Death Knights are in the unique position of being open to every race (Warriors can choose any race but Blood Elf). This means you will have a lot of options for trying to pick the best racial bonuses for your new DK; complicating the matter is the fact that DKs can both tank and DPS. Milkgas, of Anvilmar (US), recently wrote in with the opinion that Dwarves would be optimal for a tanking DK, due to their frost resistance (speculating that frost will be prevalent in Wrath). But let's go over the options (listing only the racials that seem relevant to DKs):

• Horde:
  • Orc: Blood Fury would be handy for DPS, not so good for tanks; Hardiness, on the other hand, would be nice, if not essential, for a tank to have; and Axe Specialization is helpful, given that axes will be available for DKs to use as rune weapons (as well as swords and maces)
  • Tauren: War Stomp is great for PvP. Endurance is probably the best overall tanking racial out of all the races. And Nature Resistance will probably be handy somewhere, though it's not a huge deal.
  • Troll: Berserking is a useful, if occasional, boost.
  • Forsaken: I still contend that Will of the Forsaken is overpowered. May certainly come in handy while tanking, and of course in PvP. Shadow Resistance, like Nature Resistance, is a marginal benefit.
  • Blood Elf: It remains to be seen how the Mana Tap/Arcane Torrent system will work with DKs' Runic Power, but this has the potential to be very useful. Magic Resistance is, numerically, stronger than any other race's inherent resistance - you wind up with 25 points of resistance overall.

What was going on in World of Warcraft this time last year? Back in the Day looks into the past of WoW Insider and brings back posts notable, controversial and sometimes humorous reflecting the state of the game one year ago this week.

For the week of January 20 - 26, 2007:

The Burning Crusade had gone live just the week before and the race to have the first level 60 Draenei and Blood Elf was on. In less than four days posts were flying across message boards to claim the title of being the first. This feat is either impressive or pathetic depending on your point of view. Either way, the thrill is gone since the pre-60 increased leveling rate introduced in Patch 2.3 made it easier than ever to level up a new toon in no time at all.

Debates raged over two new issues brought on by the expansion: should the Draenei heal-over-time racial ability be usable by Draenei Priests in Shadowform and should Blizzard increase the spawn rate of quest mobs in Hellfire Peninsula to deal with the influx of half the player base after the same target?

For the first, Draenei Priests felt it was unfair to be cut off from Gift of the Naaru due to their spec choice while priests of other races didn't think it was right for blueberries to get a heal in Shadowform when no one else did. Blizzard didn't back down on this and kept the ability disabled for Draenei Priests shifting into the dark side.

Every Sunday, Eliah or Elizabeth will bring you their thoughts on the Priest class with Spiritual Guidance. Whether it's keeping your fellow players alive or melting their faces, you can read about it here!

Priests are an unusual class, because they're the only class in the game that has different skills available to them depending on their race. Each race gets two racial skills, most of which are minor, making minimal impact on your gameplay, but some of them are great skills that you'll find exceptionally helpful as you level up -- or at end game. The fact that some of them are useful and others are -- well, to be nice we'll just call them "less useful" -- is a point of contention amongst Priests. Priests who picked a race with a poor selection of racial skills complain that the skills are unbalanced, while Priests who selected a race with useful skills say that complainers simply lacked foresight when first creating their character.

Today we're going to look over the different racial abilities available to Priests and discuss whether the selection is really fair to Priest players.

I played through the first few levels as a Blood Elf Mage at E3 today. As a veteran of every other newbie land, I have to say that starting from scratch as a Blood Elf has a similar feel to the other races -- there's only so much you can do as a newbie, after all.

However, the newbie quests have an interesting twist. Thanks to the Blood Elves' Mana Tap racial, levelling downtime is reduced, and quests teach you how to use the racial effectively. It's going to be a really vital get-out-of-jail card -- when you Mana Tap enemies, their mana is reduced and you receive a buff with no immediate effect. You can stack this effect up to three times, and then unleash the Arcane Torrent racial to restore your much-needed mana at a time when it really counts. The cooldown means you can't use this all the time, but I can see it becoming really vital for healers, for instance.