The Gnomes aren’t the only ones on a quest to retake their homeland come Cataclysm – the Trolls want the Echo Isles back as well, and they’re ready to bring down Zalazane to do it. Vol’jin wants to rally the troops and take back the Trolls’ homeland, and they’re looking for your help to do it:

Embedded on the coast of Durotar, the tiny troll Village of Sen’jin is bursting with recent activity. In what some claim is a retort to the overblown assertions of the vertically-challenged High Tinker Mekkatorque, Troll Chieftain Vol’jin has announced his intention to “honor de ancestors ‘n’ take back da ‘omeland, mon.” The call has been given, and the scattered Darkspear tribe has begun to gather at the once-sleepy location. Now the primal rhythm of beating drums and strange clouds of acrid smoke drift aloft deep into the night, arguably a sign of celebration and preparation for an impending offensive.

With the full support of Thrall and his war council, Vol’jin is calling upon all factions of the Horde to prepare for an assault on the Echo Isles and the twisted witch doctor Zalazane. He will pay for his crimes against the Darkspears and the land that Thrall bestowed upon them! As explained by Vol’jin in the demand for Zalazane’s fall today, honorable members of the Horde passing through the village proper — whether they’ve never slain a boar in their lives or are the subject of every dragon’s nightmare — will be given a chance to help their upstanding troll brothers in what will surely be a brutal attack. But first there must be preparation. With the Echo Isles on the line, no detail is too small, no spoken word too trivial. And for that reason the noted troll shaman, Vanira, will get adventurers started on the monumental tasks ahead.

Hordies, you’ll have plenty to do in very short order!

Looking to get your raid on when Cataclysm finally lands? There are a few very serious major changes incoming that will rock your Vanilla/BC/Wrath world that may lead to the end of raiding and dungeons as we know them…or maybe it won’t make much difference to you.

All in all, this is going to be a lot to swallow for most players, and will represent some serious and significant changes to the way they raid. Some of the highlights?

First of all, 10-man and 25-man raids will drop the same loot, just in different quantities – that means 25-man raids won’t get higher item-level gear like they currently do – a lot of people have been fighting this point on both sides, and it looks like while at first Blizzard was coming down on the side of the people who favored better gear for 25-man raids, they’ve reversed course a bit.

Second, 10-man and 25-man raids will share the same lockouts. That means a 10-man group gets the same amount of time to complete a dungeon as a 25-man group. Yowch. That would be a problem if not for the fact that also announced is the fact that 10-and-25-man bosses will be very similar in difficulty, and not the pretty big difference they are today.

Blizzard also has some plans to change up the way raids are done, and create shorter raids with fewer bosses (much like the heroic Onyxia and Sarth runs) that are still difficult enough to accomodate a large number of people, but that just have fewer bosses.

Like I said, all of this is still up in the air, and Blizzard reserves the right to change all of it, but if anything I can see it’s a pretty big leveling of the playing field between 10-man guilds and 25-man guilds and the dungeons they run. If anything, it may lend itself to the thought that Blizzard’s noticed that 10-man runs are mostly guild runs with tight social groups, and 25-man runs are largely pugs that are done for efficiency and loot. Interesting.

What do you think? Will the new announcements impact you at all?

Read Blizzard’s full announcement and leave your comments behind the jump!

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It’s been a while since I posted just a hilarious video, so have this one – Embersolte’s cover of All The Single Ladies by Beyonce, spun up for World of Warcraft, called All The Ninja Raiders!

I specifically like the line “If you liked it then you should have rolled need on it.” So true. I mean, not that I would ninja anything ever! I’m…just saying, that’s all. Just saying.

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Read the description of the video to see where you can download the mp3!

I’m the type of person who loves to spoiler myself on things like this, but I absolutely hate spoilering other people – so if you’re not interested in finding out what happens when we eventually confront Arthas in Icecrown Citadel and what happens with him and other major figures up to this point, stop reading now!

Seriously, the video of the cinematic is after the jump. DO NOT CLICK if you don’t want to be spoilered. If you do want to be spoilered however, please, by all means, read on.

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My main is a hunter, so I can appreciate tips like this – the post is written for and tailored to hunters, but the flexibility of Power Auras is all but legendary. You could tie this same arrangement and set of alerts to just about any class and series of abilities! If you do play a hunter, or your main is a hunter, you’ll probably get a lot more out of this amazing post on Power Auras tips over at HuntsmansLodge.com.

It’s a little old, but it’s a more than definitive guide to getting power auras set up for a leveling or a raiding hunter (although raiding hunters will reap the most benefit – if you’re leveling and want to train yourself for raiding, you’ll get a lot of good use from this too) or just making yourself familiar with the add-on so you can tweak it and add your own customizations later on.

I went with some of the default scripts that Garwulf has in the post, and I already can tell a difference – I’m much quicker on the draw than I used to be, and I like that a lot.

The pug is finally mine (as you can see above, that’s my screen cap), but I have to admit, that hundred random people came and went pretty quickly. Before the patch came out, I thought it would be pretty difficult to group with a hundred random people and get the Perky Pug, but once I got started using the Dungeon Finder, it was all downhill from there.

The same has been true across the realms too, I’ve seen more and more people flying the title “The Patient,” which comes with the achievement for grouping with 50 random people, called Looking for Many, and some people running about with their new pug pets after having completed Looking for Multitudes.

I’ve seen praises and horror stories about the Dungeon Finder so far, especially over at the World of Warcraft LiveJournal Community, where both the hate and the love is running wild and rampant.

If you’ve been running instances using the dungeon finder, whether you love it or you hate it, how are you coming towards your title or your Perky Pug? Are you running for badges and gear upgrades, or are you running for lack of anything better to do? Maybe you have your pug already? Let me know in the comments!

So along with the release of patch 3.3, and some of my initial thoughts (and yours!) about it, I’ve been hearing a lot of similar thoughts about what the dungeon finder means not just for World of Warcraft but for other games as well. The success of the dungeon finder is surely something that Blizzard will be uniquely interested in for other games.

That being said, the dungeon finder reminds me a ton (and it’s not just the moving eye icon) of the old Battle.net matching system from games like Starcraft and Warcraft III, but its application to World of Warcraft is unique. It all but eliminates the need to look hard for a group for just about any five-man dungeon, and even the raid finder makes it simpler to find 10 or more to do something bigger. If you’re stuck with group quests that force you to go into a dungeon at a specific level, you have no excuse not to do it; we’re all too used to just dropping them and moving on to the next zone, as if the instance quests are a sign that we’re done there. The dungeon finder has changed all of this.

But at the same time, the sword cuts several ways. A more instance-savvy playing population can have a couple of different effects – more well-geared players fresh at 80, more instance-experienced players who understand roles and responsibilities in a raid or a dungeon all around, more savvy and group-friendly players, and fewer players who think that the game is essentially a solo grind up to the level cap are all some potential positive benefits that I’ve heard, agree with, and hope to see pretty quickly: the dungeon finder will result in a number of players, especially on their alts, finding it easier to gear those alts up, pick up gear for offspecs, and learn from others how to play their classes.

On the other hand, I’ve heard that the dungeon finder will saturate the market of skilled, level-capped, and geared players for guilds looking to recruit; will dilute the market of quality players since everyone will have at least some decent gear (even purples that drop in heroics) and make it more difficult to pick out a good player from a simply well geared one. Personally, I think that’s a great problem to have, but I can see why some people would be a little concerned.

The dungeon finder was released to rave reviews, and it’s clear that it’s not just here to stay, but it’s one of the best features to be added to the game since launch. But what does it mean for the future of the World of Warcraft, and the future of dungeons and raiding in general? Will the raid finder eventually look like the dungeon finder, and make use of in-game voicechat? Will we eventually see cross-server guilds? Only time will tell, but the possibilities are certainly out there.

Well ahead of the release of patch 3.3, if you’re curious about some of the bosses you’ll be facing when you get a crack at Icecrown Citadel, you can head over to the WoW Europe site to see some of the bosses at the Icecrown Bosstiary. So far the site has information on the Forge of Souls, the Pit of Saron, and the Halls of Reflection, and you can click each to see a map of the dungeon and where the bosses are located. Hover the mouse over each boss to read about who it is.

At the top of the page there’s a wealth of additional data about Icecrown and what to expect in patch 3.3, so if you’re not in the loop about what’s in store, click around to read more about the story, major characters, the quest for Quel’Delar, and more!

Looking to do a little research and determine if someone’s a loot ninja before you invite them to your run? Maybe you’re just as afraid of PUGs as the rest of us and you want to make sure that you’re not grouping with someone that everyone else on the server already knows is going to make your run miserable. Thankfully you can run their name through WoW Jackass, a community-fueled site where players report loot ninjas, bad tanks, horrible healers, hapless DPSers, and other all around assy players who are known to steal nodes out from under you when you’re mining or tag all of the quest mobs in the area just because they see you coming.

There’s a flip side to this kind of site though – because it’s all community generated information, you have no real guarantee that the person listed is the jackass or the person doing the listing is the jackass – there are always two sides to every story. So keep that in mind when you go hunting for jackasses – it’s one thing to be a ninja known across the server, it’s another thing to read someone’s personal account of when another player wronged them. But if you do come across some genuine jackasses, it’s worth getting their names up there so the rest of the world knows to avoid grouping with them.

The way you look for an available group in World of Warcraft now is clunky at best, and still relies on people having back-channel discussions outside of the LFG system in order to find other players to run dungeons with them. It essentially relies on people queuing up for dungeons and sitting there until someone speaks up.

Right now on the PTR Blizzard is testing a new system, one that allows you to drop yourself or your group into a Looking for Group/Dungeon/Raid system that will automatically match you up with other people to round out your party. The beauty of the new system is that it’s far more passive, and allows you to essentially make yourself available and the game will find someone to match up with you – you can even drop yourself in alone, choose your role, and the system will find a group for you if you’re by yourself and looking to PUG something.

On the up side, that means that it’ll be even easier for people to find PUGs and for casual players to dip their feet into deeper waters than their guilds may currently be swimming in, but on the down-side the lack of that back-channel discussion may lead to this tool forming groups that instantly fall apart as soon as someone deemed undesirable joins the group, or PUGs that fall apart quickly because of an undesirable deviate or a loot ninja.

Over at WoW.com they have an excellent discussion thread about this, and point out that some of the other enhancements to the system involve the limitation of certain classes to roll on certain items (for example, melee characters can’t roll on spellpower gear) and the ability to disenchant an item straight from the need/greed roll screen if everyone passes on it.

Add to this the fact that the new LFG tool will automatically teleport you to the instance you’re queued up for when your group is assembled and you have what looks to be an exciting addition to the game, and one that will make it even easier to find and assemble a PUG for just about anything. But is it necessarily a good idea? What do you think? Let us know in the comments!