At long last I can finally report the new and improved Zug Gaming has arrived! You may be asking...well where the hell is it?
In order to accommodate future plans for expansion I'm moving to a subdomain format, as a result I've moved all the ZugGaming content to WoW.ZugGaming.com. In addition, all future content will be posted to this domain.
I've made many changes to the overall design as well as improved features, content organization, and above all else, better forums!
The new forums are located at WoW.ZugGaming.com/forum and are a huge improvement over my current forum solution. (or you can get the link off WoW.ZugGaming.com
As I write this we are ETA 90 minutes from launch of season 4, and with it comes a whole new season of exciting arena combat, pvp videos, new teams, specs, gear, team setups and much much more!
I'm not going to lie, I haven't been this excited for an arena season launch since season 1, and I'm sure there are plenty who are sharing in my excitement.
That said, if you're reading this then you've come searching information, and ZugGaming.com has got you covered. Below I've listed all my recent articles, news, and guides relating to season 4.
Hopefully they'll be just what you're looking for.
New Season 4 Items
Season 4 Arena Weapons
Season 4 Arena Armor
Season 4 Honor Items
Other Season 4 Resources
Season 4 Rating Requirements
A lot of very interesting changes here. Most notable...
Don't expect this patch to be availble for the season 4 launch though,
Season 4 will most likely be available on the retail realms well before 2.4.3 goes live
- Eyonix
General
* Dispel effects will no longer attempt to remove effects that have 100% dispel resistance.
* Parry Rating, Defense Rating, and Block Rating: Low-level players will now convert these ratings into their corresponding defensive stats at the same rate as level 34 players.
* Haris Pilton has launched a new line of bags and jewelry. Check her out in the World's End Tavern!
* Mounts at 30?! Yes, it's true: Apprentice Riding and mounts are now available at level 30. Training costs 35 gold.
The aldor is the second of the main factions you'll encounter in the Burning Crusade. But, as I mentioned in my Scryer reputation guide, you can only choose one of these.
How do I choose Aldor?
To choose the aldor as your faction you'll have to first complete the Shattrath City introduction quest. Once you've had the grand tour of the place simply talk to Khadgar, he will allow you to choose either the scryers or aldor at this point.
Make sure you don't choose the wrong one because it is incredibly difficult, time consuming, and expensive to change your reputation later.
How do you gain reputation with the aldor

Professions are without a doubt one of the most overlooked aspects of arena and pvp. Too often players are so concerned with gear, enchants, and gems that they completely overlook just how much professions can add.
3. Enchanting
So why enchanting? Simply put, the ring enchants. What we're looking at here is:
+2 melee damage
+12 spell damage
+20 healing power
+4 all stats
The scryers are one of two main factions in the Burning Crusade (the other is aldor). Both of these factions provide great rewards, but as they are at war with each other you can only pick one.
As you gain reputation with the scryers your reputation will go down with the aldor, and vice versa.
How do I choose Scryers?
First things first, you must choose between the aldor and scryers. You do this by talking to Khadgar after you've done the Shattrath City intro walk through quest. You can find him in the middle of Shattrath city.
How do you gain reputation with the Scryers?
There are several ways. The most straight forward is by simply doing quests for NPC's of the Scryer's faction. These are located throughout the world, and generally speaking they all give loads of experience.
This post was a question I received via email, I thought I'd just cross post it here so anyone with similar concerns might be able to get something out of this as well.
...and of course, feel free to respond with your own suggestions and insights, thanks!
Questions...
Hey zuggy, I'm a disc priest who runs currently with a shadow step rogue. I have trouble keeping up with all my dispels and strats as the matches progress. I don't have any addons currently except Proximo. Could you give me some advice on what addons to use?
Things i would like:
Low health warnings for my rogue partner.. sometimes i miss it when his health gets low.. an alert of some kind would be nice.
CD tracking. I would like to know when my fear is ready I would like to maybe know when my inner fire is not up on my toon alerting me i need to re-apply. Please tell me if you think this is a good idea.
Well, with season 3 rapidly approaching it's end it's time to start preparing for season 4's launch on June 24th. From gems to enchants, and honor to arena points, it may take you some time to get everything in order.
Honor / Arena Points
75, 000 Honor Points
5, 000 Arena Points
Of course, in addition to the points you should already have purchased the new pvp trinket. The extra resilience just makes it that much better, allowing you to get additional offensive stats in other gear slots.
As far as arena gear is concerned, you'll have to weigh your individual situation. The new rating requirements may make you think twice about what S3 pieces you'd like to purchase prior to S4 starting.
Gems
The gem choices you make are certainly going to depend on your class and spec choices, but generally speaking there are a few definite decisions you can make.
Honor Gems:
If this season seemed like it's been going on for an eternity, well that's because it has. But at long last Blizzard has finally given us the 2 week warning.
We’re currently planning to end the third Arena season and begin Arena Season 4 on June 24, 2008. This exciting Arena season will introduce the Brutal Gladiator set, and will also allow players to purchase Arena Season 2 items using the honor system. Please note that we will be resetting all Arena team and personal ratings. Players will still retain their Arena points and teams with this reset. The team and personal rating will simply be reset to the default 1500, allowing all teams to once again compete for top honors with a fresh start.
Also, with the end of the third season, players on the top teams from each battlegroup will receive their end-of-season rewards. These include Arena-specific titles that they can display proudly until the end of the new season, and, for the best of the best, an Armored Nether Drake. Please also be aware that with the end of the current season, all previous end-of-season titles will be removed.
Hey guys i would like to talk about Etiquette and knowing what to do in PVE...especially Karazhan.
1: Research Your bosses
There nothing more annoying then someone who's knew to a particular instance such as Karazhan going and doing everything wrong. Now i can use one such example as "Shade of Aran", he has a variety of ability's that can turn an awesome fight into a bloodbath.
In my opinion this team much scarier than Warlock/Rogue. Sure the lock has chain fears, but when it comes down to the burst ability of mage/rogue you're really under pressure to be smart about not being taken out of the game by CC. I've put here two strategies you may apply and it really comes down to what you're comfortable with.
Strategy #1(I recommend this against undead teams)
Rogue
Be patient at the beginning of the match. Even if you see the mage don't attack him set a focus target on him if you have a focus casting bar mod, as this will come in handy for evading sheeps. The second you see the other rogue open up on your shadow priest partner open up on him and lock him down with CS straight into a KS. Continue to stick to the rogue and bring him down. Chances are you can probably down him 1 on 1 as he'll be so obsessed over killing your partner.
Priest
Hey guys, this is my first addition to Zuggaming and i hope to add more. So lets start with your welfare epics.
Many people may be abused by other apparent "Leet" players about having these welfare epics (gladiators and soon to be Merciless), but i think they are just scared we might beat em!
So with that out of the way i have 5 easy steps to get geared.
1: Pve gear is not that bad...
When you first hit 70 you should have a few blues and mostly greens, now you may think that this is not the best in the world, but don't stress. Your current gear should be good enough to enter a few Pug Karazhan raids if your lucky. Many drops in Karazhan can easily upgrade your gear tremendously, even if your gear does not have the "Resilience" or "Stamina" that you may want it doesn't hurt to have epics to replace your greens and blues. Try to set aside a day each week to pve (such as Karazhan or Daily Heroics).
2: Badges are your friend...
Just a brief note. Early today my host was having some issues and as a result the database which stores all of the content on my site (including strategy articles, comments, forum posts, accounts, etc) was mistakenly deleted.
However, I've recovered the majority of the data and everything appears to be back to normal. My apologies if you were unable to access the site earlier today.
One minor note, it appears that recent postings (mostly within the last week) were unfortunately not restored. So if you created a forum topic, strategy article, or any other piece of content on the site I ask that you re-submit said content.
My sincere apologies for the downtime.
In addition, if you have any requests for strategy articles, tutorials, or other content on the site feel free to send me an email at support@zuggaming.com or make a post in this thread.
Thanks for your understanding.
Though it has yet to be officially confirmed by Blizzard yet, Vivendi announced earlier this morning in a press release that Wrath of the Lich King will be released sometime in the second half of 2008.
While most World of Warcraft players expected it to be within this time frame, it's nice to get a definite answer from Vivendi. With the cat out of the bag, I would imagine an official response from Blizzard would appear in the near future.

If you've be even vaguely aware of addons and user interface modifications then you've certainly heard of auctioneer. If you haven't, here's the basics...
Auctioneer is an addon which dramatically increases a users ability to analyze the World of Warcraft auction house. The mod allows you search all items currently listed. Through multiple searches the addon then builds buying and selling averages for each item.
So what's the point? Well, using this this information you can effectively make purchases on a large scale. Allowing you to buy low, sell high, and make hundreds of gold every day by simply taking advantage of other gamers who don't understand how the AH works.
Hey guys, just a quick update on the state of Zug Nation. I know I haven't made as many updates lately, my apologies on that. I've been working diligently on another big change to the site. One which will dramatically enhance each users ability to locate just the article they are looking for.
In addition, a much better forum will be live soon. Also, if you're a shadow / priest rogue fan, make sure to check out Sythe's recent update to his shadow priest / rogue 2v2 guide.
I'll be working on the logistics of the move this week, and will hopefully move the site by late this next week. Thanks for your patience.

If you've been playing World of Warcraft for any stretch of time then you've certainly heard the Blizzard's frequent PR phrase..."Next Generation MMO". Many have speculated on just what this MMO would be, and it looks like we finally have an answer.
Typically I'm not one to hop on the rumor band wagon, but a personal friend and insider Blizzard source has informed me that this new new generation MMO will be based in the Stracraft world. The official announcement is due out May 19th, and will confirm the MMO's release in late 2009.
No custom user interface is complete without ditching the stock Blizzard unit frames. The blizzard frames are anything but "ideal, they are small, poorly positioned, and offer the user little information, especially for raiders. Fortunately, there's no shortage of unit frame addons out there to help us out.
1. X-Perl
Perl has basically been around forever, I can remember using the very first versions of this module in AQ40. Overall, it's just a great unit frame. It comes equipped with all the normal features you'd expect an addon to have; range finder, HoT monitor, raid frames, debuff highlighting, raid target icon, raid tooltip, in-combat indicators, 3D portraits, red and green combat flashes, timers, and configurable colors, just to name a few.
Setup on this mod is extremely fast, out of the box it's pretty much ready to go and doesn't require very much customization to get to looking good.

For those of you that have been even vaguely aware of the
rogue community then the name Buddhist should sound very familiar. Previously Buddhist has been known for his humorous videos, but I hope his most recent release is a sign of things to come.
Without question, this is one of the best moonkin / rogue 2v2 videos I've seen. In addition to be quite entertaining, Buddhist has included textual commentary throughout the video. These notes, though brief, give a some great insights into each strategy on a team by team basis.
If you're having some trouble really finding success with druid / rogue 2v2 I'd strongly suggest checking out this video. It's got great pointers and a wide variety of matchups.

Schools of thought for proper gem selection have basically completed a 180 degree turn from arena season one as compared to arena's today. Previously, players were forced to gem very defensively, stacking stamina and resilience.
However, do to continued stat inflation, defensive stat stacking is no longer required. Without any defensive gems you can still sit comfortably at nearly 11, 000 HP and 400 resilience unbuffed. This opened the door for rogues, allowing increased amounts of offensive stats to be gained and exploited, vastly increasing damage output.
Assuming you are using a complete set of PvP gear you're sockets are going to look like this.
Helm - 2 sockets (1 meta, 1 red)
Necklace - 1 socket (1 yellow)
Shoulders - 2 sockets (1 yellow, 1 red)
Chest - 3 sockets (1 yellow, 2 red)
Bracer - 1 socket (1 yellow)
Total - 1 meta, 4 yellow, 4 red
At long last I can finally report the new and improved Zug Gaming has arrived! You may be asking...well where the hell is it?
In order to accommodate future plans for expansion I'm moving to a subdomain format, as a result I've moved all the ZugGaming content to WoW.ZugGaming.com. In addition, all future content will be posted to this domain.
I've made many changes to the overall design as well as improved features, content organization, and above all else, better forums!
The new forums are located at WoW.ZugGaming.com/forum and are a huge improvement over my current forum solution. (or you can get the link off WoW.ZugGaming.com
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