The term “healing rotation” is often bandied about by bloggers and theorycrafters, as they take the dps max output model and try, very clunkily, to apply it to a role which doesn’t adhere to the same rules. Unlike our pew-pew teammates, for whom strict adherence to a sim model can have positive consequences, good healing is dictated more by the skill of your teammates, your raid’s strategy, and your reaction time than it is by the encounter mechanics. And so,…

In the spirit of Cataclysm, which someone so appropriately has dubbed WoW 4.0, talent trees are the latest game element to see some of the effects of new-but-old-but new redesign philosophy (which by the way, as a fan of continual improvement, I actually applaud). Cut down from today’s 51-point trees, these new talent systems are intended to encourage players to identify with their spec early on in character progression, and to offer both meaningful and progressive changes in game play…

In WoW, as it exists today, elitism is both a good and a bad thing; its connotation greatly depends on who you talk to. Most oftentimes, being an “elitist” is looked upon as a negative, and not with the tongue-in-cheek approach that a certain theorycrafting guild took when they launched their intellectual salvo against “uneducated” players the world over. It is a term applied in a variety of fashions, often slung in defense of a real or perceived accusation, and…

I have a slight confession to make; make sure you’re sitting down for this one folks. I am … a WoW elitist. I make no bones about it—I believe in optimal stats, optimal specs, optimal rotations, and optimal performance. I do believe that an optimal condition exists, and although I concede that it is unattainable, for all intents and purposes, it’s nonetheless my goal to get as close to it as possible. But I’m not telling you this so I…

With the 15% buff in place and an instance of “farm” and “progression” content to clear, a number of guilds these days are facing a very real and very scary problem—raid regression. The opposite of solid progression, regression is a compounding effect, a slippery slope with disastrous consequences should you reach the bottom. I would venture every raider out there has been at a regression crossroads at some point, where attempts have been getting better and better with each wipe,…

There comes a time in every raider’s life when they find themselves faced with a daunting challenge—writing an application to a guild that they would actually like to join. In stark contrast to those guilds that you join as a friend-of-a-friend, THAT GUILD is one that you want to impress. And whether it’s a casual or hardcore guild, or anything in between, chances are you’ve approached this problem with some trepidation, knowing that the chance for general douchbaggery is fairly…

In the world of competitive raiding, we oftentimes depend on key people—guild leaders, raid leaders, healing leads, main tanks, uber dps—to carry heavier loads than others, to hold the reigns and contribute a little more than average on our way to victory. And, as I have [sadly] discovered multiple times over the course of my WoW career, sometimes the glue holding everything together is just one person’s tenacity. When it comes to healing, we’ve all played on teams where there’s…

Without a doubt, healing is something I consider a comfort zone. I write about it, I talk about, and I genuinely enjoy the game more when I’m doing it. So a few months ago I finally bit the bullet and rolled the last healing class I didn’t have as an alt—a Priest. It was an RAF romp, capitalizing on a friend’s desire to finally level a mage. And while the leveling process was something unto itself—what do you mean priests…

At around 12:30pm yesterday afternoon, a loud <THUNK> was heard from the Resto Shaman community as jaws hit the floor and tall blue trolls fainted dead away from excitement. Unless you are living under a rock, you know that yesterday Blizzard released its teaser on what Cataclysm has in store for the shaman class. So, instead of depressing you with cautionary tales and statistics on how many Blizzard “concepts” hit the floor during testing, let’s just take a look at…

About a month or so ago, during some down time at the end of my day, I wandered onto the MMO-Champion Shaman forums ready to answer some questions and, instead, walked away with one of my own. As I detailed in a previous post, it’s been my joy as a healer in WotLK to have maintained a fairly consistent spec since xpac release. I think most resto shaman are in this same boat—by and large we could spec resto in…