Posts with tag troll-druids

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This Tuesday, they see me trollin'. Whether they hatin' is ultimately a matter of conscience.

In November 2010, before Cataclysm hit, I wrote a series of articles on why (or why not) to play a particular druidic race for theorycrafting, lore, and roleplay purposes. These articles turned out to be a really big hit with readers, and you can find them here:

• Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid
• Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid
• Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a worgen druid
• Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a troll druid

This week, we're going to finish the series with a look at how trolls are faring in the transition to Mists of Pandaria. For such a cynical and often brutal race, the trolls are ending Cataclysm on a note they find extremely novel, which is to say -- not under anybody else's bootheel. It's a welcome feeling.

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration and balance druids. This week, we complete our lore series with the Darkspear trolls.

The troll article's been the most requested among the lore articles I've been writing. Trolls are such an infrequently played race that I'm at a loss to understand this phenomenon. The only plausible explanations are that existing troll players are among the most fanatical in the game, or that there's a large and eager population of people who've been dying for the chance to have a troll druid while refusing to play a troll of any other class.

By the way, if you're at all interested in how this series has done so far in terms of popularity for the individual races, I'll have a quick look at that next week, before getting into the 4.0.3a guide. As of now, the worgen article has been the most popular, followed closely by the night elves. Tauren are dead last, by a margin of several thousand hits. I'm madly curious to see how the troll article's going to do.

The full series is available here:

1. Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a night elf druid
2. Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a tauren druid
3. Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a worgen druid
4. Shifting Perspectives: Why (or why not) to play a troll druid

Troll druids just went from best druids to the best druids, as their unique flight form has been revealed -- a bat with tiki shoulders wearing an awesome mojo necklace. Check out a high-res picture over at MMO Champion. The video is after the jump.

Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting feral/restoration druids and those who group with them. This week, we get a beta key, and maybe a little sloshed.

After getting a beta key, it was my intent to hit the servers and write an FAQ/reader mailbag-type column, but I'm not going to do that today. I'm going to answer my questions, not yours. I don't care about any of you.

Well, that's not true. I do care. But I've been in the beta for less than a week and:

• Half the stuff we've read about has been scrapped or just hasn't been implemented.
• The other half is a writhing mass of angry, toxic bugs.
• The servers crash like that drunk buddy who swore he'd only be on your couch for a few days but is still there weeks later and you poke him with a stick every morning to make sure he's alive and unfortunately he is.
• About the most I could do without pulling several consecutive all-nighters was level a worgen and troll druid to level 13 as quickly as I could. Oh, and wipe a Blackwing Caverns group several times over.

Readers beware: while I may not answer any useful questions past the cut, there are still a few serious spoilers here.

Every Tuesday, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, we have absolutely no excuse for the column we've written.

I'll be honest; I wrote this week's column purely for brainless fun. You won't learn anything (not that you do normally), there are no insights to be gained (not that there are normally) and I don't have any new Cataclysm alpha information. I am very sorry to anyone who came here looking for a solid, informative column, and if you wish to excoriate me in the comments then I encourage you to do so.

Anyway. When it comes to druids, the deal with race choice is that you don't really have any. If you play Alliance, you have to play a night elf; if you play Horde, you have to play a tauren. We're the most race-restricted class in the game, and even in Cataclysm, that's not really going to change.

Some of you might recall a bug from a little while back that allowed you to model-swap between characters on the same realm by "choosing" two of them at once. I'm pretty sure it's been fixed now, so I wouldn't bother trying it if I were you, but I had lot of fun swapping non-druid races into our various tier sets and wondering what it might have been like to play them. I screenshotted like a maniac while doing so and then set them aside for a future column whenever I felt like doing something just for fun. That would be today.

Welcome back to The Queue, WoW.com's daily Q&A column where the WoW.com team answers your questions about the World of Warcraft. Mike Sacco be your host today.

Happy fifth anniversary, everyone! In honor of such a prestigious age for our young upstart MMO, this edition of the Queue ... has ... well, basically nothing to do with the anniversary at all. I mean, it's not as if you guys asked any anniversary-related questions. So, we're just setting today's Queue to "normal view" and takin' care of business.

Shall we?

Pemberton asked...

How come we can't fly from Darkshore to the Exodar?

All the World's a Stage, and all the orcs and humans merely players. They have their stories and their characters; and one player in his time plays many roles.

As you know, the new race and class combinations coming up in the Cataclysm will open a whole new set of doors to people who want an alternative character choice that goes against the grain of their typical racial customs, to one degree or another. With the exception of a couple combinations that feel as though they should have been there from the beginning (such as blood elf warriors, which need no discussion here), each new possibility presents roleplayers with an opportunity to play an outcast of sorts, a character who has made a significant break from the traditions his or her race usually represent.

The lore behind each combination is not yet fully clear. We know tauren paladins will probably worship the sun and call themselves "Sunwalkers" for instance, but not much more than that. Some things are clear, though, and there's a lot to get the imagination going for those roleplayers who yearn to play something a little different.