In an effort to further balance the game, Koraa levitated over to the Priest Beta forums to drop the bomb that Blizzard was canning all Priest racial abilities in an upcoming Beta build. This comes long after Fear Ward, formerly a Dwarf racial ability for Priests, was made baseline and trainable at Level 20. However, Koraa makes a few important points, the most notable being that Desperate Prayer, the Human and Dwarf Priest racial ability, will become the 11-point talent for Holy. Holy Nova, on the other hand, will become baseline. Desperate Prayer will likely be retuned to better fit an 11-point talent (it currently has a 10 minute cooldown).

Koraa adds that the formerly Undead Priest racial Devouring Plague will also become a baseline spell, with a reduced cooldown of 30 seconds (down from 3 minutes) and "greatly reduced" mana cost. The Draenei racial ability Symbol of Hope will be renamed Hymn of Hope and also become a baseline ability, now restoring 5% of total mana every 2 seconds for 8 seconds to the priest's party members. All other racial abilities, from Starshards to Shadowguard, will be removed from the game. Enjoy them now before Patch 3.0 hits!

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. For the next few weeks (unless it's something game breaking), Matt will do his best to guide you through the Priest leveling process!

Wrath is almost upon us. As a result, you may have decided that you have nothing better to do then to roll a Priest! A quick glance at the WI leveling guides shows completed class guides for every almost every other class but Priests!

This must be changed. The countdown has begun.

Yes, our weekly podcast will be live in a few hours on WoW Radio (starting up at 3:30pm Eastern), and it'll be a doozy -- Zach Yonzon will join us from his home in the Philippines to talk about PvP to PvE transfers, what's up with the nerfs in the latest beta build, and what other updates Blizzard has for racial abilities. Duncor will be back on (Turpster is, unfortunately, still in Florida), so we'll talk to him to see what he thinks about Mirror Image, Heirloom items, and whether he has any good insights about the AH.

Plus, we'll have your emails and insights from the IRC chat -- you can join us in IRC at irc.mmoirc.com in the #wowradio channel during the show, or just click "chat" on the top of the WoW Radio site. And even if you can't make it, you can definitely email us -- just drop a note to theshow@wowinsider.com, and you might even hear it on the air.

Should be a good time as always, and I'm very curious to hear how the PvE to PvP transfers discussion goes -- while I'm sure Zach is a big fan, not everyone is, so we'll see what can be said about that. See you at 3:30 this afternoon on WoW Radio!

Racials received a significant revamp recently in the LK beta. But it looks like they're already dissatisfied with "The Fall of Humanity," a new human racial that basically mimics Hunter Feign Death (but without the threat drop), and will be mostly giving it to Night Elves in the form of a Shadowmeld rework instead. The racial that will be replacing it is called Every Man for Himself, and reads as follows: Removes all movement impairing effects and all effects which cause loss of control of your character. This effect shares a cooldown with other similar effects, such as the PvP trinket.

As Vaneras notes, this now gives you the chance to not equip your PvP trinket, essentially giving you an extra trinket slot in PvP. But isn't this basically an amped-up Escape Artist? Doesn't seem very fair to the poor gnomes. I guess Escape Artist doesn't share a cooldown with the trinket, though.

Even as a PvE player, this will come in handy quite often, I expect. I certainly make liberal use of shapeshifting breaking movement impairing effects on my Druid. And hey, as long as they're not removing Diplomacy like I originally thought, they can do whatever they want with the other human racials as far as I'm concerned. Just let me stay diplomatic.

Edit: Shadowmeld now works as follows: Activate to slip into the shadows, reducing the chance for enemies to detect your presence. Lasts until cancelled or upon moving. Any threat is restored versus enemies still in combat upon cancellation of this effect.

If you haven't already checked out the list of updated racial abilities, you should. Some have been nerfed, others were buffed, and new ones, like the "Voodoo Shuffle" were added.

While racials are a nice bonus, they can weigh heavily on your racial decision when rolling a given class. For example, many Horde warriors roll Tauren because of the 5% health increase. This conflicts with rolling the race that you'd prefer combined with the class you desire.

There has been much speculation about what it would be like to be able to choose your own racials, and reader Mike even came up with a talent tree method for doing just that.

If you were given the power to choose, which three or four would you choose, and why? Keep in mind the overall balance which generally includes a passive ability, an active one, and one or two minor buffs to stats such as resistances, health, or professions.

It looks like Blizzard isn't done tinkering with everything for Wrath of the Lich King. This time, they've turned their attention to racial abilities, which many have pointed out to be imbalanced. Kalgan dropped by the forums to answer a good question regarding the Orc racial Hardiness, which grants a passive 15% resistance to stuns. It's been nerfed a long way from its original 25% resistance, but the poster made a good point about the game's direction towards reduced durations instead of resistances.

Kalgan responds by saying that Hardiness was being changed into exactly that -- an effect duration reduction of 15%. He also goes over all the other racials, some of which were changed, others of which were buffed, and yet a few others of which were inevitably nerfed. The changes should make it into the next Beta push. Check after the break to see the complete list. [CLARIFICATION: This isn't the complete list of racial abilities. Abilities not listed here are unchanged or, if they will be changed, will be mentioned in the future.]

Welcome back to another edition of Ask A Beta Tester! I've stolen the reins from Elizabeth and Alex for a day, so let's get into last week's comments and get some questions answered.

Death Knights:

Multiple people had lots of questions about Death Knights, so I'm just going to list a bunch of them and then delve into what's going on: How Customizable are Death Knights? Do they get unique skintones, or unique racials?

As to Death Knight Customization, the big difference they have right now are glowing blue eyes for every race. You can see that in action in our Death Knight racial gallery. Unfortunately, I think the Blue Eyes look sort of pasted on for most races, so I'm hoping they keep tweaking that to make them look more natural. We've also been promised different sounding emotes -- every Death Knight will have a deeper, sepulchral voice.

So with WoTLK fast approaching, there's still plenty of discussion and debate about that whole Death Knights being all races thing. We've already covered the lore aspect, but another thing lot of people have been discussion is how Racial abilities will work with Death Knights. Some people are concerned that abilities like Gift of the Naaru aren't something a Death Knight steeped in shadow should be able to use. Now me, I think that if the Naaru can forgive the Blood Elves for M'uru, they can forgive Draenei Death Knights and give them back Gift of the Naaru.

Still, commenter Clayton sent an intriguing thought into WoW Insider's secret headquarters the other day: Who says Death Knights have to use racials? When you consider what a Death Knight is, there's at least some measure of sense to it. Death Knights have undergone a radical change. They're suffused with dark energies, they have forsaken what they knew of love and life and light, they have forsaken whatever skills they knew in the past, all to take up the Runeblade. It is true that not all Death Knights become actual undead, but the total control the Lich King exerts over them leeches away much of their former identity. Because of this, it seems possible that Death Knights could have lost their connection with their racial identities, and through that, their racial abilities.

This could also be a quick and easy way to ensure a bit of balance between the various races. There's a whole lot of considerations to made with racials and Death Knight abilities. Will Arcane Torrent combined with anti-magic tanking abilities just make Blood Elf Death Knights too powerful against casters in PvP? Giving Death Knights their own unique set of "racials" based around their class would be an easy way to sidestep this, and probably justifiable since Death Knights are their own seperate "hero" class category. Then again, it might put them under undue pressure to make special racials for all other hero classes as well, so they might want to stay more flexible.

Which side of the issue do you fall on? Should they keep it simple and just keep the racials like they always have? Or do the Death Knights need a whole new set of racial abilities, and if so, what?

It's an exciting time to be playing WoW, what with the WoTLK alpha information leaking out (Thanks for risking your eternal soul to break the NDA, anonymous screenshotter!) and 2.4 being pretty much a roaring success. By now, I'm sure everyone has settled in and is making plans for WoTLK, figuring out which zone they'll go to first, maybe setting aside a bit of money from all those dailies to powerlevel a trade skill.

So, I was thinking the other day of one more thing I was planning: switching mains. We've discussed the art of switching mains a bit before, but there's always a lot of hassles to it: there's the concern that you'll fall behind your friends, the concern that your gear won't be good enough, the concern that you'll have to grind your reputation up for certain keys and essential reputation rewards all over again.

A new expansion is just the ticket for getting rid of most of those problems. As long as your character is max level at the start of WoTLK, they can catch up on gear pretty quickly just from level 71 greens and quest rewards. Everyone's starting out grinding all the new WoTLK reputation grinds, so no worries that you're behind on those either. Despite being on a relatively "new" character, you'll be able to join your friends in Utgarde Keep right away.

So the reasons not to switch mains mostly manage to resolve themselves when a new expansion hits, and the question becomes, do you want to switch mains, and why?