Flux

Updated PvP Disease to include the auto unflag feature in patch 2.4.3.

Updated Best Stats with more character classes.

The Wrath of the Lich King expansion is only a handful of months away.  When it arrives gear will ‘reset’ making what you currently have outdated as fast as you can say level 80.  And gold will be far easier to get.  So why bother?  You could stop playing and wait for the expansion.  You will get better gear, make gold faster, and you can come back and go through all the raids you never got to see without wiping on the same boss every raid night.  You can laugh at all your friends who spend the next few months grinding in the arena, battlegrounds, and raid bosses.

Except there are six things you won’t be able to do after the expansion.  These will either be completely inaccessible or require a character at level 70 or lower.

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Some items in the game are remarkable in that they are either insanely useful or very powerful. Let’s take a look at one.

Elemental Seaforium Charge

Profile: Open locked chests and doors
Where: Auction House or Engineer
How: Crafted and usable by engineers
Loot: Elemental Seaforium Charge

The Elemental C4 Seaforium Charge is like having your own personal lock picking rogue, that explodes.  With it engineers can open locked chests and doors that require up to 350 lock picking.  This includes most chests, lockboxes, and Outland doors like the shortcut door in Shattered Halls.  The charges are fairly cheap to craft but the schematic requires revered reputation with the Consortium.  If you aren’t revered you can sometimes pick them up at the Auction House.

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So you are dishing out damage like a cluster bomb and still not getting aggro. But your raid is wiping. People are dying and the healers are out of mana. What more can you do?

Bad dps is easy but good dps is hard. What makes for good dps? The obvious and typical answer is to top the damage meters and not get aggro. But less well know and just as important is helping your healers keep you alive.  Dead people can’t dps.

The typical mistakes bad dpsers make are getting out of range or line of sight of their healer, running away from their healer when trying to avoid damage, and not putting on stamina when it’s needed. Let’s look at some ways for dps to stay alive.

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Some items in the game are remarkable in that they are either insanely useful or very powerful. Let’s take a look at one.

Drums of Battle

Profile: You and everyone in your group does damage faster.
Where: Pattern can be bought from Almaador if you are honored with The Sha’tar.
How: Crafted and only usable by leather workers with 365 skill.  Requires 6 Heavy Knothide Leather and 4 Thick Clefthoof Leather.
Loot: Drums of Battle

There are several patterns for leatherworkers to make various types of drums which do everything from healing, increase run speed, or even fear your enemies.  But the drums that give you the most boom are the battle drums.  They are most useful for raiding and give the group an extra 80 haste rating, which is roughly 5% faster attacks and casting.  This is so useful that some players specifically level up leather working to be able to use them in end game raids. Note that they do not work in arena and you have to be a leatherworker to use them.

The buff doesn’t stack, so it’s handy to have a macro like the one below to warn other players so they don’t waste theirs. Note that this macro uses the /in command which is not a standard command. For it to work you must already have a mod installed which enables this, like Prat or Cosmos.

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Updated Best Stats with Hunter and Warlock information.

Which stat is the best? What should you be stacking?  There is a bewildering mass of over thirty five of them. And if that isn’t confusing enough their value depends on talent spec, unseen milestones/caps, and even each other. Without a degree from Gnomeregan your mechanical chicken mount has a better chance to scratch out an answer.

We have compiled a monolithic table of cliffnotes so you can skip Gnomer.

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Updated Getting Around, Fast to include the two new mage locations, Theramore and Stonard, from patch 2.4.2.

One of the more popular debates that surfaces on WoW forums like an unkillable multi-headed troll is, are hybrids better?

What’s a hybrid?  Blizzard designed the game with specialists and hybrids. The specialty classes are supposed to be the best at something, like ranged damage, while the hybrids do more than one thing like healing and melee damage, but not as well. In the first stage of the game this works very much as advertised. However in the last stage of the game, raiding or arena, it’s murkier because changing between roles requires a talent respec which is hardly something you can do quickly while off killing trolls.

During the first stage of the game there isn’t much debate which is better.  This is because it doesn’t matter.  You spend most of your time soloing.  And leveling up is not difficult, only time consuming.  But the debate burns with feverish passion in the end game when players start discussing nerfs, class balance, and raiding.

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Updated Must Have - Goblin Jumper Cables to remove trinket references since 2.4.2.