Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome.

While Ultraxion is definitely the most unique fight for healers in this tier, Yor'sahj the Unsleeping is a close second place. The boss' abilities are simple for the DPS classes and tanks, but healers will constantly be reacting to the summoned oozes and their various effects. These globules cause us to shift our healing strategies with each new wave, and learning to handle the globules will be the key to mastering this encounter.

Every raid group is going to handle the ooze packs differently. You need to familiarize yourself with what each ooze can do, and then combine the effects based on your raid leader's preference. You'll be faced with three oozes at a time on Raid Finder and normal difficulties, with the option to kill one ooze out of each wave. On heroic difficulty, there are four oozes per wave, for a total of three effects on the boss after you've killed one of the oozes.

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Filed under: Paladin, (Paladin) The Light and How to Swing It

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Filed under: Lore, Know your Lore

12 Days of Winter Veil is under way here at WoW Insider. That means 12 days of giveaways, from loot codes to gaming mice to decor and apparel. Whether you've been a good goblin or a naughty night elf, there's a chance that WoW Insider has a holiday gift for you this season.

Everybody likes vanity pets, right? Even if you're not a collector, surely you love having an awesome companion at your side while questing and dungeoneering. Today, we are giving away a Dragon Kite donated to us by WootLoots.com. What's better than having a dragon on a string as a pet? A dragon on a string that periodically gets struck by lightning. Awesome.

To enter for a chance to win, leave a comment on this post before 11:59 p.m. ET, Saturday, Dec. 24, 2011. You can only enter once. We will choose one winner at random. Make sure the email address you use to post entry comments is one you check regularly, because that's how we'll contact our winners. Because this is a purely digital item, readers of all regions may enter for a chance to win.

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Filed under: Contests

Sunday Morning Funnies is your weekly list of WoW-related web comics.

We have a new web comic to welcome to the fold this week! Check out Ylspeth's comic, Trigonometry. I'm linking the first one this week and will start linking the latest next week and thereafter. There are over 50 so far! It all started When Trigonometry Met Thrall.

In other comic-related news, Away From Reality's latest comic, Leading by Example, has a pretty awesome blog post that accompanies it arguing -- both seriously and humorously -- against Blizzard's decision not to allow characters to transmogrify their gear to look like any of the holiday or other "absurd" items.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Humor, Comics, Sunday Morning Funnies

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco will be your host today.

I expected the body type slider in The Old Republic to maybe increase my female character's muscle mass, but it turns out I could have just removed "muscle m-" from that phrase. Meanwhile, guys get wholly different body types, including a huge, muscle-bound one. Just because it's sci-fi doesn't mean we're free from fantasy body type conventions, apparently.

Lillyth asked:

So my question is: would running organized betting on 1v1 Duels, /roll, lotteries, etc. violate the ToS / EULA so long as any gold earned was used for in-game purposes only?

As Mat McCurley explained recently, running a gambling operation of any kind is against Blizzard's policies. Doesn't matter if it's a lottery or a straight-up bet on the outcome of a duel -- it's still against the rules.

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Filed under: The Queue

Hey! You adventurers! Get off my lawn! You're tracking the snow into my cave. Ehhh. The adventurers were prettier back in the day. And this reindeer isn't as delicious as it used to be. I remember back in 2004, when that reindeer was just ripe for the pickin'. But now the Demmycrats are back in power and everything's gone to hell. Oh, I miss that winter. I had tied an onion to my belt, which was the style at the time ... (Thanks to Oofu of Silverfel on Blackhand [US-A] for the screenshot!)

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Filed under: Around Azeroth

12 Days of Winter Veil is under way here at WoW Insider. That means 12 days of giveaways, from loot codes to gaming mice to decor and apparel. Whether you've been a good goblin or a naughty night elf, there's a chance that WoW Insider has a holiday gift for you this season.

Another day, another giveaway. This morning, from WoWTCGloot.com, we're giving away a Purple Puffer loot code so you may continue to inflate your number of vanity pets. This fella follows you around in a globe of water wherever you go, because a fish out of water is just ridiculous.

To enter for a chance to win, leave a comment on this post before 11:59 p.m. ET, Sunday, Dec. 25, 2011. You can only enter once. We will choose five winners at random. Make sure the email address you use to post entry comments here is one that you check regularly, because that's how we'll contact our winners. Because this is a purely digital item, readers of all regions may enter for a chance to win.

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Filed under: Contests

I love transmogrification. I just want to get that out of the way. I think it's the best basic feature to come to WoW in a long time, and it vindicates all those fashion pieces I saved in my bank over the years. I won't lie. I love playing pretty dress up. That said, Blizzard's transmogrification system is definitely more than a little limited. Most things must be transmogrified with items of the same type, and you can't transmogrify certain items at all. For me, this has certainly caused some problems.

For example, I'd love to wear a leather eyepatch on my death knight, but since he's a plate wearer? No go. I would pretty much wear an Ashkandi forever and ever if I could, but if I pick up a two-handed axe in a raid or instance? Can't transmog it. My hunter has it even worse. I roleplay her as more of a backwoods, live-off-the-land type turned sniper, so she'd be more likely to dress in brown or black leathers instead of big, flashy suits of mail armor. Alas, under the current rules of transmogrification, I'm stuck with tier 11 while her Defias Leathers stay languishing in the bank. Finally, I had every intention of dressing up both my blood elf paladin and my gnomish warrior in level 60 PvP gear, but you probably heard that only those characters with the old high-level titles get to transmogrify that stuff for now.

So what about you? Are some of the transmogrification rules keeping you from putting together the look of your dreams?

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Arcane Brilliance for arcane, fire and frost mages. this week, we seek to aid those of you who have made or will make the noble decision to level a mage in the coming months.

In the past, we've done our leveling guides here at WoW Insider as sprawling, multi-post epics, spanning 10 or 20 levels a week over the course of a month, covering every aspect of every facet of everything you could ever want to know about leveling each class in the game. The problem with that approach is that you could probably just go in blind and level your mage from 1 to 85 faster than I could tell you how to do it. The simple fact of the matter is that the leveling game just isn't terribly difficult. The process has been streamlined over the years to the point that I don't believe such detailed leveling guides are really necessary anymore. Most of this game is intuitive and user friendly now, and the part of the game that really requires in-depth strategy doesn't really start until after the experience-gaining part of it has stopped.

Knowing this, I won't be filling this guide with talent analysis, ways to optimize your level 45 boss fight rotation, or a detailed travelogue of every quest hub you'll be traipsing through along the way. This will be a more stripped-down endeavor, focusing on the parts of leveling that I think are important -- not the spell coefficients and spreadsheets, but the basic concepts your mage needs to learn while leveling, not only to make the process easier and more enjoyable, but also to help them step from mage adolescence into mage adulthood so they can shoot Deathwing in the face with a Fireball of wisdom and maturity.

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Filed under: Mage, Analysis / Opinion, (Mage) Arcane Brilliance

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Care and Feeding of Warriors, the column dedicated to arms, fury and protection warriors. Despite repeated blows to the head from dragons, demons, Old Gods and whatever that thing over there was, Matthew Rossi will be your host.

For the first time since the brief period following the launch of the pre-Cataclysm patch, arms has achieved parity with fury as a PvE DPS spec. Granted, this required a painful mauling to fury's DPS output and relies heavily on arms' ludicrous AoE potential as well as getting your hands on a Gurthalak. The proc on the weapon can add as much as 15% of your current DPS; in raids and on heroics, I've seen the Tentacle of the Old Gods put out more DPS than Rend and Deep wounds combined. Even on a high-trash dungeon where you can use Blood and Thunder to spread Rend around, Tentacle can still put out a respectable 5% to 6% of your total damage.

The sword is just as good for fury (I did in fact try out a fury build with it off-hand to test if it procced, and it did, quite frequently). While it won't make up for the nerf fury took, it does put me in mind of weapons like Bryntroll and Shadowmourne, proc weapons that did excellent damage in a warrior's hands from the end of the ICC era. I'll admit it's unfair to use Shadowmourne as an exemplar here, as the weapon was a legendary, but that's OK -- this isn't meant to be a pure comparison.

Proc weapons have a long and storied tradition in World of Warcraft but they've also somewhat fallen from favor, since they're never as reliable and predictable as pure stats. People would argue the Blackhand Doomsaw vs. Arcanite Reaper into the small hours back then. But I think Dragon Soul's two proc weapons (Gurthalak and Souldrinker) have me thinking a lot about where weapon itemization has been and where it's going, and what that means for us warriors.

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