From Forbes, via Yahoo:

If you see your password below, STOP!

Do not finish reading this post and immediately go change your password — before you forget. You will probably make changes in several places since passwords tend to be reused for multiple accounts.

Here are two lists, the first compiled by SplashData:

1. password

2. 123456

3.12345678

4. qwerty

5. abc123

6. monkey

7. 1234567

8. letmein

9. trustno1

10. dragon

Here’s the whole list: 25 “Worst Passwords” of 2011 Revealed

The article also includes tips on making good passwords. Check it out, now.

Roboform comes well recommended for protecting your passwords.

With the Pilgrim’s Bounty Holiday event you can actually level your cooking from 1 to 430 with amazing ease.

Grab the recipes book from the event’s cooking vendor and cook up the recipes. You can buy all the mats from the city vendors and they’re cheap. At 280 you will be able to cook “Slow Roasted Turkey.” The interesting thing about this recipe is that you get 2 points of skill per turkey cooked and you get it until you’re over 400 skill, even though the skill greys out. (This is probably a big, either they grey point or the level that you can reach.)

Hunt down a whole bunch of turkeys and cook ‘em up. You’ll hit 420 easily, then it start to slow. I hit 429 and ran out of turkeys and got bored with hunting them. I don’t know how high it will go, but you’ll need a lot of turkeys to get much last 430.

Here’s a Pilgrim’s Bounty cooking guide

and a Pilgrim’s Bounty Achievement Guide.

WoW Cooking guide to 525

It’s the Gold Speed Run.

Check it out here

Apart from being a killer game concept, Jon Kenins (creator of the Massive WoW Gold Blueprint) tells me that the Gold Speed Run is also the fastest way to make extreme amounts of gold. And he’s got the proof to back it up.

What’s a Gold Speed Run? Hop onto a brand new server. No friends, no guilds, no gold buying, no transfers, start from zero. Create as many alts as you like. Amass as much gold as you can in 30 days.

He organized a Gold Speed Run for his exclusive insiders’ gold-making club in March this year, and the results were amazing:

• 2.8 Million Gold earned in 30 days, starting from zero
• top gold earner alone brought in 359,313 gold
• average gold earned by all challengers: 63,901 gold – this needs more explanation: 11 people broke 100k gold, 40 broke 1k. How do you think you would do?

Keep in mind that he’s talking about doing all this with level 1 toons, and starting on a new server with no other help of any kind… not even start-up cash. Want more proof? I did my own run, not as a part of his contest, just to see if anyone could do this.

Using his techniques it’s almost trivial to break 1k gold. (300k is a bit harder… .) I wrote it up on GotWarcraft: 30 Days to (over) 1k Gold

So maybe you’re asking…

“How can I get some?!”

Well now’s your chance!

Jon is running a new Gold Speed Run Challenge starting next week. And he’s inviting newbie speed runners to sign up for a preview video series that shows you exactly how to get the same kind of results in your own gold game. Get the videos here!

Speed Run FTW!

One more thing:  Jon is limiting the entries in this Speed Run to avoid overwhelming the auction house economy on any one Realm. Sign up for the preview video series, and you’ll be on the early bird list for first shot at a spot when the challenge opens up next week!

MegaDamage and Item Squishing.

This is actually a serious post on an interesting issue: the exponentially increasing stats and damage.

Check it out, here.

The Devs (specifically Ghostcrawler) discuss what’s happening with the various classes in the 4.3 patch. Not all specs are covered and Rogues aren’t covered at all. I have no idea what that means. This is a clip from part 1, part two is below this:

Part 1:

Back in June, I wrote a blog explaining the context behind some of the changes in the upcoming patch that might not be intuitively obvious. That blog ended up being one of the most popular ones we’ve ever done; even players who disagreed with the specific changes appreciated our explanations for what we were trying to accomplish. Therefore, we’d like to continue in that fashion and we figured there was no reason to wait until 4.3 was “on the shelves” to get the ball rolling.

One note before I dive into things. If you haven’t read the previous blog, “Rate of Change,” now might be a good time. There are some changes that we want to make to class mechanics or balance in general that we don’t think are fair or appropriate to spring on players in the middle of an expansion. These include things like the power of interrupts or the active mitigation model we want to implement for tanks. We’ll get there, but in short term we fundamentally believe that it’s important to pick our battles.

On with the show. Note that most of these changes are mechanics changes. We have not yet finished enough testing to be confident in our benchmark damage, healing, and tanking numbers for 4.3. When we finish those, and when we see what some players are capable of doing on the PTR (or even what they theorycraft or sim based on PTR numbers) there will be additional changes. Off the top of my head, I’d say Fury warrior damage is almost certainly too high and Resto druid AE healing (ignoring the effects of Tranquility of course) is also too potent.

You’ll also notice some classes aren’t mentioned at all. It’s possible we’re just happy with them, but it’s more likely we just haven’t gotten to them yet. We don’t want to hold a PTR until every single thing is done, because that minimizes test time.

Melee DPS

Overall, we think melee DPS in dungeons and raids is still too low. We think melee DPS is fine in PvP, and we think melee DPS is competitive against ranged specs against target dummies, but in actual encounters with all of their moving pieces, melee falls behind. To attempt to adjust for this imbalance, we have improved the benefit to attack power given by the various raid buffs (Blessing of Might et al.) to melee only. Hunter DPS is fine, or even high in 4.2, so we didn’t want this buff to extend to them, which is why the AP benefit is now 20% for melee attacks but still 10% for ranged attacks.

Vengeance

As promised, we allow for this tanking mechanic to now ramp up quickly when the tank is taking damage.

The rest of the above post deals with class specific changes, see it here: http://us.battle.net/wow/en/blog/3615095

Part 2 goes into more details. Again, not all specs are covered and Rogues aren’t covered at all. The changes to the Mortal Strike type of effects (reduced healing on the target) should cover Wound Poison, though.

Mortal Strike (and similar debuffs)

We dropped the healing debuff from 50% to 10% some time ago, but were convinced at 10% that it was hard to appreciate the effect at all. We want to try Mortal Strike et al. at 25% to see if it feels useful but not mandatory. If 25% is too much and 10% is too little, then it may mean the entire mechanic may not have much of a future. We decided to only change the debuff for the warrior, rogue, and hunter, restoring the original relationship between “strong” and “weak” MS that we had in Lich King.

Click through to see the class details: 4.3 class changes

There will be thousands of comments on the above posts, might as well click through and add yours. QQing doesn’t help, but if you can add some solid evidence to support your remarks, then go for it.

Feel free to add comments, over there, as to what you want to see added to that (or any) guide.

Check ‘em all out, here => Bliz contest winners

Here’s some collected info on Mists.

Among other things…

• New talents and skills and another complete revision of the talent and ability systems
• New class: Monk – this class looks like it will be able to heal, dps, and tank. (Drunken Kung-fu as a tanking system?)
• Three new raids
• Nine new dungeons
• Some tweaks to make things easier for Pick Up Groups (PUGs)
• New battlegrounds and a new arena
• And so on.

Blizzard’s Official Pandaria page:

Shrouded in fog since the world was sundered more than ten thousand years ago, the ancient realm of Pandaria has remained unspoiled by war. Its lush forests and cloud-ringed mountains are home to a complex ecosystem of indigenous races and exotic creatures. It is the homeland of the enigmatic Pandaren, a race that celebrates life to the fullest even while under siege by an ancient menace.

The new continent reveals itself to a broken world just as the Alliance and Horde are spiraling ever closer to a war that will consume all of Azeroth. Will the mists of Pandaria part to reveal the world’s salvation? Or will the battle to control this rich and breathtaking new land push the two mighty factions over the brink of war and into total annihilation? The answers await within Pandaria’s mysterious shores!

Go here to check it out: Unleash the Secrets of a Lost Continent

 

Myth-Games has this to say:

The zone will start off in a similar manner to the Deathknight zone, players who create Monks willget to work through quests learning about the four elementals, the Monk philosophy, and the need to save the four fading elemental spirits: Huo, the fire spirit; She, the water spirit; Wuguo, the earth spirit and Dafeng, the spirit of air.

The Pandaria zone is gorgeous, and the Monks look like a lot of fun to play. They remind me, at first glance, of Teras Kasi in Star Wars Galaxies:

The lore for Pandaria looks pretty interesting, and I’m looking forward to learning more about the zone and the Padarens over the next few months.

Here’s the rest, including the trailer: http://www.myth-games.com/news5073.htm

Joystiq.com covers some of the background and where Bliz is going with this:

Blizzard has made the next expansion in the World of Warcraft official as Mists of Pandaria, and after conquering other planets, the Lich King, and a big bad dragon, the Horde and Alliance are headed to … China. Well, not China per se, but Pandaria, a long-rumored, Eastern mysticism-influenced realm, where panda-based humanoids roam, brew and drink beer, and offer players the next five levels in their continuing progression.

As is often the case with this game, many players have revolted. The Pandaren have long been used as a joke in the world of Warcraft, either referred to on April Fool’s Day, or showing up in the company’s parodic Christmas cards. But lead quest designer Dave Kosak says players who scoff at Pandaria should think twice. “Maybe people, because they’ve only been portrayed as cameos or only April Fool’s jokes, people think that there’s nothing to this race, and that’s not it at all,” Kozak says to us during BlizzCon last week. “I think the Pandaren are kind of fascinating — they work hard, they play hard, they eat hard, they drink hard, and they don’t do anything half way.”

Here’s the entire article: … a new direction for Blizzard’s first MMO

In a separate article, Joystiq discusses the Monk class, specifically the DPS aspect. It covers weapons, the lack of auto-attacks, and a few other items. Mostly speculation as we all know how thing might change between now and release. Also in the article is a short video with some of the Panda Monk moves. Hmmm… maybe I’ll do a Gnome or Goblin Monk…

We know the resource system has two parts: first, you have chi. Like rogue’s energy, chi starts at 100 and is consumed by using abilities. From Joe Perez’s first impressions, it looks like chi replenishes over time, and it also replenishes more quickly by completing combos. The other resource is orbs called light and dark force. These fill up by using abilities that cost chi and are then consumed to use other abilities. The light and dark force abilities don’t seem to cost chi.

The last thing we know for sure is that in current plans, monks do not have an auto-attack. Explained in the game as “needing to focus their energy between strikes,” this is the main thing that separates monks from all other melee classes. As a result, the ramifications of what this means is what I’m going to focus on first.

Read the whole thing here: Insights and observations on early Monk DPS mechanics

The Official Trailer:

Yet more links to Mists info:

• Gamespot has a whole bunch of Pandaria pics.
• Mists of Pandaria Talent Calculator and More – Keep in mind that talents and abilities may change between now and release.

Basically, they are offering incentives to entice people to roll on the Asmodean faction and are offering goodies. They also have a couple of PvP incentives. More here: Faction Balance? What a Concept…

So what could WoW do as an incentive for people to roll on or the other faction on particular servers?

If there anything that could be done to tempt more people into the PvP game?

I’m using it four different servers and I can say that it’s a pretty nifty. I don’t know how you go about acquiring massive gold, but I think this is a tool that I’ll be using a lot. Check out my Tycoon gold addon review and see what you think.