This week in WoW news: Aug 3-9, 2008

Ask a Beta Tester: The Argent Crusade
The High Elves actually have a pretty strong presence, which I'm rather excited about. The High Elves (and Blood Elves to a much lesser extent) are one of my favorite Warcraft races ...

Hybrid Theory: Spell Power hands on
We've chit-chatted about the new Spell Power mechanic off and on, but we've never gone into serious detail about it yet. Why? Well, we didn't really know how it worked.

Blood Pact: Is Demonic Circle the Warlock answer to melee?
As some of you have correctly pointed out in my last article, most warlocks use rank 1 of Drain Soul to return a soul shard (I've covered this in tips and tricks).

Ask a Beta Tester: Daily quests, skill trainers, and Arthas, oh my!
Alex said these wouldn't be worth your while, and he was right. For those of you interested in specifics, though, you seem to get 3g 40s and 9,500xp for your average daily quest in Wrath.

Where is Blizzard going with Paladin changes?
"Like I promised, the paladin changes were more sweeping than most changes. As such, it's going to take us some time to go through a second pass on the abilities and get everything polished up enough to evaluate the shiny, new paladin." - Ghostcrawler, on the Paladin forums

How visible Achievements and Talents affect anonymity
Reader Alex was kind enough to send along this forum post he wrote, and he hits on some interesting questions about achievements and how they might affect bullying and posturing on the forums. Right now, people can spout off pretty much any opinion they want ...

15 Minutes of Fame: Retiring player goes out with a BOOM
/Gamequit threads from players who are leaving the game "for good" have become a fixture of MMO communities. Very few players stop playing without a peep.

Build Shop: Hunter 41/20/0 Leveling Spec
Welcome readers to this week's Build Shop. I know you haven't seen this feature since the middle of last June, and that's because most viable talent specs have been covered for each class.

Ask a Beta Tester: (Almost) All about Death Knights
Have questions about the Wrath of the Lich King beta? We're here to find the answers! Leave your questions in the comments of Ask a Beta Tester and every day we'll pick a few new questions to answer.

Blood Sport: Arena-weary
It happens from time to time. Players get tired. Whether it's from raiding or PvP or just playing the game in general, there comes a low point where you just feel like taking a break.

Is Titan's Grip that good?
I'm noticing a disturbing trend in perusing the Wrath blue posts. Well, disturbing for me, and possibly for any other warriors out there. All that awesome we seemed to be getting?

Authenticator failure revisited, Blizzard responds
We created a lot of waves with this post about Blizzard's Authenticator key allegedly failing -- as you know if you've been listening to the podcast, lots of people have emailed us with their own input on the situation ...

Kaplan reveals a stinky achievement
It was just a quick sentence that went by almost completely unnoticed, flew totally under the radar. But in an interview which WoW lead designer Jeff Kaplan gave to WoW Vault, he mentioned a heretofore unknown achievement reward coming up in Wrath ...

Ask a Beta Tester: Healing, now with 100% more spell power!
For as long as you have questions, we'll be here finding answers. In the image above, we see a Zeppelin leaving Orgrimmar heading for Northrend -- so let's go with them!

Forum post of the day: Vicarious' legend
That was odd. I felt a great disturbance in the Force, as if millions of hunters suddenly cried out in terror and were suddenly silenced. I fear something terrible has happened.

Ask A Beta Tester: Will we ever run out of Death Knight questions?
It's 11AM... do you know where your beta testers are? Right here, answering your questions, of course! We're exploring the Wrath of the Lich King beta so you don't have to.

The Death Knight starting experience
A couple of days ago, it was with a little good fortune and a lot of soul-selling by WoW Insider lead Elizabeth Harper that I finally got my grubby little hands on a precious Beta key.

Zone level page updated with all the Northrend zones
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 ...

Olympic battleground rewards appear on European and Chinese servers
Despite the extensive problems and human violations rights perpetuated by the Chinese government, some in service of the Olympic games themselves, most of the world seems to content to settle in and watch the Beijing Olympics one way or another.

Ask a Beta Tester: Death Knight-free edition
Today I'm going to start out with a few questions that we've answered before -- but people seem so desperate to know, that I feel I have to at least point them in the right direction.