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!
You’ve got to stop letting Matticus put your links up too. They’re all broken.
-or-
He’s never had a problem with them, maybe you should start letting him. 🙂
Thanks for the links, but please fix.
Excellent list! I’ll be pointing my kids over to this blog – they’ve had quite the experience with WoW.
Enjoy, Barbara
They weren’t ALL broken, just the ones where I forgot to put http://
Fix’d!
Even for the Reputation calculator alone this was a superb post. Thank you!
Apoptygmaas last blog post..Army Meets as the Drums of War Beat Steadily
http://www.wow-heroes.com/
I like it better than be.imba. Probably because it loads faster.