by Basil Berntsen

A very interesting form of raiding has been gaining popularity. GDKP stands, literally, for “gold dragon kill points.” It’s a badly named system, but essentially, it means that instead of some effort-based DKP system, people participating in the raid use real currency: gold.

So what is this GDKP thing, anyway?

In a GDKP raid, all items of value, whether they’re BoP gear, Primordial Saronite, BoE drops, Precious’s Ribbon or quest items, are auctioned off in an open bidding system to all participants. The person willing to pay the most for it will get the item in exchange for gold, and at the end of the night, all the gold that was collected is divided out among the raiders.

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by Matt Maynard

Whether you are a first-time tank or a grizzled hardcore raid veteran, a death knight, druid, paladin or warrior, you will find some useful nuggets in these top 10 tank tips.

10. Pay attention to what abilities trigger the global cooldown (and pay more attention to those that do not). For example, warriors can generate threat on a large group by charging a mob in the back and using Thunder Clap on the mobs in the front as you pass through them. This is possible because Charge does not trigger the global cooldown. Likewise, abilities like Concussion Blow and Rune Strike can be macroed into other abilities.

9. Use a unit frames addon. An addon like Grid, which is generally regarded as specific to healing can be invaluable to a tank because of the sheer amount of information that can be concisely displayed. Grab a few additional Grid modules like GridStatusThreat and GridStatusRaidDebuffs and, at a glance, you can see your threat situation, major debuffs, etc. as well as having a handy mouseover frame for the next tip.

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by Allison Robert

With the upcoming Icecrown raid buffs going all the way to 30% damage/healing/health/absorbs eventually, more and more raids are going to find their way to Arthas. Buffs aside, a lot of Arthas’ difficulty lies in execution, and I started jotting down a few notes that I hope might be helpful to other druids likely to attempt the fight. We were fortunate to get both the 10- and 25-man version down, and I got astoundingly lucky on one 10-man attempt with back-to-back selections as a Harvest Soul target while I was running a video capture. I’ve seen a lot of comments online that caster druids aren’t well-suited to dealing with this, and that’s just not true at all.

Sweat the small stuff.

As with other elaborate, multi-phase boss fights, it’s the small stuff that’s going to kill you — over and over again until people get it right. The need to get a lot of “little things” right over a lengthy boss fight (I think our 25-man kill clocked in at around 17-18 minutes) is a big part of the difficulty, and odds are good that you will die to a number of infuriatingly tiny mistakes.

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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 Matt Low

Toravon is the latest boss to appear within the Vault of Archavon, however we’re not quite sure if he is the last of the VoA bosses to be seen in this expansion. The boss is fairly simple conceptually, but don’t take him too lightly. I’ll walk you through what you need to know to get score some sweet tier 10 PvE gear and equivilent PvP gear.

Gear Drops

He drops tier 10 level gloves and legs along with PvP gear (like belt and boots). Unlike his brothers, he drops 3 items on 25 instead of 2. And yes, he does drop Emblems of Frost. Its a fairly simple encounter for an equipped raid group. There aren’t any fires to stay out of or anything. You’ll need 2 tanks and at least 4-5 healers (on 10 man, you can get away with 2).

Tanks

Tanks will need to switch off of each other to shake the Frostbite debuff. It can stack up to 100 times and each application places a DoT which hits for about 1000 every couple of seconds. Your tanks can switch when they feel the debuff is getting high.

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by Matt Low

A great team of healers need a leader who can help them stay focused and give them the right assignments. Without their direction (or at least, someone to coordinate healing actions), it can get pretty messy fast. Being the boss of healers and acting as an intermediary between them and the raid leader or officers can often times be stressing. They’re often the first person people go to after a wipe wondering what happened or who failed and so forth. As a healer though, you can help ease the stress that they experience.

Have a dual spec: In current raids, there’s a degree of variability on the number of healers used in a fight. Want to be valuable? Pick up a DPS and healing spec. Offer to do both depending on what the raid needs. A fight like Valithria could benefit with 7 healers for raids that are just starting out. On the other hand, Festergut needs a reduction in healers in order to match the DPS requirements. You can get away with about 5 on that encounter. Your second spec doesn’t have to be one of a different role either. I myself run holy as one spec and discipline as the other. It’s handy in case I need to mass cast Power Word: Shield against Saurfang and then switch it up later to holy for Valithria.

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by Mimetir @ WorldofMatticus

Say you’re storming the Citadel on a fairly regular basis, massacring the Lich King’s advance nasties from Lord Marrowgar right up – literally – to Deathbringer Saurfang. You might be progressing through it at your own pace, or you might have it on farm and are running through weekly as a warm-up to pick up gear. Well, either way. Here are some general and some shaman-specific tips from my own experience on how to healing can help your group steamroller the nasties.

Lord Marrowgar:

1. Bone Spike Graveyard: Pain. In. The. There are two things you can do to mitigate its effect on your healing. Firstly, make sure you remind your healing  teammates to watch out for bonespike on each other. For example, if your tank healer is spiked then you need to pick up the slack for him and heal the tanks. Just til he gets back on his feet. Secondly, standing behind Marrowgar as shown in the diagram will help your DPS get you un-spiked as quickly and safely as  possible.

2. Coldflame is not cool. Really. Move out of the fire before it gets to you. Yep, I know it’s a pain and it seems to as soon as a healer has moved there’s more coldflame racing towards you. Standing at range will give you time to see it and move.

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by Xerin @ tentonhammer

Gearing up in World of Warcraft can be a daunting task. If you’re a fresh level 80 then most of the content is locked off to you if you plan on using the dungeon finder and there isn’t a whole lot you can do about getting the ball rolling and the loot flowing in. We’ve recently have gone through the process of taking a brand new level 80 and gearing it up to see exactly how things work now in patch 3.3.

Table of Contents

• Notes for Fresh Level 80s
• Gearing up for Heroics
• Tanks & Healers
• Word of Warning
• Gems & Enchants
• Gearing up for Raiding

Notes for Fresh Level 80s

If you’ve just hit level 80 then you’re going to be hitting a massive wall known as the new gear score checks placed into the dungeon finder. These gear score checks will check the total gear score of your equipped armor and weapons to determine if you’re allowed to queue for an instance or not. This isn’t so much a problem for heroics, but for Trial of the Champion and the Icecrown instances you may find yourself unable to even get the gear necessary to start off your career in PvE.

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by Mem @ tentonhammer

Playing a healer is (in my opinion) probably the toughest job you can do in a raid. Not only are the lives of your fellow party or raid members in your hands, but if you mess up, everyone is going to know it. This guide will hopefully help you prevent those flubs, by going over the basic (and often ignored) information that you will need to mold yourself into an exceptional healer. Be you Shaman, Druid, Priest, or Paladin this guide is for you!

This may seem like silly and unneeded advice, but this basic rule is often ignored or forgotten. In a 5 man party you are obviously expected to heal everyone including yourself, however once you enter a 10 or 25 man raiding situation things become slightly more complicated. Not knowing who you are healing in these larger raid situations can lead to many preventable deaths and/or your entire raid wiping.

For example if you are assigned to heal the main tank and you choose to ignore, or miss your assignment and decide to take it upon yourself to heal the raid instead, there is a very good chance that the tank you were supposed to be healing is going to die. The mob the tank was tanking will go on a rampage and own the faces of at least a few raid members before another tank can pick it up, or if it does not get picked up it will, in the end, wipe your entire raid. Even if the tank manages to stay alive, you are putting extra strain on your other healers who are taking time out of doing their jobs to do yours, which can also lead to deaths amongst the raid.

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