Every Tuesday/Wednesday/some day that ends in -y, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week we take a look at faction rewards available to Druids in "Wrath of the Lich King" and wonder if that Mysterious Egg of ours -- the only faction reward we could truly be said to care about -- is ever going to hatch.

Like most of you, I'm still running a lot of dungeons and getting acquainted with the array of drops available on both normal and heroic mode, and I'm not anywhere near as familiar with the Northrend 5-man drops as I am with Outland's after tanking them all eleventy-billion times. For the moment, my ability to compare all of the reputation gear available from Wrath factions with potential dungeon drops is fairly small and mostly confined to feral equipment, so I apologize. What I can say is that I've noticed a fairly clear trend favoring Balance if you're planning on getting a lot of your gear at 80 from faction reputations (although if you go that route there's a sizable pitfall in the form of a serious lack of +hit on most pieces). Feral is a little more hit-or-miss. Restoration seems to have the hardest time getting its best pre-raid or heroic pieces from rep grinds, and I'm not going to lie; get used to most of your best pieces being cloth.

With what are essentially four different specs to cover for all the new factions available in Wrath, this got a bit long. So this week we'll discuss the rep grinds that become accessible a little earlier in the trek to 80 -- namely, the Tuskarr, the Alliance Vanguard/Horde Expedition, Wyrmrest Accord, Kirin Tor, and Oracles/Frenzyheart. Next week we'll cover the Knights of the Ebon Blade, the Argent Crusade, and Sons of Hodir, as you're not likely to see these guys as early as you'll see the others. Indeed, before a quest line that phases the lady into existence, you won't see the Knights of the Ebon Blade quartermaster at all.

THE ORACLES:

Who am I kidding? You're here for the Mysterious Egg, same as everybody else. But along the way -- or possibly beyond it -- you might pick up a few good pieces.

• Glitterscale Wrap -- Revered, Level 78: Surprisingly good melee belt. Armor penetration prejudices it toward cat DPS although it's fine as a threat stat for bear, and it's otherwise solid. At 80 you'll want to have Trollwoven Girdle crafted for tanking (and possibly kitty if you're not doing so hot on +expertise from other pieces) if you don't get Jorach's Crocolisk Skin Belt from badges or the Sharp-Barbed Leather Belt from heroic Utgarde, but Glitterscale will tide you over til then.
  

• Fishy Cinch -- Revered, Level 78: An equally useful Restoration belt, although we're back to cloth again. No +crit or +haste to muck up the item budget; just good solid stats all around and a great chunk of spirit. If you can afford to give that up, however, then you may want to spend more time working on Ebon Blade rep for Belt of Dark Mending.
  

• Oracle Talisman of Ablution -- Exalted, Level 70(?): A level 70 trinket available at exalted with a Wrath faction is kind of a head-scratcher, but eh. The amount of crit on this, as a Wowhead commenter correctly observes, is 1.55% at level 80 -- more, obviously, if you manage to get the trinket before that. The straight +crit trinkets available from the Skyguard at exalted were actually pretty good at 70, but the introduction of Savage Roar into a cat DPS rotation generally, I think, argues for the use of trinkets granting more attack power (or an attack power use/proc). The energy/rage/mana return here could be useful while leveling or while grinding, however.

THE FRENZYHEART TRIBE:

One of the irritating things about the Oracle/Frenzyheart faction fight is that switching between the two will make you unable to use gear from both as your reputation rises and falls. If you're dependent on a piece from either of the factions until you get a drop, crafted, or badge piece, you'll want to keep that in mind.

• Azure Strappy Pants -- Revered, Level 78: The Oracles do belts; the Frenzyheart do pants. As with Glitterscale, this is a surprisingly solid piece for where it is, and possibly better for cat DPS than the Mind-Expanding Leggings available from the Kirin Tor depending on your current +expertise versus +hit. Time to fire up Rawr again.
  

• Muddied Crimson Gloves -- Revered, Level 78: The glove counterpart to the Oracles' Fishy Cinch and another fine, no-nonsense, Restoration piece with straight stats and good +spellpower. Grotto Mist Gloves from heroic Azjol-Nerub are better, unless you can somehow dig up the materials for Moonshroud Gloves -- which, at less than a month into the expansion, is going to be very difficult.
  

• Frenzyheart Insignia of Fury -- Exalted, Level 70: The proc, per Wowhead commentary, appears to be +91 critical strike rating. Undeniably useful, but again, you'll find better trinkets at 80, and quite sadly the proc is of more use to cat Druids than the actual equip on the trinket (haste, as noted, is not an amazing stat for us). It's better for moonkin, but still primarily a trinket oriented toward leveling.

Whew. Next week we'll cover the Argent Crusade, the Knights of the Ebon Blade, and the Sons of Hodir. Until then, good luck with the rep grinds you're on and the dungeons you're running (especially if it's Ymiron on heroic Utgarde Pinnacle).

Click here to head back to the beginning of the guide.

WYRMREST ACCORD:

This is another faction with which you can start building rep relatively early, although it'll be slower going than it will be for the Tuskarr. Be sure to get through the early-70's quest chain to access the daily Defending Wyrmrest Temple.

• Cloak of Peaceful Resolutions -- Honored, Level 78: Not a half-bad tanking cloak and fairly easy to get at Honored, although in a pinch you can probably afford to keep using a pre-Wrath tanking cloak all the way to 80. At 80 you can and should get Durable Nerubhide Cape crafted if you plan on doing any amount of tanking at all. Slap the +22 agility enchant on that puppy and you're good for anything.

• Ancestral Sinew Wristguards -- Revered, Level 80: These are one of the best bracers pre-heroics for Restoration with none of that +crit or +haste malarkey to gum the works. Excellent +spellpower in addition to solid stats elsewhere.

• Arcanum of Blissful Mending -- Revered, Level 80: The Wrath equivalent of the Arcanum of Renewal from Thrallmar/Honor Hold. Restoration Druids will want this as quickly as possible; moonkin may consider it if they've been having mana issues, but most of the time you're going to want the Kirin Tor enchant.
  

• Gavel of the Brewing Storm -- Revered, Level 78: This is a useful moonkin mace packing +crit and +haste, but it bothers me a bit. Like most of the other potential moonkin pieces available with reputation from this or any other faction, it lacks +hit -- and your primary concern as you level toward 80 is going to be getting (or staying) hit-capped. If you're dependent on faction gear at 80 as you get ready to raid or do heroics, keep this in mind. If for no other reason than that, the Kirin Tor dagger is better (read on).
  

• Dragonfriend Bracers -- Exalted, Level 80: Excellent bracers. The relatively small amount of stamina on them in addition to the presence of +crit prejudices them toward use for cat DPS. In terms of raw damage output, they're even better than the Hateful Gladiator's Armwraps of Triumph.
  

• Sandals of Crimson Fury -- Exalted, Level 80: Cloth, but pretty good moonkin boots with decent +spellpower, +haste, a blue socket, but once again 0 +hit.
  

KIRIN TOR:

This is almost inarguably one of the best faction reps to grind as a Druid, so it pays to choke down your nausea at the sight of that hideous tabard at 80. You can start building reputation with the Kirin Tor fairly early if you start leveling in Borean Tundra and do the questlines offered by the NPC's on the Amber Ledge. As you might expect from a faction being run by a lot of clothies, most of the potential gear here is particularly useful for casters, but weirdly enough there's also a feral staff and excellent legs available at Revered.

• Helm of the Majestic Stag -- Honored, Level 78: With the total absence of spirit but 21 mp5, this really seems like more of a Restoration Shaman piece, but it's certainly usable. Welcome to the only leather helm graphic you will see on any decent piece for the next five million years, by the way.

• Shroud of Dedicated Research -- Honored, Level 78: Decent stats for moonkin, less so for Resto. There are better cloaks out there, but this one will tide you over until heroics or the Ebon Blade cloak.
  

• Flameheart Spell Scalpel -- Revered, Level 80: Look, Ma! It's +hit! One of the best pre-raid moonkin weapons with solid +spellpower, +hit, and +crit. If you can't get the mats for a Titansteel Guardian for love or money (or if you're not hit-capped using it), this is the weapon worth grinding rep for.
  

• Arcanum of Burning Mysteries -- Revered, Level 80: The Wrath equivalent of the Sha'tar's Arcanum of Power, although the level 80 versions eschews +hit in favor of +crit. Bah. Get it anyway.

• Mind-Expanding Leggings -- Revered, Level 80: This is an amazingly good piece for tanking, and it's going to be the piece you want over the Azure Strappy Pants from the Frenzyhearts if you're doing the usual bounce around the factions in Sholazar Basin, or if you spend more time as a bear than a cat. These are arguably the best pre-raid bear legs outside of heroics and arena.

• Stave of Shrouded Mysteries -- Revered, Level 80: What a bunch of mages are doing with a feral staff is utterly beyond me, but their confusion is our gain. Right now it's inferior by several light years to the Enraged Feral Staff from heroic Utgarde Keep as a tanking piece, but the armor on both pieces is going Splitsville pretty soon. When that happens, the distance between the two with respect to tanking quality is going to shrink quite a bit. The Enraged staff is still going to retain a clear advantage for tanking in the form of both threat production and dodge (the mass of agility on it converts to 1.87% dodge in contrast to the Stave's 1.42% dodge), and I still cannot for the life of me understand itemizing Strength on a feral piece in lieu of Agility (seriously? What gives?), but without the enormous armor difference, the weapons are a lot closer to each other than they would otherwise have been.

• Robes of Crackling Flame -- Exalted, Level 80: Prejudiced toward healers with a meaty chunk of its stat allocation given to mp5, but Restoration still gets less use out of +haste than other healers (Lifebloom, Rejuvenation, and Wild Growth all being instant cast and still a huge portion, if not an outright majority, of our healing done). Usable? Certainly. Are you doomed to most of your best pieces pre-raid being cloth? Just as certainly.
  

• Ghostflicker Waistband -- Exalted, Level 80: Very good Balance belt and it includes a blue socket, but (again) it's primarily useful only if you're otherwise hit-capped.

Next: Frenzyheart and the Oracles.

One of Blizzard's avowed aims with the creation of the Death Knight class was tackling the chronic tanking shortage for 5-mans. While it was the opinion of many players that the tanking shortage had a lot more to do with tanks' unwillingness to suffer messy and expensive (and sometimes stupid) PuG's, there was no way around the fact that only 3 of 9 available classes could tank (and that 2 of them were just as frequently specced to heal). Providing a new, cool-looking tanking class that had tanking talents in all three trees and could use Warrior gear was Blizzard's contribution. Post-release, the rest is up to the players.

I've seen several Death Knights already at 80 on my realm (and to my everlasting horror, two of them in my guild beat me to 80), but haven't noticed any real difference in the number of tells in trade and LFG searching for a tank. Whenever I see these, it's hard not to wonder what's going on. While it's much too early for the majority of leveling DK's to have had a big impact on 5-man tanking between 70 and 80, most of the ones I've seen at 80 are rerolled DPS and have continued in that role. Some would like to tank but just don't have the gear to withstand the damage of a high-level dungeon. Others have privately admitted that, while they're willing to give tanking a try, having to learn it at 80 with an impatient group that just wants to get through a dungeon is a daunting prospect. Still others really do just prefer to DPS.

Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. How do you feel about trinkets? This week Matticus will examine a wide variety of trinkets in the game obtainable in Northrend for healers!

Trinkets are interesting items. They have different abilities and uses best suited for the situation at hand. Here is the majority of trinkets that I believe us healers would be interested in the most and my initial thoughts on them. I've even recommended a few of them for us Priests!

Ghostcrawler weighed in on the intention and existence of the defense statistic yesterday. He makes two interesting criticisms of the philosophy behind defense:

1. It might eventually prove a problem that defense functions both as a tanking statistic and prevents you from fighting mobs that are a higher level than your character.
2. Balance might be easier to achieve if defense provided mitigation and not avoidance.
   

This is rather cryptic to someone who doesn't often deal with the integral nature of the statistic, so let's break it down a bit.

Ghostcrawler let us all know today of a few changes for classes that are being left out of the "AoE fun." He's only talking in relatively broad terms right now, and will give specifics later when things are more locked down.

Some of the changes include:

• Shaman: Removing threat from the Fire Nova Totem and Magma Totem, and increasing the damage done by the Magma Totem.
• Rogue: Fan of Knives cooldown removed. Daggers more useful for Fan of Knives.
• Druid: Swipe will now be a baseline ability.
  

He mentions that these changes will be seen in the next minor content patch. Ghostcrawler also hints that they will be available in the next PTR push (which we're expecting relatively soon)

Honor's Code has a great post up about the secondary gear stats that often get overlooked in favor of the main attributes. Everyone knows that Hunters need Agility and Warriors need Strength, but after that, things tend to get a little fuzzy -- just what does Expertise or Hit do for you? HC breaks it down from a Pally perspective, but what they say about these stats is helpful for any class that has to deal with attacking the bad guys.

Defense comes first -- defense rating, for tanks, allows you to make sure that bosses can't crit you. Each class has its own defense cap, and the cap has changed from 70 to 80, so you'll have to keep an eye out for your own cap when you get that far. Block is next -- a high Block rating means you're pushing other attack options off the table when you're hit, so that when something does hit you, you block the damage on it. Both of those stats are mainly for tanks -- other classes, who aren't getting hit, won't have to worry about them at all.

But Hit and Expertise you will have to worry about if you're DPS -- Hit will make sure that you don't miss your target (the fewer misses you have, the higher your DPS), and Expertise makes sure that those hits don't become dodges or parries. This is tough stuff, and it shows up much earlier in Wrath, it seems, than it did in Burning Crusade, But the good news is that there's a lot of help around -- Honor's Code offers a great overview for what everything means, and from there, you can search our site or others for what you need to know about each stat and how it works with your class.

Hi, Feral fans! When last we met to talk about a big Ghostcrawler post, he previewed that they were working on changing the bear armor bonus so it didn't work on jewelry, cloaks, and weapons any more, and on doing something about feral attack power (as seen on feral staves). He didn't have details at the time, but said he'd get back to us. As GC is a crab of his word, he's now come back to let us know exactly what's going to happen, and when.

• Only cloth and leather armor (excluding capes) will benefit from the armor multiplier on bear forms. This means armor from trinkets, rings, necks, and weapons will not be multiplied. However, Survival of the Fittest is gaining the additional effect of adding an additional 22/33/66% to your armor from cloth/leather. Net armor should stay the same.

• Feral attack power will be removed. Instead, attack power in feral forms will scale based on weapon DPS. As with the armor change, this should make no actual difference to your performance - the conversion will be such that your DPS remains the same. What it does do is make it so some staves might be useful to both hunters and druids (for instance), or some two-handed maces might be useful to feral druids. In Ghostcrawler's words: "This does not mean we are no longer going to create bear and cat weapons, just that those weapons will be slightly less niche than they are now."

These changes will be coming sometime before 3.1 (Ulduar), which I've been referring to as 3.0.4 (though perhaps 3.0.x would be more accurate).

Both great changes in my opinion; the armor change should give us more viable options for tanking jewelry and weapons, instead of being forced to hold on to whatever has armor. And the FAP change will just mean we don't always have to DE a feral piece if the one or two ferals in the raid already have it; and conversely, there won't necessarily be only one weapon in a given raid that's of use to ferals (I'm looking at you, Stranglestaff).

I'm currently working on leveling my priest right now (78 at the moment), so I haven't played with this ability first-hand, but Rogues get a fun tool to look forward to at level 80: Fan of Knives. This significantly helps address one of Rogues' long-time weakness: AoE damage. Sure, we're great on a single target, but it's very difficult to build up CP and use them effectively on poly-mob pulls, and Blade Flurry only goes so far. Hence FoK, which is well-timed given how much AoE there seems to be in Wrath. It also gives you something to do when you need to be at range, which happens from time to time.

But FoK has a ten-second cooldown, which certainly limits how much you can use it - for now. Ghostcrawler recently popped his crabby head into the Rogue forums to announce that "We think we are going to remove the cooldown of Fan of Knives altogether." Yay! I would assume this is going to be coming in the next patch, which they keep saying is coming before 3.1, the Ulduar patch. Patch 3.0.4 Rogues, now with ten times the knife-fanning action!

And as if that wasn't enough nice news from GC, he also said "in case it gets asked, Feral druids we haven't forgotten about your AE either." Hmmm, I say. I have also faced this issue on my druid in cat form - I don't really want to go Bear to Swipe, because then I run a high risk of pulling off the tank, but cat form has literally nothing that hits more than one target. I wonder what they're going to give us. Any predictions?

Over the last two days, the WoW Insider team has been busy reviewing and gathering all of the still-current class information to bring you up to speed for your first steps into Northrend. You've probably had a chance to get a handle on your class since most of the changes were pushed through in patch 3.0.2, but you have an extra ten levels ahead of you, an extra ten talent points, and a whole bunch of new skills and abilities you're going to need to learn. Don't know what to expect? We're here for you. If you do know what to expect? Well, I guess you can keep reading if you want. We'll let it slide just this once.

• Death Knight - Being the new class on the block, there's certainly been a lot to talk about in the recent months. Daniel Whitcomb points you toward much of it, including leveling builds, in-depth looks at their core abilities and mechanics, as well as some sage advice from Allison Robert.
  
• Druid - Speaking of Allison Robert, she'll be your guide today if you're looking for more on the Druid class. Talent builds, a glimpse at raid healing as Restoration, the rise of the Moonkin and much more can be found within.

Welcome to Wrath of the Lich King, my fellow Druids -- and welcome, I hope, to another expansion full of great things for the class. In general I believe the future is very bright for each spec, and with dual specs coming to the game, it's going to be a lot easier to enjoy the Druid's versatility without having to finance your class trainer's boat payments.

THE DRUID CLASS IN WRATH

• Balance: We took a thorough look at the balance spec's current state and likely future here. Our laserchicken contingent probably received the most substantive overhaul of all three specs heading into the expansion, and most of the news is very good indeed.
  

• Feral: Our assessment of the feral is here and includes a look at Blizzard's effort to split the tree into bear-centric and cat-centric talents. Bears on the outside seemed hardest hit with an average loss of 10K+ armor post-patch 3.0.2, but don't let it depress you; bear tanking is better than it's ever been. Cat DPS is poised to gain a massive boost at level 75 with Savage Roar, but until then it's same ol', same ol'.
  

• Restoration: Resto, covered here, has probably taken the biggest blow in terms of both PvE and PvP viability in the form of a Lifebloom nerf and the disappearance of now-classic PvP specs, but we still got a lot of big buffs. Tree of Life has been vastly improved and we've gained both a flash heal (at 80) and an AoE HoT. Unfortunately, Wild Growth may be facing a nerf in the form of a cooldown soon, but nothing's certain yet. I don't want to sound too down here. You will notice the Lifebloom nerf in the post-3.0.2 world, but resto's gained a tremendous amount of raw healing output coupled with its customary mana efficiency. Stay tuned; healing is likely to undergo some major changes soon.

Every Tuesday/Wednesday/some sort of day occurring midweek, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting Druids and those who group with them. This week Allison Robert yanks John Patricelli's column again, hoping to make good on a threat previously made concerning her "dissatisfaction" with Tauren cat form. And by dissatisfaction she might mean something else.

I'll level with you; we have a huge Druid post in the pipeline that's going to round up the changes to the class in Wrath, new talents, new skills, new everything, and frankly I'm sick to death about reading or writing anything having to do with the expansion. So, just to buck the overwhelming trend that threatens to drive us all to the nuthouse, I'm going to turn to a topic that's plagued Druids for a while.

By this I mean the perennial form issue, something that my Druid colleagues on the blog have previously termed the Same Old Animal Posterior, or SOAP. But it's one that we've been given reason to believe will change in...Wrath. Well, that didn't last long. You'll note that David's article was written in October 2007, more than a year ago, but the same thing could have been posted in 2006 as well. Druid forms haven't changed since launch*, and while they were never really at the cutting edge of Blizzard's art direction as a result**, they look more and more shabby in relation to the higher-polygon models and landscapes. As everything around you gets better and better -- more evocative lighting, more intricate details, fantastic animation -- it's hard not to feel a strange sense of displacement as you shift into a 2004 form within a 2008 game.

But at long last we may see Druid form customization, an overhaul to the default forms themselves, or possibly (hopefully?) both.

I'm going to start off this AABT by stealing a question that Alex actually took last time, mostly because I started laughing when I read it yesterday. I have, oh, conservatively, billions of Wrath screenshots on my hard drive at this point, but there's one I remember all too well.

Marathan asks...

Some time ago, there was a talk about new player character models for Wrath - and even some bugged pictures. So the question is, are they going live? Are we finally going to get improved graphics on our characters?

As Alex wrote, Blizzard used one beta build to test the ease of implementing new skins and some of them...didn't turn out too well. Imagine you're me and you get a beta key. Budget a few hours of anticipatory excitement while your main copies over. She's a 70 Tauren Druid who has been with you since day one, your sole 70, and you think she's the most beautiful thing in the game even if to everyone else she's an ungainly 8-foot heifer. Now imagine booting up the Wrath beta for the first time and being horrified to see your beloved character with a Glasgow smile, like the developers had seen the Joker in The Dark Knight and thought, "Hey! We could make that work!"

Holy water did nothing. Neither did crucifixes, garlic, a wooden stake, waving the Bible in the direction of the laptop, or sobbing quietly in a corner.

On the plus side, here was finally something in the game to which Tauren cat form was an actual graphical improvement.

As a player who recently fell in love with Circle of Healing, this news hits me pretty hard: Blizzard is considering adding a six-second cooldown to CoH and its Druid analogue, Wild Growth. Basically, they're not happy with the fact that CoH often provides upwards of 70% of the healing done by a Holy priest in a raid. The design, according to Ghostcrawler, is for Holy priests to be versatile healers: we have a fast heal, a slow one, a HoT, and several group heals, as well as a couple of unique tricks. But the new, smart CoH sort of blows this out of the water, making Circle the answer to almost every situation, and making AoE healing Holy's de facto speciality (GC's phrase is that it makes our other heals "look like poo").

I'm not sure what I think about adding a cooldown to CoH as a solution to this, though. Initially, I hated it; it looked like Blizzard brute-forcing us to play the way they want us to, instead of making it more attractive by buffing other spells or pushing less AoE damage on us. On the other hand, there is talk of reducing AoE damage necessary. And the more I think about it, the more I think a cooldown might actaully feel good. I do sort of miss my other spells; I don't think I used Greater Heal more than a dozen times the fist raid I did after getting Circle. With a cooldown I could save Circle for when I really needed it. I do like the skill involved in selecting the right spell from our arsenal to deal with the incoming damage - it helps keep me awake during those late raids, and it brings an element of strategy that is missing when I'm just spamming CoH three out of every four GCDs.