Breakfast Topic: What's your favorite shapeshift in the game?

Druids, man -- they have all the fun. They get to be bears, big cats, sea lions, birds, and, umm, owlbeasts? I'm not sure on the last one. Let's just stick with moonkin.

But some of the rest of us can shapeshift, too! If you're a worgen, the animation shifting between your true form and your human form is pretty cool, and that's a shapeshift that doesn't require druidic skills. But there are many other shapeshifting opportunities in WoW. You can be a skeleton, if you're lucky, with a Noggenfogger Elixir. You can be a bat, as per the header image, with a Bat Costume. You can be a pirate with a Savory Deviate Delight or a huge Naga with Bones of Transformation.

There are a many other shapeshifting effects, but my very favorite has to be the Potion of Illusion. I loved it before I read Anne's article, and I love it even more since then! What's brilliant about it is stealing other people's appearances -- transmogs, character looks, you name it. I love using it in raids on people who are AFK and /dancing with them. One day, I'm hoping my entire raid will steal one character's identity for a photo.

What's your favorite shapeshift? Were you also converted to the Potion of Illusion by Anne's writeup? Are you a die-hard fan of the Noggenfogger's pot-luck powers? Or is it the pirate life for you?

Keys to PvP: Keybinding, movement and clicking

WoW Insider covers the world of player vs. player action in Blood Sport for fans of Battleground, world PvP and Arena play. Steering you to victory is Olivia Grace, who never clicks anything but her fingers. 

My last column dealt with the basics of macros and focus targets and their use in PvP. This time, we're tackling an even more heady topic, one that is arguably even more key to PvP success than macros and the use of focus targets. This article is a rare occasion when I will assert that one course of action is better than another!

Clicking is a tricky subject. People may be surprised to see it in the title up there hanging out right next other key PvP skills. I would like to say that, with one caveat that will come up later, I wouldn't encourage clicking in PvP.

First and foremost, what is clicking? When PvPers (and for that matter, probably PvEers) talk about clicking, they are referring to the practice of putting your abilities on your bars and clicking them with your mouse. In order to do this and move at the same time, you pretty much have to move with your keyboard.

OK, so now that it's completely clear what clicking is, why is it bad? First and foremost, let's look at movement. Moving with your keyboard is slow. It's really slow. If you don't believe me, stand your character still and spin through 180 degrees with your keyboard. Now do the same with your mouse. Much faster! Rather like the difference between a d-pad and a thumb joystick on a console controller, mouse movement is far more intuitive, far easier to fine tune and far faster.

Now, let's look at the actual clicking itself for a second. Is that inherently not as good as the alternative, keybinding? Let's consider some aspects of the two casting systems. With clicking, you need to be aware of where your mouse pointer is in relation to your action bars. I've been using computers for a fair while, and I often lose track of my pointer. I've not lost track of my E key for a very, very long time.

Furthermore, the movement of the mouse pointer across the screen is, it seems, certainly not faster or more accurate than the movement of your hands across a keyboard. Of course, a very important part of ensuring the efficiency of keybinding is putting the right abilities in the right place, and we'll get to that. But that aside, it seems to me at least that it is far faster to hit a key on a keyboard than to locate and click an ability with your mouse. Additionally, if you're one of the many people who are still using the default UI, your action bars are highly likely to be arranged in long, thin lines. Not the most efficient layout for either clicking or keybinding; at least with keybinding, those lines of abilities can be clustered into easily reached groups.

I wouldn't say that keybinding is an absolute solution. There are certainly some spells or abilities (particularly those with long cooldowns) that you could click and possibly get away with it. But if you can, I would certainly advise a change to keybindings.

Making the change

So if you're a clicker, how do you change over to keybinding? I would advise you to take a key like 1 that is near to your hand position for movement, and bind your main spammable ability to it. Choose the one you're hitting when you're not hitting anything else -- even better if it's one you can cast while moving. Put another on 2 and another on 3, and try to begin to use those and move with your mouse. Don't do it all in one fell swoop; add in new keybinds gradually, with the shortest cooldowns first, and try to do so sensibly. If you're struggling, a great way to train yourself can be to put textured stickers on your keys, so you can tell by touch whether you're in the right place. Make sure they're easily removable, though!

Good keybindings

This is the standard keybind setup that was no doubt on your UI when WoW was installed, with no modification or reworking. The red keys are abilities, and the blue keys are movement.

This is not an example of good keybinding! Why not? Well, for starters, you're turning with your keyboard. We've already discussed why that's bad, but most PvPers still have WASD bound to movement and strafing. That's all good. So your left hand will be hanging out over on the blue keys, meaning 1 through 4 are very easily reached, 5 requires a small movement of your hand, 6 a larger one and so on. Consider, then, if you're mouse running and strafing and need to hit the ability on the 0 key? Yeah. Not so good!

How do you alter your keybinds? Hit Escape, go into Key Binding, and look for the buttons you want to reassign. Addons like Bartender make this far easier to do.

So here's a different layout for you:

What's changed? Well, we've lost two movement keys. Q and E have been sacrificed to the almighty mouse gods, and A and D are now strafing keys. W and S still take care of forward and backward movement. So that is still home base for your left hand. The abilities have moved, though, and are clustered around the movement keys. There are no substantial hand movements required to access any of those keys.

A word on the S key and backpedaling I do think this merits a mention. Backpedaling is a very slow way to move and should not be used as a primary mode of transport in PvP. However, it has its moments -- for example, if you're under attack from a class like a rogue that does more damage from behind. With backpedaling, you can easily back yourself into a wall or to the edge of a ledge so they can't get at your backside. Whether it merits a really awesome keybind like S is up to you.

Sit your hand on your WASD keys. The easiest ones to get will be Q, E, and numbers 1 through 4. The further away the keys are from your home base, the harder they will become to reach at speed. Let's see what I mean. (Warning: If you're offended by bright, clashing colors, look away.)

Aw, yeah. Check out that color scheme. So the blue keys (WASD) are for movement. The green keys (1234QERF) are easiest to get to, followed by the pink (`ZXC5), then the purple (6TGV), then the turquoise (7YHB). If you have a small keyboard or big hands, the turquoise may well be easily within your reach, so extend that out a row!

I feel the need ... the need for speed

A gold star to anyone who gets that film reference. OK, so you've established what keys you should be using -- now for God's sake, what should you put there?! Well, it's all about speed. It should be noted that this section is where it all gets a lot more personal and begins to relate far more to playstyle and preference -- but here we go anyway!

The green keys should be abilities you use all the time, the ones you need to get to a lot. The pink should be used for key cooldowns or short cooldowns. These can either be ones that you use regularly or ones you'll need to get to in a hurry when you do need them -- say, when the proverbial's really hitting the fan, perhaps a paladin bubble, a mage Ice Block orCold Snap, or a shaman or druid Nature's Swiftness.

Move on to the purple keys. These can overlap with the pink keys, but I would recommend prioritizing the pinks for cooldowns you really need to get to in a big hurry. Offensive cooldowns could be great for the purples, as they are perhaps not so crucial to survival.

The turquoise keys could be used for abilities that have long cooldowns, like a priest Hymn of Hope or Shadowfiend, or ones that aren't used often or can't be used in combat -- the ones that you still want to have on your bars.

Where do I put the rest of my stuff?!

Now, this arrangement of keys only gives you 25 keybinds for PvP abilities. This may be plenty, but it may not, and that's where modifiers come in. Time for another amazing keyboard picture!



Whoa, there are red keys (Ctrl, Shift, Alt, CapsLock) now! Amazing! These are modifiers. Without ever creating a macro, you can bind Ctrl+R to a different spell to R, and Shift+R to a different one again. My column on macros deals with the use of modifiers within macros, if that's your thing. So, your 25 keybinds just became 100, depending on how acrobatic your hands are! And frankly, if that's not enough, something weird is going on.

Now, the observant ones among you will have noticed that CapsLock was in the modifiers. You'll also probably be muttering about how I'm a noob and an idiot and the like, but wait! With a bit of jiggery-pokery within your operating system, you can make capslock into CTRL. Yeah, this is pretty amazing. For me, CTRL is the most awkwardly placed key of them all, while I find Shift and Alt really easy to get to, Alt being used with my thumb. I also disable the Windows key.

And why is Tab empty? Because I use it for targeting. It is definitely a viable button for keybinding, but it comes with pitfalls, such as accidentally alt-tabbing out of the game. Bad times!

Practice what you preach?

A final word on this, in the interest of honesty. I have a Razer Naga mouse, and I strafe, auto-run and backpedal with the side keys. I also use the mousewheel up and mousewheel down for cleansing, and some of the other mouse buttons for other skills. My setup is not the standard one above, and this should not be seen as the bible of PvP keybinding -- but it's a great place to start.

Totem Talk: New look for Chain Heal, new features for resto shaman

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Totem Talk for elemental, enhancement and restorationshaman. Want to be a sultan of swing healing? A champion of Chain Heal? Totem Talk: Restoration, brought to you by Joe Perez (otherwise known as Lodur from World of Matticusand cohost of the For the Lore and Raid Warning podcasts), shows you how

So with all the excitement over the release of Diablo III, Mists hasn't been one to sit idly by and just be completely quiet. There have been a number of changes to shaman in general over the last few builds. I figured if you could tear yourself away from the eternal struggle of the High Heavens and the Burning Hells, then we could take a look at some of those changes.

One of the most underrated aspects of the new expansion, in my opinion, is the glyphs themselves. There's a lot to be said about the importance of the glyphs in the new expansion. I personally feel that they will become much more useful as tools to help define our healing kits for the fights, much more so than talents currently do.

The new, the improved, and even the meh

So a lot of our the glyphs you've come to expect to see around have shifted. There are some new ones, and some have even gone away. Some of the most notable have to do with ourChain Heal spell. The first up is the Glyph of Chaining, a new glyph that increases the range of your Chain Heal jumps by 100% but at the cost of giving the iconic spell a 4-second cooldown. Honestly, it's one of the more interesting glyphs.

At first, I commented on Twitter with a few people about how I wasn't sure how this glyph would really work out. Adding a 4-second cooldown to the spell seemed counterintuitive, and I almost wanted to reject the glyph out of hand, but it was just interesting enough to make me want to play around with it.

Surprisingly, it's fairly handy, especially in the 5-man dungeons where your group is going to be spread out, in some cases far enough apart that Chain Heal won't be able to bounce. The 4-second timer wasn't actually that bad. There are plenty of other spells that you can use to fill the gap while Chain Heal is on cooldown -- Riptide, Healing Surge, Healing Wave orGreater Healing Wave. It was handy in the many circumstances when the group would be running and there would be more than one target who needed an immediate heal, but the group would have run out of Healing Rain and be kind of spread out.

As an added bonus, it was a nifty way to force you to rely on your other spells instead of just Chain Heal, where in some circumstances you might have just spammed the spell. I would honestly keep this glyph in consideration when looking at new glyphs for healing early on in the expansion (if it stays around, that is).

Telluric Currents is now a glyph, and we touched on this briefly before, but it has even undergone a bit of a change. While before, it would restore a portion of the damage dealt back as mana, it had the potential to become very unwieldy and unbalanced pretty quickly, especially when you consider that it would continue to scale as you gathered more intellect and your Lightning Bolts hit for more and more damage.

Now, though, in the latest incarnation, it returns 2% of your mana when your Lightning Bolt hits an enemy. This feels like it might be reaching a pretty good point, honestly. The 2% mana will scale as your mana pool grows but without completely unbalancing your mana regen and making this glyph a mandatory one. It can be useful, for sure -- I have no doubt about that -- but now you have some choice regarding it.

Totemic Recall and Glyph of Water Shield also got a bit of a reworking as well. Totemic Recall formerly would return only a portion of your mana spent on totems when used; however, with the elimination of a lot of our passive totems, that percentage was really next to nothing. This is more of a balance change than anything else, really, since it allows you to regain 100% of the mana spent on a totem when you recall it. It's not great, but it makes the glyph less horrible. Water Shield's new glyph really is for those forgetful people who never remember to reset their water shield when it has spent all charges. Honestly, the mileage may vary.

The last set of interesting glyphs is a pair that revolves around our Spiritwalker's Grace.Glyph of Spiritwalker's Grace extends the duration of the ability by 5 seconds, which can be handier than it sounds. Those few extra seconds can really save your group's hide and help keep you from clipping that last heal short. Glyph of Spirit Walk is pretty straightforward: It reduces the cooldown on SWG by 25% or 30 seconds. It's a very useful glyph, especially if you're going to have to do a lot of moving and healing.

You'll also notice that some of the other glyphs are gone -- in particular, the Glyph of Earth Shield is completely gone. Honestly, with the way it was being changed for Mists, I'm not too surprised. The glyph had changed to turn Earth Shield into a defensive cooldown with a short duration. It was an interesting but ultimately clunky mechanic. Removing it seemed just about the next step -- and well, that's exactly what happened.

Chain Heal gets a face lift

One of my biggest pet peeves from when Blizzard redid all the shaman healing spellcasting animations for Cataclysm was that Chain Heal was just flat-out untouched. Every flavor of healing wave got a cool, watery animation. Our element of healing was present every time we healed -- that is, except for Chain Heal. Every time we cast the spell, we looked and sounded like a paladin. It grated on my nerves, because for such an iconic spell to get left behind -- it just seemed, well, stupid. I mean, how can you update every thing else but leave that one alone? I've been complaining about it for quite a while and even cornered a Blizzard Entertainment employee or two to ask about it.

Well, looks like we finally have a response, and that response looks pretty damn good! The Glyph of Deluge might actually be my favorite new glyph. You can go ahead and make fun of me for it, but having the ability to take a minor glyph and make our Chain Heal look awesome makes me so happy. Gone are the paladin-like spell effects and sounds, replaced with the healing sounds of water and the flowing water particle effect surrounding your character. The Chain Heal beam itself takes on a blue hue, and I think it looks quite sharp.

To me, this is the embodiment of what minor glyphs should have been all along, cosmetic changes to our toolkits so we can personalize our look, and Glyph of Deluge is a step in the right direction. What do you think?

Shifting Perspectives: Scribbles from an alternate universe

Every week, WoW Insider brings you Shifting Perspectives for cat, bear, restoration andbalance druids. This Tuesday, we joyride through Pandaria with fountain pen in hand. Old school, baby.

I'm back to scribbling. Every beta, a pile of poorly organized notes starts to grow at the side of my computer with numbers, observations, witty column titles (these I seem to have misplaced this time around), questions, gripes, and a truly stupefying amount of cat hair. I turn this pile into a series of articles on how druids are doing and try not to think too hard about having possibly misread my chicken scratch to ruinous effect.

(In unrelated news, until linking the above articles, I hadn't revisited the video I shot of apremade druid in level 85 blues off the Cataclysm beta and was horrified by the set of responses. Or better yet, here's the video I shot of female worgen casting animations. Oh, YouTube commenters -- you never fail to deliver!)

This is actually a collection of notes from the last several weeks on the beta. Most of them are bear-flavored, because there's not much point to questing as restoration unless your other hobbies include watching paint dry, snail racing, or the complete works of Schopenhauer.

Raw numbers

This is my unbuffed guardian druid in bear form in the same gear on the live realms and the beta. Mind you, this is all on a character who's still 85 on both servers before the real combat ratings decay presumably starts.

• Health: An 8.7% decrease from 186,261 to 170,111.
• Mana (not that it really matters, but still): A 17.5% decrease from 24,248 to an even 20,000.
• Attack power: A 26.12% decrease from 15,988 to 11,812.
• Armor: An 8.3% increase from 54,548 to 59,068.
• Agility: A 7.9% decrease from 6,222 to 5,733.
• Critical strike: The difference here is negligible.
• Dodge: This is the really ugly one: 40.62% to 14.61%. Sweet Jesus!

The numbers on their own are always deceptive. The automatic conversion of agility to intellect means that a 20K mana pool does the hell of a lot more in Mists than a 24K mana pool does in Cataclysm. A single Rejuvenation will actually make a dent in your health on the beta, provided you have to heal at all. If you're actually questing in bear form, simply topping yourself off with a quick Frenzied Regeneration after a fight while you're running to the next mob is easier.

The other important point is that Savage Defense now buffs your dodge by 45% for 6 seconds, so the absurdly low passive dodge is balanced around that. Yes, this is scary. Yes, 6 seconds runs out faster than you think.

The quest experience

Questing on either a bear or cat right now while specced guardian feels like questing on either a bear or cat on the live realms, except you're missing one or two skills for which you've developed serious muscle memory (Pulverize in the case of the bear) and you're slogging through three feet of molasses.

The slowness in itself isn't all that surprising, because you learn to expect combat ratings to decay while you're leveling -- but this is still at 85. I think a big part of it for the bear is having effectively lost two skills (Pulverize and Maul -- yeah, Maul exists, but it's a rage dump in an era in which the absolute last thing you want to do is dump rage) and being reduced to hitting anything that's off cooldown until you have enough rage for SD or FR. However, FR's a lot more useful than it was in previous builds.

• Not having a spammable ability as a bear still makes me nervous. I know why the developers didn't do it -- damage skills generate rage and don't cost anything, so always having something to hit would be problematic for the purpose of balancing tank resources -- but there's a huge penalty to missing anything at the start of a fight as a result. This goes double for skills like Swipe or Thrash, assuming you're trying to get aggro on a mob pack.
• Not having Challenging Roar around anymore makes me equally nervous.
• The rage mechanic and its built-in decay guarantees that you will never start a pull (when you're at your most vulnerable) with Savage Defense or Frenzied Regeneration up. This is where new talents like Typhoon and Ursol's Vortex, in addition to the usual standby Barkskin, are probably going to come in handy. That, and it's probably going to turn bear and warrior tanks into even bigger speed demons than they already are, because their survivability is now tied to a resource that declines the moment they exit combat.
• The selection of bear glyphs isn't that great, but I'm hoping it's terrible because Blizzard hasn't yet taken a major pass through them. Remind me to write more on this soon. We need things that are not just situational options, and it's pretty demoralizing that just about every bear glyph has a penalty attached to it.

Bizarre but funny bugs

• Notice anything strange about the tauren version of bear form above? This is from the most recent beta build. I didn't transfer my tauren main over initially (I wanted a particular piece of gear on the live realms before I did) and was restricted to a premade troll druid, so I don't know how long the night elves have been exporting their ears and doodads to their manbearcow colleagues.
• Shifting and /cancelshift macros work sporadically at best, and I'm desperately trying to train myself out of dependence on them as a result. I arrive at quest areas off the back of a mount (no flight until 90) and in caster form, so the first few seconds of most fights are spent getting the crap kicked out of me by a mob while I flail around trying to shift with a series of macros that don't work. For whatever reason, Travel Form seems to be the only reliable shift, but after extensive testing, I have determined that its suitability to combat is very poor.
• Thrash enters pockets of having an astonishingly high miss rate.
• I don't know if it's the same in Alliance areas, but the Horde landing site on Pandaria where you start questing at level 85 has a shocking number of player corpses. I can't tell if it's because players are lagging their way to mortal oblivion against nearby mobs or what. Either way, it's like running around a creepy cemetery where the grave diggers are on strike.