In Case You Hadn’t Heard – Mounts Getting Another Radical Change in Patch 3.2

Just in case you don’t like the podcast and have not been watching trade chat (which I don’t), you might have missed one of the more significant changes coming in patch 3.2.  And you might as well brace yourselves now for all the whining and wailing that’s about to happen in this thread.

I don’t know why change makes everyone so weird.  Just bear in mind that as the game progresses Blizz has simply got to make the lower end content move faster.  Otherwise people will just be completely overwhelmed with the enormity of what they are about to have to do and just chuck it.

So over the last year we’ve seen a LOT of changes that make leveling faster so much easier than ever before.  Increased XP across the board, mounts at level 30, and the piece’ de resistance – Refer a friend.   Plus a whole bunch more that I’m sure made a difference but i sleep from time to time, and I’m getting older, so I forgot them.

So let’s just deal with what’s out in front of us shall we?  You can’t forget something you haven’t done yet (how’s that for a philosophical position eh)?  Patch 3.2 has a lot of tasty tidbits, and we expect it very soon, so let’s cover one of the biggies – mounts.  And just so you know we’re being as accurate and up-to-date as is humanly possible we’ve ripped the information directly from the test realm patch notes page as of this afternoon just minutes before this post goes live.

• The cast time for summoning any ground mount is now 1.5 seconds, down from 3 seconds.
• Apprentice Riding (Skill 75): Can now be learned at level 20 for 4 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 20 directing them to the riding trainer.
• Journeyman Riding (Skill 150): Can now be learned at level 40 for 50 gold. Mail will be sent to players who reach level 40 directing them back to the riding trainer.
• Expert Riding (Skill 225): Can now be learned at level 60 for 600 gold from trainers in Honor Hold or Thrallmar. Faction discounts now apply (Honor Hold for Alliance; Thrallmar for Horde). Flight speed at this skill level has been increased to 150% of run speed, up from 60%.
• Artisan Riding (Skill 300): Faction discounts now apply (Honor Hold or Valiance Expedition for Alliance; Thrallmar or Warsong Offensive for Horde).
• In order to further equalize the number of purchasable mounts available to each race, a new 60% speed ground mount has been added for night elves, and a new 100% speed ground mount has been added for the undead.
• Flying over Dalaran and Wintergrasp is now possible so long as players keep a healthy distance above the ground.

WoW – your first mount at level 20, epic ground at 40.  Seriously, that’s a mount before you leave your extended starting zones!  Follow that with Flying mount as soon as you hit Outlands and epic flyer DISCOUNTS for rep.  But by far my favorite in the whole dang list is the fact that the regular flying mount isn’t such a lame excuse for an upgrade any more and actually gets a significant speed increase.

Past that – ALL mounts now cast twice as fast.  No big guess where this one came from, and honestly I’m not sure why mount casts stayed that long this far into the game.  Instant cast shaman and druid forms against 3 second mounts – sigh barely covers it.  Cutting it in half makes it a lot more livable.

And even though it’s last, the change in the ability to fly over WG and Dal was just a necessity.  really, is there anyone who thinks that the auto-dismount was just about the dumbest thing ever?  It was truly one of the silliest things in the game.  this tweak will end a lot of frustration for me.  It’s a little late to help my own toons, but I won’t have to complain as much internally any more (probably).

So for all of you who have been putting off plopping down 5k on yet another epic flyer, but your third alt has all the rep in the world, it’s about to be your lucky day.  Then again, you may just decide that the K-Mart mount isn’t quite as lame as all that now that it has at least a little zip to it.

Plus, if we’re going to go in for conjecture, this also looks like you can have your epic flyer for full price right at level 60, and there have been sources that have prognosticated you will be able to grab your cold weather flying as soon as you hit 70 and set foot in Northrend.

We’ve actually been kinda holding off on some of our leveling on the ally side for a bit to take maximum advantage of the mount changes alone.  Why run when you can ride right?  In our book, these mount buffs are a very welcome change.

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Adventures in Healing – Part 1

So, some people have decided to go start playing allies. “Ok,” said I, “I shall make a Priest!”
Not only that, I will level as Discipline spec! Off to a new server, soon I gave birth to Compy, the level 22 human priest. I thought it would be fun to heal my way to 80 in instances and simultaneously prove my theory that allies are dumb. Boy, was I right.

Today, I was invited into a group for The Deadmines. The group consisted of 2 paladins, a hunter, a warlock and me.

The paladin who was “tanking” was level 22 but thought he was level 74. He ran around pulling as many of the non-elite peasants and elite guys as he could. He also did so in quick succession with no regard for my (or anyone else’s, including his own) mana pool. Did I mention he was using a 2-Handed Sword? At least he knew enough to use Righteous Fury. Let’s call him Tankzilla.

The other paladin in the group was also using a 2-Hander because he was “DPS.” Oh, but that didn’t stop him from using Righteous Fury too! In fact, that was the only spell he cast the entire time. His mana was locked at 100% and didn’t budge. I’m not an expert on paladins, but don’t they get more than Retribution Aura and Righteous Fury by level 20? Maybe he didn’t want to pay the gold to train all those other useless abilities.

Before we even got into the instance, the EPIC LEWTS started a-droppin’, and by EPIC LEWTS I mean Weighted Sap and Medicine Staff of the Wolf. Predictably, the level 16 Hunter in the group NEEDED every green, much to the dismay of the poor level 17 warlock who flooded party chat with threats to leave if “that $#%@ hunter wont stop needing!!!” Eventually, the hunter started passing and that made the warlock happy. So happy that he would disenchant what he won in the middle of battle.

Due to my epic healing skill, we defeated Rhahk’Zor, the first boss. We stood around for the patrol to come, killed it, and then Tankzilla the Zealous pulled the entire next room. After all that, the final roll for Rhahk’Zor’s Hammer came in. It was the hunter. He needed. I mean, look at those epic hunter stats!

Then, the Hunter left the group and hearthed. The Warlock was so pissed.

Shortly afterward, we wiped, and I get a whisper from Tankzilla:

To [Compy]: can u rez at all?
To [Tankzilla]: I can run back to my body and rez
To [Compy]: kk do that
To [Tankzilla]: How old are you?
To [Compy]: 13, why?

/leave

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The Domination Podcast – Episode 18

This week the crew tries to add a new member to the team and, needless to say, it’s not the smoothest process in the world.  They finally do settle on a candidate for the new Summer Intern position – a lovely lady named Darkangel.  the rest you’re just going to have to hear for yourself.

The Domination Podcast Episode 18

 

 Episode 18 [15:14m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download

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Everything you need to know to FaceRoll your way to 10K threat

So far we’ve covered: The Basics, Combat Ratings and Gearing Philosophy. Today we’ll go over the hit tables and  how to generate threat … and keep it!

But before we go into threat, it may be a good idea to cover just how  Blizzard deals with the Hit Tables. When you read somewhere that you have an 18.54% chance to crit or that you have a 8% chance to miss how does that get factored in ?

Most people are under the impression that every one of those “rolls” is separate and sequential but that is false! In fact there is only one roll for every ability/spell/action that you do, it just gets divided up into %s. Say you have 5% chance to miss (not Hit capped), 5% chance to get Dodged, 5% chance to get parried, 5% chance to get Blocked and 15% chance to crit: the Roll would look something like this

• 01 -05 : Miss

• 06 – 10 : Parry

• 11 – 15 : Dodge

• 16 – 20 : Block

• 21 – 85 : Hit

• 86 – 100 : Crit

One /roll is done on your behalf (or the mob’s behalf) and the result is plugged into this matrix. In reality it’s much more like a /roll 10,000 to factor in the fractions 14.54% chance to crit but you are getting the picture, and the same thing goes on for the mobs.

If you  have a 5% chance to be missed,  20.25% chance to Parry, 22.50% chance to Dodge, 27.9% chance to Block (because you read the previous article and built a block set before the patch)  and have 540 Defense Rating, the mob’s hit table for attacking you might look something like this

• 0.01 – 5.0 : Miss

• 5.01 – 25.25 : Parry

• 25.26 – 47.75 : Dodge

• 47.76 – 75.65 : Block

• 75.66 – 100.00 : Hit  (0% crit)

Now these base values are obviously modified by talent Procs and abilities: If Holy Shield is active then your chance of getting hit for the full amount go down by 30% and you block goes up by 30%. If Redoubt procs at the same time (10% chance) then your chance to block goes up by another 30% and so on and so forth.

The important thing to note here is that every one of those 3 stats has a direct impact on your chance to get hit.  The more Dodge, Parry and Block you can get the less you’ll be getting hit. Obviously you can’t go below 0% chance to get hit, but you should be starting to get the picture.

Generating Threat

Now, let talk about Threat baby, let’s talk about you (the Mob) and Me (Paladin), let’s talk about all the things we love (Loot), Let’s talk about Threat!  (Ok,  that was a really bad Salt’n Pepa spoof, so let’s get on with the show)!

A paladin’s primary Threat generating ability is Righteous Fury(RF) and all Holy damage. All of the paladin’s abilities are Holy damage, except the “white” melee swings. As a matter of fact, a paladin can turn off RF after he’s done with his adds and just DPS the boss without pulling threat on the boss if the Main Tank(MT) has sufficient aggro. Without Righteous Fury the Prot Paladin is just another (weak) DPS in the raid.

I personally don’t do this since it’s not a bad idea to have someone take up the boss if the MT goes down. Taking the time to turn RF on may be the difference in completing the fight without any other casualties and wiping.  Every paladin tank has at some point wiped the group before realizing that RF wasn’t up – it’s n00b thing to do …  slap yourself and don’t do it again

Paladin: your only means of generating threat is damage done.

You should also bear in mind that you only have 3 ways to get mana back without having to resort to the 4 stacks of mana pot you have in your bags at all times. On a side note here: if bag space is at a premium, use Mana Inector Kits to make Runic Mana Injectors:

• You get mana back by Dodging, Blocking and Parrying.
• You get mana back from getting healed ,thanks to Spiritual Attunement.
• You can get mana back from Judgment of Wisdom if it’s being used.

Key threat generating abilities to include in our rotation:

These are you biggest assets while generating threat, everything else is fluff when it comes to Threat. That’s not to say that other abilities don’t have their uses in certain situations but when it comes to threat these are your bread and butter.

Avenger’s Shield: (30 Sec CD) One of your premiere pulling moves that hits and silences up to 3 targets. It does cost quite a bit of mana however and if you’re getting low you can skip it. It does have a silence and a stun component to it which makes it great for pulling caster-types but you’ll want to get in there pretty quickly afterward since the stun component won’t let them get very far. Remember to time yourself – even if it comes up again you should save it for the next pull since it has the longest CD of any of your abilities.

Judgment of Light / Wisdom: (8 sec CD with Talents)  By now I hope you’ve figured out how to use these, and if you’re running with another paladin you should each be using different judgments, since they stack. As a rule of thumb, Holy Pallys will judge Wisdom and Ret Pallys will judge Light. Just be aware and verify if you’re not sure: ” Hey _____ , you’re judging Light right?”

Shield of Righteousness: (6 sec CD)  This ability will represent 25% of your DPS and is your biggest asset. It can also be used to boost threat on a lone mob that you are trying to taunt off the healers or to solidify your threat in anticipation of  a DPS’ AoE burst.  It should always be used in your rotation and usually right after your Judgment if you are using the Libram of Obstruction (Purchased for a modest 15 Emblems of Heroism) . It’s the ability that hits the hardest (3-7K hits and 6-14K crits : ) and builds burst aggro. It’s the one ability you want to get off on “Skull” before you start building threat on the rest of the mobs. You should also remember that this ability scales directly with Block Value.

Hammer of Righteous:  (6 sec CD) This is another reason why Paladins are the premiere multi-mob tanking class. This is one of your abilities that will benefit the most from a better weapon and more Strength/AP

Holy Shield: (Lasts 10 sec with 8sec CD) This is a very situational ability but I include it in my rotation all the time to guarantee a 100% up time. If I was the OT and went back to hitting the boss after my adds are dead I would skip this to conserve mana.  On multi-mob pulls however, it’s essential to keeping aggro while your casters are going all out with AoE.

Consecrate: (8sec CD) Every inch of the ground that paladins are standing on should be Consecrated. This is yet another essential ability for multi-mob tanking.  It’s more free DPS … and DPS = Threat for Paladins.

Exorcism: (15 sec CD) A little free damage thrown in for good measure but this ability is receiving a significant change in patch 3.2 to where it will have a 1.5 sec cast time. Cast time makes this very undesirable since you can’t DP&B during that time and getting hit will increase your total cast time by 1sec (.5sec*2) 2.5 sec represents almost 2 entire GCDs, and your time could be better spent elsewhere. So, until 3.2 goes live include it whenever it’s up but be aware of the upcoming change.

Finally you have these two which are more situational in use:

Hammer of Wrath: (6 sec CD)This ability only becomes available once the target is below 20% health, and is a welcome addition to your rotation, again – a free, instant cast, single target DPS ability.

Hand of Reckoning: (8 sec CD) Currently only useful as a taunt, it generates initial aggro but if you don’t do some actual damage on the target before the taunt wears off you’ll lose it and it’ll go right back to smacking the healers. After 3.2 however, this ability will generate real DPS-based threat as well to any target that is not attacking you.

Our next article will feature a Rotation theory, go more in depth in the abilities you should be familiar with as well as list everything you should have on your task bars.

Now get out there and DOMINATE!

Articles in this thread:

Part 1 – The Basics

Part 2 – Combat Ratings

Part 3 – Armor: Mitigation vs. Avoidance

Part 4 – Hit Table and Threat Generation (You are here)

Part 5  – Abilities and Rotation

Part 6 – Professions and Upgrades

Part 7 – Buffs and Starter Gear

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Getting Better At Healing Doesn’t Get Any Easier Than This

I have to hit the reset button from time to time when it comes to DYS.  And that means listening to my own advice.  You see I preach all the time that MOST people who play WoW are probably on the low end of the casual gaming part of the bell curve.

I realize that not every post is going to please everyone, and that especially means you pros who are so far to the right end of the bell curve you’re barely hanging on with your 1900 arena rating and Yogg-Saron hard mode attempts (+1 tonight – WOOT!).  But for you, you need to realize you’ve forgotten more things about this game than most people will ever know.  And in a sense, that’s not a good thing.

So today I wanted to cover the one mod that you simply must have if you plan on healing in dungeons and raids – ESPECIALLY if you’re a nub.  You pros keep your mouths shut about using Grid and Clique or any other combination of things.  There really is nothing else out there that is hands-down better than Healbot.  Maybe you can do more with Grid, but in the end the expanded functionality makes me chuck it in the trash every few days.  I love it one minute and hate it the next – but I have always loved Healbot.

For a little while – I resisted Healbot.  I liked being able to target anyone I wanted and use any one of my heals just on them and check the unit frames for any other information I thought i needed.  It turns out it was only slower, and that’s just 5 man stuff.  When I got into 25’s I knew targeting was going to be an issue.  (That’s when I tried Grid the first time, and, well, NO).

So I looked around a bit at UI mods for healing.  And Healbot was by far the most popular.  So I gave it a shot.  Right out of the box it’s better, and if you tweak it a little bit in the settings – there’s nothing easier.  Now I can’t imagine healing without it and I’m actually thinking of using even fewer keystrokes and going to more clicks.

If you have never seen Healbot I’m already too far ahead.  So let’s go back to basics.  You can download Healbot here: Healbot.  Once you get it installed you’ll have this new little panel on your screen.

Left click the word “options” at the bottom of the panel to get this one:

For those of you who just want the facts and then let’s get back to playing – we’re going to walk you through our settings “AH Mastery Guide” Style.  Since we’ve been using Healbot for over a year, we’ve been through just about every situation there is with it and have tweaked our settings here and there to give us maximum visual effectiveness with as few “GOD I HATE THAT” moments as possible.  Here they are: (just make each of your pages look like each screenshot).

Obviously these are class specific, and this is where Healbot really shines.  With a 5 button mouse you can set it to do more than 25 different things.  All you have to do to customize it for your tastes is to select a mouse button with the radio buttons at the top, and then type in the name of the spell you want to use with that click.  Once you have them set, it’s as easy as hovering your mouse over the person’s name in the Healbot frame and clicking left for Rejuv, Right for Regrowth, Cleansing on the middle button, Wild growth on button 4 and maybe Swiftmend on button 5.  Since that’s about 90% of what I do I don’t even mess with the modified clicks much, but if you like having every single spell available with one click, Healbot makes it possible.

Here is another class specific portion, but Healbot “reads” your class and the options you’ll see in the pop-downs will only be those available to your class.  This one uses wacky colors to tell you at a glance who has debuffs.  We set ours to only show debuffs our toon can remove.

This is where you really make Healbot easy to read and see without getting it so large that it eats up your whole screen.  It’s not easy, it’s taken us hours of fiddling to get it just right.  You may not like it, but it’s a much better place to start than the standard settings.  Try these out for a while and THEN fiddle with them to suit your tastes.

We skipped the Tips tab, since there’s nothing all that great in those.  You can hover a nameplate for the big tooltip, but reading it in the middle of a boss fight is kinda dumb.  So in the buffs panel just make sure that you’re not monitoring for missing buffs in combat and then set all sorts of nifty ways to buff different classes and subsets of a raid.  it’s not as good as Pally Power, but it works pretty well.

The rest is pretty self-explanatory.  You get yourself into a dungeon and start click healing everything.  Be sure to check the spells you have inserted before you start.  Normally we use a small heal on left click, a big heal on right click, cure on the middle button and then OH CRAP stuff on buttons 4 and 5.  Past that, you’re on your own.

What you will find is that after using Healbot for a few weeks you’ll wonder how you ever healed without it.  Even if it only makes up 25% to %0% of your healing, it’s still going to make your response time better than if you’re just button healing.  And don’t brag that only noobs use Healbot and you do just fine without it.  That’s like saying you get to work just as well walking as driving your car – it’s hogwash.  If you’re fast just pushing buttons you’ll be even faster using a mod designed to make things even faster.

Now, Healbot doesn’t work quite as well in Battlegrounds, where members of a raid all all spread out from here to the end of a zone, but in raid situations it’s almost the only way to fly.  while you can pretty effectively heal five mans with buttons, you’ll find it much easier to heal in a raid (especially as a druid or Priest) with Healbot.  Yes, there are other options (and I’m 100% certain we’ll hear about them in the thread), but you really need to start with Healbot, and if you’re not using it you really should.  It will help you develop into a truly Dominating healer.

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(Law was ignorant and forgot to tell you that the following article was written by Thundernudle – you’ll have to ask her how to pronounce it   )

How To Peel Away From A Group To Hang With Your Guild

We’ve all had it happen to us.  You’re hanging out with friends at a party and find yourself checking your watch.  You’re scheduling a movie date with your significant other for later in the week.  You’re gauging how long beers with the coworkers will last…and factoring in traffic.

Then all eyes turn to you: “So, can you come out?”

You hem and you haw and you shuffle your feet.  How do you explain to these people that you’d love to go out, but you have a raid in 2 hours?

Explaining to non-WoW players that you have a previous engagement with a computer can be a trying task because that’s exactly how most non-gamers see it: you at home – alone – with a computer screen, and it’s beyond most of them why anyone would choose to isolate themselves with a machine as opposed to stepping into real life with real people.

Non-gamers don’t see the excitement connected with raiding or PvP and refuse to try because of the stereotypes attached to it.  I know that I’ve had my fair share of laughs and eye-rolls and disbelieving “Really?  You’re really leaving the party to play that game?” The difference between we gamers is how we handle our tormentors.

There’s always the obvious excuses: “Sorry, I’m too tired to go out” or “Sorry, I have work in the morning.” I know some people who screen their calls when they know trouble is coming near raid time, and others who don’t mention that their “previous engagement” happens to be on Ventrilo and involves killing giant fiery elementals. Still others take the blunt “I’m going to play WoW and there’s nothing you can do about it” tactic, simply taking the ensuing thrashing with calm and grace, or perhaps just a middle finger.

Personally I tend to prefer the last option because I like the game, and I’ll be darned if other peoples’ lack of understanding or unwillingness to accept the fun that is WoW will keep me from melting face every once and awhile, or even a whole lot of whiles. Still, while putting up a fight and martyring yourself for the game may be a noble cause, in the end it only makes things more difficult and less enjoyable. So what can we do to understand the stubbornness of those nay-saying noobs and what can we do to potentially alleviate the irritations and embarrassments that tend to come with the gaming territory?

Traditionally gaming has been restricted to the nerdy edges of society; it’s been limited to the pasty-faced, anti-social nerds that limit their communication to the rest of humanity with either pretentious sneering gazes through thick glasses or quiet purchases of Cheetos and Coke at the local store before scurrying back to their mother’s house.

With images such as those floating around peoples’ heads, their confusion about our choice is understandable. On top of that, non-gamers have no idea what it’s like to play a computer game, let alone a full-fledged MMO. Even in a world where computers are basically a facet of everyday life, the concept of playing games and making friends with people you’ve never seen before is confusing and borderline scary. “Playing games with strangers is weird and creepy! This must be something only nerds could understand!”

It’s A Nerd Thing?

But no!  Gaming is no longer limited to isolated nerds hiding behind stringy, unwashed hair.  MMOs like World of Warcraft are very social games where teamwork is necessary and companionship and camaraderie actually enhance the playing experience.  So how do you explain that to the normies? How do you explain that not only are you still being social by skipping out of the party early, but you’re taking part in another type of serious group event?

My favorite, and what I believe to be best method of explanation is by comparing WoW (raiding specifically, that being my largest area of practice) to a physical team sport- soccer, for example (a side note here: I say “physical” not so much because physical movement is necessary to play soccer, but to differentiate it from a computer game.  I hate making the differentiation by saying “real life” because that’s the exact kind of discrimination we’re trying to fight against; computers make the game no less “real”, they simply mean you can’t see your companions face to face).

Say you’re a member of a soccer team.  At the beginning of the season you probably agreed, with the rest of your team mates, to take part in both practices and games, probably on a weekly basis.  You show up on time and prepared to every gathering and participate to your fullest extent, and if you are unable to make it to one of the appointments, you duly let your team know that they should not expect you.  This is exactly what raiding on WoW is like: a group of people working together to accomplish a common goal while having fun.

Whether it’s to kick a silly checkered ball into a goal or kill a giant monster shouldn’t matter.  Blowing off your team mates for another “more important” event without telling them is insulting; it leaves the other people in the lurch, waiting for you to show up because you said you were going to be there.  The team is no different simply because you can’t see their faces; they’re still people waiting for you to play a game. I challenge your normie friends to find something that doesn’t have a parallel between soccer and WoW, obvious “kicking a ball vs. clicking a mouse” differences aside.

No matter how clearly you present your argument, though, don’t think this will be an easy fix.  To many non-gamers, even a logical explanation such as this one will seem like a feeble rationalization for a game addiction (which may be true for some of us).  However, there will always be a few people willing to listen and think about what you’ve pointed out…and maybe next time you’ll have one more person in your corner when you skip out a little early to meet your raid time…or at least one less person jeering and rolling their eyes.

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Instances are brilliant, and I love them. I know they are not the most popular thing for mid-level characters, and some people avoid them like nuts, but they are only hurting themselves. Once you get to level 80, that’s about all that’s left besides serious PVP, so you better start now enjoying yourself.

Instances are important because they teach you how to play as a member of a team. The best gear always drops in instances (and past that – raids), and when it boils down to it, the experience is excellent if you are there at the right levels. Now, I understand that it can be tough to find a good group, and we’ll discuss that a little later in an article on guilds, but you should really just suck it up and do them all.

Starting at level 20 I’ll run through the deadmines, Stockades and Blackfathom Deeps on all my alliance toons. Those three runs are good for usually 4-6 levels and 4 or five blue gear items. Since my guild’s power players all have alts, we go do runs like that a few times a week so they are super fast. We’ll usually get through all three of those runs in about 4 hours. You could probably level almost as fast going it solo in Ashenvale at that level, but you sure wouldn’t get the gear.

But the real reason to do instances is the same reason you simply must spend some time in battlegrounds and dueling. If you don’t ever do them, you won’t be any good at them when you really need to be.

You may be able to pull mobs great in the wild when you need to separate one or two from a congested area, but that won’t work in an instance a lot of the time. Normally in an instance if you pull one you’re going to get them all (because the mobs are linked).  So you are forced to work as a team where a mage sheeps right after a rogue saps, and then you pull whatever is left. If your hunter is any good they can trap another one and now your tank and healer only have to worry about 1 poor little dead elite walking with the fury of a rogue coming in from behind and a nice fat fireball in his face, oh – and a ravager tearing his eyes out.

You can really crush through an instance run with a good team. Some difficult mobs at low levels (assuming you don’t have a great group) include the Princess in Maraudon – I hate that woman – and Archaedes in Uldamann. In WotLK Halls of Stone can be a bear along with The Occulus, but a little practice on those and it should be no sweat. For some reason those guys at that level can be really tough to handle. But it is a very satisfying feeling when they hit the ground with a big thud.

Instance tips to live by.

• Spend some time as a lowbie toon making a few friends and playing together as much as possible. If you can build a decent friends list, you can normally have a party of three before you ever launch the “Looking for Group” function.

• Always try to play in a balanced group. Instances are much harder with more than one kind of any particular class – the possible exception to this being two druids or paladins where one is a healer and the other a tank. (if the players are very experienced this doesn’t matter nearly as much until Northrend)

• If things are not going well, don’t flame people, just ride it out: BE NICE! I have had groups where one guy quit on the run; we picked up another pretty easy because we already had 4, and for some reason it went twice as fast with a non-complainer.

• Don’t get in a tizzy over who wins loot drops. You’re likely going to replace the item in a few levels anyway. So it’s not worth getting upset about. It’s a GAME folks.

• Try to balance your play time to include at least 25% of your time in instances. This will give you the very best gear when you are solo, and plenty of time to refine your play style and talent build.

• Play with authority and practice the really hard moves; doing this will ensure that by the time you get to heroic level dungeons, you’re not upsetting runs by playing poorly. Lower level instances are the very best place to practice using multiple skills on tough mobs.

• Have fun. IT’s A GAME!

Probably not anything you haven’t heard before; no real mind-blowing information here. But you might have needed a little kick in the pants to get in there and do every instance in the game as you level up your next toon. And if you skip all this stuff you’ll never know how much fun the whole thing really is. For years the old world instances were all that people had to play through, and the game still grew. There’s a lot of good content you will miss if you just rush through to level 80 before you start hitting the dungeons.

With Patch 3.2, you’ll almost be forced to do the Daily dungeon quests.  You certainly won’t want to miss out on the extra emblems of Triumph.  Plus, you’ll also be getting Emblems of Conquest from all the other Instance and Raid bosses, so you can end up with some of the very best gear available for doing a few heroics a day.  Get used to it now and have fun with it when it comes.  And, as always, Dominate.

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We’re getting closer every day to something pretty exciting.  Ever since we introduced the Horde Leveling Guide - you Alliance guys have been QQ’ing more than the folks who whacked on Law for talking about the death of twinking.  That time is nearly over.  As a matter of fact, we’ve even gone so far as to set up some pretty exciting things for all of you Ally nuts (although we aren’t REALLY saying anything yet). 

But between now and when we get completely done with something called an “Alliance Leveling Guide” (should there ever be such a thing if we were actually working on such a thing) we thought it would be a good time to resurrect an article from when we were working on the Horde Leveling Guide (since there is such a thing and we actually did work on such a thing).  So here it is – The Lawbringer Rules. (not that Gavin agrees with Law 100% on all things).

The Lawbringer Rules

Let’s talk about the grind of leveling a little bit. The really fun stuff only starts at level 80; and that dead period starting at about level 30 where you nearly have to live in Stranglethorn Vale is something we all hate once we’ve done it a few times.

The are two ways to take the pain out of leveling and do it faster and more efficiently than you ever thought possible. Joanna’s guide brags about making it from 1-60 in 6 days played time. But when you look at the rest of his characters they are a much more modest 7 or 8 days played time to level 60.

Still sounds fast, right? You can do it too, without having to memorize every quest in the game and without having done it a hundred times before. Guys like that spend all their time doing only that. They love creating new characters on new servers and racing everybody to level 80. Not me, that’s the grind part, unfortunately it must be done.

Now, keep in mind that Gavin and I are working on making leveling a serious breeze even going solo.  (And Gavin is going to hit 70 WAY faster than 6 days!)  Our horde leveling guide is going to walk you through every single step from 1-80.  That’s right, I said 80, more on that in the next few days. (As you all know Gavin CRUSHED, DOMINATED the world record from 1-70 in less than 5 days /played time).

Gavin is a solo nut.  He gets a real thrill out of leveling  – which is just not my bag.  I prefer another method.  It took me some time to convince him to try it with me, and I’m not sure he’ll ever like it as much as going solo, but at least he can see what I mean now.  The screenshot for this post is Gavin and me as we worked on our quest pathing in Hellfire.

There are other things much more fun about this game than making leveling itself a race. It’s also really hard to do un-twinked. If you are starting from scratch on a new server, it’s tough to level really fast because you have to spend at least a little time gathering and selling something or you’ll be too broke to afford repairs and get your training.

Furthermore, I hate getting one character all the way to level 80 and then stopping and going back to level 1 with another toon and having to do it all over again. There’s a better way of doing it. There are two parts to this – two rules I level by;

The first rule is: never quest out of rest.

 

The second one: Never roll alone.

Don’t Quest Out of Rest.

If you will create three or four toons on your account, plus one banker, you can pretty much play all the time and almost never run out of rested experience bonus. When you kill mobs under the rested bonus you get 200% experience. Plus, if you combine it with questing you can get almost two full levels of experience from one full bar of rest. That’s because every time you turn in a quest, it pushes your rest bar further along since you are gaining experience without killing anything.

One quest turn-in (generally speaking) is about the same as killing ten mobs (at a minimum) at low levels. The higher you go the more a quest turn in is worth in relationship to time. If you are killing mobs about the right level you can get one or two bubbles per ten kills up to about level 30 or so. So if you do 5 quests and kill 125-150 mobs, that’s 1 level – especially at lower levels.

If you are killing a mob every 10-20 seconds that’s 3-6 kills per minute, meaning you can gain a level every hour or so as long as you don’t run out of quests to do. This will work up to about level 20, and then it’s going to take you up to two hours per level. Past level 30 you can count on about three hours a level, around 40 will take four hours, after 50 nearly five hours; and watch out for level 65 plus, they take some time.

If you just can’t stand it, and have to do something with your toon, and you’re out of rest, use that time for farming (which I never do) or grinding for rep, or running instances for gear.   Of course, there isn’t much of a need any more to grind out rep until you hit 80 anyway, so if you must go looking for herbs or something  – do those kinds of things when your rested bonus ends.  Since I never farm you can see why I can make a hard and fast rule that I just don’t do much of anything out of rest.

Just for grins let’s say you follow my rule and never quest out of rest much. How long will it take to hit level 70 if you can average the leveling times I listed above? Seven days 5 hours. Considering even Brian Kopp is showing some of his toons hitting 60 in 6 days, that’s pretty good! Seven days playing it easy too. We’re not talking about trying to achieve perfection or break any records. Just by questing in rest, you can take your time and have some fun. Run a few instances and do a profession; help out a friend or two along the way – keep it a game for Pete’s sake! This brings us to rule number two.

Never roll alone.

Now, you can certainly go from level one to around level ten much faster solo questing. You might even go up to 16 or even 20, but after that I recommend going questing in a group of two. Two people can kill mobs 125% faster than you can alone. Even though you have to share experience, if you are questing in the rest bonus it’s the same amount of experience you would be getting if you were feeling “normal.”

Plus; if you can kill 100 mobs per hour alone (if the mobs are your level or lower) you will be able to kill about 225–250 mobs per hour with a friend. And you will be killing mobs up to two levels higher than you. This means you can take another day or so off of your leveling time to level 65 just by doing everything with a buddy.

Even if you don’t buy the argument that it’s faster in leveling time, you can certainly agree that two people with some skill can do almost anything but run instances.  You can bag every rare elite you come across, do all of the team quests, and even quest in areas two to three levels higher than you could solo.  Plus, it’s just a LOT more fun.

Sure, you have to kill twice as many mobs for the loot quests that require you to get 10 of something, but it will end up taking less time to get 20 for two people than it would for one person to get 10 by himself. I can pretty much count on getting a ding every time I sit down to play, most of the time two, on every character I log in without having to grind it out for hours at a time.

As an added bonus, if you are cycling through characters like this, by the time you are done you’ve got three or four level 80 characters with awesome gear ready for just about anything and probably less than 25 days played time. Now THAT sounds like a lot of time, but my first toon didn’t hit level 70 until 23 days played time (dang I was a nub). Granted, it was faster the next time out, but both of my first 2 70’s took me more than 30 days. If I had known this back then I could have had four or five level 80’s in the same amount of played time.

The other really cool thing about playing with a friend is that you’ve got some good company; and many things that will make you mad trying to do solo are almost too easy with two players. So get back to having a good time and have more of it – quest under rest and roll with your crew. It will bring the fun and Domination back into the greatest game around.

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When To Buy, When To Sell – And When To Farm?

Farming is not something we do. It takes a perfect storm of circumstances to make me even think about it. But there are a couple of situations that came up recently that basically required doing a little bit of actually getting my hands dirty.

Well, OK, they weren’t my hands, but someone did some farming. It pointed out that there is a really good way to tell when there is a huge hole in the market where supply is way below demand. The good part is that it’s pretty easy to spot since the holes are HUGE on many servers.

In the end I didn’t actually do any farming at all, but I have some folks around the guild and the family that tend to miss the finer points of auction house Domination, but they understand that if they go get a few stacks of something they can get paid – by me.

The guy who has the gold makes the rules. It’s been that way ever since the Magna Carta. That one document took most of the power away from those born into power by shifting the money (and therefore the power) to those who had some cash. Enough with the history lesson, let’s get on to how you can take advantage of this with the whole force of more than 150 years of history behind you.

Normally we just buy low and sell high. It works best when you spread your offerings (and by default, purchases) out over a LOT of different types of things. By far my favorite is mats. Mats make up the majority of the profitable items anyway and only a pro should deal with Items – the market for those things is just too volatile.

When it comes to mats you are making a grave mistake if you try to deal too much with Northrend stuff. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but think about it for a minute. Most folks who farm are going to do so at level 80. This means that when enough of them are out there herbing and mining Sholazar that there is going to be a huge influx of high end mats into the market, thereby depressing the prices for those items.

Everyone else is rushing to GET to level 80 and not stopping to farm along the way. You see, the way you know exactly what to sell is to project what everyone in the market is doing and then do whatever they are not doing. Everyone wants 25 stacks of Titanium ore right now before the patch. When the patch hits, prices will triple, but there will be soooooo much of it around that it will drop again rather sharply once all the Jewelcrafters get sick of prospecting at 15 gold a turn for those new rare epic gems (that won’t hold a price either if you know anything about the gems market).

So – what WE do to make gold hand over fist day in and day out without having to rely on hoarding and market spikes is very simple. Instead of Titanium (which you think everyone wants) you need to control the Mithril and Thorium markets. Instead of Arctic fur, you need to make sure you have a stranglehold on the Medium and light leather markets.

You see, all those guys leveling new toons and alts skip trade skills on the way to 80 (almost everyone does). Then, when they hit 80 they want to powerlevel two (or even four if you count cooking and first aid) trade skills all the way to 400+ in a few hours. This is where you get rich. Not on Titanium, not on Lichbloom, not on Borean leathers – it’s the low level stuff that has the best supply/demand ratio.

In other words, the amount of time it takes to get those things compared to the profit margin for selling them is often higher than the Northrend mats. You can get 20 stacks of light leather in the time it takes to get 5 or 10 heavy Borean. Because listing fees for low level mats are almost nothing, you can post them over and over again for almost any price you like and they WILL SELL.

These holes in the supply end of your market become apparent when YOU try to do what everyone ELSE is doing. I was working up Alchemy, Tailoring and Leatherworking on my DK bankers last week and there were 36 light leather and 13 Stranglekelp on the AH. That was all there was, and I needed maybe five or ten times that much. Since I have a lot of gold I could care less what the prices were, I would have bought them all and not even thought twice about it.

You see, there is no such thing as a “fair price.” Fair is in the eye of the beholder. When I want to powerlevel a profession I’ll pay 20 gold a stack for peacebloom if that’s all there is. It will still cost me a lot less gold if I pay Northrend mat prices for starting area mats because it requires so much less to get skill points out of that stuff.

If YOU don’t like the high prices for entry level stuff go farm some yourself. Use what you need and sell the rest – probably to me (and I’ll jack the price up to where supply equals demand and make the bucks off of your effort). That’s how a free market works.

If you know how people want to behave or how they ARE behaving in relationship to any market you can find what their need is and fill it. This situation showed me that there was a HUGE need for light leather, medium leather, Mithril, Thorium, and about a half dozen other things. It became obvious that there was no one on the server farming mats between the levels of 15-50, but hundreds of guys supplying Northrend stuff. Low supply and steady demand (demand for mats is almost always steady) means big profits if you can fill the gaps.

I still didn’t farm, but I told a few people I would pay them twice the market rate for every stack they could get their hands on. Now the AH has just enough mats at a price I set that I make far more out of the low end mats. And since I control the supply, I set the price. Every now and again some nut posts a few stacks at doofy prices and I happily buy him out and pop them right back up at the proper price.

The proper price is always the price where the supply curve meets the demand curve and establishes an equilibrium.

Item level has absolutely nothing to do with it. If there are 400 stacks of Titanium and a demand for 200, the price is at least two times too high. If there are 2 stacks of Liferoot and demand for 20 stacks, the price is 10 times too low. It makes no difference if the price for Earthroot eventually passes that of the price for the Titanium. Supply above demand lowers prices, demand above supply raises them.

So look for these types of things in your market, and be sure you’re looking in the right spots. If you must farm, look for the things most people skip (normally in the 150-300 skill range in most gathering professions) and pretty soon you’ll be raking it in with both hands and just laughing when everyone else is taking a beating on those highly volatile high end mats – while you vacation in Stranglethorn off your earnings from the lowbie stuff.

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Ok, so not everything can be a big bad serious tip.  As a matter of fact, we’re kind of twiddling our thumbs around here waiting for all the tasty changes coming in 3.2.  But in the meantime, we thought a little levity might be in order – at least for one day.

We’re all fans of WoW, otherwise you wouldn’t be reading DYS in the first place.  Most of you know that beyond the game itself we’re also fans to some degree or another of some other WoW fan sites.  We’re not the only game in town by a long shot, and sites like elitistjerks and Wowhead and others do what they do extremely well.

There is another genre which I appreciate, mostly because I can’t do it.  We do what might be described as a rather original take on the WoW podcast with the Domination podcast, but despite a certain amount of ability to do audio broadcasting – video is something we’ll just never do.  It’s not that it’s impossible, it’s just outside of our current skill set.

But, almost because I find the process of producing video a little like soloing Naxx, I do appreciate those who obviously have a knack for doing great machinima.  And that’s what this post is about.  We’ve posted a link to one of our all-time favorites – ROFLMAO before.  That one was done by Oxhorn and he’s got a great little collection of funny stuff.

IF you’re an old fart like me you might appreciate an honorable mention like the parody music videos from Nhym such as  Pretty Fly For A Dranei, Just Loot It or Ni Hao.  But Oxhorn and Myndflame have to take the cake in our book.

The first music style video I remember from Oxhorn was The Great Kodo.  Later, you get to Drunken Kodo Riding which is even funnier if you watch ROFLMAO and Inventing Swear Words first.  But my favorite so far has to be the Anti Elf Anthem, which you can watch below.

After Oxhorn, I also like the Illegal Danish stuff from Myndflame.  Illegal Danish Started with the film Super Snacks and then moved on to Escape from Orgrimmar (another all time favorite).  If you watched those you’ll see that Myndflame is really good.  But his latest offering is a parody of the new Starcraft Trailer movie.  You just have to check it out-

You can also watch the Gnome only version here.

Now we’ll get back to working on more ways for you to Dominate so completely people accuse you of uber l337 hax, but laughing for a while never hurt either.

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