THE ORACLES:

Who am I kidding? You're here for the Mysterious Egg, same as everybody else. But along the way -- or possibly beyond it -- you might pick up a few good pieces.

• Glitterscale Wrap -- Revered, Level 78: Surprisingly good melee belt. Armor penetration prejudices it toward cat DPS although it's fine as a threat stat for bear, and it's otherwise solid. At 80 you'll want to have Trollwoven Girdle crafted for tanking (and possibly kitty if you're not doing so hot on +expertise from other pieces) if you don't get Jorach's Crocolisk Skin Belt from badges or the Sharp-Barbed Leather Belt from heroic Utgarde, but Glitterscale will tide you over til then.
  

• Fishy Cinch -- Revered, Level 78: An equally useful Restoration belt, although we're back to cloth again. No +crit or +haste to muck up the item budget; just good solid stats all around and a great chunk of spirit. If you can afford to give that up, however, then you may want to spend more time working on Ebon Blade rep for Belt of Dark Mending.
  

• Oracle Talisman of Ablution -- Exalted, Level 70(?): A level 70 trinket available at exalted with a Wrath faction is kind of a head-scratcher, but eh. The amount of crit on this, as a Wowhead commenter correctly observes, is 1.55% at level 80 -- more, obviously, if you manage to get the trinket before that. The straight +crit trinkets available from the Skyguard at exalted were actually pretty good at 70, but the introduction of Savage Roar into a cat DPS rotation generally, I think, argues for the use of trinkets granting more attack power (or an attack power use/proc). The energy/rage/mana return here could be useful while leveling or while grinding, however.

THE FRENZYHEART TRIBE:

One of the irritating things about the Oracle/Frenzyheart faction fight is that switching between the two will make you unable to use gear from both as your reputation rises and falls. If you're dependent on a piece from either of the factions until you get a drop, crafted, or badge piece, you'll want to keep that in mind.

• Azure Strappy Pants -- Revered, Level 78: The Oracles do belts; the Frenzyheart do pants. As with Glitterscale, this is a surprisingly solid piece for where it is, and possibly better for cat DPS than the Mind-Expanding Leggings available from the Kirin Tor depending on your current +expertise versus +hit. Time to fire up Rawr again.
  

• Muddied Crimson Gloves -- Revered, Level 78: The glove counterpart to the Oracles' Fishy Cinch and another fine, no-nonsense, Restoration piece with straight stats and good +spellpower. Grotto Mist Gloves from heroic Azjol-Nerub are better, unless you can somehow dig up the materials for Moonshroud Gloves -- which, at less than a month into the expansion, is going to be very difficult.
  

• Frenzyheart Insignia of Fury -- Exalted, Level 70: The proc, per Wowhead commentary, appears to be +91 critical strike rating. Undeniably useful, but again, you'll find better trinkets at 80, and quite sadly the proc is of more use to cat Druids than the actual equip on the trinket (haste, as noted, is not an amazing stat for us). It's better for moonkin, but still primarily a trinket oriented toward leveling.

Whew. Next week we'll cover the Argent Crusade, the Knights of the Ebon Blade, and the Sons of Hodir. Until then, good luck with the rep grinds you're on and the dungeons you're running (especially if it's Ymiron on heroic Utgarde Pinnacle).

Click here to head back to the beginning of the guide.

If you're still trying to decide whether to grind rep with the Oracles or the Frenzyheart in Sholozar Basin, here's something that might make up your mind: The Mysterious Egg, a reputation reward at revered with the Oracles. You'll have to keep the egg on you for 7 days, but at the end of those 7 days, it will hatch into a few things. Most of the time, the egg will be a "dud," and you get an Aged Yolk.

Some of the other possibilities, however, are pretty dang cool.

Throughout the lifespan of Ask a Beta Tester (now The Queue), people have asked if there are any factions like the Aldor and Scryers. Are there two factions like that, you get to pick one or the other? The answer is yes, but they don't play as big of a role. They're less prime players of the expansion, and more lolcat comedy relief.

I'm convinced that this situation in Sholazar Basin isn't to be determined by which faction you like more, but which faction you hate less. The two warring factions are The Oracles and the Frenzyheart Tribe. The Oracles are a group of fully sentient, 'intelligent' gorlocs (a step up in murloc evolution) that unknowingly worship the Titans. The Frenzyheart Tribe are a tribe of wolvar (little wolverine men) and they're fairly new to Sholazar Basin. They're huge jerks that do jerk things and steal gorloc land like jerks. The gorlocs do have big, annoyingly floppy tongues though, so I guess it's justified.

Building up to Wrath's release, we've been showing you previews of each of the world zones of Northrend. Sholazar Basin and Zul'Drak are two of the remaining zones you probably haven't yet seen, so if you're interested, links to the galleries are below.

Sholazar Basin is Northrend's Un'goro Crater, and has a pleasing mix of the familiar and the unfamiliar. A testing grounds of sorts for the Titans, you run into a lot of unusual lifeforms here like the Oracles, a race of intelligent murloc-esque creatures who are at war with the Frenzyheart Tribe of Wolvar. This is also the new hunting ground of Hemet Nesingwary, and trust me when I say his quests aren't nearly as awful this time around.

Zul'Drak is the center of one of the last Troll Empires, home of the Drakkari Ice Trolls. Under heavy assault from the Scourge, the Drakkari Empire has pooled their resources and pulled back to their capital, using some rather desperate measures to ensure their survival. Your first major Argent Crusade quest hubs are in this zone, and our old friends of the Zandalar Tribe will be meeting up with us here as well.

Edit: As always, if you're trying to avoid any and all spoilers, these galleries are not for you. There are no heavy plot spoilers contained within, but there are some light ones. If you don't like spoilers, don't look.

Isn't this fella cute? Sooo cute? Adorable!? No? He isn't? Yeah, i don't think so either. We'll get back to these horrible abominations a little later, because Meethan asked...

Is Hunger For Blood, the 51 point Assassination talent, at all useful for solo leveling?

I asked a friend of mine about this since I don't personally play a Rogue, and he says popular opinion is that Hunger for Blood is mostly going to be a PvP talent. Keeping the damage buff up constantly while questing isn't worthwhile, and the debuff clearing it provides will be highly situational while soloing through Northrend. You can take it if you're gung ho about Assassination, but you'd be better served picking up something else until you start PvPing often.

Drewcast asked...

Are there or will there be any Aldor vs. Scryer type factions?

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.

Just in case you missed it the other week, my absolute favorite part of all the new expansion news was that we will, for the first time ever, be doing something with Murlocs besides killing them. In the Borean Tundra, there will apparently be two Aldor- and Scryer-like factions, with one being called "Wolvar" and consisting of "wolverine people" of some kind (probably not the same as Worgen), and the other being our favorite gurgling landfish.

Which is not only awesome because, man, we sure missed Murlocs in Outland, and also because apparently the Oracles (that's what the faction will be called) will be a reputation faction, so we'll actually get to earn reputation with Murlocs. We have no idea how we'll possibly communicate with them, though -- rumor is that they're "more evolved" than the murlocs we've been fighting so far, but it would be super out-of-place to see a Murloc saying anything other than "Murrrglgglrrlgglll!!"

Then again, we already know it's possible (at least unofficially) to capture a live Murloc and develop a translator. Never underestimate the power of goblin ingenuity, I guess.

WorldofWar.net also got an invitation to the Blizzard event this past week (our invitation must have been lost in the mail, maybe?), and they've got six full pages of text about what they saw. Six pages hard to read though, so we've got all the salient points right here:

• Both Jeff Kaplan and Tom Chilton presented, with Kaplan showing off the Death Knight class and Chilton showing off the work they've done on Northrend.
• The Forsaken-designed starting town Vengeance Landing was shown off -- this was the same area we got to play back at Blizzcon, as well as Utgarde Keep
  
• They also got to see Valliance Keep (the other Alliance starting area), and Warsong Hold, a huge gothic iron structure run by Garosh Hellscream that Kaplan apparently called the "new look " of the Horde
• Horde players will be taking a Zepplin up to Northrend
• The Nexus, in the Coldarra part of the Borean Tundra, is the first instance on the western side of Northrend from Utgarde Keep, and it's a three wing instance with a raid dungeon where players will meet Malygos.
• The Badge of Justice system will continue in Northrend, but there will be new tokens to act as Badges and be returned for loot.

Lots more after the break.