Murphy’s 13 Laws of Raiding

by

Who exactly is Murphy and what are his laws? Regardless, I came up with this briefly last night before going to bed and I’m sure several of you can relate to it. Curse you, Murphy!

1: That heal that you casted on the tank at the last possible second will land but they will always die.
2: The item that you want will drop when you’re not there on the character that needs it.
3: When working on Teron Gorefiend, the player who has never done it before will always be chosen to do Gorefiend ghosts first.
4: If you have 2 Druids and a player dies, both Druids will use their battle res on the same person at the same time.
5: Key players will somehow be prevented from showing up on progression nights.
6: Dropping heals after activating trinkets will result in a 100% overheal because that nefarious Paladin managed to top him up before you did.
7: The new item you spent half your gold on in order to enchant and gem will be replaced within a week.
8: The word “oops” will always precede a spectacular wipe.
9: One person signalling a bio break will cause a chain reaction throughout the entire raid for the rest of them to use the bathroom.
10: When summer is here, odds are good that established raiding guilds will disband.
11: Rolling 100 will occur when you least expect it and will be used on items that you don’t really need or want.
12: Heroism will be used to kill a boss and you will still end up with having 30 seconds left over.
13: Spell procs kick in after the target’s already dead.

Would you add any others to this list?

Time Saving Tip in Black Temple

by

Black Temple’s a sickeningly long instance. My guild only logs about 12 hours a week raiding. I’m hoping to appeal to some raiding readers for some help. Aside from the usual time saving tips in Black Temple, can you think of other ways to shave minutes or even seconds off while clearing through?

Here’s an example:

A variety of tricks can be used in conjunction with Blessed Medallion of Karabor. This means your Guild will have to have killed Illidan. Anyways, when you kill Teron Gorefiend, equip the Medallion and use it to port to the entrance. Hop on to your mount of choice and zoom into the entrance. Talk to the Draenaneanainnie ghost (thanks Ratshag), and you’ll get ported to the other Draenaneanainnie ghost. While it may not seem like much, it has the effect of shaving five years off the run down (to me at least).

Aside from that, do you have any time saving tips? Are there any particular mobs that can be skipped? Shortcuts that no one knows about? This doesn’t have to even be limited to Black Temple. I’m thinking about compiling a future post on raiding shortcuts and I’d love to hear some more from the readers!

(On other note, approaching the 500k traffic mark. Oh boy.)

WoW Resources for the Wyn

by

tools
Image courtesy of woodsy

I’m a tremendous advocate of using all the tools available to evaluate and improve your toon, your gear, and your gameplay. (It’s how I first met Matt!) Hands-down, the most valuable resources for learning to play are other players willing to share their experiences. Even with access to some great minds, though, it helps to know what questions to ask to get the most bang for your buck. Besides that, I’m an information junkie. These are, in no particular order, some of the resources that have helped me the most in my quest for Priestly perfection.

Be.Imba.hu – The first online character auditor. Takes a look at your gear, the available gems, enchants, and add-ons and gives you a solid opinion of what stats are best for you, and what level of content is appropriate. I’ve found it a little cut-and-dry, but a very useful place to start.

GankBang – The armory, comparative. Wanna know how you stack up to the other Priests on your server? Wonder no more. Great tables, which you can organize by stat, show you how you compare. Be aware that you may need to manually update or add players.

warcrafter – The ultimate armory sandbox. Load your character, change enchants, gems, or see what your stats would be if you were in full T6. (Or T3!) Now you can REALLY find out if +6 stats or +15 spirit to chest is a better idea.

Arena Points Calculator – Arena points calculator. Plug in your rating, guesstimate your points. Hooray!

WoW Reputation Calculator – Tells you how much rep you need to hit the next level with any Burning Crusade faction. And tells you how many instance runs it’d take to earn it. This gem has helped that 21000 rep look much, much more manageable, and helped me make decisions of which instance to run for max. rep reward.

Warcraft Realms – Statistic crawler for all realms. If you feel like your faction is hopelessly outnumbered… it just might be. This sucker breaks down all kinds of information – and is especially helpful if you need to know when it’s time to start recruiting from off-server.

WoW Character Watch – Allows you to stalk anyone and everyone. Really great if you want to follow up with an applicant or a former guildie.

Edit: I dunno how I forgot this one, but Mapwow is Google-based maps for WoW. It shows herbalism nodes, mining nodes, and a million other VERY handy things.

WoW Web Stats – Upload your combat log for a bird’s eye-view of what really happened. Have a few different people from the same raid do it for extra well-rounded-ness and you have a hell of a tool for improving not just your own gameplay, but the synergy of the entire raid.

Love forums? Two you should check out are the official Blizzard Priest forums (No, Really!) and Elitist Jerks. (I have another favorite that Matt launched a while ago which you are no doubt already familiar with.)

Here are my favorite threads from the first two:

Lux et Umbra  – The greatest intro-to-priesting guide I’ve ever read. I have stolen so, so, so much from her….

Elitist Jerk’s Holy Raiding Compendium – Required reading for any Priest wanting to raid.

Another great guide written by DwarfPriest – it’s a work in progress, but holy cow, what a piece of work

I left off things like the Armory, WoWhead, Bosskillers, and WoWwiki. If you’re reading World of Matticus, and you DON’T know about those sites, you should’ve spent a little more time getting to know Google.

Luv,
Wyn

P.S. I gotta stop letting Matt write my headlines!