Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is now Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. Matt scored a beta key and busied himself speccing and respeccing his Priest multiple times to figure out funky ways to level to level 80 and has arrived at 2 possible specs!

What do all Priests have to look forward to when Wrath of the Lich King comes out?

Leveling. The grind starts all over again.I'm going to dive right into it and suggest not one but two possible talent builds that you may wish to consider once you get your shiny copy of the new expansion.

The good thing about being a pet class is that you always have a friend. Hunters have bears, wolves and cats. Warlocks have stolid voidwalkers, capricious imps or sexy succubi. And death knights have ... this ... this thing. Um. Is it too late to take it back to the SPCA and exchange it for a kitten?

Reader Exanimo of Aszune-EU, who also writes Full Time WoW Addict, sent us this image straight from the Wrath of the Lich King beta -- and we'd love to have your beta screenshots, too! If you have anything our readers might like, sharing it is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. We prefer full screen shots without the UI showing -- use alt-Z to remove it. And, please, no more sunsets! Unless it's a sunset over Arthas's grave.

Astrael of <Saga> on Boulderfist is a better man (or gnome) than most of us -- instead of playing the beta 24/7, he let his roommate have a go at Northrend. His roommate repaid him by repeatedly jumping off of Dalaran into Crystalsong Forest. It cost a couple Light Feathers, but it paid off in this beautiful screenshot. Yep, that's the underside of the magical city in the background.

This image came to us straight from the Wrath of the Lich King beta -- and we'd love to have your beta screenshots, too! If you have anything our readers might like, beta or not, sharing it is as simple as e-mailing aroundazeroth@wowinsider.com with a copy of your shot and a brief explanation of the scene. You could be featured here next!

Remember to include your player name, server and/or guild if you want it mentioned. We prefer full screen shots without the UI showing -- use alt-Z to remove it. And, please, no more sunsets! Unless it's a sunset over Arthas's grave.

If you're anything like me, ever since the beta talents for Wrath of the Lich King were leaked, you've been going to your favorite talent planner and seeing what new spells and abilities you're going to get. A few days ago we asked what new talents got you excited, but now that you've had more time to study the new talent trees, do you see a respec in your future?

We all know that beta means any and all talents could be shuffled around, buffed / nerfed, or even removed completely, but knowing what we do at this very moment, what's your game plan? Will you fine tune your existing spec or completely change your play style and try a new tree?

Myself, I'm eager to learn exactly what "exotic pets" are going to be, but I really like the extra pet talent points, so my Beast Master Hunter looks like he's staying put. Just incase though I've mapped out an appealing Marksmanship build that might be a nice change of pace. My Mage on the other hand might be forsaking his fellow Ice Mage brethren for an Arcane build. That tree recieved a lot of love and looks really interesting and new. Finally, my Enhancement Shaman my just be shelved if Death Knight looks as fun as it seems to be. So what are you leaning towards? New build? New class? Let us know by leaving a comment.

Yes, I know 'huntery' isn't a word.

Tipster Korgak sent in a piece of news from the Wrath Shaman forums: shamans now get AP from agility. To quote Blue poster Koraa:

• Sorry about that, it should of been in the patch notes. The idea is for DPS mail (with AGI and AP) to be viable for both Hunters and Shaman. Strength is mostly now only a stat for Death Knights, Warriors and Ret Paladins.

While this won't immediately take shamans out of wearing leather for their enhancement DPS needs, it does make the leather that feral druids wear less attractive. Rogue leather, which tends to have agi, attack power and crit will still be fairly attractive, but now all that mail that has stats for hunters will look a lot more appealing to our melee branch of the best class in the game. One depressing note seems to be that our agility to crit formulas seem to have changed negatively as well, most likely because we're expected to push agility more than currently.

(Thanks again to Korgak for the tip)

Well, we were going to talk about other things, but with the Beta coming out I have to admit I've entirely forgotten what they were. There's really no point in pretending that we're not going to be talk about this, is there? I don't think so myself.

We learn nothing about any new talents that don't directly replace older talents. Nothing about Bladestorm or Titan's Grip, and talents like Incite are only mentioned because they're directly replacing talents like Defiance. We also don't learn what the big new protection talent to replace Shield Slam is from these notes. (We do have other sources and we will be discussing those talents in more depth, I'm just pointing out what the notes don't specifically mention.) The notes focus more on protection spec than others although we do find out that mace spec and sword spec are being slightly nerfed while poleaxe spec is getting a nice little buff: these changes seem PvP related to my eyes, but I have no idea how effective they'll actually be.

The juggling of talents and the alteration of their effects definitely seems to confirm the notion that crushing blows are a thing of the past. On the one hand, this is a huge change to warrior tanking mechanics, as we're noted for our ability to hit uncrushability while druid tanks simply soak the damage with higher armor and stamina (paladins use the same mechanic as we do for uncrushable, they just need more block rating but can stay uncrushable longer than we can due to how their abilities work vs. ours): we've yet to see how this is going to play out. With the addition of DK's as tanks, removing CB's keeps them from having to rely on a gimmicky high parry (since they won't use a shield to tank) to avoid being crushed, but it also means that warriors will need a means to stay competitive with other tanks. Threat seems to be getting entirely reworked, so for now I'm cautiously optimistic about where tanking is heading for protection spec warriors, and indeed, all warriors.

I'll go so far as to say that arms and fury warriors will be tanking in Wrath. I don't expect them to be dedicated main tanks for raids, but I do expect to see them tanking in five mans without respeccing, and that is without taking the possible two talent spec idea into account.

Recently WoW Insider caught up with Neg, a restoration-specced Orc Shaman who raided with Nihilum before leaving recently for SK Gaming. An experienced player who has seen all of Blizzard's raid content, from Molten Core through Sunwell Plateau, Neg's talked to us previously about high-end raiding and what Sunwell was like on the PTR. As he's become one of a small group of raiders worldwide to finish the whole zone, we've asked him some follow-up questions about guild stability during the transition to Wrath, what Sunwell was like going live, why there are so many Shaman nowadays in high-end raiding, and the best and worst raid content on offer in WoW.

If you didn't catch our first interview with Neg, you can find that here, but read on for an inside look at the toughest raiding you'll find in the game:

Vivendi earning statements announced today hint that Wrath of the Lich King is expected to be released the second half of 2008. This would also fit into dates that we've seen on sites like Amazon and Gamestop.

This is also significant in that it's the first time an official confirmation of a release time frame has come out. And being that this is the data sent to Vivendi investors, it comes with a good bit of clout.

Additionally, the statement tells us that World of Warcraft now has 10.7 million subscribers, up from 10 million at the end of 2007.

The exact paragraph in the statement is after the break. And of course, stay tuned to WoW Insider for all the latest Wrath of the Lich King news.

First, go read Alex's post, because he makes some good points about recruiting for 25 man raids in Wrath of the Lich King. We now know that in the expansion, all raids will come with a 10 man and 25 man setting, effectively a 'normal' and 'heroic' mode for raiding. While I personally believe this to be awesome, I can understand the idea that this will adversely affect (not effect, I'm reminded) recruitment for 25 mans if people can see the exact same content by just running a 10 man. Sure, the gear won't be as good, but if the starter 10 man gear allows you to run the next stage 10 man, and so on until you finally reach a 10 man version of Arthas, guilds that run 25 man raid content might have a harder time recruiting people to run what is essentially the 'same' content with 24 other folks instead of 9 other folks.

The reason I don't think it will be a real issue (I do think it's worth considering, though, and I do believe it will have some effect on 25 man recruitment) is threefold. Unrelated to those reasons (which are coming up after the jump) I have to admit that this may vary by server: on Norgannon, if anything I'm seeing more new 25 man guilds recruiting and starting up the crawl through Gruul's and Magtheridon, so I may just be working from a glass half full through rose colored glasses state of ludicrous (and heavily over-metaphoric) optimism here.

It's a good week for posts at DwarfPriest.com, it seems. In this look at the manual for World of Warcraft, we get to see that the maps included in the original, 2004 release (which hasn't been updated since... four years later, and we're still using the same increasingly inaccurate manual) are at times surprisingly accurate to what we see in the game today. Interesting inclusions and omissions abound: the fact that Maraudon isn't on these maps but Dire Maul is just fascinates me from the perspective that Maraudon was a full patch ahead of the Maul.

I remember riding around Silithus way before the AQ release trying to get inside and see what was back there, and have been to both Hyjal and along the Greymane wall with my lovely wife who always wants to see the zones that are the hardest to access: I like the idea of Gilneas coming into the game so much that I've mused about releasing the whole zone as an instance before. For these reasons I found this look back at the game manual's maps and what has and hasn't made it into live yet to be grist for the mill of my naturally speculative brain. Will we finally see Uldum when Ulduar hits in WoTLK? Maybe Hyjal will finally go live? Will those islands off the coast of Gilneas make a reappearance on the world map? I've been wondering for years now what's up in Kul Tiras.

Anything on these maps you're surprised to see? Anything excluded that you'd expect? The very detailed map of Quel'Thalas, years before it went live, was one of my big 'woah' moments looking over these maps, which shows how easy it is for me to forget just how much lore the RTS series packed in.

I'm one of those odd players who likes to play multiples of the same class. I've got a tauren, human, night elf and draenei warriors at 70 and to be honest, my human currently way out-gears them all. Not only does he sport T4/T5 level gear for tanking, his DPS gear is also at that level even though I rarely DPS with him. Now, this isn't a problem, exactly. It's not that I dislike having good gear for the content.

It's that I hate playing my human.

When I first started playing World of Warcraft, I started a paladin, and then switched quickly to this warrior. I've been playing him on and off ever since, he's got close to 170 days played on him. I've come up with a personality for him (I wouldn't actually say I roleplay him so much as I emphasize my curmudegonly side when I play him... I like to roleplay, mind, but I don't really put enough effort into it) but while he's got a lot of sentimental attachment for me, his major flaw is that he's a human, and Blizzard gave humans the dumbest emotes and /silly jokes in the game.

Well, okay, a couple of towers is funny. But the rest really just doesn't work for me anymore after having played the other options. In fact, what I really want to do is play my 70 draenei warrior instead. The problem there is, while he's on the same server, he's nowhere near as well geared for the content my guild is doing, and it's hardly fair to ask them to gear up another warrior for me.

Yes, I realize this is a really minor problem. But since WotLK is promising us more cutomization in the form of dances and haircuts, my pipe dream is that they'd allow me to either pay to transfer my soulbound equipment between my level 70 toons or allow me to pay a similar fee to a server transfer to change my race. I know there are PvE and PvP balance issues to be considered here, and I got myself into this situation by playing all these characters to 70, so I don't ever expect to see it happen. But man, I'd really like it if it did.

What about you? What one ridiculous, you know it's never going to happen but you can't stop wishing it would dream do you hold dear for the game?

Tipster Medros emails in pointing out that Blizzard has finally put the Wrath of the Lich King Bestiary online. In his email, he mentions that the TBC bestiary started showing us the long leggedy beasties of the first expansion roughly nine months before it launched, arguing for a summer release for WoTLK.

What with all the recent talk of what else might be in the expansion, I am starting to think it may launch sooner than that. It depends, in my opinion, on when Sunwell Plateau launches and if we can expect them to have learned from the original launch of Naxxramas so close to Burning Crusade. In my opinion, I'd hope there would be enough time between the Sunwell launch and the expansion for more guilds to get to see the place in full, especially with the way we're told content will unlock there as people complete quests. So I wouldn't be surprised to see it in late spring/early summer, nor would i be surprised if it didn't launch before Christmas of this year.

Meanwhile, take a look at the two new monsters being unveiled for us today and get your speculation on.

The Care and Feeding of Warriors spent some time looking back at 2007 not so long ago, and finds itself looking forward to 2008 and beyond this week. Matthew Rossi wants you to imagine a big swirly tube and either the Stargate or Dr. Who music playing, whichever you prefer. I'm more of a Dr. Who man myself, but as the omnipresent third person narrative device I don't think my opinion is much consulted. It's a hard life being a narrative device. No one ever asks you out for coffee.

As the somewhat emo italic text stated, this week we're going to look forward at where the Warrior class is going, a discussion I quite frankly think will be more interesting in the comments you leave than in my own ramblings. My goal here is mainly to serve as a firestarter, hoping to initiate a few sparks of brilliance from you. As a result, I'm going to just throw my musings and opinions at the wall here and see what sticks with you guys, what you accept and what you reject. After all, in the end it's the players who will ultimately determine what warriors will become, as they're the ones who'll chose what they do with their characters.

My first thought is, looking over the past few years, the trend is that warrior successes in PvP tend to be followed by large nerfs. So PvP warriors are almost certainly going to be nerfed in a rather large way if they remain dominant in PvP. I expect mace spec to see the lion's share of this nerfing, perhaps changed into an entirely unrecognizable form removing stuns entirely, but mortal strike is also up for a few changes. It will probably be safe for the next few months, as they just gave a similar effect to hunters and to change MS now would mean having to change that, too, but it will most likely come in whatever patch lays the preparations for Wrath of the Lich King. If not these, then some change to a fundamental warrior DPS/PvP mechanic, similar to the way weapon speed and rage generation were normalized.

Warriors with better gear still, despite nerfs like rage normalization, perform at a much higher rate than before they achieved it. My tauren warrior does much, much better in PvP now, even against opponents who substantially outgear him. In my biased experience, right around the time I start winning in PvP is when the nerfs start coming.

You can find all kinds of things on the forums. For instance, you can find a forum thread about Illidan. Back and forth the debate goes: does killing Illidan free him from his demonic taint or, well, just kill him? Will he come back or not? Is Maiev kind of a jerk? Bornakk weighs in on page two and continues to post throughout, which to be honest is what I like to see in a blue poster.

The debate on whether Illidan was a hero to his people, a misguided power-hungry ambitious sort, or even out and out evil is interesting on its own, but what really interests me is to see this level of back and forth, even if Bornakk doesn't really say a lot in his replies. It may just be the lore geek in me talking, but I'd really like to take Chris Metzen out for a beer and talk turkey about Illidan, Arthas and the storyline in WCIII. How is it going to manifest in WotLK, did it work out in TBC the way they wanted? Might we see Illidan again or is he definitively dead on the floor of Karabor? Does Maiev have any purpose to her life now? This kind of stuff fascinates me, and clearly it does some other folks as well given the back and forth of this thread.

What about you? Could you care less about lore? Do you want to see Illidan again? Was he a basically good but flawed hero or an out and out villain or both?

One of my guild's officers has taken up the dubious practice of "farming for Wrath of the Lich King." He has epic mounts for all his 70s, all the recipes he could ever want, and enough spare cash to pay alt support for an army of gnomes, but he's convinced there'll be some big, 20K or so gold sink in the new expansion.

The gold sinks for WoW have always been epic mounts: the epic ground mount in vanilla WoW, and the epic flyer in BC. I'm not sure what it could be for WotLK. I can't see that many people would spend a ton of money on PvP structures, which leaves a couple of options. There could be extremely expensive forms of character customization, such as tattoos, wings, or other adornments. There could be guild housing (finally.) My guildmates suggested that it will be submarines shaped like "sharks with frickin' lazer beams" and underpants "with rockets on the front", further confirming that my guild's sense of humor is stuck in 1997.

What do you think the gold sink will be when WotLK finally emerges from its cocoon?