Welcome to Ask a Lore Nerd, the column that answers your questions about the story and lore of the Warcraft universe. Click the Comments link below, ask your question, and blogger/columnist Alex Ziebart will answer you in a future installment!
Two weeks ago, when I was going through my queue of questions, one stuck out as especially complex. Sean Riley inquired about the beliefs and practices of the various Azerothian religions. This topic really excited me as I kind of have a thing for analyzing religion and faith. I would never claim to be an authority on theology, but it's stlil something that is very interesting to me. Warcraft lore combined with theology? Yes please! Obviously this isn't really the place to analyze and debate religion, but taking time out to research the gaps in my knowledge on this particular topic was incredibly fun for me.
Unforunately, I didn't have the space in that week's column to fit the answer to that question in, nor did I really have the time. It was a broad question and needed to invest a hefty amount of time into it. This one question has filled today's column, and while that may be disappointing to some that are waiting their turn, I hope it's an interesting read regardless.
As I've mentioned before, The Darkmoon Faire is currently in Terrokar Forest, just outside Shattrath City, so if you have decks to turn in or need to refill your private stock of Darkmoon Special Reserve, now's the time to get on it. But if you're still a little bit taken aback by the prospect of gathering all those cards, or wondering if the trinket at the end will really be worth it, we'd like to help you out.
In this post, we'll be looking at both the old and new decks and listing some pros and cons of each deck so you can figure out if you want to spend the next month tracking down cards before the Faire shows up in Elwynn Forest in March, or even if you just want to blow your epic flying mount fund on getting a deck before it leaves for the month.
Totem Talk talks about totems this week, in a stunning and entirely unexpected turn of events that no one could possibly have forseen even if said non forseeing types were actually Farseer Nobundo himself. Well, okay, he probably could have seen this coming. Matthew Rossi once again apologizes for the incoherence of the introductory paragraph. He didn't see this coming.
Okay, so you have decided to roll a new shaman. You start off in the starting area, fresh faced and ready to run around dropping totems only to discover you haven't got one yet. Confused, you run around with a mace hitting things until you reach level four, when the questgivers suddenly remember Oh, right, this class is supposed to be about dropping pointed, decorative sticks into the ground and you get your first totem quest.
The totem quests are a fun, sometimes easy, sometimes challenging way for a new shaman to get a handle on the class. Well, I think they're fun, anyway. Except that water one, that one is hard for a horde to pull off... well, to be fair it's not much easier for alliance, really. As you might expect, horde and alliance shamans have different questgivers and as such different quests in (mostly) different zones. The horde ones require a bit more travel than the alliance ones, which were put in for the expansion and, in my opinion, are slightly better in their design and play. But that's to be expected as Blizzard put the lessons they'd learned designing the original quests into play for the new ones.
Anyway, we'll talk about the horde quests first, as is fitting for horde shamans have been around longer.
You laughed when I said it, readers. You said I was just whining. You called my character a "dirty Shaman." You even told me to reroll Hunter! Yes, when I suggested Shaman pets to Blizzard, you tried to laugh me off the Internet. But the new talents and spells came out this week, and lo and behold, look what Blizzard added to the Shaman class.
That's right, suckers! Pets! Ok, well, I didn't get my shadow wolf, but two new totems will give Shamans the ability to summon at least two elementals-- a Fire Elemental (to "rain down destruction"-- sounds like a caster), and an Earth Elemental. I suggested we should get them for sixty seconds, but Blizz doubled that, and we will get to have them around for a whole two minutes in the expansion. Serves you all right for questioning my suggestions. Don't do it again!
And there's more pets on the way-- Mages have picked up a 41 point talent that will summon a Water Elemental for them to play around with. And while the Druid (or "Drood" as I like to call them) talents haven't been officially released yet, the rumors say they'll get their very own Treant (that has some really neat talents of its own). Pets for everyone! Although maybe this is why they lowered the raid limit to 25. If everybody brings a pet, you'll have 50 entities fighting on your side. Sweet!
You laughed when I said it, readers. You said I was just whining. You called my character a "dirty Shaman." You even told me to reroll Hunter! Yes, when 
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