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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, News items

Did you know you could do this? We crowdsourced readers' favorite advice for Mists of Pandaria and patch 5.1, to show you all the little inside tidbits you just might have been missing. Included is an entire section of tips for streamlining your dailies -- don't miss 'em!

Let's rev up first with a few of our most recent tips and tricks posts:

• While there are limits to how far you can progress, you can start your farm as soon as you get to Pandaria -- no need to wait for level 90.
• Get exalted with Lorewalkers in an hour or less; collect all the lore objects for each "story" in a single, enjoyable session, or simply make sure you don't miss any nearby items while you're leveling.
• Murder this innocent creature, win fabulous prizes.
• Riding the Darkmoon carousel gives you a buff to XP and rep gains.
• I can turn into what? A baby panda?
• Tip: How to see if your Grand Commendation is active.
• Tip: Where to get new pets in old dungeons.
• Blingtron now helps you become a natty dresser.
• If you're a treant, here's how to become hot stuff.

Down your dailies and discover hidden delights with our collection of reader discoveries and advice, collected after the break.

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Filed under: Mists of Pandaria

Just added this to the DMF guide, Gelvas Grimegate sells more sandbox rides in 5.1, looks like carousel rides: wowhead.com/npc=14828

- perculia (@perculia) December 5, 2012

Sandbox mounts that look like the Darkmoon Carousel? We had to check it out. It took a short while to locate the vendor, Gelvas Grimegate, very near to the carousel itself. But once we did, he had a huge array of sandbox mounts to sell, for only one Darkmoon Prize token for ten charges.

What's the catch? With a deal as good as that, there's always a catch. And this is no exception. Sandbox mounts don't move, they are stuck to the ground by their springy stands, and simply undulate gently back and forth. What's more, that one Darkmoon Prize Token only buys you ten charges, but you can carry as many sets of those ten-charge items as you see fit. So you can only summon this incredibly entertaining wooden murloc ten times per purchase, and the same applies for the rest, of which there are many!

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Mists of Pandaria is here! The level cap has been raised to 90, many players have returned to Azeroth, and pet battles are taking the world by storm. Keep an eye out for all of the latest news, and check out our comprehensive guide to Mists of Pandaria for everything you'll ever need to know.

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Filed under: Mists of Pandaria

Welcome back to The Queue, the daily Q&A column in which the WoW Insider team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Adam Holisky (@adamholisky) will be your host today.

We'll get right into the Queue today with a good question:

Blaze asked:

In the eight years of Word of Warcraft, what has been the single greatest improvement to the game?

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Filed under: The Queue

Since pandaren come from a tropical climate, it makes sense that a new immigrant to the rest of Azeroth might get a little overexcited about her first real winter snow. You see it all the time in the southern U.S., where certain native Southerners who may or may not be my husband completely freak out at the first hint of snow in the forecast and say incredibly stupid things like "I hope it snows a foot!" Some of us have to drive an ambulance in that foot of snow, buddy. Anyway, submitter Fas of Might and Magic on Arathor (US-A) and his druid pal are celebrating their first winter by playing in the snow outside of Ironforge. Looks fun, guys!

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Filed under: Around Azeroth

Every Thursday, WoW Insider brings you Scattered Shots for beast mastery, marksmanship and survival hunters. Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the hunter podcast uses logic and science (mixed with a few mugs of dwarven stout) to look deep into the hunter class. Mail your hunter questions to Frostheim.

There will always be some hunters who disagree with anything (believe it or not I recently read a hunter who thinks removing minimum range made the game no longer playable) but most hunters these days agree that we hunters have too damn many buttons. And it's not just us: in a recent tweet Ghostcrawler said so too:

We don't think hunters need a massive revamp (beyond range and ammo changes they already have). They do have too many buttons.

- Greg Street (@Ghostcrawler) November 20, 2012

Unfortunately there isn't a whole lot that can be done in the middle of an expansion -- frankly what needs to happen is a bunch of these abilities just need to go. But remove anything (even minimum range) and you'll hear complaints, not to mention making hunters learn new rotations mid-expansion is bad design move. But I think there are some things that can be done to mitigate the situation.

But first lets get into why too many buttons is a bad thing, because there are actually two important reasons.

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Filed under: Hunter, (Hunter) Scattered Shots

Remember Corki? Really, now ... Who could forget the most annoying little twit ever to grace not one but four quests in Nagrand during The Burning Crusade? There really aren't many NPCs that can set my teeth on edge like Corki could, but Li Li Stormstout sure is making a run for the title. I know she's supposed to be loosely modeled on an actual little girl (the daughter of Blizzard Senior Writer Micky Neilson, also the author of the graphic novel about her), and yeah, I'm a mom with a little girl of about that age, but this little flibbertigibbet drives me batty -- which has done nothing to put me in any decent frame of mind to deal with Dook Ookem, Chief Kah Kah and their ilk, now that I'm running up my team Horde-side.

I know, I know, many of you love those little bundles of comic relief. Maybe I'm just "lazy and old," as Li Li might claim. I'm all pumped up and ready for war, though, and I hate being sidetracked by these knuckleheads. I guess I could try leapfrogging the storylines I don't care for, but it's part of my storyline. I don't wanna skip anything!

Commiserate with me. I know plenty of you are agonizing over more important matters, grinding your gears over Garrosh while I'm merely fretting about a little girl and bunch of monkeys. So tell me, what characters in Mists grate on your last nerve -- and what are you doing to mitigate the pain?

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Filed under: Breakfast Topics

• All eligible players can now complete the quest It Is A Mystery, which makes things far less mysterious, but far less frustrating as well.
• The Crow on Darkmoon Island can now be caputured, and cannot be caged for sale.
• Picking up Meatball's Strange Energy in the Brawler's arena will now benefit the Brawler's nearby pet as well.
• It turns out framerates were merely a setback, and the issue affecting system performance in Silvermoon City has been resolved.

Read on for the full list of hotfixes.

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Filed under: Hotfixes

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, The Burning Crusade, Wrath of the Lich King, Cataclysm, Mists of Pandaria

WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Dawn Moore is a discipline priest by reputation, but still enjoys melting faces as shadow and bugging her raid to click the Lightwell as holy.

One of the most interesting things about the new talent system added in Mists of Pandaria is that it encourages priests (and all classes) to choose which talent is best for them at almost every turn. No longer is one talent clearly better than another when examining them in a bell jar. Now instead you have to look at how and where the talent will be used; one talent might shine brightly in certain scenarios but be so utterly awful in others that it's practically unusable. The result of all this? We're now adjusting our talent builds more than ever.

Of course, this isn't a new thing for DPS, who frequently swapped to alternative talent builds on each encounter to get the best possible damage (got to beat those 'locks!) but for healers it's more of a change. In the past, a healing priest might have considered switching between disc or holy, but rarely did that involve altering individual talents in our trees. Usually healers had an all-purpose build that was good for everything; changing around talents was only done on the rare occasion. That makes this new talent system a bit of a shake up for us, since the majority of priests are healers (two healing specs and all). So today I thought we'd look at the new priest talents as thoroughly as we could so it's easier to decide which one you want.

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Filed under: Priest, (Priest) Spiritual Guidance