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WoW Rookie: What's my DPS?
New around here? WoW Rookie points WoW's newest players to the basics of a good start in the World of Warcraft. Send us a note to suggest a WoW Rookie topic, and be sure to visit WoW.com's WoW Rookie Guide for links to all our tips, tricks and how-to's. You're level 80 now, you've picked up a few sweet upgrades from five-mans and heroics, and you're ready to try a PuG into Naxx. You've found a group that's looking for members, but you're not quite sure how to answer the raid leader's demand: "What's your DPS?" The best way to figure out what your raid DPS, of course, is to measure it while you're raiding – but if you haven't started raiding yet, you can't really do that, can you? The first thing you'll need in order to figure out what kind of DPS (damage per second) you're capable of putting out is an add-on that keeps track of your performance. Recount is popular and widely acknowledged as a fairly accurate tool. There are plenty of alternatives on all the major add-on sites. Select and install the DPS meter that appeals to you.
Lichborne: Death knight leveling 68-80
Welcome to Lichborne, WoW.com's column for all things deathly, knightly, and death knightly. So, death knight. You're through with Outland. You just dinged 68 in Nagrand and want to move on to whiter, snow covered pastures. Maybe those pastures are in Northrend. Maybe those pastures are in Alterac Valley. Either way, let's discuss getting through those final levels and pushing you through to the end game.
Are DPS helper mods cheating?
Karthis at Of Teeth and Claws raises an interesting question concerning "helper" mods for DPS rotations -- should they be considered cheating? He observes that, whie they may be a godsend for classes and specs with more difficult rotations, many of them remove the need to think about anything other than following the mod's instructions on what skill to use and when. He writes, "If a chimpanzee was trained to press the key that corresponded to the skill that Face Mauler popped up, then it would put out insane DPS without understanding even the very basics of what it means to be a feral cat."**The issue leaves me somewhat torn. There's no way around the fact that Karthis is right; mods like these -- and they exist for several classes -- make it possible for players to do great, or at least acceptable, DPS without understanding the class and spec they play. They also have the side effect of encouraging tunnel vision on the mob/s rather than what's happening in the raid (and, as someone who plays a tank, I must admit I hate dealing with an utterly oblivious DPS). Nobody wants to see a lazy player rewarded with excellent DPS for no other reason than their ability to install a mod and then do what the mod tells them to do.
Spiritual Guidance: 4 different ways to diagnose your healer
Every Sunday (usually), Spiritual Guidance will offer practical insight for priests of the holy profession. Your host is Matt Low, the grand poobah of World of Matticus and a founder of PlusHeal, a new healing community for all restorative classes. Today Matticus checks out common problems healers run into that stall them from being effective. Every healer in their life time will experience a situation gone bad where they try to figure out what went wrong. It usually goes something like this: "What's the problem?" "Lack of heals." "Okay, more heals please!" If I had a copper every time I heard that phrase, I would have enough for a mammoth by now. After every wipe or death, the first person that gets blamed is the healer. Big props to all of you right now no matter what class you are for sticking through it and helping your friends, guilds and raids out. I know I put up with a lot of stuff when crap hits the fan.
Encrypted Text: Hunger for Blood is terrible (to play)
Every Wednesday, Chase Christian of Encrypted Text invites you to enter the world of shadows, as we explore the secrets and mechanics of the Rogue class. This week, we discuss how troublesome Assassination's new rotation is.During my regular readings of the Rogue forums, I often heard complaints regarding our Assassination 51-pointer (Hunger for Blood). The main issue is that people find with it comes from the fact that it takes our required button-pushing amounts from manageable to annoying. I was skeptical at first, as I had not been having much trouble with it in heroics and the odd Vault of Archavon run.I initially figured Mutilate would be a more interesting rotation than the old Rupture/SnD spam that was TBC Combat Swords. With Mutilate generating way more Combo Points than Sinister Strike, and simply replacing SnD with Envenom in my raiding DPS rotation, I figured it would be business as usual. I trade off using Mutilate less than Sinister Strike by having to keep HfB up. Easy enough, right? Wrong.
Unofficial G1 auto-rotation in the works
The G1's got its fair share of accelerometers -- one need only pop open compass mode in Street View to figure that out -- but one thing it doesn't have is screen auto-rotation. That's where the ever-vigilant developer community comes into play, and Google's all's-fair policy toward third-party apps should guarantee that this nifty little hack will be readily available to anyone who wants it. Follow the break to see the keyboardless magic in action (hint: it works pretty much how you'd expect it to).
Peerless' RMI-1 spins your display right round in 15-degree increments
If you just couldn't be bothered to use a level when hanging that new flat panel or you want to make your living room look more like the SportsCenter set, the Peerless Rotational Mount Interface (RMI1) might be what you need. The RMI1 rotates displays up to 71-inches large through a full 360-degrees in 15-degree increments with the pull of a lever and a spin of the display. At $149, this is a relatively cheap way to either salvage some pride from that install that went terribly wrong, or have a display you can flip between portrait and landscape at between plays; either of these is way more fun than the suggested "waves, zigzag and 45-degree angle patterns."
Mac 101: Screen rotation
For today's Mac 101 I thought I'd draw your attention to a feature of the Displays tab of the System Preferences that only appears on external monitors: Rotate. If you plug in an external monitor to your Mac you should see that you have the option to rotate the display by 90 degree increments (clockwise). Now why would you want to do this? Well, if like me you have an external widescreen display, sometimes it's actually more handy to use it vertically instead of horizontally. I do this because I work entirely on the main (24") display and use the external (20") for showing my email, iTunes, etc. On my desk, I feel like this is a more efficient allocation of pixels. You can see a picture of my setup after the jump.
