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!

Back in the BC days it was easier to plan your gear upgrades – there were certain well agreed-upon items that were clearly best-in-slot, and just about every class knew which instance they should head to in order to get specific upgrades. With the flurry of 5-man instances, the addition of a couple of 10-man instances, and new hard-modes and heroics where the gear that drops from the same instance is of higher quality, it’s a little more difficult these days to really plan out your upgrades, especially if you’re looking at getting the gear required to get into some of those 25-man hard-modes.

Thankfully there’s Rawr, a tiny little portable app that you can use to test out upgrades, various enchants and gems, and to see how your stats will be affected if you choose one piece of gear over another potential one. Since Rawr is completely portable, once you download it you can drop it on a USB flash drive and carry it around with you. You may need to do the extensive Armory or WoWhead update once to make sure you have all of the source information for all of the items correct, but once you’ve done it, you can load your character from the Armory and see what items make the most sense for your character.

The video above is pretty long, but it’s an incredibly detailed tour of the application and all of the things you can do with it. Now that getting badges and getting geared up is as simple as running a few random dungeons using the Dungeon Finder, it’s more important than ever to know whether or not you want something when it drops from a boss, and to know what you should get when you have a bag full of badges and no idea what to spend them on. Download the app and give it a try!

*Looks suspiciously around the room*

… Dagpep, do we have control? Ah, most excellent.

Folks, there has been a Christmas Coup. Phoenix has been, um… let’s just say ‘taken care of’. So, instead of well thought out, reasoned posts… you get subjected to my babble. Bahahaha!

*shuts closet where a figure can be seen…. restrained with wrapping paper and Christmas bows*

Now, I know you have been reading about all the shiny gifts Blizzard have been giving you. The Dungeon Finder, the Patch, the Core Hound… yes, yes, we should all be very grateful. Such wonderful presents! What great ideas! Someone at Blizzard must really love us. Or at least, that’s what Blizzard WANTS us to think!

Did it ever occur to you that Blizzard was just giving us these things to make us THINK they like us? Did you ever ponder what the real purpose of these gifts is? Sure, they have tossed us a couple of shinies – as a way to placate us while they sit there cackling while we work our butts off for the Merrymaker achievement! What on earth is so Merry about those darn gnome costumes? And dailies…. aren’t they more ‘pleasant’ when you have your faithful little Onyxia pet running by your side?

I think that there is some secret grand master plan to all of this. I strongly suspect that we are little hamsters, running on wheels of Blizzards design… powering some great secret ‘take over the world’ plot. All that gold we are generating. All that power we are using. It must all be going towards something. Well… I’m not going to be a part of it anymore!

That’s right! No more dailies! No more achievements! For Winter Veil, I am going to throw my Santa hat in the gears of their insufferable machine! I shall spend all my gold on Kungaloosh, sit around the middle of Dalaran, drink myself tipsy (since we all know Kungaloosh can’t get you drunk), and yell my conspiracy theories for all to hear!

That’s right… I’m bucking the Christmas tradition of hard work and grinding in exchange for good cheer and copious amounts of alcohol. And Blizzard can’t do anything about it!

Now… I should really give my succubus that little present I have wrapped up for her in the closet. She is going to love it! *cackles*

phoenix sez: This post is by Saresa, of Destructive Reach, (you can follow her on Twitter @saresa) and part of Saresa’s Secret Santa, a Kris Kringle series of posts among WoW community bloggers over at Blog Azeroth. Saresa herself was responsible for organizing it, so double props to her for writing, organizing, and managing to tie me up so tightly!

…and frankly, I can think of worse ways to spend the holidays than tied up with Saresa and her succubus. I mean really. Worse ways to go. With that, and the life being oh-so pleasurably (read: painfully) drained from my body by her great warlock-ness and her minion, we both wish you all the happiest of holidays!

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.

So patch 3.3 landed and has been out for a couple of weeks, and we all have hopefully had a chance to rol around in it for a bit, give it a good whirl, and see what we think. So – how are you guys feeling about the changes made in the recent patch? From the dungeon finder (which is apparently getting rave reviews around the Web) to the death of a number of popular add-ons that have claimed no plans to update for 3.3 (like my beloved Cartographer), how has your experience been with the patch so far?

Have you picked up your Merrymaker title? Given the dungeon finder a whirl?

My own experiences have been largely positive: granted, I haven’t had the opportunity to run any of the new instances yet mostly because I just haven’t hit them in the dungeon finder or my gear isn’t up to par, but I did manage to pick up my Merrymaker title in pretty short order this year, and ever since then I’ve been running random heroics and dungeons for the fun of it, and while not all of my groups have been stellar (run into a couple of jerks, run into a couple of groups where people simply afk’d out, run into other groups where we all looked at each other, realized it was Oculus, and then disbanded) the vast majority of them have been amazing, quick, to the point, and a lot of fun – something I can’t claim to have gotten from my guild prior to the dungeon finder. Just last night I picked up my Northrend Dungeon Hero and Dungeonmaster achievements!

But enough about me – how about you? Have you stood against Arthas only to realize that YOU CAN’T STOP HERE, THIS IS LICH KING COUNTRY and run the heck away? Let us know in the comments!

If you saw Casino Royale, the most recent James Bond movie [ed: not at all! As Dobmiestre pointed out, Casino Royale was followed by Quantum of Solace, over a year ago!], you’ll really enjoy this little Arthas highlight reel done in the same theme as the opening for that movie. It’s a little Frostmourne heavy, which I assume makes sense, but I liked more of the character interactions. Still, a lot of fun, especially if you dig the movie!

I love this video for a number of reasons, partially because I’m actually a hunter. My main is a hunter and I even have a couple of others running around. This is a fitting tribute video to hunters in general, and I absolutely love it.

And yes, I think he MD’d the healer at 1:27.

(much love to WoW.com for the video!)

If you’re looking for some information on your realm, like what the horde-to-alliance ratio is, or how many alliance paladins you have on your server versus how many rogues there are, WarcraftRealms can give you all of the information you’re looking for. Just head over to the realm data page and look up your server to see everything you wanted to know about the population of your server.

The data is mined from a combination of the Armory and user submissions using the WarcraftRealms add-on, so it’s only really accurate for characters over level 10 that have made it into the armory, but if you’re interested in lending the project a hand on your server, you can download the utility and use it to help bolster the site’s database. In the interim though, the service probably has more information about your realm than you thought you wanted.

Okay, it may not be the ultimate weapon, but if there’s a weapon in the game that I’ve always wanted for at least one of my characters, it’s Thunderfury: Blessed Blade of the Windseeker.

And one brave Blood Elf Paladin made it his quest to obtain the legendary weapon, and he invited people from his guild, his server, and across the net to watch his triumphant achievement. And party afterwards, of course!

(much love to WoW.com for the video!)

So today’s the day, and the realms are currently having some stability issues but they by and large seem to be up and running. Patch 3.3, “The Fall of the Lich King,” is up, out, and ready for players to download. Some guilds will already have their plans to start bumrushing Icecrown Citadel tonight solidified, and other folks like myself will probably give the new dungeon finder a try. Still others are fiddling with add-ons to make sure that they’re not all busted, and others may be poking around the data files to see if there’s anything juicy in there that we missed from the PTRs.

In any event though, make sure you go grab the patch and install it, and then let us know what you’re most excited about now that the patch is live! Is your guild headed straight for Icecrown? Maybe you’re going to use the dungeon finder to catch up on old instances and gear up your characters? Maybe you’re just going to sit back and let the issues work themselves out for a day or two and THEN jump into the fray – shout it out in the comments!