One of the key skills required for success in a group or raid for any damage dealing class is the capability of the player to manage their own threat levels and this is a skill best learned early on in your gameplay.

When you start out in early instances such as Deadmines and Wailing Caverns, mobs don’t have a huge amount of punch to them and so the penalty for poor threat management is low. However as your progress through higher-end content you will quickly find out one simple fact: if you pull aggro, chances are you will die and in the process may take other players to the graveyard with you; obviously this is something best avoided.

Luckily threat management is a simple skill to pick up, and there are numerous things you can do to ensure you do not pull aggro, ever!

The first measure any player should take is to install a threat meter into their UI, there are several out there but most rely on the other players in your raid or group to have the same meter installed for it to work properly. The best advice here is to ask other players in your guild or server what addon they use and then choose the most common one.

Failing that my personal favorite is Omen, which can be downloaded at http://wow.curse.com/downloads/details/9101/

What a threat meter will do is provide an accurate visual representation as to how close you are to pulling aggro from a mob.

At its most basic, threat management is simply making sure you never exceed the tanks’ threat on your meter but in reality that can cause your DPS to drop should you reach the point where you must stop nuking to avoid the buildup of threat.

As such there are various tips and tricks you can do to give you an easier time of controlling your threat till you feel confident that you don’t even need to look at your threat meter anymore.

The first trick is to think carefully about what spells and abilities you open up with against a mob; using an attack which causes a large amount of instant damage as your opening spell is a very bad idea!

A much better idea is to open up with DoT attacks and debuffs, for instance I tend to open up with insect swarm. This way you can still deal a large amount of damage right from the start of a fight but you delay the threat from it until your tank has had time to build up a decent amount of threat himself.

A second trick is to bring a paladin along with you, they can give you a buff called blessing of salvation that will reduce all threat you produce by 30%, it is quite rare to be able to pull aggro with salvation on unless you are deliberately attempting to do so.

The third trick is to utilize threat reducing talents and skills such as feign. However this measure should only be undertaken after trying a few instances without such threat reduction.

Talent choices for threat reduction or spending time actively reducing your threat will reduce your DPS and so should only be done as a last resort. It is much more preferable to manage your threat through other means.

Finally, certain classes get methods to completely reset their aggro. Mages can ice block or turn invisible, Rogues can Vanish and hunters can feign death. If you find yourself climbing the meters or actually pulling aggro from the tank then do not hesitate to use either one of these skills.

With these simple tricks you can ensure the ability for you to DPS mobs down without fear of reprisal, allowing smooth dominating runs throughout any instance in the game!

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The Midsummer Fire festival won’t last forever!  You only have until July 4th to take advantage of all the buffs, gold making opportunities and last (but certainly not least) some really killer loot from Frost Lord Ahune.

Ahune <The Frost Lord> is a new boss which can be summoned inside Slave Pens, in Zangamarsh. Ahune can be completed on both normal and heroic modes, both with differing difficulty and different items dropped after defeating him.

Ahune  is a frost lord in Neptulon’s service. The Twilight’s Hammer plan to have him battle Ragnaros to start an elemental war on Azeroth. Players summon Ahune in the second room of the Slave Pens, at the Ice Stone to the left. He is only available during the Midsummer Fire Festival.

If this is your first time killing Ahune, he will drop an item called Shards of Ahune which starts the quest Shards of Ahune. Accept the quest and bring the shard to Luma Skymother, and she will reward you with Burning Blossom x20 and your choice of a unique tabard: the Tabard of Summer Skies or the Tabard of Summer Flame. You can only complete this quest once, so you will not be able to receive both tabards on the same character (well, not until next year at least)!

The quest to summon Ahune can only be completed once per day, per person. Which means that if you have a five person party, each person can complete the quest to summon him one time (provided you didn’t actually save yourself to the Heroic) and you could potentially do five runs, one after another. Even if you have killed the boss, as long as at least one person in your party is able to take the quest and summon him you’ll have yet another chance at some of the phat loot he drops!

In Normal Mode Ahune Can Drop:

Shared Loot for both Normal and Heroic Mode:

On Heroic Mode Only Ahune Can Drop:

Don’t dawdle any longer!  If you have a level 65 or above find you a group and start whacking at this big icicle until you get you some of this stuff.  Special event bosses have great gear and Ahune is certainly no exception.  You’ve only got a few more days - go dominate that dude!

Contributing Author - Slavrix

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6 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

One of the most versatile classes to play is the druid. They can be set up for tanking, healing, melee DPS, and ranged DPS. The best part; any spec is highly effective.

Given the balance and restoration trees, there are some incredible abilities that can lend support to each other. Keep reading on to learn how to manipulate these two talent lines to get a dps/healing effect that is incredible for PvP, raiding, and just running simple heroics.

Before I explain, here is the link. This is known as the Dreamstrate healing spec. The idea is to use the talent abilities Lunar Guidance and Dreamstate to replace ToL (tree of life.)

Dreamstate healers spec fully in intellect and +healing. They are not reliant on spirit because it really does nothing for them. The cycle of healing consists of lifebloom, rejuvenation, and regrowth on at all times while casting healing touch (HT) appropriately.

HT is extremely powerful (especially with empowered touch) so lower levels of this ability are required. Healing touch will not be spammed, but used appropriately when big heals are needed. Combining it with nature’s swiftness is vital for getting a 6k heal in half a second to save a tank. With 1800 bonus healing and empowered touch, a HT crits for 10k or more.

The only thing that hurts this spec is losing swiftmend and the threat that HT generates. However, the effect of HT easily replaces swiftmend. The bonus healing from ToL form is replaced with Lunar Guidance.

Let’s take a look at the pros and cons of the dreamstate build:

Pros:

• Spell damage is now applied, also giving an extra ability (Insect Swarm)
• Moonglow reduces nearly all spells by 9% mana cost
• No shapeshift form. Healing touch can now be used and no speed reduction
• Dreamstate gives 10% mana regeneration every 5 seconds
• Nature’s Grace

Cons:

• No Swiftmend
• No Improved Regrowth
• No Empowered Rejuvenation
• Casting Healing Touch causes more threat

This is a different strategy to bring to the table, but is still very effective. It all depends on your style and equipment. The druid is very diverse and can be manipulated in several ways. In addition, the ability to off-DPS or solo daily quests without difficulty makes it much easier than being full restoration. There is plenty of DPS to carry around through this build, making the life of a healer more simplistic.

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37 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

When you first begin playing, it’s fine to go it alone. But you are going to miss out on most of the game if you only ever play by yourself. And since trying to do instances with just pick-up groups can be a real drag, let’s talk just a bit about guilds and why you might want to join one as opposed to merely building a friends list.

Guilds are groups of players who have joined a permanent “team.” You can create your own guild by visiting the guild master in any major city to buy a charter. You then have to get 9 other players to sign your charter, and now you’ve got a guild. It costs 10 silver for a charter and once you’ve got a guild, you can create a crest for 10 gold. Having a crest is a bit of fluff that shows up on your guild tabard. Not necessary, but it can be a sort of calling card.

People form guilds for a lot of reasons. Some guilds are more social than others. The main purpose of social guilds is having all their friends chat in the guild chat instead of whispering them individually. Other guilds are built for raids and end-game content. Guys in these guilds are often quite serious about the game and can be a little rough on newbies, or even just decide they don’t like certain play styles. Still other guilds will be built around things like PVP, or even more specifically Twinking, all the way down to “level 19 twink guilds.” I’ts really pretty amazing how specific they can get.

If you choose to form your own guild, get ready to do a lot of recruiting. Building and maintaining a guild roster can chew up a good portion of your time unless you grab a few guys with big friends lists. Now that WoW has been out a few years, it can be harder to recruit than ever. I recently created a fresh set of characters on the very newest server with the lowest population. It already had more than 50 guilds, and the top ten guilds were 95%+ lvl 70 and above. Everyone looking to do end-game content will be looking to join a top-end guild, so it might be a big chore building a roster in these situations.

You best bet when forming a guild is to catch a server when it first opens, like the first couple of weeks. Experienced guild masters won’t have trouble building a guild even if they move to an older server and start from scratch 2 years late. But if you’re new to the GM world, getting an early bird bonus will help you a lot. Even if you do form your guild early in the life of the server, you better run pretty quickly to 70. It won’t look all that great for the guild master to be lvl 20 in a guild full of 70’s. Or you can choose to make a lot of friends and just do a more social guild. It can be tough to get to the really interesting high level instances this way, but possibly more fun if you’re a people person.

If forming a guild and recruiting constantly sound like no fun, then you seriously need to consider joining a guild. Guilds will normally fall into the social or power categories, with a few somewhere in between. If you want to make a serious run at every ounce of game content you need to join a power guild.

If you want to find out about guilds on your server you can use www.warcraftrealms.com to do so. Just go to the realm data button at the top of the page and select US realm stats from the list. Choose the first server in the list Aegwynn and click the hyperlink. The main page for this server will tell you quite a bit about the server. Aegwynn has 11,688 toons, and of those 68% are horde and 32% are Alliance. (The really interesting thing is that this article was originally drafted several months ago and the ratio at that time was 56% Alliance and 44% Horde). Additionally, 1/3 of the players on this realm are either hunters 18%, rogues 13%. So your best bet at some really good gear and the most group or guild invite possibilities probably come from playing a priest 8%, or a shaman 7%.

Now if you click the name for the first guild in the list: Continuum, you will get to see the same data for this one guild. We see this is an alliance guild with 161 members. Of these, 149 are level 70. With that many level seventies and virtually no characters below level 45, this is more than likely a power guild. Since they are also at the top of the guild ranks, they are the guild with the most level 70 characters on this server - might be hard to get an invite to this one.

Choose another guild further down on the list – Raided R. This guild is also Alliance with 42 members. But in this guild the character levels are a lot more spread out, with 12, or more than 1/4 below level 65. They only have 30 level 70’s, so they are probably running some end-game content, but that’s not nearly enough toons to make a run at SSC or the bigger raids so this might be a spot you could find a home. You would just have to talk to some of the members and see what their goals are.

Somewhere in the listing of these guilds on your server will be a group that would love to have you and will help you out a lot. One of the reasons you might want to start in a guild with more low-level toons is that it makes running the low and mid level instances so much easier. Don’t worry about that if you plan on rushing past them to 70 and worry about instances in Outlands. I only recommend that for people who have been around the block a few dozen times though. When you first start out, don’t even worry about high level content until you get there. Join a guild with about 20-60 characters your level and work your way into Outlands, refining your solo and group play technique along the way.

Just like I don’t like skipping instances, I don’t like doing them out of my guild. I also don’t like not being in a guild. I’m a people person and guild chat is fun for me. It doesn’t keep me from playing hard, but I like talking to people I have become friends with through my guild affiliations. Being in a guild makes instance running much easier. As a matter of fact; the higher you go, the harder it will be to find pick up teams for instances. So find a guild with people that suit you, and if it doesn’t work out, just find another guild. However; don’t give up on guilds altogether just because one group doesn’t act right. Once you find a group of guys and gals that you enjoy playing with, it makes the game just that much more fun.

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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 70, 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 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. 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. 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.
1. 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.
2. 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 Outlands)
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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 70 before you start hitting the dungeons.

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6 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

Nanny nanny boo boo -

I don’t know if kids still use the same annoying little chants to taunt each other that we used when I was a nooblet in real life. But the one that sticks out for this lesson is: “I’m rubber; you’re glue, whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you!” Boy I hated that one. But it’s very appropriate for the technique we’re going to talk about today. The pull and pass.

Last time we talked about using all of your skills all of the time. But there are certain cases where some skills are just not that useful outside of instances. Even worse, there is not a reason to use them in most instances until you get to the really hard ones. Beginning with Steamvaults, Shattered Halls and Shadow Labyrinth, the mob pulls are beginning to come in groups of 4-6. And those teams are well-balanced just like your group. If one of those elites, or even worse - two or three, get locked on your healer, you can pretty much just start hustling toward the entrance so your corpse run will be shorter.

Most of the time, a healer can do something like bubble (for priests), and run around for a bit and heal himself while the rest of the team goes full DPS on one or two mobs. He can kite guys around and survive for a while. But the elites in the end game instances hit so hard and you simply cannot get them off your back once they lock on, especially as a healer. So the best you can hope for is that you can keep the party healed long enough in spirit form so that they finish off a couple of them and make the next pull easier. But talk about a long night. One or two wipes in an instance is a good run, One or two wipes every one or two pulls blows.

Hunters have gotten a bad rap in groups because many other players think: they don’t (most of the time) do the serious DPS of a mage or Warlock (and locks have off-tank pets too), they can’t tank a murloc, are useless unless they are in range (except those 7 players who went survival spec) so they spend a great deal of time just running around like an idiot, blah, blah, blah. I’m sure you’ve heard these and more. If you have decent skills as a hunter you know that these statements may be true about many hunters, but not AL hunters. But the thing is: 25-30% of the toons on just about every server are hunters. Why? Because they solo so well. For the casual gamer, getting a holy priest to level 70 is about as fun as having your wisdom teeth removed. But hunters can do just about anything without having to have much help.

You can be the exception to the rule for those people who don’t really like hunters on instance runs. You paid attention to me in the last article when I told you to use all of your skills so you have all your hot buttons ready to go. Let’s cover how every priest in the game will be your new best friend when you do this a few times for them. Paladins and Shaman aren’t nearly as squishy as their cloth compatriot, but they will appreciate it just as much.

I call it a pull and pass. It can be a little tricky, but not if you know where all your buttons are and pay attention to what’s going on. We are in a big fight and you see a mob going to take a big chunk out of your healer. Here’s what you do:

1. Fire Distracting Shot - As soon as you see your healer has drawn aggro (btw, this IS hunter duty, to pull agro off of healers and to take down trash add mobs) Nail it with distracting shot to get them locked on you.

2. Use Scatter Shot/Concussive Shot - If you have specialized in Marksmanship and can use scatter shot to slow them down or even stop them altogether - if they disorient, they will drop agro on you and your pet can pick it up. If you are Beast Mastery, concussive shot.

3. By this time one of two things will have happened: the mob is now ready to pick on someone else, or someone else is picking on him.

4. If he has already been drawn to another party member, you can go back to nuking down the mark you were on in the first place - OR - use misdirection.

5. Misdirect - Hit your misdirection hotkey and then click your tank. Blast away at your target with the three biggest damage shots you have and he will go back where he needs to be.

So you pull the agro off of your healer and pass it back to your tank. A different kind of crowd control, with a hunter, you gotta love it. And that’s just one of our hunter crowd control tips. Misdirection may be the most underused skill hunters have, and I have never seen many hunters use distracting shot well because they don’t want the agro either. Most marksman hunters will use scatter shot because it saves their own bacon, but don’t know how to pass agro once they pull it. If all else fails, Feign Death and let the mob naturally wander off to someone else. You and your healer are still standing. Hunters have another great way to manage agro we’ll talk about another time.

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13 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post

I’ve been doing a lot of farming lately. To be honest with you, I’ve never had a need to farm gold before level 50 or so, but lots of you have been asking for farming spots for lower levels.

So, my team and I have rolled some new lowbie toons and we’re scouring Azeroth for some great low-level gold farming spots.

Stay tuned for the results of this - we’re actively seeking out the best places, and I’ll report them to you as we find them.

For you higher level guys, today I’m going to discuss farming the Scarlet Monastery.

Lots of people farm SM, but we wanted to know is it worth it?

We ran a level 60 Mortal Strike warrior, with mostly Valor armor (this is the first dungeon set of armor that you get from places
like Scholomance, Stratholme, and Blackrock Spire.

His weapon was nothing particularly great: the [item]Obsidian Edged Blade[/item] from Molten Core.

In other words, this would be a standard level 60 character that has done some end game stuff, but not a fully decked out toon. This is important for you to know so that you can determine whether you’ll be able to farm the SM instances faster or slower than our test character.

The results below are based on a few rules:

1. ALL blues and greens were VENDORED. Nothing was placed on the auction house.

2. All cloth was made into bandages and then vendored.

3. Repair costs were removed from the total profit .

4. We ran each instance in SM 4 times, and what you see below are the averages.

5. Time shown was the time to kill every mob in the instance, and then any respawns on the way back out.

SM Graveyard:

Avg time to complete: 20 minutes
Total Profit: 6g 34s 51c

Profit per minute: 31s 73c
Profit per hour: 19g 3s 81c

SM Library:

Avg time to complete: 22 minutes
Total Profit: 7g 99s 43c

Profit per minute: 36s 33c
Profit per hour: 21g 79s 80c

SM Armory:

Avg time to complete: 31 minutes
Total Profit: 8g 54s 75c

Profit per minute: 27s 57c
Profit per hour: 16g 54s 20c

SM Cathedral:

Avg time to complete: 37 minutes
Total Profit: 10g 91s 02c

Profit per minute: 29s 49c
Profit per hour: 17g 69s 40c

Now you have some hard data to use during your farming sessions.

What can you do to improve these numbers? I have two suggestions for you.

First, because we did not put anything on the auction house, you would probably double these numbers if you auctioned the greens and blues that dropped for you. Use auctioneer to get the proper price, and rake in the extra gold.

Second, if you don’t want to pay the auction house deposits or you don’t want to risk your greens and blues not selling, pick up enchanting as one of your tradeskills and disenchant all the greens and blues that drop for you. You don’t have to pay deposits at the AH for selling enchanting materials, they are almost always in high demand, and since you can’t auction the Bind on Pickup items you get in these instances, you’ll almost certainly make more profit selling the disenchanted materials on the auction house than you’d get for vendoring the item.

Finally, don’t think that you have to be level 60 to farm SM. The mobs are around level 35, and although they are elite, they are not particularly tough.

Almost any character level 50 or higher should be able to clear out SM solo (although it will take longer that it would with a level 60 character.)

And don’t overlook the possibility of duoing SM with a friend. We were able to clear out SM with a 45 warrior and a 41 Shaman with no problems at all.

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6 Comments » ~ ~ Random Post