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Filed under: Lore, Know your Lore

@trimbleirl Yes, you only get one first of the day from scenarios. We want heroics as a replacement option not something else to have to do.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) May 24, 2013

So, to restate what Ghostcrawler is saying, if you run a normal scenario and receive the chest, then run a heroic scenario, you will not receive a second chest. You only receive the chest from your first scenario of the day, regardless of whether that scenario is normal or heroic.

If you're after the superior chest, therfore, along with the superior rewards, you should ensure that your first scenario of the day is one of the new heroic ones. For clarity, these require a pre-made group of three, as well as an item level of 480 or above. The chest has a chance to contain ilvl 516 loot, so definitely bear this advice in mind when you're making your decisions on what you're doing today. The system seems a little counter-intuitive, so spread the word.

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Filed under: Mists of Pandaria

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Protection specialist Matt Walsh spends most of his time receiving concussions for the benefit of 9 other people, obsessing over his hair, and maintaining the tankadin-focused blog Righteous Defense.

Last Thursday, Ghostcrawler tweeted something which caused a bit of a stir within the tanking community. In it he revealed that the devs were looking at some strict caps for Vengeance levels (30% of health for 10s, 50% for 25s) that would prevent tanks from using Vengeance to pursue unintended things like solo tanking a two-tank raid boss or standing in fire to stack really obscene amounts of attack power.

Now, this isn't another column about the virtues or not of Vengeance. That's a pretty mutilated horse at this point, and from the looks of it, the mechanic is not going anywhere any time soon. However, the brief rekindling of the Vengeance debate did once again shine some light on what is a continuing problem in WoW: what should tanks be allowed to do (in terms of damage output) and what can be done to keep players from parlaying excessive survivability into unintended advantages?

What do you do when one third (arguably two-thirds, a lot of this can apply to healers as well) of your players' roles revolves around the mitigation and prevention of damage, and the primary means you have of creating barriers or challenges for players is the threat of character death?

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Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

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Filed under: The Queue

Sunday Morning Funnies is your weekly list of WoW-related web comics.

Each week, we're featuring a regularly updating WoW-related web comic from our list. This week, we're shining the spotlight on Away From Reality:

Away From Reality (AFR) is a comic by Erik Jensen. Professor of ancient Mediterranean history by day, WoW-player by night, he has been creating AFR comics since 2007 but adventuring in Azeroth since 2004. It is made using software programs such as Poser, Bryce, GIMP and Paint, and most comics take 2-3 hours to do up (not counting the days or weeks spent with the jokes percolating in the back of Jensen's mind, of course).

Jensen aims for humor and accessibility, so new readers can jump straight in and won't feel lost. The tone is light and on the occasions when the comic is critical, he tries to keep it fair and maintain the silliness. Most of his inspiration comes from his own play-time, but he also gets ideas from engaging with WoW-related media.

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

What's up, lizard-bros? It's just me, one of your fellow saurok, here to hang around the campfire and talk about our upcoming plans in great detail. You may notice that I've acquired a staff. You'll be pleased to know that I took it off a filthy human, which I killed with my claws and such. I shall use it to roast marshmallows. Now, what time exactly are we going to attack that Alliance camp down the road, and which invasion route will be we using, and how susceptible are we to Shadowbolts? I'm just going to take notes for ... my research. Damn it, Jones! Get me out of here! They've caught on to my brilliant disguise! And I was being so subtle about it. (Thanks to submitter Raenah of Nameless on Nagrand [EU-A] for the screenshot!)

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Want to see your own screenshot here? Send it to aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com. We strongly prefer full-sized pictures with no UI or names showing. Include "Azeroth" in the subject line to ensure your submission dodges email spam filters; if you'd like to be credited, also include your name, guild and realm.

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Filed under: Around Azeroth

Good morning. Today's your lucky day, boys and girls. You get to play hooky from school or work, and you get to do it in Azeroth come to life!

Your guidelines: While this is Azeroth as if it had come to life, you are not your character –- this is the real-world you who's slipping into Azeroth. For the purposes of faction balance, you may assume that you appear to be the appropriate faction and race to be accepted by the inhabitants of the city or land you choose to visit. You can also communicate with the residents.

However, aggressive monsters will remain dangerous to you, and since you are real you and not your character, we don't recommend choosing a zone where you could be attacked by anything at all. (Unless, of course, you're actually qualified to battle these creatures yourself -– in which case, do send photos to lisa@wowinsider.com.) It's probably not a good idea to try stepping into a general zone or instance, unless you're certain you know a safe spot. But what about a city? A quiet fishing hole out of aggro range? A sightseeing tour via zeppelin, or a boating expedition along the shores of Krasarang?

Your advantage is the gift of instant materialization. Wherever you'd like to go, there you'll be. If you'd like to spend the afternoon reading under a tree on a floating island in Nagrand, we can make that happen. If you'd like to party in Goldshire, we'll get you there without braving wolves, spiders, and bandits (although what you'll have to brave once you're there is up to you). You can travel about only if the real you could manage it using Azeroth's usual modes of transportation.

What would you like to see? Who would you try to meet -- and do you think you could talk your way in to see them?

Where would you like to play hooky in Azeroth today?

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Has it really been six months since we last ran BLIND? Must be! We've now received a half dozen requests for this video, including a few from people who never saw it before. I guess Memorial Day weekend is a fair time to rerun the video. So sit back, and enjoy some pop-driven blood elf buttkickery.

The most painful part of the recent suggestions is that they used a duplicated YouTube video. I don't know why someone would steal the video and claim it as its own, but it's a shame. If you're going to use BLIND, please use the creator's original link.

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Interested in the wide world of machinima? We have new movies every weekday here on WoW Moviewatch! Have suggestions for machinima we ought to feature? Toss us an email at moviewatch@wowinsider.com.

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Filed under: WoW Moviewatch

TradeChat's Panser returns with this week's WoW Insider news recap, where we look back at the hottest news from the past week and whatever other kickin' rad things may have come our way. This week's topics include:

• Top 5 things you should know about patch 5.3
• The Patch 5.3 PvP Roundup
• Learn how to Deepwind Gorge
• Pet Battles and you
• The official patch notes, if that's your thing
• Do you WoW-craft?

If you enjoyed the show, make sure to subscribe to TradeChat, leave a comment, and come back next week for the next episode!

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, News items

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

I'm not looking for a buff to warrior DPS. Every time I talk about warriors as DPS (and half the time I talk about warriors as tanks) it comes back around to people assuming I want a DPS buff, but I don't. At least, I'm not asking for our damaging abilities to do more damage. What I am asking for is parity in terms of methods to be able to apply that DPS.

Quite frankly, raiding today has lots of methods to prevent a warrior from doing damage. There are mazes to run, debuffs that force you to switch targets, interrupts to hit, and conditions that will instantly kill you if you don't take them into account. To use one example, let's look at Heroic Jin'rokh. Both his Ionization and Lightning Strike force players to move out of optimal position (you don't want to be decursed of Ionization inside the Conductive Water, or you'll blow up the raid) and in the case of Lightning Strike, you'll spend half the phase dancing around. For a warrior, this is DPS death. We have no abilities outside of a couple of throws (one with a cast time) that can do damage at range, and we have no method to remove Ionization or prevent its application.

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Filed under: Warrior, Raiding, (Warrior) The Care and Feeding of Warriors, Mists of Pandaria