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Totem Talk: Enhancement 101
Axes, maces, lightning, fire, frost, and wolves, and best of all, Windfury. It can mean only one thing: enhancement. Rich Maloy (aka Stoneybaby) loves it and lives it. His main spec is enhance. His off-spec is enhance. And he will be penning the enhance side of Totem Talk. It seems 101 guides are all the rage these days, which makes enhancement shaman 101 a convenient place to start with my inaugural WoW.com post. Playing an enhancement shaman, and playing it well, means dealing with the most extensive spell rotation in the game, having two caps to hit in gearing, and a dozen cooldowns to track. Not to mention the need to run out of fires, avoid whirlwinds, and generally dodge all that hate on melee. It's safe to say enhance is one of the most complex specs to play. It's also one of the most fun. My favorite part is that we're right up front making a mess of things with both physical and magical damage–to deadly effect. You want to play enhancement? Let's dive right in to get you started!
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Fury 101
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is here to hurt things this week. Hurt them, make them bleed, make them die, stand over their corpses and find something else to kill. Hear the warsong hammering in your ears? Let it out. Let it out and show the world your rage. Matthew Rossi knows that sometimes, dead is better. Last week, we talked about Protection. Protection warriors are the tanks of the warrior class, the guys who stand up there and bang on their shields and bang their shields into things ranging the gamut from large horrible squamous tentacle monsters in Old Kingdom to giant walking bone piles in ICC. And that's fine: somebody has to keep the monsters and bosses of the game focused on a hard target so the rest of us can kill it. It's good to see prot warriors alongside bears, walking corpses and daisy picking fancylads doing the tank job. (I kid you paladins because my heart is black and full of envy.) It's good that there are warrior tanks. But that's not you, is it? You haven't read this far because you want to tank. If you did, you'd have clicked that link and been on your merry way. You don't want to tank. You don't want to stand up front and keep monsters attention focused like some kind of giant nursery school teacher for the horrors of Azeroth. No, you don't want to tank. You want to kill things. You want to rip them into bloody gobbets and leave their ruined, looted corpses in your wake. You want to wear two huge weapons crossed on your back and reach up to draw them forth as soon as things get ugly, which can't come soon enough in your opinion. You want to get on up there and rip things heads clean off. You're the kind of person who thinks Grom Hellscream had a good idea but didn't go far enough with it. Come right this way. Fury is the spec for you.
Scattered Shots: Beast Mastery 101
Welcome to Scattered Shots, written by Frostheim of Warcraft Hunters Union and the Hunting Party Podcast. Each week Frostheim uses logic and science mixed with a few mugs of Dwarven Stout to look deep into the Hunter class. When you're looking at stepping into the hunter class for the first time there are three key concepts to keep in mind: guns are finely crafted machines of death while bows are primitive contraptions better suited to butterfly-humpin' hippies; dwarves are solidly-built, better looking, and better able to handle the sweet nectar of life (alcohol) than other races; and finally beast mastery is the ideal entry point into the hunter class. No spec is as widely useful and easy to learn and master as BM. Today we're going to walk step-by-step through everything you need to know to get started on your BM hunter. Don't worry, they're baby steps. Even the aforementioned butterfly-humpin' night elves will be able to understand.
Arcane Brilliance: Arcane 101
Welcome to another Arcane Brilliance, the weekly mage column that is the only place I know of where a gnome in a dress with glowing hands hanging out in the middle of the forest isn't so much creepy as it is socially acceptable. Since I see a growing trend among the other class columnists, and because I crave the approval of my peers, I bring you Arcane 101. This is intended to be a relatively basic overview of the spec; I won't be delving into much in the way of the more complex mechanics here. This will also be a PvE-centric column. We'll revisit arcane PvP at some future point, but sadly not today. So without further ado: 1. What is arcane? The leftmost of the three mage specs, this tree focuses on magic that is neither fiery nor frosted. It is (for the next five minutes or so, at least) the current single-target pure DPS champ, as far as mage specs go. 2. Arcane Benefits Extremely high damage Simple rotation Low hit cap Provides good raid utility Missile Barrage is awesome 3. Arcane drawbacks Highly dependent on timely procs for mana efficiency Cannot sustain highest DPS rotation Rotation is fairly boring Sub-par AoE
The Light and How to Swing It: Holy 101
Every Sunday, Chase Christian of The Light and How to Swing It invites you to discuss the finer side of the paladin class: the holy specialization. This week, we examine the basics of a holy paladin, from gems and enchants to talents and spell usage. I have always been of the belief that the paladin is a healer at heart, with their hybrid nature simply an extension of their healing capability. In vanilla WoW, paladins were the Alliance's healing all-star, with our tier sets and raid utility focusing on the restorative arts. Retribution and protection both have abilities that heal in some way, and their talent trees even have pro-healing options. If you want to experience the purest distilled essence of the paladin class, you have to try holy. This is intended to be a guide to the holy paladin's basic principles and tenets, not an in-depth guide into high-end raid healing or specialized gearing choices. If you're new to the holy paladin or want to discover what the spec is all about, read on.
The Care and Feeding of Warriors: Protection warriors 101
The Care and Feeding of Warriors is WoW.com's weekly column for warriors. This week, we jump on the bandwagon. Matthew Rossi tends to miss jumping on bandwagons, fall, and hurt himself, followed by a lot of swearing. It's actually somewhat entertaining to watch. There is, ultimately, only one thing warriors actually do. We hit things. We don't poison them, we don't electrocute them, we don't burn them or freeze them or hit them with diseases or the Holy Light. We just hit them.We don't turn into anything, we don't stand back and let an animal hit things for us, we just plain hit things. We hit things and get angry, and we get hit and get angry about that, too. That being said, warriors can specialize in one of two ways to hit things. One is to heft a big two handed weapon (or two of them) and hit things to death. The other is to put on the heaviest armor we can find, strap a car door to our arm, and get things to hit us as hard as they can, and then hit them back. This week, we look at protection, the "Is that all you got? Is that it? COME ON!" spec. 1. What is protection? Well, read the above. Now we'll go into more detail. The warrior protection spec is the oldest actively used tanking spec in World of Warcraft. Tanking is the role in a five man, 10 man raid, or 25 man raid (and originally 10, 15, 20 and 40 man raids as well) where one player deliberately attempts to hold a mob or multiple mobs attention so that they do not attack the healers and/or damage dealing players. To do this, tanks need to work on two separate but equally important aspects of play. They must hold aggro. Aggro (derived from aggression) is the hostile attention of the mob or mobs in question. They must survive the damage inflicted on them by the mob or mobs long enough to be healed. No, really, you need to do these two things. Otherwise, you're not tanking, you're just a greasy stain on something's fist and/or other means of killenating. Yes, I said killenating. What, you're too good for made-up words?
Shifting Perspectives: Restoration 101
Every week, Shifting Perspectives explores issues affecting druids and those who group with them. This week, a quick and dirty guide to raising one's tree from a young sapling to a mighty oak, or other suitably impressive arboreal species. Whenever other columnists here write really good columns, I sit at my computer and swear a blue streak, for I am a jealous god. Sacco, damn him, turned out a great article on the basics of elemental shamans, and for a while I've been kicking around bits and pieces of 101-esque columns for all four druid specs. This was the last shove I needed to get that done. While I expect our new balance blogger (a.k.a. Murmurs, the person I will be forcing to do all my number-crunching in the future with bribes or, when necessary, threats) will address moonkin, I'll cover bears, cats, and today, trees. A quick note on what I want to accomplish here: I'm addressing this to people with no prior knowledge of the spec who want the tools to become reasonably competent healers quickly. By necessity, that means we're going to gloss over a few finer points; this is a cheat sheet, not an encyclopedia. When I say (for example) that Improved Tranquility needs to be dragged out behind a barn and killed with an axe, I'm not going to spend paragraphs explaining why that is, or examining situations where you could actually get some use from it. If you think I've glossed over something truly important, please drop a comment and I'll direct readers to anything they really need to know.
Totem Talk: Elemental 101
Melee combat? Barbaric. Healing? How pedestrian. Let the elements do the talking. Totem Talk: Elemental. Brought to you by Mike Sacco. If you're here and reading this, you've probably decided that elemental will be one of your shaman's two possible specs and you want to get a good grasp of how it all works before you dive in. The maiden voyage of Totem Talk's Elemental edition is intended to tell you everything you need to know to get started as one of the game's simplest specs, from mechanics to gearing to rotation. What it isn't intended to be the is be-all-end-all of Elemental theorycrafting. We'll delve into more complex stuff later on. Let's get started!
iPhone Dev 101: Useful Cocoa Development Resources
It has been a while since the last iPhone Dev 101 post (and I must apologize for that -- sometime life can get in the way of different things, and this was one of those times). In this Dev 101 post, I want to take you through a few of my favorite resources for Cocoa/iPhone development. Some of these resources are books, while others are sites, but all of the resources are valuable to up and coming developers (and experiences developers) alike. BooksSome books are just invaluable and couldn't be replaced with another. Aaron Hillegass' Cocoa Programming for Mac is just that book. Currently in its 3rd edition, the book gives you much of the Cocoa programming information that you need to program for both the Mac and iPhone. There are only a few subtle differences in programming for these platforms, namely the use of the Cocoa Touch. If you ever have the chance, going to one of the Big Nerd Ranch Cocoa programming classes gives you the ability to learn Cocoa hands-on. Another title that is useful to beginning iPhone developers is the Beginning iPhone Development book. This book has a useful approach to stepping into the world that is programming on iPhone. It talks about numerous topics including UI design, Quartz, and OpenGL. Also covered in the book are APIs like CoreLocation and interfacing with the camera. If you already know Cocoa and a little about iPhone development, Erica Sadun's iPhone Developer Cookbook is a great jumping off point to start development. She assumes, however, that you already understand Cocoa. Continue reading to learn about more valuable books, websites, and resources for iPhone/Mac developers.
Tabula Rasa crafting 101
Over at Stratics, there's a good guide for learning how to craft, modify and disassemble items in Tabula Rasa.Crafting was relatively broken in the Tabula Rasa beta, so I'm looking forward to creating enough paint to drive Dulux out of business. Delicious, delicious paint.Several TR veterans have also recommended you start disassembling weapons for their components immediately -- whilst it loses you some credits in the short term, it'll give you a wider range of modification ingredients when you're a higher level and with a Supersonic Rocket Launcher Flamethrower of Doom that you want to upgrade. Try it out.Be sure to read the end of the guide too, if you've been curious what the numbers next to a weapon attribute mean!EDIT: fixed link, tricksy blogsmith
i-mate slots JAMA 101 and 201 below the Ultimates
Remember the i-mate JAMA? Yeah, we don't really remember it either, but it looks like i-mate upped the specs on its JAMA 101 and 201 models just enough so that they might (emphasis on "might") get some notice the second time around. Designed to give the manufacturer a pair of lower-end options to balance out its Ultimate models, the two share an overwhelming majority of their respective spec sheets: 2 megapixel cams, triband GSM / EDGE radios without 3G or WiFi, 64MB of RAM and 128MB of ROM, microSD slots, and Windows Mobile 6 underpinning the whole mess. i-mate lists the 201 -- its Standard device with a QWERTY keypad -- as having a VGA screen, though we're skeptical since QVGA seems like a far more logical choice for a handset in this class. No word on availability yet, but we don't expect to see 'em stateside without GSM 850.[Via the::unwired]Read - i-mate JAMA 101Read - i-mate JAMA 201
