Apparently this keylogger watches for you to log in to WoW or the World of Warcraft website, and rather than passing your credentials to Blizzard, instead passes them to a third party. They then log in to your account within the 30 seconds the Authenticator code is valid, and commence the usual account strippage.

Quote from Blizzard’s Kropacius:

“After looking into this, it has been escalated, but it is a Man in the Middle attack.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Man-in-the-middle_attack

This is still perpetrated by key loggers, and no method is always 100% secure.”

For now, Mac users are unaffected. From WoW.com’s article:

“This is a PC only attack, at the moment. Mac users are immune to this particular virus, however they are not immune in general. Mac users must practice the same security methods as PC users.”

Always good advice to follow basic safe-browsing procedures, no matter what platform you’re on. Strong passwords, ad/script blocking software, a good hardware firewall, and common sense are your best defense against all these sorts of threats.

But we had Wintergrasp, so we figured we’d take a look at the new boss – Emalon the Stone Watcher.

Emalon is located in the same instance as Archavon. At the circular room, there’s now a right-hand wing available. At the end, beyond a couple of trash mobs is the boss. Once again like Archavon, getting there is straightforward.

The fight requires two tanks. One tanks Emalon near the rear wall, and the other takes the four adds up the stairs. Two healers keep the two tanks up. There’s no raid damage to speak of, assuming folks pay attention.

And that’s the crux of the fight – paying attention.

Emalon himself has a lightning nova, similar to Loken in Halls of Lightning. Melee will want to run out of it. He also has a chain lightning, so ranged will need to spread out to avoid damage.

As for the adds, that’s where the gadget for this fight lies. Every 30 seconds, Emalon will “charge” an add. Once the charge is up, DPS has 10 seconds to down the add, or the resulting explosion will wipe the raid. In 10-man, the adds have ~200k HP.

The key lies in locating the charged add quickly. The longer it takes your DPS to focus, the harder this boss will be. On average it took us 2-4 seconds to get focused. The times we got it in 2, we were fine. The times it took us 4 seconds, we wiped. Simple as that.

Whereas Archavon had a tank switch, and was essentially a DPS race, this one is all about DPS being fast at focusing.

With gear from Ulduar, he’ll become easier, but right now, he’s quite unforgiving. I have a feeling we’ll take him down next time, but with a mishmash of Naxx10/25 gear, he’s a challenge for us, with little room for error.

TLDR: Living Bomb, Scorchx2, FFB spam, Pyro on Hot Streak. Refresh as necessary. Stack cooldowns, use Mirror Image to even out your threat early.

You can check out my version of the spec. It’s not quite cookie-cutter, as I drop a couple points in Fire to pick up one in Improved Blizzard, and one in Shatter. In the normal spec, one of those points would go into World in Flames to improve Pyroblast’s crit rate by a couple of percentage points, and the other into Impact for a greater chance to stun. Basically I swap a tiny bit of single-target DPS for a bit more AoE. The core build remains the same, however.

Glyphs I use: Frostfire Bolt, Improved Scorch, Molten Armor.

There are three “main” spells you’ll use in your general rotation.

Start off by casting Living Bomb, normally during the pull. Since it works like a DoT, it doesn’t deal any damage up-front, giving the tank 3 seconds to build up some aggro before it ticks. It doesn’t tick for much at a time, but it does add up. The explosion at the end is quite nice as well.

Follow that up with 2 applications of Scorch. With the glyph, this will give you a full 5-stack of the Improved Scorch debuff (for 10% extra crit). Note that if you have a Frost mage along, you can generally skip Scorching, as Winter’s Chill (applied with every frost spell they cast) carries the same crit buff, and doesn’t stack.

Now that the preliminaries are out of the way, we can start spamming our main nuke – Frostfire Bolt. Watch your timers and procs while you do this.

You want to refresh your Scorch stack before it runs out, and you want to apply Living Bomb after it detonates.

When you crit twice in a row, Hot Streak will proc. At the earliest convenient time, you want to throw your now-instant Pyro. Don’t stop a cast in progress to do this, and certainly don’t let your Scorch stack drop to weave it in. You have a few seconds of lee-way, just don’t miss it, it’s essentially free damage.

(Deep Fire mages may recognize this rotation, as it’s exactly the same, switching Fireball for Frostfire Bolt.)

On raid bosses, you also need to manage your cooldowns wisely. There are two big times you want your cooldowns ready: At the start of the fight, and at 20% boss health. Most raid bosses will last long enough you can use your cooldowns at both times – however if you’re running with an overgeared or extremely proficient group, you may only get one shot. If that’s the case, you want to save everything but Mirror Image for 20%, when Molten Fury kicks in.

Cooldowns you should be looking to stack include: Icy Veins, Combustion, an on-use trinket, Mana Gem (if you have 2 pieces of T7 for the bonus, and need the mana), and (if off cooldown) Mirror Image.

Mirror Image is a little special. It doesn’t increase your damage. Instead, it takes you off the threat table for 30 seconds. After those 30 seconds, you grab all that threat back. Generally the optimum time I’ve found to use it is near the beginning of the fight, just after you’ve loaded Living Bomb and a Scorch stack, but before you start nuking. It gives the tank a full 30 seconds to out-threat you before things become a problem. And they can become a problem quickly if you’re blessed with an early string of crits. Normally that 30 second reprieve will even things out, and you’ll be safe when you come out. If it doesn’t look like you will be (watch Omen), pop Invisibility 3 seconds before Mirror Image ends. You’ll Invis just as you come out, dropping all your threat, and leaving you in a good position for the rest of the fight. Mirror Image isn’t really as important later on in the fight, but it can certainly help even out some of the burst-threat you’ll cause popping cooldowns at 20%.

Gear-wise, you’re looking primarily for Spellpower and Crit. Haste is useful, but not something you should be specifically gearing for. Hit is important (as always) up to the cap. Unfortunately, really good crit gear is hard to come by until you’re doing Heroics and 10-mans, so you’ll very likely get stuck using a couple pieces of PVP gear before then. That’s fine, if sub-optimal.

The lack of really appropriate SP/Crit gear means that there’s a very uncomfortable and awkward phase before you get Heroic-level gear where you’ll be easily out-damaged by any class that can DPS. This is frustrating as all heck, but normal. Stick with it, learn the rotation, work on your LB and Scorch uptime, and eventually the gear will come, and those all-important DPS numbers will start to go up.

The classic Fire/Arcane spec is dead.

This goes back to Classic WoW (IE: before expansions). Mages specced Fire, then took enough points in Arcane to get Arcane Power and Presence of Mind. The idea was to use these two abilities in tandem, to throw a buffed, instant Pyroblast (that would do a heckuva lot of damage). Normally, Pyroblast wasn’t used in a rotation, as its 6 second cast time and higher mana cost wasn’t worth the slightly better damage it did over Fireball. However, given its higher coefficient (based on its much higher casting time), it gained a lot more from Arcane Power than Fireball, and with Presence of Mind making it instant-cast (once every few minutes), it was a great addition to Fire’s burst.

When I started my mage, this was the spec I played. Sure, Frost was undeniably the “better” leveling spec – but I had a soft spot for Fire (and I love seeing big numbers ;P ). It was fun, and part of the reason I loved playing my mage. I’m sad to see the classic Fire spec die as a side-effect of a PVP nerf.

Sure, they’re going under, closing stores around the country, and probably won’t be around much longer, but hey – at least you can get some cheap stuff out of ‘em before they go =)

I’ve decided to make my mage my main this time around, rather than my warlock. There are a few reasons behind this, not the least of which being the rather heavy-handed nerfing of warlocks in 3.x. But, it’s not all about nerfs, at least not directly. For me, it’s about fun. Affliction is now so cumbersome with timers and pet management that it’s simply not fun. To do comparable DPS with my mage is *much* less stressful.

Northrend is gorgeous. Between the attention to detail, the higher view distance, and Blizzard’s outstanding art direction, it’s a huge step in the right direction for an engine that’s starting to show its age.

Quests are fun, and varied, although most are still your generic combination of fetch, kill, or collection. There seem to be a few more party-friendly quests this time around, but there are still an annoyingly high number of rare-drop quests.

Breaking things up into two starting zones has helped the lag factor tremendously. Finishing quests that require specific mobs to be killed is still a pain, though. There are a LOT of folks in each zone, and you’re all competing for those same mobs. It’s annoyingly frustrating to wait 10 minutes for a spawn, only to have it taken fom you by someone who just ran in a few seconds ago. But, as always, leveling beings out the absolute worst in people, so I suppose it’s to be expected.

The two instances I’ve done thusfar – Utgarde Keep and The Nexus – are both outstanding. Although the difficulty of these starter dungeons isn’t much higher than the level 70 instances in Outland, they seem to be a lot more fun.

My mage is a little over halfway to 72 – I’m not pushing all that hard right now for the levels (there are several 80s already), although I’d have liked to have made 72 by the end of the weekend. The ride is enjoyable, and I’ve no doubt that it’ll continue to be so. Replacing hard-won epics with blues/greens is rather painful, but I’ll get used to it.

A word on Death Knights: There’s a *lot* of them, as expected. Their starting zone is fantastic, and leads them directly to level 58 and being Outland-ready. They’re also pretty much the only class you’ll find in Outland right now. A few people in my guild were having fun running Ramparts with 5 DKs, no healer, so it’s certainly possible. Should be fun to see how long that lasts.

Unfortunately now he must start the arduous process of running BGs for marks and honor. It’s like fighting a bonfire with a paper bag.