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Spiritual Guidance: Shadow Priest 101
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. On Wednesdays, the shadow-minded Fox Van Allen takes over for the discipline-oriented Dawn Moore. Fox -- the Reagan '84 to Dawn Moore's Mondale; the communion wine to Dawn's flavorless communion wafer; the Charlie Sheen to ... that other boring guy with the fat kid. When I tell people that I write for WoW Insider, they often have a lot of questions. "What does Mike Sacco's hair really smell like?" "What's Tyler Caraway's deal?" "Can I have Dawn Moore's personal cell phone number?" I answer them all, of course (seriously, it smells like strawberries; he's overcome with Fox-induced hero worship; and no, you can't!). Today, though, I want to answer the one that comes up most often: "Do they let you write about whatever you want?" In short, yes. My employers are gracious folks, who seldom resort to physical violence against their writers. Every once in a while, though, the editorial gods issue an edict from their digital version of Mount Olympus. Three months ago, that edict was "now that Cataclysm is out, write a [your spec here] 101 article." You see, lots of World of Warcraft players are interested in reaching out and trying new specs, but are overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information they need to get started. They want to know all about talents, gems, and what the spec is all about, but they don't want to sift through 50 articles to get the information. They want the Cliff Notes version. And that's precisely what the 101 series is all about. All my fellow writers here finished their Not as Cool as Shadow 101 articles back in December or so. Since I was too busy staring at my own reflection to get it done in time ... well, here it is, three months late: Shadow 101.
Spiritual Guidance: What few shadow priest highlights BlizzCon 2010 could scrape together
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Even weeks when your shadowy messiah, Fox Van Allen, is nursing one heck of a headache -- along with, presumably, everyone else who's still suffering from the non-stop party atmosphere of BlizzCon 2010. Let's start by saying that BlizzCon 2010 was an absolute blast. I met most of the WoW Insider crew, got to smell Mike Sacco's hair yet again, got some amazing swag and got to eat at Jack in the Box no less than five times. The best part, though, was probably meeting Orkchop (pictured above with WoW Insider's moonkin blogger Tyler Caraway, who can only aspire to be as amazing as Orkchop). The dude is an internet celebrity. For real. But enough about how awesome Orkchop is. Let's talk shadow priests, and how awesome they are. Now, I'm not good at sugar-coating things, so I'll just come out with it: BlizzCon 2010 was pretty disappointing in terms of World of Warcraft-related content. The biggest news out of the convention was the new loading screen for Cataclysm. Really. That was the big news. Seriously. And it's just a palette-shifted version of the Sindragosa loading screen. Despite the lack of earth-shattering news, I made sure to take note of all the shadow priest action. There wasn't a heck of a lot of it, but what little ground was covered was hugely important to the future of the spec. The good, the bad and the non-answers -- we'll go over it all after the break.
The Queue: The one where Fox tells you about all the [REDACTED]
Welcome to your daily dose of The Queue. With your usual hosts suffering from post-BlizzCon fatigue, The Queue was left unguarded and once again captured by Fox Van Allen. All members of the Van Allen faction shall enjoy a 5 percent buff to damage and experience for the 24-hour duration, and Spirit Shards may now be collected. The powers than be here at WoW Insider are still licking their BlizzCon-inflicted wounds, so they requested I once again write The Queue. And since Holisky, Sacco, et al. probably won't even have the energy to edit this, I'm spilling the beans on what happened at BlizzCon 2010. Not the boring stuff. The awesome, seedy stuff that could get everyone fired. First of all, I cannot believe what happened after [REDACTED] ended. [REDACTED] stayed a little bit after, and once we all got a few photos, all of us took turns [REDACTED]ing in the [REDACTED]. You know how [REDACTED] seemed awful friendly during the [REDACTED]? Yeah, you guessed it, he was totally [REDACTED]. Like, really [REDACTED]. On a somewhat related note, I'd really appreciate it if those of you who were taking the pictures of me when I was [REDACTED]ing [REDACTED] would stop uploading them to Facebook. Or at least stop tagging me in them. I mean, my grandmother can see that stuff. Come on. Oh, and P.S.: [REDACTED]'s hair smelled exactly the way you'd have expected it to -- like [REDACTED]. [Nice try, Fox. – Ed.] Dark Finch asked: Does WoW Insider plan to redo the "(Place Spec Here) 101" articles to match the current talent trees and abilities? If so, will you do this before or after Cataclysm launches?
The Queue: The one where we issue a retraction
Welcome to your daily dose of The Queue. With Mike, Alex and Adam busy, their precious Queue was once again left unguarded and captured by the adorable Fox Van Allen. All members of the Van Allen faction shall enjoy a 5% buff to damage and experience for the 24-hour duration of this Queue, and Spirit Shards may now be collected. Don't get the wrong idea. I'm not back running today's The Queue just because yesterday was, like, the most awesome edition of all time. I'm back because there's serious work to be done. You see, sometimes, in the rush to break a story, those of us here in the "media" jump to judgement. We make mistakes. As such ... The Queue would like to make the following retraction: That drunk girl in a Boston bar did not think Mike Sacco's hair smelled like girls' hair. She thought it smelled better than girls' hair. We apologize for the error. (And not just because it means we get to reuse the Mike Sacco has girl hair tag.) Dudegar asked: How are flight paths handled in Cataclysm? Are they changed much? If so, if I have all the flight paths in the old world at the moment, are they going to reset in Cataclysm and I will need to grab them again? Or are they automatically adjusted?
The Queue: The one where Fox takes over
Welcome to your daily dose of The Queue. With Mike, Alex and Adam busy, their precious Queue was left unguarded and captured by Fox Van Allen. All members of the Van Allen faction shall enjoy a 5% buff to damage and experience for the 24-hour duration, and Spirit Shards may now be collected. Before I start the queue in earnest, I shall innaugurate the first ever Fox Van Allen edition of The Queue with a question I want to clear up once and for all: "Is Fox Van Allen your real name?" Yes. That's totally my name. For serious. We all blog under our real names here, and I'm no different. The ladies at Panera never believe me, though. "Well, you know, people sometimes give us fake names." They think they're so hot just because they have, like, six different kinds of soup. Well you know what? They're not. They're not hot at all. Hmph. hp1 asked: My understanding is that there won't be a new neutral city in Cata, a la Shattrath or Dalaran. So where will all the lvl 85's be hanging out? I didn't play in Vanilla but heard most Horde "lived" in Undercity because of it's proximity to Scholo, Strat and to a lesser extent Blackrock. Do you think we'll all be parked in faction-specific cities or someplace new?
