However, when you hit level 80, there is one distinct path to follow to level 85, and each zone in that path has been carefully laid out. Quests are divided into hubs, and each hub must be completed in order to move on to the next. If you’re taking an alt through these areas, you must replay through the same set of hubs and the same set of quests. If you’re replaying several alts, this gets incredibly tiresome incredibly quickly.

Thankfully, we’re about to say goodbye to that leveling model. Let’s look at Mists, shall we? No spoilers, I promise!
Mists of Pandaria is divided up into several monstrous zones and several smaller ones — but don’t let the smaller zones fool you. While Jade Forest is one gigantic leveling experience and the place where new players will start out, these smaller zones are far more fluid as far as your leveling choices go. In the case of the Valley of the Four Winds, it’s almost a sister zone for the Krasarang Wilds to the south. Quest chains will lead you to both areas; it’s up to you to choose your path. There are a massive number of quest chains between the two, but here’s the catch: You don’t have to stick around and finish everything.

Yep, you heard me. While it is useful that you finish the main chain from a story perspective, there is certainly nothing stopping you from moving on once you hit level 87. All of those other chains floating out there undiscovered? Well, you can leave those and come back at level 90; you can finish them on the spot, if you’re a crazy completionist like me; or you can just leave them undiscovered and let your alt play through a slightly different set of circumstances. If you’re not too keen on storyline and you just want to move as quickly as possible, you can certainly do that.

And things only get less linear as you travel north to Kun Lai Summit. Kun Lai also features a massive number of quest chains, each with their own little pocket of story. There is one section that you will definitely want to complete as you move into Townlong Steppes, but the rest of the zone includes sections and places that don’t really need to be completed to move on. The severe linearity we saw in Cataclysm has been replaced with a hybrid of story linearity and free-form questing that really, really works. The replay value is back, and in a major way.

Speaking of replay value — if you’re in the Mists of Pandaria beta, at level 89 and furtively waiting for Blizzard to open new content, you may want to try something a little different. Go copy another level 85 character over, either from your main account or by making a premade character, and play through the zones again. Why? Because in beta, quests by and large are still in the process of being tweaked, which means that all those quests you played through the first time may have changed, been adjusted, or been removed and replaced with different quests altogether.

I discovered this earlier this week after hitting level 89 on my first copy on the beta. After finishing everything I could, I decided to go play another copy of my rogue — this time, a copy that has the Fangs of the Father completed — and was surprised to see that a lot of the Horde content in the early parts of Jade Forest have been changed entirely. But it’s not just Horde content that’s been changed; quests all over the map have been tweaked and adjusted, up to and including the pivotal moment in the zone.

This is pretty typical for beta content, to be perfectly honest. I remember playing through chains in the beta for The Burning Crusade that didn’t make it to release. If you’re new to betas, one thing you always need to remember is that everything changes as time goes on, and nothing’s really solidified until release day. Heading back and replaying that content you’ve already done is totally worth the time spent doing so.

I recently talked to a player who managed to solo most, though not all, of the Glory of the Hero achievements from Wrath. He mentioned ones like Share the Love that been impossible to complete without putting a group together, and as you can imagine, getting four more players for heroic Wrath achievements isn’t the easiest thing in the world at 85. People who want the achievement for their alts are rarely interested in doing a meta piecemeal, and this is probably going to get worse, rather than better, once account-wide achievements go active. Once someone’s got a red proto-drake on one character, they almost certainly won’t repeat the process on one of their alts.

The vast majority of achievements get easier as you level up, but the canny achievement hunter will pay attention to the ones that don’t. As the game changes, players’ priorities and interests change, and older content has a tendency to fall by the wayside. It’s best to strike while the iron is hot.

This isn’t the first time I’ve written a column like this, and we’ll revisit the topic once we have a firm handle on any achievements going bye-bye in Mists of Pandaria. In the meantime, let’s tackle the Cataclysm achievements you want to get done before the next expansion hits.

General

General achievements aren’t that bad. You won’t lose anything other than a little convenience if you decide to put these off until later.

Cataclysmically Delicious and Drown Your Sorrows You can actually afford to ignore these until later, but they’re both marginally easier to do right now when so many of the ingredients or even the finished dishes themselves are on the Auction House.
To All the Squirrels Who Cared for Me As above. You might as well knock this one off while you have a reason to be in the Cataclysm zones in which they’re located.
Quests

Two words: Molten Front. Expect this to empty out quickly when Mists arrives, and that will make several of the related achievements more difficult to get done.

The First Rule of Ring of Blood is You Don’t Talk About Ring of Blood Blizzard is very likely to reduce the amount of experience needed to level from 80 to 85, as it’s done with previous expansions. This had the effect of turning later zones from The Burning Crusade and Wrath of the Lich King into ghost towns, because players outlevel the expansion’s content before they need to do zones like Shadowmoon Valley or Icecrown. The Twilight Highlands are likely to suffer the same fate. However, if you play a class that can solo the Crucible of Carnage, disregard.
Round Three, Fight! Same deal as the above.
Have … Have We Met? It’ll be tough to find a lot of people doing the Molten Front dailies after Mists hits, and some of the NPCs needed for this (Thassarian is the major sore point) are already rare catches. Even if it means hanging around Sethria’s Roost for a bit, I would really try to get this done now.
Gang War This will still be relatively easy if you can convince a friend or guildie to come with you in order to lose a duel, just more inconvenient.
Master of the Molten Flow You need another person in the party with you in order to complete the Flamewaker Sentinel requirement. Unless you want to make a special trip back with a guildie or friend who’s already phased in that particular leg of the Molten Front dailies, do it now.
Exploration

No real problems here. However, if you’re one of the few people who doesn’t have this yet, go knock off Stood In the Fire. Reportedly you can still get this on the Spine of Deathwing encounter (I haven’t personally observed this, but commenters have written in about it before), so try to get it done while Dragon Soul PuGs are still common and you haven’t outleveled the Raid Finder version.

Player vs. player

Oh, this one’s easy. As any Wrath player could tell you, Wintergrasp achievements got a lot tougher when Cataclysm made the zone less compelling to max-level players. The same thing’s likely to happen to Tol Barad. The problem’s less acute than it was for Wintergrasp, which had more achievements that were reliant on having a zone with lots of players around, but you’ll still want to get Master of Tol Barad (which encompasses most of the stuff you need to worry about) done before players set sail for Pandaria.

By contrast, the daily quests and reputation associated with the zone shouldn’t be a problem.

Dungeons and raids

This is the big one, and it’s actually what prompted this article after that conversation I had with the Glory of the Hero soloer. It got me to thinking about a few scattered Cataclysm dungeon achievements that I never got around to doing, and I started to wonder how many of them I could realistically put off if I weren’t getting them out of the way now.

The Legion was born out of the decision of the Titan Sargeras. Whatever we believe about his motives, his actions are clear enough. Once the champion of the Pantheon, Sargeras’ long struggle to protect the Titans’ work in ordering the universe led him to battle demonic forces from the Twisting Nether that sought to consume the life and magic from creation.

While Sargeras battled and defeated the entities that he faced, their very existence and the fathomless evil they displayed troubled him. When he faced and defeated the Nathrezim, the shadowy magic and corruption of the dreadlords were baffling and enraging to him. If the cosmos could birth such horrors, what point was there to imposing order on it? In the end, the Titans were doomed to fail.

So Sargeras turned his back on the Titans and their grand project. Now, as relentlessly powerful as Sargeras himself is, he is but one of the Titans. Although the Pantheon let him leave, hoping that in time he would be restored to the champion they once knew him as, he knew he couldn’t undo all of the Titan’s creations alone. It’s a vast universe, after all.

Luckily for Sargeras, his time as the fist of the Pantheon had been spent in defeating and penning up several of the most depraved and evil forces in existence. Sargeras sought out the prisons he himself had penned the dreadlords and other such foul demons up into and shattered them, impressing the demons into his service. Not only did they know he could destroy them if they refused, they didn’t particularly want to refuse him. What he wanted to do — destroy all creation — fit in nicely with what they wanted to do, which was to batten upon existence and drain it dry.

Sargeras had his army. In his growing fury at his fellow Titans for having imposed upon him a task that could not be completed — the defense of existence and the Titan’s vast ordering of the universe — he chose for himself a task he believed could be completed, the destruction of that order. But the army he created lacked a crucial element. It lacked generals, commanders, officers, those who could lead and guide it in his name. Searching infinity for just such a body of potential rulers over his Legion, Sargeras found what he sought on the world of Argus, over 25,000 years ago.

Argus meets its fate

Argus was the home world of the Eredar, a race of magically gifted beings whose intelligence and facility with magic made them exactly what Sargeras was looking for. Ruled at the time by a council of three, Kil’Jaeden, Archimonde and Velen, the Eredar were of course amazed by the appearance of the vastly powerful, godlike Titan and even more so by his offer to elevate them to serve as his agents, to experience power and knowledge unlike anything they had ever known.

Both Archimonde and Kil’Jaeden were in favor of accepting this offer, but Velen, despite his close relationship with Kil’Jaeden (they often called one another brother), felt that something was amiss. He soon discovered why. In a vision, he saw Sargeras’ true agenda and the fate of his people once they accepted the offer. While Velen received the aid of the mysterious naaru in evacuating himself and those of his people who believed him (who would become known as draenei, meaning exile in their native eredar) from Argus, Archimonde and Kil’Jaeden took Sargeras at his word and accepted the dark Titan’s offer.

Thus, the Eredar became the masters of the Legion. Archimonde took the Annihilan, or Pit Lords, as his personal servants. With them as the core of his forces, he began growing the Legion’s innumerable armies. Kil’Jaeden, far more subtle, took the Nathrezim in hand and created the Legion’s more sophisticated infiltration and subversion programs. While Archimonde’s forces would invade and smash worlds to lifeless husks, Kil’Jaeden’s forces would find new races suitable to become part of the Legion, bolstering its forces.

We do not know how many worlds the Legion has invaded. We do know (thanks to Harbinger Skyriss) that the Old Gods claim to exist throughout the universe and to be capable of resisting the Legion, which implies that the Legion as well has a pan-universal presence. The visions of the Prophet Velen and statements by members of the Legion indicate that a great many worlds have in their time fallen to the Legion’s onslaught.

The usual method depends on the world in question. In the case of Draenor, the Legion used subversion tactics, led by Kil’Jaden himself. This was a special case, however, as it was driven by Kil’Jaeden’s personal desire for vengeance on Velen and his followers and not the Legion’s usual mandate. It’s telling that once the draenei followers of Velen appeared to be destroyed that Kil’Jaeden didn’t even bother to bring the orcs he had corrupted with Mannoroth’s blood into the Legion proper. He simply abandoned them and their world, likely expecting Archimonde’s forces to come destroy the planet when they had time.

However, when you hit level 80, there is one distinct path to follow to level 85, and each zone in that path has been carefully laid out. Quests are divided into hubs, and each hub must be completed in order to move on to the next. If you’re taking an alt through these areas, you must replay through the same set of hubs and the same set of quests. If you’re replaying several alts, this gets incredibly tiresome incredibly quickly.

Thankfully, we’re about to say goodbye to that leveling model. Let’s look at Mists, shall we? No spoilers, I promise!
Mists of Pandaria is divided up into several monstrous zones and several smaller ones — but don’t let the smaller zones fool you. While Jade Forest is one gigantic leveling experience and the place where new players will start out, these smaller zones are far more fluid as far as your leveling choices go. In the case of the Valley of the Four Winds, it’s almost a sister zone for the Krasarang Wilds to the south. Quest chains will lead you to both areas; it’s up to you to choose your path. There are a massive number of quest chains between the two, but here’s the catch: You don’t have to stick around and finish everything.

Yep, you heard me. While it is useful that you finish the main chain from a story perspective, there is certainly nothing stopping you from moving on once you hit level 87. All of those other chains floating out there undiscovered? Well, you can leave those and come back at level 90; you can finish them on the spot, if you’re a crazy completionist like me; or you can just leave them undiscovered and let your alt play through a slightly different set of circumstances. If you’re not too keen on storyline and you just want to move as quickly as possible, you can certainly do that.

And things only get less linear as you travel north to Kun Lai Summit. Kun Lai also features a massive number of quest chains, each with their own little pocket of story. There is one section that you will definitely want to complete as you move into Townlong Steppes, but the rest of the zone includes sections and places that don’t really need to be completed to move on. The severe linearity we saw in Cataclysm has been replaced with a hybrid of story linearity and free-form questing that really, really works. The replay value is back, and in a major way.

Speaking of replay value — if you’re in the Mists of Pandaria beta, at level 89 and furtively waiting for Blizzard to open new content, you may want to try something a little different. Go copy another level 85 character over, either from your main account or by making a premade character, and play through the zones again. Why? Because in beta, quests by and large are still in the process of being tweaked, which means that all those quests you played through the first time may have changed, been adjusted, or been removed and replaced with different quests altogether.

I discovered this earlier this week after hitting level 89 on my first copy on the beta. After finishing everything I could, I decided to go play another copy of my rogue — this time, a copy that has the Fangs of the Father completed — and was surprised to see that a lot of the Horde content in the early parts of Jade Forest have been changed entirely. But it’s not just Horde content that’s been changed; quests all over the map have been tweaked and adjusted, up to and including the pivotal moment in the zone.

This is pretty typical for beta content, to be perfectly honest. I remember playing through chains in the beta for The Burning Crusade that didn’t make it to release. If you’re new to betas, one thing you always need to remember is that everything changes as time goes on, and nothing’s really solidified until release day. Heading back and replaying that content you’ve already done is totally worth the time spent doing so.

There’ve been a few changes to death knights, but the most interesting one comes with Plague Leech. This first-tier talent, which replaces Vile Spew, will allow you to generate a death rune by canceling the diseases from your target.

The nice thing about this skill is that it gives us another much-needed Blood Tap replacement now that Blood Tap itself has been turned into a somewhat more restricted talent. The bad thing about this skill is that it’s probably going to become mandatory for min-maxing DPS death knights. If your diseases are about to expire anyway and you can eat them for an extra death rune, it’s hard to see how that won’t become a DPS increase. Once we all reach level 90 and the math has been sufficiently mathed, it seems relatively obvious that Plague Leech will be considered mandatory by the hardcore PvE community, for better or for worse.

Coupled with this is the Glyph of Outbreak, which takes away the cooldown on the ability but makes it cost 40 runic power. While this seems like a nice, handy way to solve our disease-spreading issues in general, the 40 runic power is what makes this a bit hard. That makes it impossible to use as an opener, which means it’s out for unholy death knights unless they want to have the awkwardness of spending runes to apply diseases and thus having an orphaned blood rune in their rotations. In addition, runic power regeneration has been cut down in a myriad of ways in Mists, meaning we may not have 40 spare runic power — and even if we did, it means we’re losing the DPS we could have gained from a Frost Strike or a Death Coil.

So really, this all feeds into a massive tangle of issues we’ve been dealing with for a while now. Runic power regeneration was utterly destroyed in the Mists revamp. As Plague Strike and Icy Touch have grown weaker and unholy has changed to make those attacks more awkward to use, we’ve needed more of a way to easily spread diseases than ever. Unfortunately, the 1-minute cooldown on Outbreak has proven to be more and more of a thorn in the side. Making it cost runic power might have worked in Cataclysm, but with the horrible stunted runic power regeneration in Mists, it probably won’t work here.

The feast or famine issue with death knight runes is now more pronounced than ever. We’re either overloaded with resources, or the resources refuse to come and we’re sitting around with nothing to do. We need the 1-second cooldown of Unholy Presence but also the extra runic power and runic power regeneration of Frost Presence.

At this point, I really feel like Unholy and Frost Presences and their bonuses need to be rolled into one and given to DPS specs as a passive ability, while blood death knights get Blood Presence as a passive feature of their spec. It wouldn’t be a perfect solution, but it would put us back to where we are currently and temporarily fix the feast or famine issues with the DPS specs.

Ghostcrawler and the search for identity

There’s also been some angst over the past few weeks about the lack of feedback from the dev team about death knight issues and concerns in the Mists of Pandaria beta test. We certainly have issues, but the devs haven’t specifically addressed any of them. We finally got a blue post from Ghostcrawler in which he indicated that the dev team is mostly satisfied with the state of death knights and doesn’t plan to make huge changes with them this expansion.

This, of course, has sent huge ripples through the death knight community. A lot of death knights, including many well known theory crafters and raiders, certainly believe there are issues that need addressing. This thread of DK issues is a good place to start to see just some of them.

Of course, Ghostcrawler did say specifically that he believes DKs don’t have spec identity problems. You could argue he’s not too far off the mark. For example, unholy is well known as the pets and disease spec, focusing more on magical tricks than swordplay. Then again, this has lead to issues of its own, as unholy has been on a huge roller coaster, and Unholy Might remains a thorn in our side, an ability that doesn’t scale with new item levels very elegantly and certainly leaves us in the lurch as far as scaling with weapon damage goes. Frost has similar issues with the struggle between two-handed and dual wielding damage and rotations, and blood continues to struggle with being the active tanking class that generally ends up doing twice the work for less survivability and flexibility than other tank classes.

We also tend to be a bit paranoid because we’ve been down this road before. Back in the Cataclysm beta, death knight testers predicted most of the issues we had in the live game, from GCD capping to rune tetris. With this in mind, there’s room for concern that the issues we’re uncovering in this beta test could lead to the same thing. The dev team may be similarly paranoid about trusting our findings though, as we did come out of Wrath beta testing a little overpowered, or at least with some overpowered abilities that needed to be cut or nerfed.

Needless to say, we’ll all be waiting with bated breath to see what Ghostcrawler has to say in the future. There’s a lot more testing to go, and with any luck, we’ll have more changes to test soon.

There are only two new races to worry about, the pandaren and the mogu, and you get nothing but these two on the continent of Pandaria. As usual, players get four random digsites across the entire continent, though it’s currently bugging out to three or even two sites only. But Pandaria is so huge, you say. We’re restricted to no flying until 90. How can it not be painful?

The digsites have been greatly improved. They’re better positioned for traveling in between digsites, whether by being actually near each other or just by being closer to flight points.

Also gone are the gigantic digsite areas. On beta, all the sites I dug at fit inside my minimap at max zoom. Players can complete six surveys per site instead of three, and each survey grants the player five to nine fragments.

I strolled the Jade Temple Grounds or darted between bears below the Gong of Hope in Jade Forest, collecting pandaren fragments. I journeyed to Winter’s Blossom and Lao & Son’s Yakwash in Kun-Lai Summit. Behind the rolling hills in Valley of the Four Winds lies The Heartland, where I completed pandaren artifacts with Pandaren Oracle Bones I’d collected.

The ruins where the mogu still patrol in Krasarang Wilds were full of mogu fragments. I passed through the Veiled Stair collecting Mogu Statue Pieces and hiked through the Valley of Emperors in Kun-Lai Summit completing mogu artifacts. Sha-touched areas like west of Stoneplow Fields in Valley of the Four Winds also yielded mogu fragments.

Speaking of the Sha, on rare occasion, digging up a handful of fragments spawned a hostile Ancient Haunt, a Sha creature equal to me in level. After I killed the creature, I looted not gold but also mogu fragments! I spawned the Ancient Haunt from both pandaren and mogu digsites, but it appears to have only mogu fragments for loot.

Rumor has it that the Lorewalkers will enrich a player’s knowledge of a race by showing off the artifacts in libraries. Unfortunately, the Lorewalkers appear to be located in the Vale of Eternal Blossoms, which isn’t open yet. But don’t worry — I’ve saved some solved artifacts for presentation when the Lorewalkers become a-Vale-able.

The Diablo games are very different from anything in the Warcraft setting, a far more black-and-white morality played out in endless cosmic war between absolute forces of order and righteousness opposing evil and chaos. This war, the Great or Eternal Conflict, is so massive in scale and scope that it can almost be said to be endless. The war predates the world of Sanctuary, the realm where mortal men and women are born and live out their lives. Indeed, Sanctuary itself was created by a rogue angel and his demonic lover and ally as a place to find an end to the war.

But before the conflict, before the universe itself existed, there was only Anu. Anu existed as a pearl, a central point which contained all evil and all good, all possibilities and all dualities contained within its mirrored surface. Yet Anu felt imperfect in its duality and sought purity in the rejection of its negative aspects, casting them aside to become a being of glittering diamond — a perfected warrior. Yet what Anu rejected, his cast-off impurities themselves became perfection of a dark bent, forming the monstrous Tathamet. This seven-headed dragon declared war on the glittering Anu, who in turn sought to destroy that which he had cast out of himself.

A creation through self-annihilation

Within the pearl that had been Anu’s entire existence, the diamond and Tathamet the Prime Evil did battle. The time of their conflict is not relevant, for no time existed before it or during it. In the end, Anu and Tathamet were annihilated by each other. The result of their destruction was the creation of the High Heavens, the Burning Hells, and Pandemonium between them, where the Eye of Anu rested. The heads of the destroyed dragon of death became the Prime and Lesser Evils of Hell itself, while the essence of Anu scattered to the High Heavens coalesced into the Angirus Council and ultimately the Angels.

And so the war for control of everything began, at the very moment that everything itself also came to be.

The Eternal Conflict earned its name, ranging back and forth across creation. Many realms became battlegrounds for the opposing forces of Heaven and Hell. Worlds rose and fell, often destroyed by the very battle to determine who would control them. In time, there were those on both sides who tired of the battle, the endless status quo of two deadlocked hosts playing at eternal battle. Two figures, Inarius of the Angiris Council and Lilith, daughter of Mephisto (one of the three Prime Evils), came together in an alliance neither holy nor infernal but rejecting both. They led many angels and demons to likewise abandon the war without end, seeking a new place to call their own.

The theft of the Worldstone and the Sin War

In order to make that place real, they managed to steal the Eye of Anu, using its great power to create a new world, the world today called Sanctuary by the men and women who live upon it. Those men and women do not know that they themselves descend from Inarius and Lillith and the other angels and demons who retreated to their new world.

Once Sanctuary existed, the self-exiled hosts bred a new generation neither angel nor demon but both and therefore neither, the nephalem. These beings threatened to eclipse the power of their sires and dams, as they were the first beings since Anu to contain myriad possibilities. They could be evil or good, orderly or chaotic, and their might seemed without limit. To prevent them from growing more powerful than their maker, Inarius used the power of the Eye of Anu (now called the Worldstone) to impose limits on these potentially unlimited sons and daughters of his own actions, forcing them to diminish over time. Eventually, they became the humans of today.

Warcraft lore is a continually fluctuating beast of a thing that can change at a moment’s notice. This is particularly true for stories and plot developments that we hear over the course of beta testing, prior to an expansion’s actual release. Nothing announced for Mists of Pandaria in the way of plot development is really set in stone and slapped into lore until the day you can purchase the game for yourselves and play it to your heart’s content.

Even then, things might not be what they appear to be. Early this week, we had a fairly eye-opening announcement from Community Manager Zarhym in which he stated that perhaps Thrall wasn’t slated to make a return to warchief once Garrosh had been removed, unlike all previous assumptions had suggested. Given the fact that Thrall’s just saved the world, not to mention the fact that he’s about to be a father, it’s hard to picture him gladly taking his place as warchief again. There are more reasons than just those, of course.

But then that leaves the major question: Who the heck is going to be warchief? We don’t have answers, but we’ve got five interesting possibilities for you to consider.

Why Thrall isn’t the logical choice

We need to look at why Thrall left in the first place. He didn’t think he was fit to be warchief and lead the orcs in the way they apparently wanted to be led. That hasn’t changed with Cataclysm; if anything, that rift between Thrall and traditional orc thinking has gotten even wider. Thrall’s journey in Cataclysm was a journey of self-discovery and a strong lesson about his place in the world and the place of all mortals in the world.

Thrall has always held the opinion, much like Jaina Proudmoore, that there are far larger dangers in the world out there to be concerned with, dangers that vastly outweigh any petty squabbling between Alliance and Horde. If anything, his participation in the events that led to Deathwing’s downfall only reinforced his opinion. A rampaging dragon bent on the destruction of the world is a much larger issue than fighting in Ashenvale. We’re talking about the needs of the world vs. the needs of a faction — and Thrall is siding with the world on this one.

Speaking of the world, it’s still in shambles. Deathwing’s emergence tore the landscape of Azeroth asunder and sent the elements of the world into a tizzy. Just because Deathwing is dead, it doesn’t mean that everything is going to be magically better again. In fact, things might have gotten a little more chaotic, especially given the fact that Ragnaros and Al’Akir are now dead, and Neptulon is nowhere to be found. The world’s been saved, but the elements still need a guiding hand and reassurance that everything is all right again — something that Thrall could help with, along with the Earthen Ring.

Thrall’s had his eyes opened by the Aspects and the events of Cataclysm. Given the amount he’s seen, it’s just unlikely that he’d quietly step back into the role of warchief, particularly when tensions between the Alliance and Horde are heating up to a boiling point. And that leaves us wondering exactly who’s going to step up to the plate.

Vol’jin

Vol’jin isn’t just the leader of the Darkspear; he is also arguably the most vocal opposition to Garrosh’s placement in the first place. If anyone understands Thrall, it’s Vol’jin. The Darkspear were the first addition to the Horde on the way to Kalimdor. And just before making that trip, while his father died at the hands of the Sea Witch, Vol’jin was off on a vision quest with his friend Zalazane. In that vision quest, Vol’jin saw bits and pieces of his future, including the Darkspear’s departure from Orgrimmar.

“I brought de Darkspears here to protect our bodies,” he said. “We live to fight another day. But that just our bodies. One thing the Darkspears can’t lose, loa, we can’t ever lose, is our soul. The Darkspears have a soul, and if we stay with this orc, do his bidding, we lose our soul. And there be no comin’ back from that.”

Vol’jin has held this knowledge somewhere deep within for years, knowledge gleaned in the months before the orcs arrived on the tiny jungle island, saved the Darkspear from the Sea Witch, and offered their hand in alliance. He may not have remembered all of it, but as the events of Cataclysm played out, there had to be a part of him deep inside that remembered the visions, remembered Garrosh’s face. It’s likely a good chunk of the reason Vol’jin argued so vehemently against Garrosh, because deep in the corners of his mind, there was an inkling of memory.

Vol’jin isn’t a leader like Thrall. He understands that fighting comes with a price, yes, but he also understands that sometimes you simply have to fight. He understands that struggle is a constant, but struggle is also a key to freedom. He also, in his way, understands the importance of keeping those tentative Alliance threads intact. Without the help of the Alliance, who knows what would have happened in Zul’Gurub and Zul’Aman?

For all of these reasons, he’d make an excellent leader. The only thing standing between him and that leadership are the orcs. And those orcs may or may not trust Vol’jin, largely because of his abrupt departure from Orgrimmar and his lack of support for Garrosh. On top of this, Vol’jin isn’t an orc himself — and the backbone of the Horde has always been the orcish race. Would the orcs gladly look to a troll as a leader? It’s an excellent question.

A few weeks ago, Ghostcrawler mentioned that Incarnation would have specific art for cats, bears, and moonkin; in the latest patch, a datamined model showed us what is likely the first example of that. At first, I wasn’t too sure about the idea of putting armor on a feral form, but it’s really grown on me over the last couple of days. It’s obviously difficult to do cosmetic effects for a class that revolves around shapeshifting, but I’m grateful that Blizzard’s continuing to add something for forms. I can’t wait to see the bear and moonkin armor. (Do moonkin even need armor?)

New level 90 talents

To put it kindly, the original level 90 talents were not well received. While a few players (including me) welcomed the challenge of incorporating shapeshifting into our play, many, many others felt forced into a playstyle they didn’t want. Happily, Ghostcrawler saved the day. Allison’s already covered the changes from a general perspective, so instead I’ll take a look at each talent and see what it heralds now for cats and moonkin.

Heart of the Wild Dramatically improves the druid’s ability to serve combat roles outside of normal specialization for 45 seconds and passively increases Agility and Intellect by 6%.

Well, adding the passive stats made the talent much more palatable to those who didn’t like the idea of role-shifting; unfortunately, it directly contradicts what Blizzard said talents were going to be. Adding the passive buff feels like a bribe. “Don’t want to shapeshift? OK, pick this, but if you ever change your mind … the button’s right there …”

Anyway, the passive buff is nice, but we’ll have to see how the numbers play out in comparison to Nature’s Vigil. There are a lot of mechanics that come into play here. How will it stack with other buffs? How much will agility/intellect be worth in comparison with secondary stats in Mists? How much better will druids be than other classes? Two times or 10? You know, the usual.

Dream of Cenarius Wrath, Starfire, Starsurge, and melee abilities increase healing done by your next healing spell by 30%. Non-instant casts of Nourish, Healing Touch, and Regrowth increase the damage done by your next damaging spell or ability by 70%.

I think I get where Blizzard’s going with this. I really do. The devs want to give DPS druids a talent that lets them use the occasional off heal, without forcing them to give up the clear damage boost that the other talents in the tier provide. Unfortunately, I don’t feel like this design will work for PvE.

Let’s face it. Mr. Boomkin or Mr. Feral’s job is to kill the target by using their damaging abilities in a good rotation. DPS rotations, when done well, flow logically. Stopping a rotation midway to throw in a heal is counterintuitive, as it means breaking the flow to find a heal target, then resuming. Certainly, Blizzard can add a buff and play with the numbers to make doing this a DPS increase — but should they? That’s a harder question to answer, but I lean toward no. DPS classes should not be mixing in cast-time heals.

“Hypocrisy!” you exclaim. “You were all about Heart of the Wild last week!” Well, yes, but I think the two ideas are fundamentally different. With HotW, you’re not popping back and forth from one role to the other; you’re completely assuming another role temporarily to help your group deal with a situation, and then you stop. It’s a one-time thing, fundamentally no different from a non-resto druid Tranquility or a shadow priest’s Divine Hymn (except it lasts a bit longer.) I’m OK with one-time rotation interrupters; DoC is not one-time. I could envision a class that mixed healing and DPS in an effective, fun way — but not in this game.

Nature’s Vigil Increases all damage and healing done by 30% for 30 seconds. While Nature’s Vigil is active, all single-target healing abilities damage a nearby enemy for 50% of the healing done, and all single-target damaging abilities heal a nearby ally for 50% of the damage done.

Many commenters on the beta forums recommended a talent similar to this, and now it’s here. I’m a big fan of the healing portion; unfortunately, it doesn’t really synergize well with the damage portion. To boost DPS to the greatest extent possible, NV will be used in concert with other DPS cooldowns (Incarnation/Celestial Alignment for moonkin, or Incarnation/Berserk for ferals) and then used on cooldown. This pretty much eliminates the idea of saving it for when the group needs healing, though.