As a few of our readers have noticed, Blizzard has fixed the old problems with the Harvest Festival this year -- the new races of Blood Elves and Draenei can now do the quests that start outside of Orgrimmar and Ironforge. Last year was the first time the races had a chance to run them, and Blizzard hadn't implemented the quests for them yet. But this year, things are A-OK.

Unfortunately, there's no acknowledgement that they're new to the game -- while the quests do mention the character's class, they just see BEs and Draenei as just other members of their faction. It was a little weird running to honor Grom Hellscream with my Blood Elf, but if you want to be a good member of the Horde or Alliance (and pick up that nice food dispenser in the mail), have at it.

Heard about Warhammer Online, but the thought of a whole new virtual world to get lost in frightens and confuses you? Worry not -- our good friends at Massively (like WoW Insider, but for all MMOs) have you covered. Just in time for the impending Warhammer Online release, they've posted a WoW player's guide to Warhammer Online. With their in-depth guide, you can take all that knowledge you've racked up about Azeroth and its inhabitants, and carry it right on over to Altdorf and the rest of the world of Warhammer.

Need a class translation guide, or want the lowdown on what quests and crafting are like? Perhaps the biggest difference between WoW and WAR is a bigger emphasis on PvP of all kinds, and Massively's got the story for you on that as well. If you've been interested in checking out Warhammer at all (or if a few friends have mentioned they're switching), this guide will bring you right up to speed.

Of course, even EA admits that Warhammer won't really be a rival to World of Warcraft, but there's no question that the game has already influenced how even Blizzard makes its games, so no matter how many players choose to cross over, there's no question the new MMO on the block is going to make a splash. The game comes out in just over a week on September 18 -- if this guide has piqued your interest, stay tuned to Massively for more on what's up with the game and its release.

I've been grinding as much Netherwing rep as I can lately, and this is definitely the most fun of the quests down there, if not the most fun daily quest ever.

Name: Booterang (Wowhead, Thottbot, Armory)
Type: Quest item
Damage/Speed: N/A
Abilities:

• Gets Disobedient Peons back up and working again, and fast.
• As you might expect, the Booterang is a boot you can throw that will come back to you, whereever you are. It's part of the Netherwing rep questline, and involves a daily quest where you must search out Disobedient Dragonmaw Peons on Netherwing Ledge, toss the Booterang at them to give them an attitude adjustment, and then the boot flies back to you (and as you catch it, you do a great fist pump motion). It's great, great fun -- while the bombing daily quests are always a good time, and the Murloc de-mind-controlling on Sunwell Isle always brings a smile to my face, the Booterang is the best.
• Unfortunately, the Booterang only works on Disobedient Peons on Netherwing Ledge, so using it to knock some sense into raiders who aren't paying attention or battleground members who aren't fighting at the flag is, unfortunately, out of the question. But maybe we'll see an upgraded Booterang in the expansion?
• There is also a technique called "Booterang chasing" -- you can use the item from your mount, and since an epic mount is required to do the Netherwing quests, you actually move faster than the Booterang can come back to you. Since you can use it 20 times in a row, you can throw out 20 Booterangs at various peons, and as long as you keep moving, you can trail all 20 Booterangs behind you, spinning around you as they try to find their way back. The 'rangs can be trailed anywhere, too, so people can be seen flying around Shadowmoon Valley with a trail of spinning boots behind them.

How to Get It: There are lots of Netherwing quest line guides around (including an official one) -- to start the quests, you've got to first have a 300 riding skill, and then you'll have to grind a few dailiy quests until you get to Friendly reputation with the Netherwing Faction (by masquerading as a Dragonmaw Orc grunt). Once you hit Friendly, you'll get upgraded to an Overseer, and with the promotion comes your very own Booterang (which you've got to assemble with a quick quest that requires you to get some Knothide Leather, easily attained on the AH if you're not a skinner, and the hide of Tyrannus, a dinosaur hiding in the northernmost ecodome in Netherstorm).

Make your Booterang (the "There are many like it, but this one is yours" inscription, along with the text of the quests, comes straight from the great Full Metal Jacket), and then the next quest requires you to bust some Peon heads. And let me tell you -- after a day of slogging through the Netherwing mines dealing with all those Flayer respawns and fighting with other players over drops and mobs, there is nothing better than slinging a booterang around and telling some lazy orcs to get back to work.

Getting Rid of It: Unfortunately, you don't actually get it -- even though you "make" it by getting the mats together, the Overseer who gives you the quest keeps it when you turn the quest in. It sure is fun while you have it (and note to Blizzard: this would be a great leatherworking pattern, especially if you threw a stun or even a debuff on it), but when the quest is gone, so is your Booterang. Until the next day, anyway, when you can do the quest again.

RP Spotlight highlights little things people do to deepen their experience of the story of World of Warcraft, whether they are roleplayers or not.

Inadra's voice chills you from the very outset of her story: "I have walked on the bones of my people," she begins, "on a path so long that I could not see where it ended, or where it began..." So have you. You remember walking on those same bones, on the Path of Glory in Hellfire Peninsula -- where the corpses of the draenei people that were killed in a genocide by the Old Horde paved the way for the orcs' march to the Dark Portal and into Azeroth. (For more on the background of this genocide, find out how the orcs became so bloodthirsty.)

If you've done the quest called "Path of Glory" at Honor Hold, then you will have seen a glimpse of the tragedy in this story. Perhaps, like me, you felt touched at the cleansing of some draenei bones, reminded of real people who had suffered similar ends at the hands of merciless enemies.

Phaedria, of the Venture Co. realm, must have been touched too. She drew on this element within the Warcraft lore to craft a beautiful and heartbreaking tale of her own, set on Draenor just as the genocide against the draenei was beginning. It's about how the draenei in families such as her own faced such a terror with bravery and sacrifice, and how a few managed to survive with hope alive in their hearts. Phaedria narrates her tale in the voice of her main character, Inadra, and sets the mood perfectly, with background music, and subtle changes in her tone of voice.

It's a great piece of audiodrama; so give it about 10 or 20 minutes of your time. After listening to it, you may never see draenei, or the World of Warcraft, the same again.

[Thanks Tyche, for letting us know!]

As a few of our readers have noted (thanks Nicholas!), the Public Test Realm Forum is back up and running, apparently in anticipation for the impending test cycle of patch 3.0.2, the pre-Wrath content patch set to release in the next few weeks or months. As of this writing, Blizzard hasn't posted anything in there yet, but considering Blizzard apparently likes to break open servers right before the weekend, we could have access to 3.0.2 as soon as tomorrow evening.

And more folks are getting into the Wrath beta as well -- we've heard from quite a few people on our tips line, and there's been lots of murmuring on the forums that new beta invites are going out. Looks like Blizzard is ratcheting up testing of the new content in a big way. That doesn't mean that we'll move our expectation of the release date up, as there's still a lot of work to be done on what we've seen in the beta. But if you've been waiting patiently for your chance to check out some of the new content, it could be right around the corner.

A few weeks back, I was a guest on the Canoodle Strudel radio show, a Sunday night show about gaming on WIUX, Indiana University's student radio station. In the comments of that post, our good friend Totalbiscuit at WoW Radio was kind enough to offer to host an mp3 of the show, and the recording is now up over on their site for your listening enjoyment. It's a long show (about two hours), but we hit on pretty much everything there is to talk about in the World of Warcraft, from what it's like to start out in the game, to what's going on in Wrath, what it means to be "human" in Azeroth, and how easy the recruit-a-friend program's triple experience makes leveling (two of the guys on the show just recently started playing WoW, and they've been using the triple experience and level grant system extensively).

The show was late on a Sunday night, so I was a little loopy by the end, but hopefully it turned out OK. I did share a few Auction House secrets that I haven't really posted here on the site (though if you're already an Auction House hawk, you'll know what they are already), and we talked a little bit about the behind the scenes on the WoW Insider Show that might be fun if you're a fan of that.

Was a great time -- thanks to the guys at Canoodle Strudel for having me on. It's always a pleasure to talk Warcraft, on the radio or anywhere else.

Shellyw has a good question on the forums: what quests do you always skip? Blizzard is pretty good about the rewards system -- even if a quest is a pain to get through, they'll usually make the reward worth it. But there are quite a few quests in the game that just don't have anything you want, and just aren't worth the time putting into them.

Green Hills of Stranglethorn is mentioned early on in the thread, and I couldn't agree more -- any of those collecting quests I usually just give up on, as it's usually easier to just sell the pages off inside that zone to someone who is actually doing the quest. I often skip a lot of group quests as well, especially while leveling. While the rewards for those are usually very good (and they're often the end of long chains, which means both XP and items that come from them are great), it's often tough to find a group, so they usually sit in my quest log until grey and then get abandoned.

And occasionally, especially when I need space in my quest log for newer quests, I just plain skip anything that doesn't give an item that I need. If there's a choice of quest rewards, and none of them fit my class or spec, I'll just abandon the quest entirely to replace it with a quest that works better for me. What quests do you find skippable? How do you do triage on quests when your log fills up?

Players have been doing the math on the notorious Hemet Nesingwary (murderer of animals everywhere), and on the forums, Stubblez has figured out that if you follow all of Nesingwary's beast-killing instructions to the letter, you're responsible for murdering 278 of Azeroth and Outland's fauna. Of course, most players kill even more than that (and there are other quests that ask you to kill even more animals), but even if you take those total numbers and multiply them by the 10 million players Blizzard claims, you get two billion, seven hundred and eighty million animals, all slaughtered in the name of Nesingwary. And that doesn't even count alts.

Fortunately, as Neroblanc notes, all that killing hasn't actually thinned the Azerothian animal population at all -- if anything, the beasts in Stranglethorn Vale are herding thicker than they used to be. We'll have to nuke them from orbit just to get rid of all those Raptors down there.

But that, of course, doesn't keep the hippie animal lovers from fighting back -- as you might know by now, in the expansion Nesingwary is going to face some opposition in the form of D.E.H.T.A., or Druids for the Ethical and Humane Treatment of Animals. We have a feeling that Hemet's impeccable taste in leather and animal-skin based wear, not to mention his classic novel, probably won't be too much protection against the do-gooders.

I'm resisting the urge to post more about downranking and shamans because I want to let it shake out a little bit more. However, since the change to downranking and the XP change happened at the same time in the beta, it's made my attempt to explore various specs a little harder to do: in order to see what all the new abilities can really do, I need to burn my way to 77 as fast as I can. Having done that on my warrior, I now move to leveling my horde shaman as fast as I can, and for that, there's still one spec that's the best in my opinion. So I took my resto/elemental geared orc shaman and started gearing him up in quest drops as an enhancement shaman.

I've deliberately been avoiding the Alliance side as my mains nowadays are in that faction, so I'm in part using the beta to catch up with old friends (and it helps that my Horde toons have worse gear, as it allows me to evaluate if you can get good enough gear questing to get through the zones) and I have to say I'm liking the Horde's quests and settlements, it's all tied together very nicely. Borean Tundra has lots of flavor quests that work well with a shaman, there's plenty of decent gear to help give you a leg up (in the picture above the only piece of gear that shaman is wearing that didn't come from Northrend quests are his shoulders) and the mobs, while not totally weak pushovers, aren't especially daunting for you if you're not geared to the teeth.

The spell power changes (I've been admonished not to detail how spell damage or damage/healing converts as it has been covered too many times already by commenter Mizatt) has had some interesting consequences: I've taken a trinket that has crit strike and spell damage on it as the crit works for both my melee and magical attacks, and as I've commented before you get a lot more out of your shocks and spells now with the addition of Malestrom Weapon.

So, recently we learned that Blizzard would be doing everything they could to reward achievements retroactively. Besides the obvious rewards for exploring, they will also look at your quest logs and gear and give retroactive rewards out for dungeons and raids based on what they find.

Still have your Stormrage Legguards tucked in a corner of the bank? Congratulations, you'll get the Molten Core achievement. Turned in Hard to Kill 2 days after the dungeon went live? You'll automatically have the Magister's Terrace achievement come Wrath.

It's a pretty cool idea that'll help us old vets feel like we've accomplished something with these years in the game, and I'm all for it. It's also been sort of fun to look at my transferred characters on the Beta servers and see what I have and haven't run, or what I have run but am not credited for.

What's occurred to me though is that I could go back to the live servers, run a few dungeons, finish a few quests, tuck a few pieces of random loot away, and come out of the gate on Wrath release day with a whole bunch more shiny achievement points. You know, if I could actually tear myself away from the Beta servers.

But anyway, the idea is tempting, if only because it's a constructive thing to do with my characters before Wrath hits and the grind to 80 starts for real. After all, no matter how often they up the level cap and add new dungeons, they'll never take the Slave Pens achievement away from me.

Are any of you out there working at racking up what achievements you can preemptively? If not, are you considering it?

I still really haven't wrapped my head around the fact that we can get mounts at level 30 yet -- for so long, it's just been a fact that you don't get to ride anything around until level 40 that I'm still surprised when I see someone under that riding around. But it's true, of course, and Truffled over on WoW LJ took full advantage of that fact, in addition to the recent changes to reputation at lower levels -- she ran her Draenei through both the Azuremyst and Teldrassil starting areas, and was able be riding around a Night Elf mount right at level 30, bought for the Exalted price.

Very impressive. She says she hit Exalted only two quests after 30, and that she basically just did every single quest there was to find, save for the Raene's Cleaning end quest (so she could keep the rod). She doesn't mention /played time (all of the traveling probably added a little bit of extra leveling time in there), but however long it took, it was worth it, as she's one of the lowest non-faction Exalted characters we've seen. Nice job.

It was our 50th show this past week on the WoW Insider Show, so you'll have to forgive us for doing a little more backpatting than usual -- we promise that next week we'll be back to form for sure. But in the second half of the show, we did get down to talking WoW business, and the results are now posted online for your listening pleasure. When we weren't looking back at our favorite moments in the show's history so far (and giving away stuff to people who tuned in live), we also hit on:

• A live version of Ask a Beta Tester, where we answered listeners' questions about the Wrath beta in real time, including how professions work with Death Knights, what we're not so excited about in the beta, and whether there are any grind quests to be found.
• We devoted some time to discussing the Vicarious incident, and why it's wrong (or, in Adam's view, right) to give a Legendary ranged bow to a Rogue.
• And we answered emails about Hero classes and the possibility of another expansion announced at BlizzCon, as well as the fact that I dinged 70 last week, and the terrific Nethack, supposedly the first game with Achievements in it.

Lots of fun stuff in the show. If you have questions or concerns to share with us, please do so by sending an email along to theshow@wowinsider.com, and you might even hear it on next week's show. And as always stay tuned to WoW Radio on Saturday afternoons at 3:30pm Eastern to hear the show live, or hit us up on iTunes to download each show automatically. Until next time, have a great week.

As Blizzard's front page has noted, the realm levels page has been updated with all of the Northrend zones and the levels that we'll be going through them. There are ten Northrend zones in total, which you'd think would equate to one level per zone, but of course that's not the case -- as with Burning Crusade, there's a lot of overlap, so it looks like not only will many players be reaching 80 before seeing everything, but you may even have to run the zones twice to get the entire Northrend experience.

And it's interesting to see that Lake Wintergrasp is so [redacted!]. Wait, what? You don't want to know which levels match up with which zones in Wrath of the Lich King? Just in case you think this list is a spoiler, we've gone ahead and thrown it, uncensored, after the break. Read on for where you'll be when.