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Every week, Shifting Perspectives examines issues affecting druids and those who group with them. Today we gingerly step back into battlegrounds and discover that the world can be a very unfriendly place.

I love writing this column, but there's one thing that bugs me about it -- the druid class is tailor-made to defeat a sole writer's efforts to cover everything she can. No matter how hard I try, I'm never going to cover each spec and playstyle with up-to-the-minute and in-depth experience, because it would require the simultaneous mastery of ranged DPS PvE, ranged DPS PvP, tanking, off-tanking, melee DPS PvE, melee DPS PvP, healing PvE, and healing PvP. Even with all that, I'd be leaving out all the hybrid and kooky specs people dream up. This has been getting to me lately.

Consequently I thought that, before we get to some end-of-year and patch 3.3 business, it might be a good idea to spend some time on topics that -- to be frank -- I haven't been that great about covering. Balance as a whole needs some love and so do our kitties, but before I do that, I'd like to address a topic that, in contrast to Balance and Cat, I've been willfully ignoring -- PvP. It occurred to me that roughly a year after Wrath's launch, it might be a good idea to pop back into battlegrounds and see how the class' most common PvP spec (Restoration) is faring in combat these days, so I dumped badges and gold into a PvP set and went for broke.

And, well...a lot's changed.

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Filed under: Druid, Analysis / Opinion, PvP, Features, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives, Battlegrounds

It's no secret that certain things (and even whole zones, in their current state) are going to go the way of the dodo when Cataclysm arrives, and both players and developers have talked a lot about the changes in Azeroth and environs beyond. By contrast, today I'm interested in hearing about what you don't want to see eighty-sixed -- the quests you'd miss, the factions or NPC's you hope will cling to life, the dungeons or raids you don't want to see go gentle into that good night.

Personally, as dumb as I know this will probably sound, when I think about old Azeroth my mind immediately returns to a tiny quest called Until Death Do Us Part. It's started by a bitter Forsaken who wants you take a pendant to her husband's grave at the Sepulcher. If you only wanted to look at it in terms of game mechanics, then it's a Fed-Ex quest designed to get you across the ocean and questing in Silverpine, but even with all the improvements to questing today, it stands apart. It's a very long journey for a young character, and when you finally arrive at the Sepulcher and find the husband's grave, you realize you've come all this way to deliver a worthless trinket to someone who threw his life away on a hopeless cause. You turn it in and...that's it. There is no follow-up. There is no happy ending. There is, however, the feeling that there's more to the savagery of the Forsaken than meets the eye.

Blizzard is actually trying to move away from quests that emphasize text over cool visuals, and it makes me a little sad just because Until Death Do Us Part was, from a writing standpoint, a masterpiece of effective writing and quick exposition. I'm hoping that, out of all the quests that stand to get axed in Cataclysm, this little gem survives.

Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Breakfast topics, Cataclysm

One of the easier ways to distinguish an older character from a reroll or alt is the presence (or absence) of a Feat of Strength. Feats of Strength, remnants of "the past glories of Azeroth," are among the most difficult achievements to get, and that's when they're even possible at all. Most, like the presence of an old-school PvP title, one of the original 100% mounts, or the Vengeful Nether Drake, are impossible to get these days, and are a sign that the person who has them is an experienced player. But with a little luck and a lot of elbow grease, even a new player can accrue some of these supposedly "past" glories.

I started playing WoW shortly after Burning Crusade launched and didn't expect to have a shot at most Feats, but a surprising number of them are still available. After getting The Fifth Element recently and being surprised to discover that: a). It's a Feat, and b). The original quest isn't even in the game anymore (man, I'm glad I'm such a quest packrat), I started nosing around the list of Feats to see what else a player could do even if they're new to the game. Moreover, there are two achievements you can get right now that will become Feats in 3.3, so let's get cracking.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Features, The Overachiever

Ensidia, now of Tarren Mill-EU, reported today that they have captured the world-first A Tribute to Immortality. Considered to be one of the most difficult, if not most difficult, raiding achievements currently in the game, A Tribute to Immortality requires a perfect run of heroic Trial of the Crusader-25 with no player deaths and all 50 attempts remaining. The reward for pulling this off is the Crusader's Black Warhorse (Alliance version here), but I wouldn't expect to see too many of these running around in the near future.

I'm most impressed that they managed to get through the heroic version of Faction Champs without losing anyone, although -- as Mackzter acknowledges on the news release -- the achievement "involves a bit of luck." Congratulations to Ensidia, and best of luck to all the guilds out there working on this as well!

Filed under: Ranking, News items, Raiding, Achievements

One of the things that's continually surprised me since news broke on the likely changes to the Horde's leadership is how many otherwise die-hard Horde players have considered going Alliance. Yeah, yeah, most of it's probably idle threats anyway, but the real issue is one that's simmered for the length of Wrath's storyline. Lots of traditional Horde players are happy to fight under Thrall. Lots of traditional Horde players are...not so happy to fight under someone else.

The issue seems to be the growing rift between players and Horde leadership in Northrend, and the degree to which many of us can't identify with the sub-faction that eventually hijacks the Horde storyline. I burned Saurfang's letter as he asked. I nodded alongside Golluk Rockfist as he told Horde players, "You are leaving to the Ruby Dragonshrine. This is not a request." I sat with Thrall in his darkest moments in the Undercity throne room, when he realized that everything was lost.

By contrast, I /facepalmed my way through Icecrown.

Spoiler material past the break.

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Filed under: Horde, Alliance, Breakfast topics, Expansions, Lore, Factions

Every week, Shifting Perspectives examines issues affecting druids and those who group with them. Today we root around our inbox and herd a series of scribbled notes across our desk, trying to get what we actually know about patch 3.3 in order. Also, Zach Yonzon's PhotoShop skills for the win, but we already knew that.

This week's column is going to be a little bit of a grab bag in much the same way that our patch 3.1 miscellany post was, because there have been a few changes on the PTR recently that we haven't yet discussed.

Before we get any farther, I'd also like to give a shout-out to our readers and commenters on last week's column, "The disappearance of the bear." I was a little antsy over how it was going to be received (lengthy articles on what's going wrong with a spec can get derailed into QQ-fests pretty easily, and that wasn't my intent), but was heartened to see so much quality discussion. One of the things I realized after reading through the comments was that Blizzard may actually have succeeded a little too well in their quest to make tanking more attractive and fun to the average player. WoW's four tanking classes (warrior, paladin, druid, and death knight) comprise 4 of the 5 most popular classes in the game right now. As I've written previously, the druid functions as the proverbial canary in the coal mine as a harbinger of class balance concerns, and with each of the game's plate classes numbering among the most played at 80, it's impossible for this not to have an impact on druid spec choice.

Anyway. For the moment, we are going to turn away from this rather depressing situation, and concern ourselves with what's going on in patch 3.3.

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Filed under: Druid, Patches, Analysis / Opinion, Features, (Druid) Shifting Perspectives

Bornakk confirms something that a number of guilds still working on their Ulduar drakes have been wondering -- are they planning to eighty-six them as soon as patch 3.3 hits? Nope -- Blizzard hasn't changed anything from its previous policy concerning the drakes, and they'll still be warning us a month in advance if they do eventually decide to remove them. This started as a response to the removal of the Naxx-era drakes without much advance notice, which resulted in some very unhappy players being caught unawares.

What I always found interesting about the wording on Blizzard's policy is that they don't "currently" have any plans to remove the drakes at all, but they're keeping an eye on things. It makes me wonder if there's an ideal percentage of guilds or players they'd like to achieve the drakes each patch, and that numbers were short in Naxx and still short in Ulduar. The Naxx-era Glory of the Raider (heroic) was certainly uncommon and, for a competent guild, hinged almost entirely on their ability to get past the RNG-riddled and sometimes-buggy Immortal, then said to be the rarest raiding achievement in the game. For Ulduar, my guess is that achievements like Firefighter are probably the biggest stumbling block, although fortunately the achievements required for the meta are more dependent on skill and less dependent on RNG than Immortal. We'll keep an eye out for you, but for the moment, raiders, keep plugging away at those drakes.

Filed under: News items, Raiding, Mounts, Forums