by Allison Robert
Once WoW’s most disparaged profession, Fishing has experienced a resurgence in Wrath — and it may get even better in Cataclysm, with developers studying fishing from other games like Animal Crossing in order to make it more fun. As far as I’m concerned, as long as they cook up another distraction like the Dalaran fountain in Cataclysm, I’ll be happy.
Accomplished Angler is a very work- and time-intensive meta-achievement, so I’ve taken the liberty of splitting this guide up. The first set of achievements you’ll need:
Grand Master Fisherman
Sorry, folks, there’s no real way to shorten this one; you’ve just got to keep fishing. One of the nice things about the profession is that you can level it anywhere — the only penalty to leveling it in an area with higher “fishing skill” than you currently have is the amount of junk you’ll catch versus actual fish. But on your way to Grand Master, you’ll have put a lot of work in towards:
1000 Fish
No way to cheese this one either, but fortunately it counts objects as fish too. If you’re starting from scratch, the best way to do it might be to combine 1000 Fish with the following achievement, angling for a fish from a low-level area:
One That Didn’t Get Away
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by Zach Yonzon
Rogues. Those sneaky little bastards could be anywhere. Out of all the classes in the game, there is perhaps no class no more feared for their PvP prowess than rogues. Rogues gain a fearsome reputation by virtue of the nature of the class alone — they can Stealth. Because of rogues, everyone has to literally watch their backs. No place is safe because a rogue can be lying in lurking in some dark corner waiting to strike at the proper time. Through years of leveling in a PvP server, there is no sound in the game more unsettling than the low humming whoosh of a nearby stealthed rogue. In fact, rogue (and by extension, feral druid) stealth is the single biggest reason why I don’t PvP with music on.
And for rogues, it’s all about timing. In the Battlegrounds, it isn’t uncommon to find rogues preying on the weak, those low on life, the defenseless players eating or drinking. They can’t help it. It’s in their nature. The class encourages foul play through Stealth and a wonderful repertoire of attacks from behind. Rogues are at their best when catching their opponents off guard and are extremely capable of doing so. After the jump, we’ll take a closer look at the basic things to expect when fighting a rogue regardless of their spec.
Stealth
As mentioned, Stealth is a rogue’s defining ability. Learned at Level 1, every rogue learns to sneak around and pounce on an opponent. It’s their single biggest trump card, the ability to remain unseen. In Arena play, it’s critical for the rogue to get the opener, as some of her most powerful attacks require her to be stealthed. Taking a rogue out of stealth removes the element of surprise so it’s important to be on your toes. If you see a rogue from a distance entering stealth, always be on the ready. While it is practically impossible to get the jump on a very good rogue, the good news is that there are quite a lot of mediocre rogues who get too close to an opponent assuming their stealth will keep them undetected.
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by Brian Wood
today we’re going to run down the advantages of the tier 9 and tier 10 hunter set bonuses for each of the three hunter specs, and suggest which way you should gear your hunter.
Older Sets
We’re only interested in the tier 9 and tier 10 sets. Anything older isn’t worthwhile for hunters. We don’t even care about the tier 9 4-piece bonus (not even if you’re BM). The only other older set that we’d ever want to hang onto is the tier 5 2-piece (from BC raids) for extreme soloing situations (it lets us automatically heal our pets for 15% of the damage we do).
Before we get into the spec by spec details, lets hit a quick review of our tier 9 and 10 sets.
Tier 9: Windrunner
There are three versions of the hunter tier 9 set:
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by Zuggy
When it comes to macros, the druid class has seen both extremes. From the classes initial conception, which literally required dozens of macros to effectively operate in both PvP and PvE environments, to the more simplistic druid we see today. After years of tweaking and adjustment this type of mass macro creation is no longer environment (thank God!), as many shifting abilities are now automatic.
Restoration Druid Macros
Nature’s Swiftness Heal
/cast Nature’s Swiftness
/stopcasting
/cast Healing Touch
Mouseover Healing Macros
/cast [target=mouseover] Healing Touch
/cast [target=mouseover] Rejuvenation
/cast [target=mouseover] Lifebloom
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by Fox Van Allen
As promised, follow me after the break for the shadow priest’s guide to the Icecrown Plagueworks.
Your Mission: Stay alive. Inoculate yourself and others against Festergut’s raid-wide mega-attack. Pull out all the stops to maximize DPS, cause dude needs to die quick. Marvel at the guest appearance of Koffing above your head.
Festergut, especially in 25-man mode, is a pretty brutal DPS check. This means, of course, that your entire raid could do everything right, and you can still find yourself getting wiped by the enrage timer. To add to the challenge, as a ranged player, you’ll find that there’s a lot of movement involved and your DPS will lag behind the melee classes. Still, shadow priests bring more to a raid than just DPS, and it’s that extra utility that lets us shine here.
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By Matticus
When it comes to the Blood Queen Lana’thel encounter in Icecrown, one of the challenging aspects is to set up vampire bites on players. Some days, the first player that gets bitten by the Queen isn’t always the same one in subsequent attempts.
Well worry no more.
There’s an addon called Blood Queen which manages all that stuff for you. For raid leaders, it becomes a big asset because the process doesn’t have to be micro-managed.
Features
- Auto-assigned bite targets
- Automatic raid icons set
- Takes into account deaths, disconnects, mis-bites and mind control’s
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by Mimetir
If you do know something about macros then have a read anyway – some of these might be basic to you, but you might pick up something that saves your skin, bark or cow-printed hide.
Paladins
1. Buffs up quicksmart
/castsequence [target=focus] Beacon of Light, Sacred Shield
- This macro will put both of your essential healing buffs up on your focus, which is likely to be the tank.
- TIP: you can use the addon Need To Know in conjunction with this setup. It’ll give you permanent timer bars for those buffs regardless of whom you’re targetting.
2. Easy judging
/cast [target=focustarget] Judgement of Light
- Casts your judgement of light which both does healing and gives you a powerful haste buff
- It won’t cause you to overaggro when casting your judgement as you’re using it on the tank’s target
- Means you don’t have to mess around with tab or mouse targetting a mob to cast it on. You may need to re-target your tank but that’s less trouble than having to target everything manually.
- TIP: you could use the addon Clique, which will allow you to set up mouse and key bindings for anything you could wish. Want to heal the tank? Sure, click the <insert mouse button here> and you needn’t retarget them after using your JoL macro.
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by Gregg Reece
1. Typical PvE talent setup
The base talent build we’re going to look at is a very retribution build of 5/5/55 which gives us six points to do with as we wish. Now, there are generally two viewpoints on what you should do with these depending on which type of utility you want to provide. If you want access to Divine Sacrifice then you’d go 5/11/55 with those six points all in protection. However, if you’d rather provide a little debuff to your target’s attack power as well as have a wee bit more survivability, then you’d take Vindication as well as fill out the rest of the retribution tree with 5/5/61.
2. Talent overview
Talents in italics are optional, and you can flex your build to pick up or drop these based on utility you want to provide. If a talent is struck out, avoid it, as it provides little or no benefit to you as a damage dealer. I’ll only be covering the protection and holy talents that are relevant for a ret paladin to pursue.
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by Daniel Whitcomb
One of the most important things you can do to become a good death knight is to solidify your damage (or threat) rotation or priority system so that you can consistently keep your runes on cool down and your damage high. That said, it’s far from the only thing that marks a good DPS or tank. Another thing is flexibility.
Death Knights have a wide variety of tools and tricks that can turn the tide of a battle. These tricks can be hard to weave into your existing system without giving up your rotation, but there are tricks to making it easier, and sometimes the benefit outweighs having to mess up your rotation for a few seconds. Let’s take a look at 5 specific buttons that more death knight should be pushing.
Rune Strike
I’ve heard complaints from some death knights that their threat just doesn’t measure up to other tanks. Most of those death knights, I think, probably aren’t make full use of Rune Strike. Rune Strike is, if nothing else, the best way you can spend your runic power if you’re looking to gain threat. To truly maximize your threat, you should pretty much be hitting it every time it’s available (That is, right after a dodge or parry when you have the runic power). Of course, one major problem here is that it’s definitely a pain to remember to press it every time. Luckily, that’s when macros come to the rescue. For all of your major weapon strikes, simply create macros such as this:
#showtooltip
/cast (Ability)
/cast !Rune Strike
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by Zuggy
Macros for any class are going to be important, but for death knights they are absolutely vital. This death knight macro guide will help you implement key combination macros into your death knight’s arsenal. These macros will help you consolidate keybindings and quicken your overall rotation and hotkey speed. If you have a macro you think should be added to this death knight macro guide please leave a comment below and I’ll add it into the compiled death knight macros list.
Death Grip + Chains of Ice Snare Macro
/startattack
/cast Death Grip
/cast Chains of Ice
Will cast death grip first, if death grip is on cooldown will cast chains of ice instead.
Frost Panic Button
/cast Lichborne
/cast Unbreakable Armor
/cast Icebound Fortitude
Ranged Ghoul Stun
/castsequence Leap, Gnaw
Your ghoul will leap then stun, requires 2 clicks.
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