is somewhat ponderous in his recall.

The past couple of weeks have been exciting with Q&A's to analyze and PTR changes to consider. It's been easy for me to forget that I left our round-up of mail drops in Uldar half-way through the 25 man items. One of the things I forgot to gripe about as much as I really should have last time we discussed Ulduar mail is the complete and utter lack of mail boots for elemental shamans in the instance. As of the last time I checked, there are three pairs of boots in Ulduar 25: two enhancement, (yes yes, I suppose hunters might use them too) and one mostly suited to restoration shamans. And I covered all three pairs of boots last time anyway.

Let's get right to the heart of it, shall we?

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Filed under: Shaman, Items, Analysis / Opinion, Instances, Guides, (Shaman) Totem Talk

Heresy! A Veronica Mars quote rather than Firefly. Eh, who cares, it's a holiday weekend, so we're wild and crazy. We're continuing our march through Glory of the Hero, and today we're going to tackle the first of Wrath's "halls," the Halls of Lightning. Before we do, here's a round-up of what we've done previously in the OverAchiever: GotH series:

• Part I: Ahn'kahet
  
• Part II: Azjol-Nerub and Culling of Stratholme
  
• Part III: Drak'Tharon Keep
• Part IV: Gun'drak

HALLS OF LIGHTNING

Lightning Struck

As long as your tank and healer aren't in greens, this isn't an overly difficult achievement. Bjarngrim and his adds path around a series of 3 platforms and will pause at each, gaining a Temporary Electrical Charge that increases their damage. You simply need to pull Bjarngrim while he still has this buff. During the fight you can force him to lose it by killing his adds, and if you're still gearing up, that's a more reasonable option than trying to survive the damage. The abilities of note here are Mortal Strike, which is a fairly nasty hit in the range of 15-16K, and Whirlwind, which can two-shot melee DPS.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, How-tos, Features, Bosses, Guides, Achievements, The Overachiever

The latest installment of Walhtor of The Underbog's "Series of Embarassingly Avoidable Deaths" is available for purchase. Entitled Drowning in Shallow Water, it features Walhtor's bloated, humiliated corpse drifting pathetically under the waves. It joins previous offerings Fell Off Teldrassil While Auto-Running, Accidentally Right-Clicked the Horde Flight Master, and Went AFK in Contested Territory and Was Slowly Beaten to Death by a Level 15.

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 pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran.

Filed under: Screenshots, Around Azeroth, Galleries

It's Sunday, the 5th of July, and somehow I think that some of you guys are either traveling, sleeping in, or "mysteriously" a little ill. This one's dedicated to all of you. I hope you had a happy Fourth of July, and here's a quickie to enjoy before you realize that today is the last day of the Midsummer Fire Festival and you never did get around to finishing those achievements.

• Cru the Dwarf: A Pile of Dried Plums.
• Dark Legacy Comics: On the Run.
• GU Comics: If the Armor Fits.
• On Experience Points, Victor finds a way to solve his problem.
• Flintlocke vs. the Horde.
• Check out the latest from LFG.
• NoObz: Crafting.
• NPC: Time Spent and 17 Pound Catfish.
• Teh Gladiators.
• World of Warcraft, eh?: Girls Just Wanna Have Fun. I agree with the comments, there are some great facial expressions in this one! Plus, a pretty cool bikini.
  

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Features, Humor, Comics, Sunday Morning Funnies

With the Azeroth-shaking announcement of paid faction changes, it seems like one of the last barriers to character re-customization have been broken down. Who would have thought that we could switch allegiances four years ago? The World of Warcraft has certainly come a long way since it launched. One of the big changes back then was allowing players to transfer realms -- initially disallowing PvE-to-PvP transfers but that restriction was eventually lifted. That was shocking news then, but then Blizzard opened the door for names and even gender changes.

What we're essentially seeing is Blizzard's own clever version of microtransactions. Sure, we can't buy powerful items like those in free-to-play games (which will soon become endangered in China...), but we can pay real money to cater to our vanity or convenience. I've paid several times for server transfers, name changes, and even character re-customization. My wife grumbles whenever I shell out real money for those things, but I'm sure she'd pay to morph her former main, a Troll Priest, into a Blood Elf in a heartbeat. Even Matthew Rossi would pay good money to turn his Human Warrior into a huge-like-Rossi Draenei. There's only one problem, though -- they can't. Race change is one thing Blizzard hasn't given the go signal to... yet.

Anything's possible, though. Years ago, Blizzard unequivocally said that they would never allow PvE to PvP realm transfers. See how that turned out. What other paid services do you think Blizzard lacks? You probably already know that I'm all for race change as part of character re-customization. But how about paying for levels? I mean, despite all the changes they've made to make leveling easier, I abhor it. I'd gladly shell out some cash to get a high-level character right off the bat. What other paid World of Warcraft services do you think the game needs or players want?

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Breakfast topics

Each week Arcane Brilliance celebrates Independence Day in its own special way. Most people celebrate the 4th of July by setting off explosive devices of varying sizes. In similar fashion, Arcane Brilliance also enjoys blowing things up. The difference is that whereas most people tend to set off pretty fireworks, Arcane Brilliance prefers to cause Warlocks to explode. The result isn't nearly as pretty, but to Arcane Brilliance, it has its own very unique charm.

I don't know if you're trying out the patch 3.2 PTR or not, but if you are, you should go out and mess with Living Bomb. Like, right now. Go cast it on some things. That's right, I said things with an "s" on the end. As in plural. As in more than one thing. Watch those things burn to death simultaneously. Rejoice.

Yes, Blizzard's present to Mages on this day when the United States celebrates its Declaration of Independence from foreign rule is apparently the ability to blow up multiple targets with Living Bomb. On the PTR, you can now have Living Bomb up on as many targets as you can feasibly cast it on before its duration or your mana pool expires. The tooltip doesn't yet reflect the change, but Ghostcrawler has confirmed that this is not a bug, and that Blizzard is intentionally testing the idea.

How awesome would this change be? Read on after the break to hear my take on it, but let me just say that on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being not very awesome and 10 being more awesome than anything, this change would make the scale explode on a molecular level and then reform over billions of years into a new planet of awesome.

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Filed under: Mage, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, PvP, Features, Raiding, Classes, Talents, Buffs, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance, Battlegrounds, Arena

Insider Trader is your inside line on making, selling, buying and using player-made products.

Over the past few weeks, Insider Trader has been discussing and analyzing the changes to professions set to go live with patch 3.2:

• Patch 3.2 Profession Change Analysis takes an in-depth look at the early announcements.
• Patch 3.2 Q&A answers questions being asked in the WoW community.
  
• Recently, a rather large list of Patch 3.2 Engineering Changes was released.

This week's column will be devoted to updating you on some of the newer changes, clarifying as many details as possible, and analyzing some of those juicy Engineering changes.

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Filed under: Alchemy, Blacksmithing, Engineering, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Features, (Professions) Insider Trader

Robin Torres writes WoW, Casually for the player with limited playtime. Of course, you people with lots of playtime can read this too, but you may get annoyed by the fact that we are unashamed, even proud, of the fact that beating WoW isn't our highest priority. Take solace in the fact that your gear is better than ours, but if that doesn't work, remember that we outnumber you. Not that that's a threat, after all, we don't have time to do anything about it. But if WoW were a democracy, we'd win.

Holidays are for all players, of course, but I think they are particularly appropriate for players with limited playtime. Sure, there are often raiding quests or achievements that we can't complete, but overall, the activities seem to be designed for casual gameplay. For the most part, I think I'm preaching to the choir, here. But every once in a while, I read comments from people who just don't get holidays and avoid them completely. So here is my sales pitch about why every casual player should give each holiday a try.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Events, (Casual) WoW, Casually

As the holiday weekend rolled around, we started to get a number of tips that Hunters were successfully training themselves a...Worgen pet? Worgen?!? How was this level of cool allowed into the game without anyone knowing about it until now?

Well, it turns out that the Worgen pet is in fact a very clever use of game mechanics somewhat akin to those used by Hunters in order to tame the (now sadly vanished) Grimtotem Spirit Guide. Garwal, a warg NPC in northern Howling Fjord who can turn into a Worgen as part of a questline (the link is the Horde version, but it's the same for both Horde and Alliance) can actually be tamed and kept in Worgen form if the timing is right. Mania's Arcania has a look at the process used here, which involves a little math, a little guesswork, and the strategic use of Wyvern Sting.

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Filed under: Hunter, Cheats, News items, Humor

Is it just me, or have we had lots of EU-only contests lately? First, Lesley gives away some loot cards for the EU, and then Turpster gives away some more. This is July 4th, and it's about time we served the North American side of the globe! (Canada, we missed Canada Day, so we'll throw you in the mix, too). Courtesy of our good friends over at WoWTCGLoot.com (be sure to visit them if you need to know anything about the TCG Loot cards), let's give away some loot codes!

We've got 10 in total that we'll give away to ten random commenters on this post before tomorrow night, Sunday July 5th, at midnight. There's an Epic Purple Shirt, two Sandbox Tigers, three Papa Hummel's Pet Biscuits, and four Party Grenades up for grabs -- to enter, just leave a comment on this post, and since it's Independence Day, how about telling us what your favorite kind of firework is. I was always partial to the black snakes -- most people though they were boring, but I knew how the big ones blew up, and I never really understood just how those darned snakes worked.

One comment per person in the US and Canada only, please, and do be sure to use a real email address when you comment (that you check often) so we can get in touch with you ASAP if you win. Good luck to everyone, and happy Independence Day!

Filed under: Items, Fan stuff, WoW Insider Business, Odds and ends, Contests, Humor