Posts with tag shadow-orb

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. This week, the venerable shadow-specced Fox Van Allen asks Theralion's Mirror who the fairest priest of them all is. Spoiler alert: It's not Dawn Moore.

One of the biggest mysteries for shadow priests during the development of Cataclysm was what our mastery mechanic would be. We had some vague notions of what we were getting early on -- Shadow Orbs -- but it took the boys at Blizzards a very long time to define what those orbs would actually do.

Perhaps it's that history that leads to one of the greatest misconceptions among shadow priests today. Most of us believe that Shadow Orbs are our mastery mechanism. They're not. If they were, shadow priests wouldn't see them until we trained mastery at level 80. Instead, we start seeing orbs as early as level 10.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Spiritual Guidance for discipline, holy and shadow priests. Even weeks when your shadowy messiah, Fox Van Allen, is nursing one heck of a headache -- along with, presumably, everyone else who's still suffering from the non-stop party atmosphere of BlizzCon 2010.

Let's start by saying that BlizzCon 2010 was an absolute blast. I met most of the WoW Insider crew, got to smell Mike Sacco's hair yet again, got some amazing swag and got to eat at Jack in the Box no less than five times. The best part, though, was probably meeting Orkchop (pictured above with WoW Insider's moonkin blogger Tyler Caraway, who can only aspire to be as amazing as Orkchop). The dude is an internet celebrity. For real.

But enough about how awesome Orkchop is. Let's talk shadow priests, and how awesome they are.

Now, I'm not good at sugar-coating things, so I'll just come out with it: BlizzCon 2010 was pretty disappointing in terms of World of Warcraft-related content. The biggest news out of the convention was the new loading screen for Cataclysm. Really. That was the big news. Seriously. And it's just a palette-shifted version of the Sindragosa loading screen.

Despite the lack of earth-shattering news, I made sure to take note of all the shadow priest action. There wasn't a heck of a lot of it, but what little ground was covered was hugely important to the future of the spec. The good, the bad and the non-answers -- we'll go over it all after the break.

After a vicious, brutal campaign, the primary election between light-side Spiritual Guidance writer Dawn Moore and the shadow-specced Fox Van Allen (your host for today's article, of course) has come to a close. Fox had built a strong lead in the polls right up until this weekend, when a confused cadre of Tea Party activists misread Dawn's fondness for Earl Grey as tacit support for a right-wing economic agenda. Stupid democracy -- it just never seems to work.

Being an international superstar, I'm constantly accosted by fans. They walk up to me on the street and they ask, "Fox, what's the best part about working for WoW.com?" There's an awful lot I like about writing, of course. I love that I have groupies. I love that I get to write about priests, internet dragons and magic, and then name my column something ridiculous, random and ill-fitting like "Eight simple rules for dating my teenaged shadow priest." I love that I can actually help people play the game better.

But what's the best part? The groupies. Yeah, hands down. The groupies.

The second best part, though -- I'm free to write whatever the heck I want about World of Warcraft and Blizzard. I don't have to toe a company line. When Blizzard gets it wrong, I can say they've gotten it wrong. A few weeks ago, I wrote a column called The four best things about Cataclysm for shadow priests. I touched on things like Shadowy Apparition and Paralysis, two new talents that I'm loving while leveling in the beta. "But Fox," you ask, "what about those great new Shadow Orbs? You left those off your list!" That's right, I did. I left them off because Shadow Orbs represent one of Blizzard's misses.