by ZACH YONZON

The vault is a raid instance accessible only to members of the faction that control Wintergrasp. It is one of the more important reasons why control of Wintergrasp is so important. Archavon the Stone Watcher is an extremely easy raid boss who drops pieces of Tier 7 and Arena gear. In short, he means free epics.

While there are no level restrictions to entering Wintergrasp (though if you can’t fly you’ll either have to take the portal or be summoned), players must be Level 80 and in a raid group in order to enter the Vault of Archavon raid instance. It’s a very short raid with exactly four trash mobs who have special abilities, but are essentially tank and spank and prepare the raid for how the boss will be like. Archavon is a DPS race.


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by ZACH YONZON

With gear upgrades these days being so easy to come by, I’m not so sure ‘welfare epics’ is such an accurate term for PvP gear anymore. That said, Arena Season 5 started the other day without so much as a whimper. It kind of crept in quietly, without even a patch to go along with it. I’m sure it’s taken a few players by surprise to see so many new PvP gear available from different sources that it can get confusing. Don’t worry, we’re here to help you make sense of it all.

First of all, in the new PvP rewards system there are three tiers of PvP gear. The Savage Gladiator, Hateful Gladiator, and Deadly Gladiator are equivalent to Level 80 dungeon blues, 10-man raid epics, and 25-man raid epics respectively, with a lot of item points thrown in the way of Resilience and sometimes Stamina. These items aren’t the best for PvE, so gear accordingly. You’ll be wasting a lot of item points by way of Resilience, so keep in mind that all this new gear is best for your Battleground and Arena pursuits.
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by ZACH YONZON

The battle for Lake Wintergrasp is one of the most fun parts of the game today — it’s certainly my favorite thing, such that I sometimes only log in whenever I know there’s a battle. The great thing about Wintergrasp is that there are numerous battles throughout the day. It’s the game’s best mini-game, and I’m looking forward to seeing it get even more awesome as more and more players reach Level 80 and Blizzard makes improvements to the zone.

Pre-game
An hour before each battle, an NPC in Dalaran — Arcanist Braedin for the Alliance and Magister Surdiel for the Horde — will yell that a battle will soon begin. He will repeat this battle cry again at thirty, fifteen, ten, and five minutes in order to alert the inhabitants of Dalaran to hopefully drive players into going to the zone. To make it easy, portals to Wintergrasp appear at the Silver Enclave and Sunreaver’s Sanctuary. 

Generally, a portal to Wintergrasp appears in Dalaran for the controlling faction and observably disappears about an hour before battles begin. This usually means that defenders must make their way through flying mounts into the zone before the battle begins or wait until the game ensues whereupon their faction’s respective Wintergrasp Battle-Mages will open a portal to allow reinforcements. Defenders will port directly in front of Wintergrap Keep, where the Titan Relic is housed, while players on offense will port into their respective landing camps — the Horde on the West side, and the Alliance on the East.
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by ZACH YONZON

Wintergrasp is the smallest zone in Northrend, bordered by Sholazar Basin, Icecrown, and Dragonblight. It is a PvP zone, which flags all players entering it for PvP. This isn’t an issue on PvP servers, but on normal or RP servers, this makes everyone in the zone fair game. There is no physical way to access Wintergrasp other than through a flying mount, creating a natural Level barrier of 77 although lower-level players can be summoned or take the portal from Dalaran. It is my favorite zone in Wrath of the Lich King, although it isn’t without its flaws.

To best understand how to play Wintergrasp, it’s important to understand the zone itself. Wintergrasp Keep is the structure North of the map, with siege workshops and graveyards to the East and West, as well as further down South. There are three towers South of the map that currently have no strategic advantage but confer bonus Honor when destroyed or defended. The Horde permanently controls a graveyard and flight path on the Northwest side while the Alliance have a counterpart on the Northeast.

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by CHASE CHRISTIAN

After a few all-nighters in a row and a lot of showing up to work very tired, I finally reached level 80 this weekend. After a few victory laps in Dalaran to celebrate my victory over experience points and blue bubbles and Hemet Nesingwary (not for long, I’m sure); the looming realization of level-cap responsibilities started to enter my mind. Reputations, heroics, arena points, and honor – I had a lot of work to do. 

So, I took my own advice and decided to start some heroics, but not before spec’ing into my PvP mutilate build. I thought about trying out the truly insane DPS of Honor Amongst Thieves builds, but decided to postpone that until I’ve got some more gear to give it a real trial. Read on to see what I discovered on the way to my first Emblem of Heroism.

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by ALEX ZIEBART

Wrath of the Lich Kingintroduced not only new content, but an entirely new type of item. These items are called Heirloom items, or Bind to Account (BoA) items. They aren’t tied to any one character and can be freely passed from alt to alt, but they’re all tied to oneaccount, the account that bought the item. No handing them over to your friends, no mailing them to other players, no mailing them to your second account. So far none of these items are drops, but rewards for more veteran players of the Wrath content. There are two different ways of earning these items, but they dovetail nicely.

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As you can image the opposite faction has to own the fortress if you are trying to do this exploit!

There are several ways into the fortress while the other faction holds it.
Flying mount, logging out in the fortress, etc. whatever it takes, you just need to be in the fortress before the battle begins. Get up to one of the cannons and try to hide somehow until the battle begins. After the timer got to 0, you start clicking like mad where the cannon usually appears. If you are fast enough you will get into the cannon as they seem to be neutral shortly after spawn (at least for alliance it works, but I think it’s possible for both factions) and own it for your faction! If there are no people around you can just frag the other cannons or leave them alone.
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Just thought I’d share this is with you all as I find it quite fun to do over and over and it really pisses people off! Need to be Death Knight for this guys.

When you are in AB, go to the Lumber Mill and just wait around for the enemy to try and cap, then run to the edge of the hill and jump down but instantly turn around and death grip them off the edge with you. Make sure that after you jump off the ledge, you are not holding any movement keys. I made a macro for this that yells “GET OVER HERE” as I pull them to there doom.
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To do this, you’ll need this item ,Thunder Capacitor - Item - World of Warcraft and Molten armor. Being frost would also be nice as you have ice barrier to protect you from damage.

You need to aggro guards and let them attack you until all of your charges are used up, the molten armor crits for around 400 at level 80 and the thunder capacitor crits for about 2500. so killing a level 75 guard would take about 2 minutes, but you have to remember you arent flagged so other player cant touch you.
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