night-elf-racials
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Night elf druids at the end of Cataclysm
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, we ponder each druidic race's prospects in Mists of Pandaria. In November 2010, before Cataclysm hit, I wrote a series of articles on why (or why not) to play a particular druidic race for theorycrafting, lore, and roleplay purposes. They turned out to be a really big hit with readers, and you can find them here: Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a worgen druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a troll druid While most of the information contained in these articles is still accurate, a few things have changed since then, and each race approaches the end of Cataclysm and the expansion's events from a different perspective. Because each race's background obviously hasn't changed, I thought that rather than write another comprehensive guide, it'd be useful to revisit each race briefly to see how they and their druids are handling the shift from this expansion to Mists of Pandaria. Of course, once I started writing, I got really into it, and the column started metastasizing in celebrated tumor fashion, so this week's outing is confined to the original druidic race. Within the game, this is who you are as a night elf druid. This is what the world thinks of you, and this is what you think of the world -- or at least, it's one perspective on it.
Spiritual Guidance: What Alliance race is the best for shadow priests?
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. On Wednesdays, shadow priesting expert Fox Van Allen regularly insults normal people, so you should never take his writing seriously. Fox encourages you to follow him on Twitter. Rejoice, brethren! Since the Cataclysm, the shadow priesthood is more accepted than ever before. A full 11 of the 12 races can now be priests. (Orcs are the holdout, which is a shame -- they have a terrific plus-spellpower racial.) We have a wealth of options when starting a new shadow priest or when dropping some coin on a faction or race change. I was thinking about starting this particular column with some kind of bold statement such as "Fox Van Allen is a racist," but that could hurt my future political career. (Van Allen for Vice President! Call me, Mitt.) Still, there's no escaping the fact that in WoW, some races are just plain better than others. And some -- gnomes -- are clearly inferior. Eventually, our analysis will take a look at all the Horde and Alliance races. For now, though, we'll focus on Team Blue. Which Alliance race is best? Which gnome recipe is the tastiest? Can I manufacture a reason to reuse that picture of Taylor Lautner staring with lust at John McCain? All questions will be answered ... after the jump.
Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid
Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we repair to Teldrassil. I owe you guys a cheat sheet for patch 4.0.3a and probably something on the recent tank cooldown announcements, but with raids still being tested on the beta, I'm afraid that Blizzard will make whatever I write obsolete within days. My informal sense of class balance as things stand now is that bears needed to be nerfed, cats might be nerfed a little bit (though perhaps not at all) and restoration is definitely going to get nerfed. I was wrong to predict that Blizzard would shy away from encounters with massive raid damage, though not as wrong as Blizzard was in reinstituting it. Rejuvenation spam, hoooooooo! Anyway. In addition to updating our 101 and leveling guides when Cataclysm settles down, I've wanted to write a more lore-centric series on the new worgen and troll druids. While drafting those, I realized that what I really wanted to do was write a series on each druidic race now that the choice is more complicated than, "Are you playing Alliance or Horde?" While there are folks out there who can and will spend time on a character rolled purely for utility, most of us need to care about a toon in order to play it extensively. It's not really about roleplaying, it's about ... personality, for lack of a better word? As an example, I wound up deleting my first night elf because she bore a terrifying resemblance to Cher. I mean no offense to anyone who's a fan of her music, but the idea of Cher being able to Berserk is, at best, disturbing. We'll start today with the original druids, the night elves. The full series is available here: Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a worgen druid Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a troll druid
