Child labor laws have no standing in Azeroth, so Louis of <Dragons Teeth> on Wyrmrest Accord saw no problem with having his squire do all of his fetching, lifting, and trudging through swamps looking for rare herbs for him. Until the squires formed a union, that is. “One part Baby Spice, three parts Papa Hummel’s Old-Fashioned Pet Biscuits, three angry Argent Squires, one frightened warr… <squashed under the biggest boot you’ve ever seen>,” wrote Louis.

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@wow.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, Val’kyr on mounts, or pictures of the Ninja Turtles in Dalaran. Older screenshots can be found here.

The World of Warcraft has always had amazing fan art. Looking through the fan art gallery, it’s hard not to get blown away by the talent the community has and their passion for drawing Blizzard properties. This year, the folks in Irvine decided to celebrate all that talent and passion by holding a contest for the artistically-inclined. Zarhym invites artists over at the official forums to contribute to the Holiday Fan Art Calendar Contest.

The idea is to create a piece of World of Warcraft art that sets the tone for a particular month based on the in-game holidays. Artists can choose to depict scenes from or situations inspired by events from the Lunar Festival, Love Is in the Air, Noblegarden, Children’s Week, Midsummer Fire Festival, Pirate’s Day, Brewfest, Harvest Festival, Hallow’s End, Day of the Dead, Pilgrim’s Bounty, Feast of Winter Veil, all the way to New Year’s Eve. Winners will be featured in the 2011 Official World of Warcraft Calendar as well as win a set of 2010 wall, daily, and mini calendars.

One grand prize winner will also get to take home a Wacom Cintiq 12WX, the pen-on-screen drawing tool that some of Blizzard’s own artists use. Additionally, the grand prize winner will also have his or her work featured in the official World of Warcraft magazine. Deadline for submissions is on February 8, 2010. As always, be sure to read the fine print if you’re eligible!

Will the random heroic search have the option of excluding certain Heroic instances?
The dungeon finder will not let you exclude a specific instance, however – if you have already run a specific dungeon it is much less likely that the random heroic search will place you in the same dungeon again (on the same day).

Will players still need to purchase keys to queue for TBC heroics?
The tool complies with all standard requirements for entering a heroic dungeon. For example, if you log into the game right after 3.3 is released and queue for a random heroic dungeon, you will not be placed in instances such as Icecrown Citadel – Pit of Saron or Halls of Reflection unless you have cleared all the pre-requisites (previous wings in those cases) to unlock said instance entering (i.e. you must still clear Forge of Souls to enter Pit of Saron, and Pit of Saron to enter Halls of Reflection).

Is it true that players will no longer be saved to heroics? Does this mean players can chain farm heroics for Champion’s Seals?
The Heroic lockouts still exist, however the difference is that the random heroic option will ignore any potential lockouts a player might have. This means that even if you run every single WotLK heroic dungeon in a day, you can still choose the random heroic option to continue running WotLK heroics that day. As mentioned above though, the heroic dungeons you have run the most that day will be the least likely to be randomly selected for your continued play by the dungeon finder system.

Does this mean that raid-lockouts are unaffected and you can enter multiple raid instances through the random heroic dungeon finder?
The new dungeon finder is designed only for 5 man dungeons, and the lockouts and accessibility to raid content remains unchanged/unaffected by the “override” in heroic instance lockouts for 5 man dungeons.

I’m not sure how much of this is legit, but stick with us for the information first, and then stay for the debunking. Edward Hunter over at Gamasutra decided to do some poking around in comScore’s MediaMetrix application (which can track, based on a survey of a few million users, access to various applications on a computer — which programs are run when), and he found something that surprised him: despite the economic downturn and the emergence of a few other popular MMOs recently, World of Warcraft’s audience is estimated globally at 13.1 million. In other words, it’s still growing from the last official numbers (11.5 million players worldwide) we heard.

Now, the first issue we’d have with these numbers is the situation in China — Hunter doesn’t mention it at all, and in fact his graph (from comScore) doesn’t have any dips at all in it, even though the game, and presumably its millions of players, went offline over there earlier this year. That right there throws a wrench into all of these estimations — it’s very likely comScore’s information is just plain wrong.

But then again, Ghostcrawler himself told us recently that subscriber numbers are still growing, and the last “official” numbers we heard were from nearly a year ago, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that Blizzard is close to 13 million, if not there yet (many Chinese players, we’ve also heard, could have transferred over to Taiwanese servers. Of course, if this is true, and WoW is bigger than ever, odds are that we’ll hear it officially from Blizzard soon — they’re not shy about sharing information about the game, especially when it’s good news for them. If there really are over 13 million computers in the world running World of Warcraft, don’t be suprised to see that information in an official press release sooner rather than later.

Every week Blood Pact serves you up a dish of warlock delight. Chock full of juicy chunks of detail, smothered in lashings of class specific tips all topped off with a sprinkling of hundreds and thousands of mage tears.

This week I’m rounding off the Trial of the Crusader guide with the last three bosses; Faction Champions, Twin Val’kir and Anub’arak. A more diverse trio of boss fights you will be hard pressed to find. As with last week I aim to bring you the flavor of the fights with some insight into how they look through a warlock’s eyes. Again, I’ll be linking only a selection of the loot from the overly complex table. This week the Horde drops for normal mode.

Faction Champions

This will be one of those fights you either love or hate. If you haven’t done it before, and don’t know what it’s all about, then I suggest you have a look through a full strategy; such as those on WoWWiki or Wowhead. There’s a huge amount of detail to the fight most of which is pretty irrelevant when you boil it down to your role. If you are leading the fight for the first time then be ready for a headache in assigning everyone their responsibility. If you’re not leading then listen to what you need to do and go for it.

Now, assuming you have at least looked through a guide you will know that this is a PvP styled fight against either 6 (10 man) or 10 (25 man) player-style NPCs of the opposing faction. If you dislike PvP then do not worry, although many of the game mechanics of PvP are at play (diminishing returns for example) the bosses are still reasonably predictable and manageable. You certainly don’t need to go out and get yourself any PvP gear.

As a lock, your role in this fight is either going to come down to damage application or mitigation. If it’s damage application for you, then you need to know who is the current target at all times. There is no point trying to burn a load of them down with area effect spells because of Champion’s Aegis which means they only take 25% damage from AoE spells. Applying heavy damage from the start makes a big difference so be ready for a Bloodlust or Heroism to be coming your way early.

The first target is likely to be a healer, burning them to a crisp as quickly as possible is the key to making the rest of the fight easier from there. You can throw in fears and Death Coil if you like as they will interrupt casts. Generally it’s better to leave the interruption up to the melee classes however, as fear takes too long to cast (costs too much DPS) and Death Coil will just make everyone have to move. You’re there to nuke, so revel in it and let those others do the fiddly stuff.

wow nerfs… before 3.1 on a funny way