Every week (sort of), WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, the bookmarks folder gets the root cellar treatment.

I've been away from the game since the holidays due to what I will politely refer to as technical difficulties. (I have a variety of impolite terms for it too, but this is a family blog.) During that time, I've watched the game from the sidelines and have grown bored enough to do some maintenance on stuff that usually gets ignored until I'm rooting through it in a hurry. Add-ons were updated, dead blog links were sent to their folder, interesting ones were added, and then I turned to my collection of bookmarks in order to prune there as well.

I have a pretty sizable cache of druid or druid-related links that's grown over the years, and a lot of them are still pretty interesting. In the absence of the ability to talk about what's actually happening in the game with any fluency, I thought it might make a decent stopgap Shifting. This is a selection that's kept me absorbed for many an hour on a snowy weekend, and it ranges from comparisons between druid and warrior tanks in the classic game to where you fall on a healer's priority list when you're a jackass.

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

Whether we like to admit it or not, we tend to give other players the once-over whenever we zone into a Raid Finder or dungeon PUG, particularly if you've had a run of bad experiences while getting valor-capped for the week. A recent thread on the Tanking forums about the best title for a tank to sport is both a sideways acknowledgment of this and a question as to which title best suits your role in the game. For healers, one could argue that Undying or Immortal means you probably had job security for the length of Wrath, but that kind of ignores everyone else's responsibility to not screw up in Naxx. Possibly Herald of the Titans/Conqueror of Ulduar would have been the equivalent for DPS players, although a raid had to fire on all cylinders for those achievements too.

Before achievements were account-wide, and leaving aside obvious ringers like Light of Dawn/Bane of the Fallen King before Mists, I would have nominated Loremaster or Seeker as the most reassuring titles to see on a player regardless of gear quality. I can't say exactly what link exists between the persistence needed to get these titles and overall competence, but I have yet to see a Loremaster or Seeker player do something screw-the-pooch crazy in a PUG. These days, it's tougher to guarantee that a player sporting a title is doing so on the character that originally got it, so maybe The Undaunted is probably the single best outward indicator of competence.

Having written all this, I've also had the pleasure of knowing a world-class hunter who never bothered using titles, and we have to acknowledge that a generic, funny (e.g., "Chef Boyardee"), or absent title means nothing at all. But if you had to pick one that said, "I will not get you killed in this PUG," which would it be?

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion

Love is in the Air returns this year from Sunday, Feb. 10 through Saturday, Feb. 23. As always, check your game calendar for your server's specific start and end times. After many tweaks over the years, the holiday's become one of the less annoying and RNG-riddled outings from the What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been meta. However, last year's version added a pretty grind-intensive mount to the holiday rewards, so if you're starting fresh and want the meta and the mount, be prepared for a lot of work.

Before you ask -- yep, it's required if you're still on the warpath for your Violet Proto-Drake. The finished holiday meta will also reward the title the Love Fool.

If you're completely new to Love Is In the Air, you'll probably want to read our FAQ on the holiday. Otherwise, we'll be dealing with the holiday achievements here. There are only two optional ones if you're going for the meta, so I've listed all the ones you'll need first.

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Filed under: Events, Achievements, The Overachiever

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, the Fed-Ex quest from hell.

This year, the Lunar Festival runs from Sunday, Jan. 27 to Saturday, Feb. 9. (As always, check your game calendar for specific start and stop times for your server.) On a very important note, this year cuts the length of the holiday from three to two weeks, so if you're a new player or you're starting a fresh character, you won't have as much time as you usually do to get everything done. I think Blizzard limited it so as not to clash with Love Is In the Air, which begins Sunday, Feb. 10.

If you're new to the Lunar Festival, the holiday mostly revolves around involve talking to a number of elders in order to honor them, receiving Coins of Ancestry in return, and then using the coins to purchase holiday items, including clothing and pets. The To Honor One's Elders meta-achievement is also a requirement for What A Long, Strange Trip It's Been, so if you're still after a Violet Proto-Drake, make sure you get this done.

The Lunar Festival is definitely not one of Azeroth's more difficult holidays, but it's time-consuming if you need all the NPCs. However, it's also a good time to do other travel-intensive achievements like World Explorer.

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Filed under: Events, Achievements, The Overachiever

Every Thursday, The Overachiever shows you how to work toward those sweet achievement points. This week, get off our lawn.

One of the things I think about while revising and updating the holiday guides is that the audience for them is doomed to get smaller over time. It's reasonable to expect that, because people don't need the guides after they finish doing the events on characters they care about, and there's generally a few years between Blizzard's major updates. However, with the introduction of account-wide achievements, pets, and mounts, the replayability of holidays has probably suffered a bit. That doesn't mean that the content's not enjoyable, just that each successive character derives less reward from it.

This is a particularly acute problem with the approaching Lunar Festival and how one element gets a lot more onerous as the game continues to expand.

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Filed under: Achievements, The Overachiever

Zaronis: Doesn't anyone else have a problem with enslaving a sentient creature to fight to the death for your own amusement?
MarioLanza: Nope.
Zapwidget: I only fight till they pass out.

Ah, December. Tons of holiday-related silliness, and (for some reason) a lot of point-counterpoint articles and patch 5.2 news. This has been a fun month.

To everyone who's been reading WoW Insider this year, whether you're new to us or a longtime fan, thank you! Happy New Year, all! Stay safe today, and let's have a good 2013!

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, WoW Insider Business, Humor

AiunTanks: I spent all my time in Pandaria looking for a way to murder Anduin Wrynn.
Kennyj116: He becomes "more powerful than you could ever imagine."
AiunTanks: And run the risk of him becoming as useful as Obi-wan was in the movies? I think I'll take that chance.

November was possibly the most introspective month of a very introspective year. We'd had enough experience in Mists of Pandaria to sit back, take stock of what was working and what didn't seem to be, and start digging into the latter. Primarily, that meant LFR and the nigh-endless series of dailies.

But that didn't mean people weren't enjoying the expansion. Judging from the explosion of blog posts, commentary, and machinima hitting the airwaves in November, they were enjoying it a lot.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, WoW Insider Business, Humor

dngreene: Man, when Blizzard wants to get players out into the world, they get players out into the world ... or else.
atanae: Meanwhile, four stalwart players who have no lives are killing boars ...
shrikesnest: Yes, WoW got hacked, and that sucks. I wish it didn't happen. But I can at least take some consolation in the fact that this is the funniest comment thread on WoW Insider in a long time.
PhilDGiles: Does anybody think "SPARE US GOD" might fall into that same list of infamous WoW quotes as "LEEEEEROY JENKINS" now?

In this month, everybody died. Then they rezzed and kept playing. October 2012 was pretty lockstep with the pattern we've already seen in major patch or expansion releases, which is that staffers largely abandon whatever editorials they were working on in favor of, uh, playing the game.

As you might expect, lots of great news this month, and an unbroken string of comments and pokes at the wonderful random stuff that kept popping out of Pandaria.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, WoW Insider Business, Humor

Mists of Pandaria was released on the 25th, and everything about September is just an embarrassment of riches. Once again, opinions and editorials suffered a little bit as we turned our attention to other stuff, but this is easily among the most action-packed months I've ever had to summarize.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, WoW Insider Business, Humor

MusedMoose: I stood in fire. / Everyone stood in fire. / It's an achievement.
TristanLeonard: No one remembers / Yor'sahj's name in my guild. / We call him "Skittles."
JeffLaBowski: Thank you, Olivia. / Now I'm counting all my words. / I ran out of beer.
metaphyzxx: I'm glad to be done / With this stupid expansion. / Bring on the pandas.
Docteurmi: Less QQ, more haiku.

Our staffers and columnists went into overdrive preparing for patch 5.0.4 and the eventual release of Mists, so opinion/editorial work took a backseat to class preparation. However, we did find time for haikus, Tides of War, the MoP cinematic, and a little shopping.

Also, NASA finished Dragon Soul landed an SUV-sized rover on Mars.

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Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, WoW Insider Business, Humor