by Chase Christian

While I hate to boil down an entire encounter to a single idea, sometimes it simply can’t be helped: Baleroc is the healer fight of this tier of raid content. The developers have been throwing one healer fight at us per tier since Wrath began, making Baleroc the latest in a long line of mechanics designed to let healers play outside the box. Chimaeron and Anub’arakmade us focus on keeping health pools low but not too low, while Loatheb and Valithria challenged our burst and sustained throughput. General Vezax’s awful aura forced us to make every point of mana count, although our love affair with intellect helped us weather that storm.

Baleroc makes us choose between healing the raid and healing the tank. It’s one of the age-old questions for healers, but Baleroc has upped the ante with the Vital Spark/Vital Flamemechanic. The choice of healing targets is transformed from a simple problem to a crucial decision, as the wrong move can cause a wipe. Luckily for you, Beacon of Light will help you truly shine on this encounter, allowing holy paladins to dominate the top 40 board on World of Logs.
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by Josh Myers

Every fight in Firelands has its positives and negatives for enhancement shaman. Rhyolith takes reduced damage for 60% of the fight, but he goes molten at 25%, and you need to burn him before he burns you. Beth’tilac spends the first 3 minutes making you run around like a confused wildebeest while you try to avoid scary fire on the ground, but then he gives you a nice, long burn phase at the end.

This seems to be the Firelands model, at least in the first four fights. Every fight has periods of low damage to the boss followed by intense DPS phases. Shannox, the Hagrid of Firelands, is no different. His first phase will either make you want to rip your movement keys off your keyboard or make you want to reroll an arcane mage, while his second will just make you want to roll arcane.
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by Matthew Rossi

Patch 4.2 is in full swing by now, with most players having unlocked either the Shadow Wardens or the Druids of the Talon for the various vendors. Many guilds are already working on heroic modes, and even more are fighting their way through the raid to one degree or another.

And what does this all mean to us warriors? Well, it means new gear, for one thing. The past couple of weeks, we’ve discussed gear you could pick up in the Firelands raid itself as well as via reputation rewards and unlockable vendors (and a quest chain). Now, it’s time to discuss what you can buy for valor points.

Before we go into the big list o’ loot, I wanted to say that a couple of weeks in, I’m feeling like I’m getting a handle on how warriors perform in the Firelands raid. It’s like I figured: Once again, warriors need to get geared up to equal other DPSers. I feel that for right now, arms DPS is the easiest to sustain, then SMF fury, and finally TG fury. I expect TG will pull ahead once I’m using a couple of Firelands weapons. On a fight like Rhyolith or Staghelm, I can sustain more DPS than on an Alysrazor or Shannox, where I have to target switch more, move around to chase down mobs or avoid damage and even interrupt. I think perhaps the nerfs to fury were more than was needed, but we’ll see once a couple more weeks are gone and we’re talking about set bonuses and Firelands level weapons.
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by Christian Belt

“Mages are a two-button class.” — The internet

These days, you literally can’t post the word “mage” anywhere on the web without someone, usually multiple people, posting some poorly spelled, perplexingly punctuated amalgam of the above words. It’s usually intended as an indictment of the class, a dismissal of what non-mages feel is the simplistic nature of of our major DPS spell rotations. The assumption is that mages are an easy, boring class to play, that one could be a successful mage simply by drunkenly alternating pressing two buttons.

For a very long time, it was easy for me to ignore this. It was stupid, and false, and perpetuated by non-mages who were either clear trolls or outright ignorant. But lately, I’ve been hearing self-deprecating versions of this same phrase from actual, honest-to-goodness mages. Are we really buying into the ignorant assumptions of the rest of the community? It was at that moment that I realized that it was time I addressed what I call the two-button myth.

My original concept for this column was to present my argument in the form of a dirty limerick: There was a young mage from Nantucket … Then I realized that nothing good could come of that, only tears and heartbreak. I instead opted for a sampling of my favorite arguments, each of which plainly refutes the misguided assertion that mages are simple and boring to play.
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by Tyler Caraway

No matter what class or spec it is that you may play, you always bring more to the table than your prescribed role. DPSers especially have far more utility than they realize. It’s time that players wake up to this, and that is exactly what I intend to facilitate in this week’s article. Playing balance is exceptionally fun. You bring fantastic damage to any raid group, but you also bring so much more than that. Want to be a better raider — no, want to be a better player in general? Then read on!

Using all of your abilities

Druids are the masters of nature. While each specialization focuses on a specific subset of our class, no druid should ever forget that you have a wide array of tools at your disposal that can save a failing group at the drop of a hat. We’re spectacular in that way. It is for this reason alone that I started my WoW career as a druid and why I have never been able to leave the druid class behind.
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by Matt Walsh

In this column, I’m going to outline four easy ways to boost your combat table coverage — by hook or by crook — so you can scrape your way to the magical 102.4% number. I’ll go over an amazing addon that’ll visualize the process for you, a spreadsheet that can remove the fog of war from the whole process and make gear choices much more transparent, proper consumable choices you can make, and more.

But first, how to visualize the combat table

One addon I cannot recommend enough is Visual Combat Table, which puts a resizable bar on your screen that divides itself according to how much avoidance, block, and normal hits you are subject to from your target. If you want to see how close you are to 102.4% CTC, click on the raid boss-level target dummy in your home city and check out the polychromatic bar of awesomeness on your screen.
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by Matt Low

This Baleroc encounter gave me a big fit both on the healing management side and the micromanagement side. It is entirely about the healers and their ability to switch assignments on command. Peripheral vision plays a huge role, so make sure your camera angles aren’t too far out, or else you’ll miss the crystal spawns. Stay too close, and you’ll be blasted with a debuff that will cause your healing ability to plummet and almost assuredly lead to a tank death. After successfully healing with both the one-tank method and the two-tank method, I prefer the two-tank method.

My thoughts and the methods laid out reflect my raid group in a 25-player setting.

On both of our kills, we used anywhere from six to eight healers. The first time we walked in, we resorted to eight. (Actually, we had to use eight because we were short a number of DPSers that day.)

The mechanics can be a little confusing. Even though I had an understanding of the encounter walking in, I didn’t really get it until toward the end, when everything just seemed to magically click. When you break it down and look at it from a broader perspective, there are only three players who take any real damage:

• tank
• two DPSers for two crystals (25-player raids; only one DPSer for one crystal in 10-player raids)

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by Brian Wood

The problem with skill is that there’s no number on our character pane or armory to measure it. Everyone will swiftly agree that skill is the most important thing — more important than this talent or that reforge — but without having a number right there to look at, everyone ends up ignoring it and instead focuses in on this talent or that reforge.

“Your DPS is low? Well you should really reforge your boots to haste,” or “Why aren’t you gemming for agility u noob!”

Let me assure you something: If you’re underperforming by thousands of DPS and can’t make it to the top of the meters, 95% of the time it’s a skill issue. Even if your talents/gems/glyphs/reforging aren’t very optimized, odds are you aren’t really seeing that difference. But if you have even a moderate slip on skill issues, it’s immediately apparent.

So let’s today step back a moment and consider hunter skill once again. We’re all used to obsessing over every tiny part of character optimization, so we’re going to put skill into terms that correlate to that: DPS.
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by Basil Berntsen

Trade chat is simultaneously one of the most overused and underused tools in our toolbox. Non-auctioneers sometimes use it almost exclusively because the addon-free auction house is intimidatingly badly designed. Gold-making pros sometimes get so wrapped up in their own business that we miss out potentially profitable chats.

So how can you use trade chat to profit?
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