Posts with tag Year-in-Review

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!

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.

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.

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.

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.

Nathanyel Warcraft: Moon Guard. Would rake in way more cash than that other Warcraft-inspired movie ...

Beta. Beta. Beta. And, weirdly enough, a lot of really good observational pieces on a very diverse set of subjects.

Also, Olivia largely spent this month giving us no excuse whatsoever for ingame poverty.

bengeibe: As a fan of metal, I can't fathom what could possibly be offputting about the imagery in this video. All I see is pure awesome.
AleisterHyde: As not a fan of metal, my ears hurt.

Another busy, busy month. June 2012 was equal parts restrospective work on what Cataclysm had brought to the table, and looking ahead to Mists of Pandaria to see what would change.

This was also a period when real-life concerns intruded on the game world in a fairly unpleasant manner. You'll see what I mean past the cut.

May saw Diablo 3's release on the 15th, the Avengers, a sudden exodus of staffers from their posts, and another avalanche of Mists of Pandaria beta news as the editors dragged people back with a slew of threats and bribes.

The female pandaren dance was also revealed to be the Caramelldansen. Alex posted this. The video in that article's been taken down, so I've helpfully embedded an alternative above.

bim.shield.spec Cross-faction romance! They are star-crossed lovers, for certain ... Oh wait, never mind. Method is faction-changing to Horde.

Beta, beta, and more beta ... and for some reason, an awful lot of completely random stuff this month. Seriously, there's no rhyme or reason to the array of one-off articles we wrote in April.

Also, we got a new comment system. We thought that was pretty cool.

Ellyndia: Whenever I need to do something that might be scary or a little intimidating, I take a deep breath, close my eyes, and say to myself: "Time's up, let's do this." I have gotten a job using this method.
jazz.panther: My success with that method is only about 33.33% ... repeating of course.

Mass Effect 3 was released on the 6th, which was just enough time for people to finish it and be really pissed off in time for the Mists of Pandaria beta, which hit on the 21st. Not surprisingly, beta coverage absolutely dominated everything else we did in this month. Rather than overload readers with an endless parade of it, I've tried to centralize our MoP coverage in our omnibus guide.

Matt Rossi: I'm starting to think Neltharion was the tank for the dragon aspects' regular 5-man group.

After a few times around the block, the general "feel" of months like February 2012 becomes pretty familiar. The combination of aging raid content, an approaching expansion, and a lot of stuff going on with the business end of WoW combined for several weeks' worth of commentary on the meta-game and what was going on with Blizzard HQ. This was a month with a lot of interesting news, and it also turned out to be a fabulous time for Moviewatch and the arts scene.

Marthazon: World of Warcraft is sort of like the French Foreign Legion of games when it comes to age. As long as you can do your part, it's rare for someone to ask "How old are you?"

For anyone out there who's new to the site, at the end of every year we run a retrospective series examining the last 12 months and the articles that best captured the zeitgeist of the player community. You'll find one of these published every day through the end of 2012, assuming we don't all vanish into the nether on Dec. 21 (which I am inclined to doubt, as bills are due and nobody's that lucky).

2012 felt like a very introspective year for the game. Between the lack of a 2012 BlizzCon, Cataclysm's winding down, and the 9-month wait for Mists of Pandaria, players used the extra time to argue and probe into systems that most needed improvement. January was no exception, and this was a very chatty month for our staffers.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. On Wednesdays, shadow priesting expert Fox Van Allen comes from out of the shadows to bask in your loving adoration. He is also the founder of several ill-fated boy bands.

Happy New Year 2012, shadow priests! I rather love the holiday. Not necessarily because it gives my friends the opportunity to slap me in the face five times over the course of 30 minutes -- which this year, it absolutely did. It's because I love to reminisce. And now that 2011 is officially in the history books, I can finally look back at a really awesome year for shadow priests.

When we were standing here almost exactly one year ago doing our 2010 shadow priest year in review, there was a lot to talk about. We'd seen one expansion end and another expansion begin. But don't think that just because we "only had Cataclysm" that 2011 was a boring year. We learned a lot. For starters, we all learned:

• We learned that after a long period of neglect throughout Wrath, shadow priests not only did competitive damage in Cataclysm but, in multiple raid fights, were a chart-topping DPS spec.
• We learned that Tyler Caraway's crippling sense of neediness would lead him to move halfway across the country to literally live down the street from America's favorite shadow priest.
• We learned that we'd be getting pandas. Shadow pandas.

And that's just for starters.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, Allison's grip on reality is less certain than her grip on a bottle of cough syrup.

Sadly, I do not have a cool poem for this past year. 2011 was not a particularly poetic experience, and not just because I spent like two weeks of it without power or with trees on my house or with a new Maine Coon kitten that literally bit through my headphone wires, occasioning a small crisis on my end before I realized they were the cheap ones I got for like five bucks on sale somewhere. But still. If you're new to this tradition (four years running!), I spend the last few weeks of every year catching various illnesses from my relatives, mainlining cough syrup, and then stumbling to a computer to write a year in review column that the editors have to publish because they don't have anything else in the site queue.

So now, dear readers, I will take you on a small tour through the year that was. The other alternative is I take everyone on a run through Zul'Aman, but you'd be safer next to a Cub Scout with matches and poor impulse control, so we're not going to do that.

Oh, and if you care about this sort of thing:

• The druid of 2008 The first year I got sick and unwisely decided that a surfeit of cough syrup would allow me to finish a column on time.
• The druid of 2009 "The ridiculously-popular death knight was, in many ways, designed to counter the restoration druid, although I am hedging this somewhat by saying in many ways instead of definitely, and counter instead of annihilate."
• The druid of 2010 Letitia, the official fashion consultant and Snark Passenger to the Shifting Perspectives column, makes her second appearance to remind me that I am not a shirtless Christian Bale.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you The Light and How to Swing It for holy, protection and retribution paladins. Every Sunday, Chase Christian invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. Feel free to email me with any questions you want answered, like why paladins are so awesome.

As I looked forward to this year last December, I wasn't sure holy paladins were going to survive 2011 in one piece. We were just learning to adapt to the three-heal model and figuring out how to manage our holy power properly, and I had serious doubts about our AoE healing and mastery bonus. Luckily, I was wrong, and we have thrived in Cataclysm. We started by focusing on our specialty, powerful tank healing, and then expanded to take over the raid healing role as the year progressed.

While holy power and the new healing model were the big topics of early 2011, AoE healing has clearly been the topic that defined this era in holy paladin history. Holy Radiance's first beta version, Healing Hands, was loudly trumpeted when the Cataclysm NDA was lifted. Light of Dawn's struggle to find a place in our arsenal has caused more lines of paladin patch notes than any other ability. Learning to AoE heal has been our biggest challenge this year but also our greatest success.