Still haven’t gotten a good offhand to test Single-Minded Fury, and so the past week I decided to switch to arms for my raiding spec. Yeah, I’m raiding as DPS at the start of an expansion again. I’d be shocked if it hadn’t happened at the beginning of BC, the beginning of Wrath and the beginning of Cata. I just seem to have an absolute gift for showing up to the party as DPS and leaving it as a tank.
Now, conventional wisdom would tell you that fury is king of warrior DPS, and I’m not exactlyarguing with that wisdom. Arms is certainly lower in PvE than I would like, but it’s got its respectable moments, and it’s a lot easier to gear for. To be fair, for my gear level I’m doing fairly well with arms – with the proper talents it’s fairly beastly for certain heavy add fights, and if you get a nice addon like SlamAndAwe you can track your Taste for Blood procs and take care of the single most annoying aspect of the spec. I tend to prefer Bladestorm for trash and Dragon Roar for bosses, and I’m still using Bloodbath due to its being up every minute, which is just to my personal tastes.
Raiding arms means playing with a lot more predictability than fury. The only random proc ability is Sudden Death, while pretty much everything else is almost metronomic in its precision. CS to open, MS then Overpower, CS when SD lights up and otherwise Slam unless your rage bar is totally full even with Slams or if you stack TfB to 3 or higher, then try and time a Colossus Smash to be followed by a three-stack Heroic Strike. If TfB is going to fall off if you don’t use it now, and it’s below 3, let it. Not very hard to use.
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I thought maybe I’d goofed, that I’d mis-timed the first two-thirds of Mogu’shan Vaults and would need to interrupt to make a fun post about Black Temple and some new warlock lore. Sadly, the felfire questline got postponed for a little while.
Oh well. In the meantime we can alternate between old raids and new as a warlock. First, let’s finish up Mogu’shan Vaults with two complex-to-explain but simple-to-do fights.
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by Joe Perez
Mogu’shan Vaults starts out with a bang. By bang, however, I mean that the first two fightsare all about execution to get past then successfully. Your raid group will have to work in concert in order to make it to the next set of bosses. The third and fourth boss of Vaults doesn’t shy away from the execution standpoint, and it is safe to say that while there are certainly some DPS and healing thresholds you need to meet, that the entire zone really is about execution.
Gara’jal the Spirit Binder and The Spirit Kings are fun fights, that have a lot going on in them. Whether it is multiple planes of existence or multiple long dead kings, you can be sure that there is enough going on to keep you on your toes and keep you busy.
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Patch 5.1 introduced pets to the vanilla-era raids. Patch 4.3 introduced transmogrification, which brought old raids back. Before that, some players would solo or duo old raids just for the challenge giggles. Every new expansion has raised the level cap and opened another expansion to soloing.
Whether you’re soloing for a look, for improved familiarity with your spell toolbox, or for bragging rights, warlock is definitely a great class to jump into soloing old raids. At level 90, even before you’re decked out in tier 14, most of the Wrath of the Lich King raids are fairly easy. But let’s start with the basics — speccing and playstyle.
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by Dawn Moore
Sometimes I think I’m the only person who likes the Klaxxi. It seems like everyone either hates them because they’re bugs, or hates them because all their quests are in the Dread Wastes (people hate the Dread Wastes too, for some reason). I love them though. Their daily quests can all be done in one go, they have lots of fun buffs, and they remind me of Zorak. You know, from Space Ghost Coast to Coast.
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by Olivia Grace
Healium
Healium takes quite a different approach to the other addons I’ve reviewed so far in this set of Addon Spotlights. VuhDo, Healbot, and Grid+Clique are all click-to-heal addons, that is to say, they take a set of either their own frames or a third-party set of frames, and set up mouseover macros on them. A left-click on a frame fires one heal at that player, while an ALT+ left click fires a different one. Healium, on the other hand, as can be seen in the header image, doesn’t perform quite like this.
Instead, Healium sets up a row of buttons next to each party member, on which the healer can put various spells. Setup is extremely simple, all you do is go into the interface menu then into Addons, then Healium, and move the slider to indicate how many buttons you want Healium to display. Next, you can drag and drop spells from your spellbook straight onto those buttons. It’s also possible to set each button in the Healium options screen.
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by Olivia Grace
Getting Started
I’ve been talking about addon configuration quite a bit recently, with some criticisms of a couple of addons’ setup methods. Configuration is really, really important for addon use. It’s what people first encounter when using them, especially with healing addons such as these that you can’t really wade straight into with no setup.
Both Healbot and VuhDo do offer a standard configuration by healing class, which they now both automatically detect, but unless you’re a little psychic and — especially for priests — don’t need most of your spells, these won’t get you very far. The point I’m trying to make is that configuration is necessary for both these addons in order to use them effectively. Given how similarly they work, configuration is half the battle between these two.
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by Alex Ziebart
If you haven’t purchased the Pandaren Monk pet off of the Blizzard store (or don’t have access to the numerous limited edition murlocs and holiday pets), it can be a challenge finding a good humanoid pet to use in pet battles, especially early on in your battling career. The first one you’ll gain access to is the recently implemented Harpy Youngling from the Northern Barrens, but it isn’t very good as a humanoid pet as it has primarily flying-type moves. You can acquire the Stunted Yeti as early as level 12 in Feralas, but in my humble opinion, the first humanoid wild pet worth its weight is Zangarmarsh’s Sporeling Sprout, acquired around pet level 18.
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by Dan Desmond
I really like Terrace of Endless Spring. In my eyes, Terrace represents a continuation of the process of experimentation the developers began in Trial of the Crusader, namely that of making raids smaller without holding any actual content back. This experiment was continued in Cataclysm in Throne of the Four Winds, but I feel it wasn’t quite a success until Terrace. Shrinking raids is a tricky proposition, but the surface area of this instance is balanced out by the complexity of its encounters.
For you regular readers out there, you might have noticed I seem to have skipped right over the second half of Heart of Fear, Nightmare of Shek’zeer. Truth be told, I didn’t really find these encounters interesting enough to devote an entire column to tackling them. Don’t let my apparent entomophobia hold you back, though — please do feel free to discuss Wind Lord Mel’Jarak, Amber-Shaper Un’sok, and Grand Empress Shek’zeer in the comments below!
Anywho, let’s jump right into the encounters for Terrace of Endless Spring. If you’re looking for some raid guides for these bosses, Icy Veins has a great set on their site.
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by Robin Torres
I’m bored of Northrend. It is beautiful and has lovely music and is full of lore and I’m bored. It’s the new Outland for me and my alts. Other ways to level abound, of course, but they all have their drawbacks and are various levels of “Been there; done that.” as well. So I took Tizzi, the bored goblin mage, to a place where my aged druid spent many grindful days: the Isle of Quel’Danas.
We complain about dailies now, but Quel’Danas (also known as the Sunwell Isle) was the land of too many dailies for our quest log. Grind, grind, grind we ancient Burning Crusade players did, so we could be of the Shattered Sun and get some lovely loot besides. When Quel’Danas was the in-thing, everyone was max-level, so there was no XP — just the cash, gear, and camping. Oh, so very much camping.
The Isle of Quel’Danas is vacant of players now, but is otherwise unchanged. It resides in a bubble in time, much like Outland, and the NPCs are still there to give quests or be slaughtered.
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