As the leader of a small, casual guild in World of Warcraft, I have found it increasingly difficult to recruit following the introduction of the Dungeon Finder tool, however in past expansions we have always managed to somehow scrape our way through raids, calling on friends and PuGs to fill our numbers each week if necessary, and even experimenting with guild merges between ourselves and other guilds in similar situations.  With the release of Cataclysm, however, things seem even more difficult, and seeing so many of the same advertisements scrolling through Trade Chat every day it begs the question: can small guilds even survive any more?

LFGoing, going... Gone!

If you’ve been playing since The Burning Crusade, you will remember a time where there was no such thing as a Dungeon

Note: While some things are the same or similar between the two, this article focuses on the Level 85 Heroic version of Shadowfang Keep.

As we have all been playing World of Warcraft: Cataclysm for a couple of months now, one would think that most of us have experienced most of the end-game content.  This is not the case, however, as many people (particularly those in the casual category) have not even reached 85, or experienced dungeons at heroic mode.  Their schedules, real life commitments, altaholism or various other afflictions have stood in the way of their advancement, and while that is all well and good to be going outside every once in a while, it means they have missed out on a lot of the revamped content that comprises the core of this expansion.  Because of this I

By now, all of you should have heard that in the upcoming World of Warcraft Patch 4.1, Classicraid Zul’Gurub and The Burning Crusade raid Zul’Aman are being reinvented as 5-man Heroicdungeons. This news has spurred mixed reactions across the internet - while many people arehappy to hear that their old troll favourites are returning, many have jumped on the anti-recycling bandwagon and fiercely oppose the move (as only good trolls can do).

Personally, I am in the former camp. ZA and ZG are two of my favourite raids from years goneby, and I am looking forward to being able to experience them again. The fact that there isrecycled content doesn’t bother me in the slightest, in fact I am quite looking forward to therevamped versions of the gear we used to wear. Call me sentimen

As we should all be fully aware of by now, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm has been out and playable for three weeks.  The expansion was greedily and enthusiastically gobbled up by fans and newcomers alike, all wanting a piece of the new, forever transformed Azeroth that we were promised (and delivered).  So now that the hype, server lag and ganking has calmed down, and the festive season is nearly over its time for me to take a step back and reflect on what has changed and what has not (but may seem like it has).

Now, please bear with me for a moment - perhaps it is something to do with being a woman, being my age and having the friends I do, but right now seems to be a great time of year to get engaged and/or married.  People have weddings on the brain.  For some reason t

Unless you’ve been living with your head in the sand for the past few weeks, if you play World of Warcraft, Starcraft or frequent any gaming news site its likely that you’ve heard at least some of the drama surrounding Blizzard’s new Real ID.  Circulating the internet have been a plethora of blog posts, forum threads, even full websites have sprung up dedicated to discussing (or in many cases, flaming) the privacy issues surrounding Blizzard’s latest attempt at enhancing the gaming experience.

Even being on holiday halfway across the world and spending subsequent days battling jet lag I couldn’t escape the uproar; it seems that the blogosphere had virtually erupted into an angry, fiery mess of Blizzard customers concerned for their privacy (some considerab

Tonight heralded the beginning of a long wait for many World of Warcraft players, as over 70 servers went down for a 24 hour long extended maintenance at midnight (Pacific Time) this evening.  According to Blizzard, this extended maintenance is to prepare this large group of servers for the upcoming expansion pack, World of Warcraft: Cataclysm.  Now, we know that the expansion isn't about to land on us just yet - after all, we still have Patch 3.3.5 to come - but its certainly good news that they seem to be beginning preparations now.  Hopefully this batch of upgrades will mean less cataclysmic (excuse the pun - couldn't resist) effects upon the servers on release day.  Fingers crossed, but I'm not holding my breath - I'm sure there will be something to prevent us f

As we all know, World of Warcraft is a particularly social game.  As with most MMO's, you're practically forced to interact with other people in the game in order to progress.  Treating WoW as a single player game may work for some (perhaps a deaf mute character with Schizoid personality disorder on an RP server?), but it is against it's nature.  An MMO is intended to bring large numbers of people together, to interact with one another within the virtual game world.  These interactions come in many forms - from the anonymous quest help in the middle of a zone, to guild mates, impromptu pvp partners to best friends.  Everyone has experienced a strange one or two, but hopefully everyone has had a number of good experiences, also.

Unfortunately for all of us, we can

Perhaps the most noticeable of items in World of Warcraft (other than ridiculously huge shoulders), mounts have become something of a status symbol amongst players.  The mount you ride can arouse feelings of awe, reverence, and pride; or on the flip side they can inspire pretentious displays from their owners, envy and even ridicule from other players.  If you have a particularly rare, expensive or difficult to obtain mount (especially those gained from raids or PvP achievements) then you become the object of other peoples desire in that they want what you have - and that is, an awesome ride.  I can totally understand why people would want to hang about in public places on their Icebound Frostbrood Vanquisher or perhaps their Black Qiraji Battle Tank - it would be like pulli

Some of you may have seen that the Patch 3.3.5 PTR Patch Notes were released by Zarhym on the forums today.  Along with the introduction of a brand new raid, the Ruby Sanctum, they are also going to be implementing a range of new chat features - which, quite frankly, have me more excited than the prospect of yet again attempting to fight off the Black Dragonflight.  Don't get me wrong, I like raids - they're just not at the top of my list for "Having a Good Time".  Socialising with my fellow players is, though, and so anything which is going to help me do so more effectively - no matter how small - is good in my book.  A few of the features mentioned in particular stand out to me as being major changes for the better.

Players can now right-click on any chat t

With server and faction transfers more popular than ever these days, more and more people in World of Warcraft are becoming faced with a dilemma - they're sick of their old server or faction, but don't quite know what to do when faced with a completely brand new one.  I, myself, have fallen victim to this more times than I care to admit - being a social person, I like having other people to interact with in more than just a trade/Barrens chat kind of way.  Many times I've wanted to try playing from a Horde point of view, or been so completely fed up with my server that I have considered changing realms.  I've also tried my hand at joining an RP server, just to see what all the fuss was about.  Ultimately, all of these attempts at changing my environment have ended up in the same way - abandonment, because it was just too lonely - and now I am completely ensconsed in all that is Firetree.  Even my fellowwriters have tried to get me to join their server, and

As predicted last week, my boyfriend and I managed to hit level 80 on our alts in World of Warcraft on Saturday.  After initial celebrations were complete, the first thing on our mind was getting into some heroics so we could strip off the god-awful gear that our adventures had landed us and slip into something a little more befitting of our new, maximum-level status.

Eagerly hitting the 'I' key, I was disappointed to see that we were unable to queue for a random heroic straight away - the reason being "You must obtain better gear".  Now, I had seen this before regarding the new instances (Forge of Souls, Pit of Saron, Halls of Reflection - you know, the ones that drop actual epics) and my newer 80's, and that is understandable to a degree.  Heroic HoR is no walk in the park, and while it clearly depends on skill, having decent gear helps too.  But never before had I seen this message come up over the entire option of doing any heroic.  Boy, o

Anyone who's progressed further than level 10 in World of Warcraft is aware of Talent specs - they define how we play our characters, and in most cases directly affect our performance.  Every class has three talent trees, each of which serve a different purpose, some more so than others.  This is particularly true in the case of hybrid classes where each tree defines a primary function, such as healing, dps or tanking, but the same can be said for all.  The general rule of thumb seems to be to pick one tree in which to specialise, and then choose supporting talents from one or both of the other trees.  Thus we have three, sometimes more, different ways in which to play our class available to us at any one time.  But which do you choose, and what motivates you to choose it?

As we level our characters, it is common to experiment with all three specs and eventually settle on the one that we enjoy the most.  I have levelled fivecharactersto80now, and I definitely know which spec I enjoy playing the most for each.  But is playing what we enjoy the "best" way?  Having fun whilst playing is important to everyone - after all, who wants to