We introduced you to the basics of using Thottbot, now let’s look at another resource that has great information you might not have heard of. Wowhead is another database site for WoW that I have come to use more and more. The interface is not as easy to browse for trade skills, but when it comes to looking up things for instances and quests, it wins hands-down.
Let’s look at two ways I would use wowhead. The first is to find out more about an instance boss or quest such as Shattered Halls. The second will lead us into something more advanced with talent tree research.
I’m about to go into Shattered Halls for the first time. Some guildies are afk, and so it’s a pick-up game. As it turns out, only one member of the group has ever been there before, and didn’t finish. Now what do we do? I hit wowhead right away and type shattered halls into the search box. Up pops a screen that lists 1 item associated with this keyword, and 1 zone. Let’s click into the zone tab.
The zone tab gives me the hyperlink to exactly what I was looking for, the instance itself. Once I go to the page for the zone, I am probably looking at everything I need to know to complete this instance (considering my team works well together).
The first page will start with a description and general information about Shattered Halls and lists reputation gained from running the instance as well as the requirements to enter and even open heroic mode. Under this description are 8 more tabs full of information. It defaults to the drops for the normal version of the instance where I can browse through the killer loot. Let’s look at the bosses tab now.
The bosses tab shows me four boss names for this instance, and I want to know about the first one – Blood Guard Porung. Borung’s page also opens to his own loot list tab, but what I want to do is check out the comments from other players about this guy. Well, we have nothing to worry about. This boss only spawns in heroic mode, so I’ll go back one page and check out Grand Warlock Nethekurse.
On his comments page we see that he uses two abilities, death coil and void zones. He also has a shadow bolt volley at 20% life. In order to beat him it says to run out of the little void zones and really go hard at DPS once he hits 20% or the shadow bolt spam volleys are a certain wipe. There is even a link to a video tutorial on this guy.
This technique of looking for information about zones, drops and bosses etc. are available at wowhead for virtually anything. I find the comments segments at wowhead to be more useful than those at Thottbot, since arguments over silly things are rare at wowhead.
Now lets go to the browse button in the top left of the screen. We get a pop-down list – let’s go spells>talents>druid>feral combat. Now click on the link for predatory strikes rank 3.
The next page will list all the ranks in this talent, as well as a comments and screenshots tab. Let’s see what folks say about predatory strikes. Looks like it’s not a real popular choice, but necessary for Heart of the Wild, so if you’re thinking of going feral combat, this is probably a necessary talent to choose.
I just love wowhead for that kind of information. There is also a clone of blizzard’s talent tree calculator, but it loads a lot faster on this site.
For those of you who were dissapointed when I did the article on Thottbot, you now know we like wowhead as well. There are really quite a few good places to find information for WoW, and no single one of them does everything well. Wowhead is another one of the sites we use a LOT.