Chris Miller

Gaming By Chris Miller

Breakfast Topic: What do I level next?

Throughout vanilla WoW I'd managed to create a small selection of alts that I managed to level all the way to 60. Since the expansion, I've been focusing on gearing out my main character, the irrepressibly cute gnome warlock pictured here. But what's next? I have a druid, warrior, and a hunter that I've leveled up to 60, and a Draenei mage that I've leveled up to 20 just to see the new starting area. I'm tempted to level the mage up as a tailor so I can crank out more shadoweave cloth for the warlock's nefarious purposes, but leveling my druid alchemist up could also be a nice moneymaker. I enjoy playing all the classes I have, or I wouldn't have leveled them up as high as I have, so that's not an issue.Any thoughts on what I should level next? Are there any leveling catches that I haven't heard, things that make a hunter, druid, or warrior easier to level than the others?

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PC Gaming By Chris Miller

Beginning Karazhan

I got a chance to lead a raiding force from my guild into Karazhan last week. It went really well. I was very pleased to find fight after fight that managed to rely on coordination and communication, as opposed to old style raiding which relied on how fast can mages, priests, paladins and druids spam their respective cleanse spells. I started out with a conservative group, which to me means a group that's heavy on heals at the expense of damage dealers. This makes the fights take longer, which means the fights are a lot slower. When things begin to devolve, we can all see very clearly what's wrong with our tactics and modify them during the fight or at worst after the fight. This works great up to the Curator, where if the group doesn't have enough damage dealers then the event becomes very difficult.The instance is pretty. Very pretty. The fights are engaging and require adjustments for class balance, which is great because many of the fights in "Vanilla WoW" had very hard class requirements for crowd control. As it is we can do most events with one priest and one or more paladins. I actually prefer a shadow priest for the Vampiric Embrace goodness, which helps out the paladins a lot with their mana usage on long heal fights as well as improving our raid's damage output. Even with the priest nerfs that went in, Shadow is still a very viable raid spec. In addition I've had a paladin play offtank with great results. I haven't had any druid tanks yet, but only because the scheduling hasn't worked out yet. In other words, this is a great small-guild instance, it only requires 10, you need adequate healing and tanking which can be supplied by multiple classes, and you need adequate DPS. The gear checks aren't even horrible, a group that's geared with nice blues from Shadow Labyrinths, Steamvaults, and the Tempest Keep instances will do very well here. So how are you doing in Karazhan? Do you have any stories to tell?

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Science

Science By Chris Miller

The sad state of engineering

While many trade skills aren't living up to our expectations, engineering is the saddest panda. While the gathering professions get to gather new materials (although maybe not in the quantities they'd like) and nifty epic patterns and weapons, engineers have gotten a variety of new flares and items they can't even make. Yes, flares. And items that can't be made because of bugs that will go "in to a future patch."There were many engineering recipes dropped between beta and retail release of the expansion, as a result there aren't many recipes available to progress from about 355 to 370, and the recipes that are in game require very expensive materials. Also, most engineering trinkets cease to function against creatures or other players over level 60, so as an engineer levels the stuff they've been using becomes less and less useful with no replacement in sight. To compound matters, none of the trinkets or bombs can be used in arena combat, including even marginally useful trinket pets. As compared with jewelcrafters, who can use all their pets in arenas. The only positive preview we've gotten for things coming for engineering is this post, in which Drysc hints at a frost grenade. Since it's a grenade, and probably a consumable, it's also a non-player in arenas, and since many engineers took the profession for it's PvP utility this is not a very promising development.I've dropped engineering after being an engineer for over a year. How many engineers are left out there? Why are you still an engineer? Are you finding it has enough utility to justify keeping it, or are you hopeful that there are enough new things coming that it will be once again worthwhile?

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News By Chris Miller

Breakfast Topic: So how are those keys coming?

So the expansion's been out for over a month, you've gotten all your raid keys done, right? RIGHT? The overwhelming looking raid attunement chart hosted by WoWWiki seems intimidating, but a lot of things turned out to be easier than I'd anticipated. For example, you don't need to complete Shadow Labyrinth, The Steam Vaults, or Arcatraz for your Karazhan key. The Shadow Labyrinth key is at the end-boss, Murmur, but the fragment in The Steam Vaults can be reached without actually killing any bosses, and the one in Arcatraz can as well. The reputation buildup just from doing the usual instances and quests was enough to provide me with almost all the reputation I needed for heroic mode keys, but I haven't started any heroics yet.How are those keys coming folks? Horror stories with that pickup group in Steamvaults got you down?

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PC Gaming By Chris Miller

Whither Zul'Gurub?

We used to run Zul'Gurub weekly, if not more often. The loot was OK (a couple of GREAT tanking swords drop there, and not a lot else), the reputation rewards were fantastic, as were the enchants. Since Burning Crusade, we haven't even gone to Stranglethorn Vale. Is it less fun? I'm not sure. With the boss scaling issue, and trying to get everyone up to level, we just haven't taken the time to check it out. Since the shoulder enchants and head slot enchant are still very good, I may try to get a group to go back on a bijou and coin farming mission. We might just go back to see if we can run the place with 5 people for kicks.That said, if I never set foot into Molten Core again, I'll be happy. I'd like to finish Blackwing Lair and poke into Naxxramas since I never managed to get there, but the new 5-man instances and new raids are keeping me adequately busy for now.Any plans to go back in time now with new and improved gear and abilities?

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Social guild events

One of the things my guild does is bi-monthly guild events. Every now and then we all get together and do something fun or crazy, and then get together in Stormwind or Darnassus to have a few ceremonial ales and /dance around the fireworks. We have a few people in the guild who set the events up, a few folks volunteer/get drafted to help out, and everyone has a good time. No real guild progress is made, no huge bosses downed, just general craziness and fun. We do occasionally n00b races, where we have members make level 1 alts, summon them to a secret location and have them run to another secret location, usually PvP flagged (with some of our experienced PvP'ers riding shotgun to prevent any spawn camping). Gift swaps during the holidays, and so on. Does your guild do any fun social events? Got any concepts I can steal...uh...use with appropriate credit?

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Breakfast Topic: How many times have you changed your talents?

With the new talent trees and the challenges of leveling, I've had to adjust my talents several times. On my warlock, I did a post-2.0 build before the expansion pack that was very heavy demonology, a leveling build that was heavy affliction, then I tried multiple builds for post-70, settling on a hybrid 40/0/21 build similar to my old raiding build.Fortunately I'd had my old raiding spec for a very very long time, and my cost to switch everything now is up to just 30G. How many times have you unlearned your talents lately? What's your re-spec cost up to?

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Computing

Computing By Chris Miller

Server stability one month later

So, how are the servers treating everyone a month after the expansion release? Alleria's actually gotten (knock on wood) significantly better, with only one hard server disconnect last weekend. It seems that all of our instabilities are on weekends, last weekend's was Saturday, the weekend previous was on Sunday. There have also been no queues for the last two weeks, even during prime times, lag has been "acceptable" for me anyway. How are your servers treating you?

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PC Gaming By Chris Miller

Breakfast Topic: Most annoying mob in The Burning Crusade

With every new expansion comes a new mob to hate. Pictured here is my most hated mob for The Burning Crusade. Found in the Shadow Labyrinth of Auchindoun, these Fel Overseers hit cloth really hard, and have a very annoying Intimidating Shout fear effect that is annoyingly resistible and resets aggro on the tank until the tank is back in melee range. When I say "annoyingly resistible" I mean that I often resist it, and the tank doesn't, so the tank is halfway across the room and I'm being stabbed at for for 1,200 to 1,900 hit points per swing, with a very nice critical hit one time of 4,796. My favorite part is how this thing is classed as a "demon", but immune to both Banish and Enslave. The best method I've found for dealing with them is to make sure everyone is in very short range, so everyone gets feared, including the healers. Hunters are excused if they can feign fast enough to achieve the same effect. This generally means the mob will follow the tank around. Since there's no warning, and he hits so hard, trying to stay in berzerker stance to have anti-fear abilities up is somewhat hazardous. The cool down on the fear is very short, on the order of 30-45 seconds, so even fear ward and berzerker stance will eventually be on cool down when the fear hits. If I don't get feared, I either will try and drain-tank the big guy, or simply run after my tank, so the tank is in melee range as soon as the fear fades. Either way has about a 75% success rate, where success is me not needing a rez at the end.So, The Burning Crusade has been out for about a month now, have you found a new most annoying mob?

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Warlock Spells: Ritual of Souls

The last in the "Warlock Spells" mini-series, Ritual of Souls is a spell everyone can love. Why? Healthstones! And who doesn't love a nice, refreshing healthstone every now and then? The fact that it's a reduced shard cost for the warlock just makes the warlock happy.This spell is only usable out of combat. The warlock starts the spell and a small altar drops out of the sky. Two people in the party/raid assist, and the altar disappears, to be replaced by a red crystal. One shard is consumed, and up to 10 healthstones can be pulled out of the crystal for the next 5 minutes. The healthstones will be just like getting one from the warlock made one-at-a-time, benefiting from the Improved Healthstone talent. As an added bonus, the red crystal that spawns will dispense healthstones for a full 5 minutes, whether you are in combat or not. So before a long fight, warlocks can drop one of these, give out healthstones, and if someone uses their healthstone during combat they can pick up another one and use it after the 2 minute cool down on healthstones has expired.

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Bugged Instance Gates?

User Chris McDonnald sent us a tip about an issue with a gate in the Mechanar instance in Tempest Keep, Netherstorm. It seems that the gate pictured here has an annoying tendency to lock closed if your party wipes on the final boss. It's been confirmed by Drysc as a known bug here, where Drysc goes on to say that it's not intended, however it requires a client side patch that most likely won't be included in 2.0.7. Blizzard seems to have a bad track record with implementing gates in dungeons. Anyone remember the door to Baron Rivendare on the undead side of Stratholme? Or the gate right before the Razorgore encounter, just inside the instance in Blackwing Lair, which originally would only reset 2 hours after a wipe? Or the door to Vaelastrasz in Blackwing Lair shortly after it was released, which would jam shut in certain circumstances? Or the gates in the Rend encounter in Upper Blackrock Spire? That's the list I came up with off the top of my head. Why do they need to put these gates in, and why can't they check what's obviously been a problem area in the past (well, except for the Razorgore encounter, which was an intended reset time but someone changed their intention later).So, a word of warning. Make sure you have a Shaman have an Ankh up, a Warlock have a soulstone up, and a Paladin use Divine Intervention as required, because if your party wipes here, you either get to put in a ticket in order to be transported through or re-clear the dungeon.

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Warlock spells: Seed of Corruption

The next spell that warlocks receive is a level 70 spell called Seed of Corruption. This is an incredibly nasty spell, I'm having a lot of fun with it.Basically it's a different version of the warlock spell Corruption, it does a certain amount of damage over time. What's different about this spell is that it has its own, built in finishing move. When the target has sustained 1044 total damage, whether it's from Seed of Corruption, other spells you cast, or spells other players do, the seed "goes off" and inflicts all hostile targets within 15 yards with a one-time shadow damage spell. This spell will kind of chain react with other seeds, so if you cast it on, say, 4 targets, the first one exploding will contribute to the other targets exploding. Finally, I can't throw this and Corruption on the same target. Which is sort of a bummer, really.This spell is incredibly useful in a few different situations. The spell does, at a minimum, about the same damage/mana as Corruption on a single target. When there are multiple close-packed targets, the efficiency really starts to shine. For the downsides, read on.

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Ding! 70!

My warlock hit level 70 during one of the horrendous trash pulls in the Auchindoun's Shadow Labyrinth. It took about 2 weeks, a little over but for the first four days my server was unplayable. I have a few suggestions for those of you who are trying to get 70 in the minimum amount of time spent. First, get out of Hellfire Peninsula as quickly as possible. There are so many people in that zone that I spent way too much time waiting for spawns. Second, unless you are a mage getting powerleveled with the help of a entire guild, quests are the way to go, not grinding and not instances. Finally, my pattern was Hellfire Peninsula to Zangarmarsh to Nagrand to Terokkar Forest to Blade's Edge to Shadowmoon Valley. I did Nagrand first Terokkar Forest was very heavily in use, and I wanted to stay out of that mess. They're about the same level, so it works out. I haven't even been into the Netherstorm area. Why did I skip Netherstorm? I'm a warlock. Shadowmoon Valley is full of demons. I was completely playing to my strengths. I started The Burning Crusade with about 150 gold on my warlock. I ended with a tad over 1500, not counting green items (sold via my bank alt) but counting all consumables, repairs, flights, and other expenses. Whenever there were quest rewards with no usable options, I picked the 2 handed weapon or the plate armor, those items tended to sell better. Unless you blow all of your cash on tradeskills, you should have basic flying mount cash very quickly.I managed to find groups to finish nearly all of my group quests on an ad hoc basis. On a couple of quests I got help from in-guild. Now that I've finished leveling, my goals are to finish up all my keys, do some instances, and help the rest of the people in my guild level.

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Warlock Spells: Soulshatter

Soulshatter is another new skill that warlocks receive, this one at level 66. As a variation on the usual "Spells cost mana" theme, this spell costs you 8% of your base health. Base health is your health before any bonuses from items, so it's probably between 3 and 4 percent of your hit points. It also costs one Soul Shard. For the warlocks this spell is great because we didn't have a practical way to dump aggro before, and now we can easily reduce our produced threat to stay below the threat of our tank. The 5 minute cooldown means it's only usable once or maybe twice per fight, but that's usually enough to keep you far enough down the aggro list to not be a threat.Sorry, no action shot for this one. Trying to capture an instant-cast spell with the screenshot tool would run me out of shards fast.

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Warlock Spells: Incinerate

Warlocks get a few new non-talent related spells in the expansion pack. One of the neatest ones is called Incinerate. Incinerate is acquired at level 64, and it's a fire-based spell in the destruction tree. As you can see from the tooltip, it has a pretty average mana cost (Rank 10 Shadowbolt, learned at level 60, uses 370, this uses 325) and does less damage. Oh, it does less damage unless you've got an Immolate debuff already up on the target, in which case this does damage on par with a shadowbolt, with a lower casting time. For more on this spell, and a picture of the coolest casting graphic in the game, read on.

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By Chris Miller

Breakfast Topic: Why stay in general chat?

I see lots of complaints both here and on the official forums about General Chat, and how people are tired of other players asking the same questions, over and over and over again. I don't know about you, but when I create a new character, the first thing I do, even before getting the character added to my guild or getting my interface set up, is /leave general. Maybe I was just brought up in the "don't complain about what you can't fix" school, but why doesn't everyone who complains leave general? Have you ever left it and gone back because you missed it? (Picture Credit: Mankrik)

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Nerfs: Math is fun

So, we here at WoW Insider get letters. Some of them are great story suggestions, some of them are good things to know, and some of them are, well, not very well thought out. A case in point. An email from a hunter wondering why we did not have sufficient coverage of the "ricidulous" hunter change in the previous patch, that apparently "sucks huge." Especially since "mages got buffed and locks were untouched."I sit at work all day, and read these when I get a spare moment. This letter just kinda stuck sideways in my brain. Besides the bad spelling, bad grammar, and so on, well, let's look at the claims here.A hunter nerf. Since I play a hunter, I was somewhat concerned, but rather than waging a vast war on the Warcraft forums, I sat down with my good friend Excel and poked the numbers in. For a hunter at level 60 with 1000 ranged attack power, which is a decent value for a marksmanship spec hunter without a lot of epic gear, this is a decrease in damage output of 17%. Which sounds like a lot, until you realize, it's a nerf of 70 hit points on a non-crit against an unarmored target. Seventy. Hit. Points. There was another damage reduction to the marksmanship tree involving Multi-shot. The talent reduced the critical hit chance bonus some, but it also reduced the base damage bonus. How much? My good friend Excel and I came up with 2 percent. The interesting thing about the change to multi-shot is that it actually scales DOWN with gear, so the better your ranged weapon is, the less effected you are by the change.So, yeah, a fairly sizable nerf to an instant-cast spell with a reasonably short cooldown that was extremely mana inefficient. The other change, the "multi-shot" change, was a gimme. Basically this is the kind of change hunters should be thankful for: it looks really bad to anyone who doesn't play the class, but, in reality, it's a very small change in the amount of damage done. The change in critical strike percentage is actually worse, but even that's a very small change.Now, let's look at the rest of the list.

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News By Chris Miller

Crafting for Profit

So what can you do with crafting to actually make money? I haven't found a single thing in leatherworking, herbalism, engineering or blacksmithing that I can actually turn a profit on. Specifically, there's nothing that I can make that I can sell for more money than what I'd sell the raw materials for. Just because I can gather the materials myself, if I can sell them on the auction house for more than I can sell a crafted item with, then I sell the raw materials.There's only one exception I've found: Bags. I can almost always buy runecloth, rugged leather, and rune thread from the auction house and the vendor and make a profit. I'm not sure if it's still people doing Argent Dawn turnins, or if people really do start up that many new characters, but I can generally sell runecloth bags on the auction house for 2g75s at a minimum but up to 4g sometimes, and the material cost is under 2g25s. It's not a huge profit, but it makes more money for me than simply selling the runecloth.My guild's alchemists tell me that it's generally cheaper, even with the expansion coming soon, to sell dreamfoil than to gather the rest of the materials for fire protection potions. I believe it. Are there professions and items I'm missing, or did I manage to luck into tailoring since it's the only one that can consistently turn a profit?

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PC Gaming By Chris Miller

The Burning Crusade: Lag and Instability

The vast amount of coverage I have seen on The Burning Crusade rollout has been positive. I'm having very negative experiences. For the first time since I started playing Warcraft I got to bed early last night. Not because a raid got cancelled, or because I was tired, but because I couldn't actually do anything.Every quest spawn in Outlands was camped. As a warlock, I'd typically get a couple DoT's on a mob, and some warrior would charge it. DoT's don't tag mobs until they do damage. It was taking, oh, 20-30 seconds for DoT's to tick because of the breathtaking lag. So I'd do about half the damage on the mob, the warrior would do the other half and get all the quest credit. Excellent. At least I was still out mana for the cast.So I rolled a new Draeni. Every quest spawn in the Draeni starting zone was camped. As a mage, I'd typically get 8 seconds into a 10 second frostbolt cast (did I mention it was laggy?) and a shaman would earth shock the mob, and I'd kill it half and get no credit. Nobody wanted to group, because of the XP penalty. The Outlands and the new starting zones are all on the same server. How do I know that? They all crash together. So I went back to my warlock, back to Outlands, and decided to get a guild group together to try the Ramparts. We zone in, the server crashes. Twice. Before the first pull.Then I get clever. I go to bed early, use flextime for the early in-early out and get home at 4. That would give me 3 hours of playtime before prime time. And they rebooted the servers this afternoon. I got 20 minutes in before the waves of crashes started again. I'm moving one of my level 60's over to a different server. A server that isn't crashing the outlands over and over and over again. Maybe I'll hit 70 there. Because it's not happening on my main server. So far this patch has been a uniformly horrible experience for me. Anyone else having bad experiences? Vent (but keep it civil) below.

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Patch 2.0.5 Issues

Apparently patch 2.0.5 came out overnight last night or early this morning. A lot of users are getting an "Unable to validate game version" error (pictured above) along with a myriad of other connection problems. The official forums are also down, or so slow as to be effectively down. I'm going to guess that perhaps your game version is fine and this will sort itself out in the next few hours as the patch gets distributed. Thanks to everyone for submitting this as a topic suggestion, there's too many of you to credit directly.UPDATE 10:54 from the in-game Breaking News:"The 2.0.5 client-side patch has caused issues with our authentication system. These issues can cause players to be suddenly disconnected from the game, as well as prevent them from logging in to the game. We are working to resolve this issue as soon as possible and will provide you with updates as soon as they are available."UPDATE 11:30 The realms are accessible, or at least mine is. The forums are also back online and usable.

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News By Chris Miller

Made By...

I'm pretty merciless about my inventory management. My main is a warlock. I leveled the warlock all the way to 60 before the talent review, more importantly before soul shard bags were introduced to the game. Having to deal with 12 slot bags for a long time with one or two full of shards tends to teach inventory discipline quickly, especially since I was also a skinner. I like to think I've gotten pretty good at sorting out what's important to keep and what's important to ditch. I'm not very sentimental about it the time it took to get something, either. I've tossed a Rod of the Ogre Magi that it took me about 15 runs in Dire Maul to acquire and that I used for about 6 months in game. I tossed it 3 days after I got an Azuresong Mageblade, sold to help buy the materials for the enchant I had put on the 'blade.My one weakness however is the <Made By> tag. I remember Rev making me that bag. I remember farming the felcloth, making the mooncloth, and handing it all over so Rev could make me a bag for more soul shards. I also remember running out of shards in a Scholomance run, my first run there, with Rev as the healer. Rev, the crazily patient healer who kept the n00b warlock up somehow. The <Made By> tag is, simply, genius. It helps me remember good, fun times every time I hover over the bag display, and the chances of me ever feeling the need to ditch a 16 slot bag are very small, at least through the next couple of weeks. I think there will always be a bag <Made by Rev> sitting on my toolbar though, even with the new larger bags in the expansion. What do you have with sentimental? Any neat crafted goods you keep just because of who made them?

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Gathering Professions

So far on my characters, I've managed to level herbalism to 300 once and skinning to 300 three times, but I've never managed to get Mining above what you see in the picture, a whopping 217. Skinning was easy. I blew through skinning on my warlock without even trying. I'm also skinning on my level 30 priest. Why did I choose skinning on a Warlock and Priest? When I was levelling to 60 with all my talents in the affliction tree, I'd basically send my Voidwalker, throw Corruption, Curse of Agony, Siphon Life, and Immolate, then I'd skin the previous target while I was waiting on the new one to die. Lather, rinse, repeat, and pretty soon I'd gotten the 30 wild boars slain. Between quests I'd mail the skins off to my bank, which would sell them. Each individual stack went cheap, but selling hundreds of stacks makes a difference.

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Is Blizzard prepared?

The tagline for The Burning Crusade is "You Are Not Prepared." Based on what I saw tonight, Blizzard is not prepared for the expansion either. It took me awhile to grab a good screenshot, I started out at 583 in queue, 57 minutes. Post after post on the General forums complaining about long queue times. With the number of people coming back to the game for the expansion pack, what kind of queue times and problems can we expect? Oh well, it gave me time to get a few new raids scheduled. Hopefully people can get logged in when I want to start.

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Gaming By Chris Miller

Have You /hug'd your raid leader today?

Good raid leaders need to have a lot of tools in their tool basket. People skills, the ability to manage people and understand people is critical. Tactical skills, being able to study an encounter, look through a combat log and understand what went wrong, and being able to make the adjustments to complete an encounter more efficiently and more easily next time is critical. It's a political job, keeping groups happy and managing everyone's expectations. It requires time, effort, and a lot of knowledge. So give your raid leader a /hug.

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